Photo by Ron Sinfelt

I have Okie bass-fishing friends who would go apoplectic if you tried to step into their boats with a package of chicken livers or a jar of stink bait. Catfish, they feel, are inferior fish that just happen to share an environment with their revered black bass.

They're snobs. And their punishment is that they miss out on the fun, and the tasty rewards, that so many know to be part and parcel of catfishing.

Catfishing, like any other kind of fishing, can be as much of a science or an art as you make it. A mountain-stream purist who delicately drifts a dry fly over feeding trout is no more accomplished an angler than a dedicated catfisherman who knows just what kind of bait to use and how and where to present it to catch various species of catfish at any given time and place.

OK -- I'll admit that it can be a little messier than fishing with artificials. But it's still fun. And no one looks at you like you're a child molester if you say you filleted a few catfish for the table.

It's been my pleasure, in what is now nearly 30 years of writing about the Oklahoma outdoors, to have fished with and learned from some of the best catfishermen in the state. And I've spent some amazing days on the water with them, catching big blue cats, even bigger flatheads, lots of channel cats and more than a few of the lowly bullheads commonly resident in many Oklahoma creeks and ponds.

I've lost rods and reels to strong, aggressive catfish that pulled them into the water. Scarier, I once nearly lost my 6-year-old son to the water as he battled a 12-pound channel cat that pulled him steadily closer to the end of the dock. I held onto his belt from the back while he fought the fish; at first he screamed for me to take the rod from him and catch the fish myself, but after he felt my hand holding his belt, he renewed his efforts and wore the fish out in a battle that lasted a good 10 minutes. Then he had to drag the fish onto the beach, because it was too big to lift onto the high dock.

I've dined on many a plate of tasty catfish filets and worn out a couple of electric knives filleting cats of all sizes from Oklahoma waters. And I've watched the water turn to froth as fisheries biologists on sampling expeditions jolted resting catfish with electricity, causing them to thrash and splash and turn a half-acre of water into what looked like a storm-tossed sea.

Catfishing is fun. No matter whether you get down in the trenches and wrestle flatheads by hand as a noodler in a Western Oklahoma flatland creek or drift grasshoppers with the current on a fly rod in a cool Ouachita Mountain stream, Oklahoma offers a lot of varied catfishing opportunities. Let's look at a few venues at which you might fill your stringer with catfish this summer.

I was talking recently with a bass-fishing friend -- an enthusiast with a glittery fiberglass boat and a dozen bait-casting rods and reels tipped with shiny lures of many styles -- whose wife is the "catfisherman" in the family. Parked next to his bass boat is his spouse's small, drab johnboat.

We were talking about blues replacing channel cats as the dominant species at one lake after another, such that blue catfish are now probably the most-caught cat species at every large Oklahoma reservoir. I personally like that change. It's not that I have anything against channel cats; it's just that I've always found blue cats to be much more willing to get caught.