This is an article about North Texas Catfish Guide Service and Learn To Catch Catfish that ran in the Fort Worth Star Telegram.
BY ART CHAPMAN
Special to the Star-Telegram
I’ve always thought of catfishing as kind of a secretive sport.
Years of information is passed down from generation to generation; hot spots are closely guarded, never divulged; best baits are often homegrown recipes and a lot of action goes on under the surface — on trotlines and jug lines — where the “catching” can’t be seen.
If you wanted a guide, the best thing to do was ask around the marina, or maybe, if you were lucky, you could find a business card pinned to the bulletin board at the bait shop.
But like most things in fishing, catfishing is changing. The information is still somewhat guarded, but guides such as Saginaw’s Chad Ferguson are pulling the curtain back and introducing a number of new anglers to the challenges of stalking the whiskered fish.
Ferguson is a young man, a family man, with a long history of catfishing. And he is also a man well versed in digital and cellular technology; which is to say he runs multiple websites that center on the sport of catfishing as well as serve as his primary marketing tools.
Now a lot of guides have websites, but Ferguson goes beyond a few photos of his guided trips and telephone numbers to reach him. He has a website for his guide business, one for the catfish bait he manufactures, another for the jugs he builds for jug line fishing, and yet another to simply disseminate information on the overall sport of catching catfish.
He is also on Twitter and Facebook.
When we visited earlier this week, I had to ask him if all that computer activity kept him off the water, and therefore was a hindrance to his fishing.
He laughed, reiterated to me that he was a workaholic, and promised his guide business was a busy as always. He is simply building for the future: providing interesting information to people who think they might like catfishing, and therefore increasing the scope of his potential clientele.
“The last couple of months or so, I’ve gotten a lot of phone calls from people I’ve never heard from before,” he said. “They specifically mention my websites and they express a lot of appreciation for the information they’ve been able to get.
“Before, I would usually just hear from my customers, and people who heard about me by word of mouth.”
The interest has caused Ferguson to begin reworking the sites, moving some of the older material to archives, and making plans for new, innovative features up front.
He said he is still a couple of weeks away from any announcements, but followers of his sites can be on the lookout for some pretty neat ideas, such as videos, more question-and-answer segments, and maybe, at some point, live pod casts.
A lot of his information will be guided toward his Learn To Catch Catfish website.
“We’re going to centralize a lot of the information on WhiskerKitty.com,” he said. “Not so much of the information will be about techniques, but we’ll help people find guides on specific lakes, get information about those lakes, and we’ll list all the tournaments.”
He’s still trying to figure out how much all this information is going to cost him — particularly the bandwidth costs involved in the Catfishing Radio podcasts. He said he’ll try to keep it all free for a while, but ultimately there might be a small membership fee for those who want to invest in more information.
He’s just finished a book on jug fishing, he said, and he’s working on a companion video series.
“So far, I’m not making any money off of it all,” he said. “I haven’t seen a significant change in my business. But I do get a lot of feedback from people who say they appreciate it and I’ve got to think it will come back around to me one way or the other. It should be some good karma if nothing else.”
In the meantime, fishing’s been good, he said.
“It was going real good a few weeks ago; we had one morning where we caught 135 fish in about 21/2 hours. The blue catfish started showing up and we were catching some bigger fish.”
It kind of died off, though, he said and the local lakes began turning over.
“We’re probably one or two more good cold snaps away from it being really good again,” he said.
Ferguson said he’s been fishing Eagle Mountain Lake mostly, but plans to work Lake Worth more this winter.
“Interest in catfishing seems to increase every year,” he said. “It is still considered the No. 2 game fish in
Texas. But I don’t know if there really is more interest, or because of the Internet and the social networking it’s just more visible.
“I think about it a lot.”
