Night of the Monster Cat

Maryland
Some Time In The Late 90s

The night was as pitch-dark as any I’d seen since the desert. A distant streetlight on a dock where a large cabin cruiser was moored lit the massive, sloped yard behind the pier, but would not reflect across that black water.

There was no breeze. Nothing moved in the humid air of that hot night so long ago. I had two bank spikes beside me. In one stood a Shakespeare six foot rod, heavily armed with a Penn Spinfisher Z and Berkeley XT hi-vis green 20-pound test mono. The other was a shorter, more stout red Shakespeare bearing a Shakespeare spinning reel loaded with Berkeley XL 17-pound. My hooks were 1/0 kahles baited with freshly cut eel sections. As I awaited the end of high tide and the movement of the minnows and perch to exit the creek and the big catfish to follow them, some weird things happened. Something no bank fisherman could ever forget.

Still of the night. Even, smooth water. Not a sound. No crickets. No cicadas. No nocturnal birds. And above and to my left, no traffic on the Bear Creek drawbridge which carried Wise Avenue to Holabird Avenue on one end miles away, and North Point Boulevard on the other. Last call for the two bars within earshot was over. Dundalk was a ghost town; the water, all mine.

I sought only one fish. A channel cat, by my estimation about a twenty pounder. I’d seen him before. Hooked him once, and I didn’t see him that time. But he made a sideways run, not exactly characteristic of cats, who just go deep or head to the nearest cover. Usually carp make lateral runs. But big and feisty as this fish was, I knew it wasn’t a carp. It was a monster cat. My monster cat. And if he left Bear Creek, I knew it was never far, never for long. One night at sunset, I saw him come up for a mouthful of mosquitoes and gnats. His head was massive. He didn’t sound, or jump. Just stuck his head out of the water, opened his maw and was gone. I cast a line in the spot. Nothing. Nothing, not even a nibble. On this dark night, however, that fucker knew I was there. A ripple spreading into a wide arc came toward me from the stygian darkness in the middle of the creek. Then another. And another, getting closer together. Something was moving out there. I turned a weak flashlight on. I used it for tying knots, attaching terminal tackle and baiting hooks. But this night, something weird, something creepy was up, and something huge was breaking the surface out in the channel. Because the ripples turned into waves. And the waves kept getting bigger. I was thoroughly spooked by then.

I turned on a fluorescent camping light. A wave washed over my Chuck’s, soaking my feet. And I saw it. It was a monster. It swam on its side, looking at me with one eye, a pectoral fin in the air. Almost as if waving at me. But at 03:00, the dead of night…the hour of demons…I sensed malevolence. It swam into the darkness. Then it came back, its other side exposed, the opposite fin in the air. Looking at me. I thought, impossible. Then it did it again. Going back in the original direction. Then, once more, the other way. I’d never heard of anything but dolphins, whales and sharks doing this, and none of them were there. This was a catfish, admittedly a monster cat, but it didn’t act like one. This thing circled me like a fucking predator. Only one other fish is that evil, and that’s a tiger musky. But those demons are freshwater, so I got the fuck out. Left the area.

But I wasnt gonna give up. I bought beefy gear. Two Abu Garcia 6500 reels, loaded with 30 lb test Stren gold. I bought bigger hooks for bigger bait (except for big game fishing the hook size should be decided by the bait size not the fish size). Big O’Shaughnessy hooks. I began to switch bait. I tried clam snouts, peeler crab, stink bait, you name it, I had at least 3 on hand if I had a hook in the water more than fifteen minutes. I used heavy sinkers for long casting, good bottom holding and attached them to the main line with 10 pound test in case it snagged. It would be easy to break and keep my terminal tackle.

I learned to tie a Bimini twist in 30 seconds. The rods were switched out with seven and eight footers with lots of glass for more leverage in a fight. You never let a hooked catfish run; you have to horse it. That bullshit about fighting them is for fishing shows that can be edited. You get that thing in as quick as you can.

I’d started out a novice to bank fishing but had plenty of time on the Chesapeake hooking blues, rockfish and more. But that didn’t require casting; you let the lines out and put them in a holder and waited while the captain trolled and watched his fish finder.

My first attempts at bank fishing were something out of Gilligan’s Island. Poor Gilligan would go fishing and reel in mines and shit.

I’d hook minnows and use floats. Every damn float wound up snagged in a tree behind me. After a week it looked like a Christmas tree.

One time I made a cast toward the channel. It was early on a Sunday morning. I watched as bait and sinker sailed 30 feet into the air and right down onto the drawbridge. A car skidded to a stop. I’d struck the windshield! Holy shit! And damn it! He was cussing but I couldn’t see him. He would follow the line and look over the rail and I’d be in trouble! So I wound the slack in on the reel, gave the rod a hellacious jerk, and the rig came sailing back over the rail. I wound it in like a fanatic, and ran for cover under the bridge. Finally he moved on. I packed up and moved on.

Another time after the Night of the Monster, when I was using an 8-foot rod, which will enable longer casts, I had better control, but unknown to me, I had put the bait and sinker clean past the channel and hit the shoals on the other side. I was all kinds of proud at my mastery of rod and baitcasting reel, but then a guy with an outboard crossed under the bridge, inbound from a day on the water.

I was oblivious to the fact that my line went out so far, and therefore that the line was floating on the surface across the channel.

Until, that is, his motor chugged to a stall as line was stripped off my reel as if I’d hooked a great white. I was trying to set the hook when I saw the guy pull his motor out of the water. His prop was absolutely engulfed in Stren gold monofilament, and before he could see me, I cut the line and hid in the bushes.

That finally did it for me. I retired from fishing forever. When your luck is that bad, you gotta know it’s time to hang up the waders.

One year later, I read a local piece in the paper. Some dickhead in a boat had caught a 20 lb. channel cat near the Bear Creek drawbridge.

My fish was gone. And I’ll bet it was the guy whose prop I fouled who caught it.

Life is just not fair. You know?