The Sabine River is the line between Texas and Louisiana, which means it has spent its entire existence being argued about. It runs slow and the color of sweet tea, through cypress and willow and a great deal of country that has never asked to be improved. In August the daylight hours are for other people. Flathead catfish do their real work in the dark, and anybody serious about catching one has already made peace with the fact that they will be awake at three in the morning holding a rod and thinking about their choices.
A flathead is not a channel cat and does not appreciate being confused for one. It will not eat a punch bait or a hot dog or a chicken liver of any vintage. It wants something alive, ideally something that would rather not be there, fished right up against the nastiest laydown you can find. This is a fish that lives inside a brush pile the way a bad tempered uncle lives inside a recliner, and getting it out involves roughly the same amount of noise and negotiation.
We tied off to a cypress snag a little before ten with a livewell of perch and a plan that was mostly optimism. Setting rods in the dark is a specialty skill. Everything you need is under something else. The headlamp attracts every insect in East Texas, and there were moths in the light thick enough to have a quorum. Somewhere down the bank a barred owl started asking its question and did not get an answer all night. The first two hours produced one rod tip twitch, which we all agreed was probably a turtle and privately hoped was not.
The bite came at half past midnight and it came the way it always does, which is that a rod that has been perfectly still for hours simply bends over and stays bent. No tap. No warning. Just a large animal deciding to leave. Our man on that rod got it out of the wood by pure luck and about four seconds of good instinct, and then the fish did what flatheads do, which is fight in short furious circles under the boat until somebody makes a mistake. Twenty-two pounds, wide as a truck tire, with a mouth you could lose a wristwatch in. We got a picture and let it go back down into the same brush pile it clearly considered home.
Two more came before daylight, both smaller, both trying very hard not to be. We ran back to the ramp with the fog sitting flat on the river and the sky just starting to think about it, and somebody said the thing everybody says, which is that this is a stupid way to spend a night. Nobody disagreed. Nobody suggested we stop, either.
Early starts and long runs, with her stitched into the crown. See our embroidered boat hats, drawn from a photo of your own boat.