Baits soaked tight to wood are the cat’s meow for Toledo Bend blues.

Story and photography by Matt Williams

If there is one thing Charlie Shivley likes better than giving a sunset bon voyage to a three-inch bluegill on a stump hook set, it is returning at sunrise to find out a fat cat gobbled up the peppy little bait fish under the cover of darkness.
Sometimes there might be nothing left except a bare hook and staging coated in a thick layer of clear slime. Other times a whiskered fish with a six-inch gap between its eyes might be laying there quietly, almost like a piscatorial time bomb just waiting to explode.

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