The blue catfish cruise the deeper water and move up the slopes between the top of the hump and the deeper water to feed. Therefore, finding baitfish in an area is more important than finding catfish. If Pritchard spots some bait on his graph, he'll anchor and spread out several lines. If the fish don't cooperate within an hour or so or they feed well and then quit, he'll move to another hump. One of the advantages in fishing this area is that with so many humps in close proximity, the travel time to the next spot is short.

RIVER CHANNEL FLATHEADS
"The flatheads will be down in the river channel during the summer," Pritchard said. "We'll ride the edge of the channel searching for them and then will fish vertically, anchoring directly over them, once we find them."

Flatheads make big marks on or very near the bottom, and they usually are close to a timberline or some other cover and right along the channel break. Often the best groups will be in channel bends or at the confluences of ditches or creek channels. Pritchard likes to find four or five good fish together before he puts down a single line.

Once he locates fish, Pritchard will double anchor to make certain he stays right over the fish and that the boat won't swing. Then he'll put rods in holders all the way around the boat, rig them all with live bream, white perch or shad, and drop them down. He'll let the baits go all the way to the bottom, reel them up a single turn, and lock the reels into place.

With the baits in place, the waiting game begins. As top-end predators, flatheads feed when they want to feed. It's not uncommon to have 10 baits dangling in the faces of five or six big fish for an hour without as much as a sniff and then suddenly have two rod tips get buried three eyes deep in the water almost simultaneously.

Pritchard rigs for bear when he flathead fishes. He uses stout rods, Ambassadeur 6000 reels and 65-pound-test Spiderwire.

When flatheads do decide to bite, it's important to grab rods quickly and start cranking hard. The endless-seeming trees that are visible from above the surface at Lake Marion are only a tiny fraction of the trees that are in the lake. Timber tangles cover the bottom in many areas, and if a flathead gets its head down into the cover, getting that fish back out becomes highly unlikely.

THE NIGHT BITE
Traditionally, most catfishermen have not done a tremendous amount of night-fishing on the Santee-Cooper lakes. Fishing always has been sufficiently good during the day that there has been no reason to take on the lake's potentially treacherous waters after the sun has stopped shining.

However, the brave few who did fish after hours enjoyed phenomenal success at times, and over time the word began slipping out. Most anglers still stick with the daytime approach, but night-fishing is becoming ever more popular, and at times the night bite can be really good.

Eddie Covington splits his time between days and nights during August. At night, he concentrates on shallow water, but always in areas that are close to the Santee River channel or other deep water.

"The catfish come up out of that deep water at night to feed," Covington said.

Covington finds that the fish feed very well right at dark and then there tends to be a couple of hours lull while the fish get acclimated to the night and the shallower water. When the action starts again, it can get frantic, with clickers screaming and lines racing out all around the boat.