Montgomery has hooked and landed fish up to 60 pounds -- but he’s also hooked many more that took all his line and left with it. “And I’m talking 100-pound braided line on offshore tackle,” he explained, “and I never had a chance. They either get in the current and run with it until they strip me, or they dig down into the logjams in 40 to 80 feet of water, refuse to move and the hook either straightens or the line finally saws on a log.”

For sheer numbers of edible blues, Montgomery loves jugging over the long shallow sandbars formed in the inside bends of the river. “We’ll put out a couple of dozen jugs baited with cut shad, with a 3- to 4-foot line and either a 4/0 or 6/0 stainless steel hook, and put the spread out at the upper end of a bar,” he said. “The current will pull the jugs right down the river over the bar, and we want them to stay in 6 to 8 feet of water.

“In the meantime, we’ll run down the river a mile or so, pull up on the bar and tightline with cut shad for blues and channels until the jugs get to us. We’ll gather up the free ones and then run up to find the ones with fish.”

In addition to the river itself, all of its connected waters and tributaries are home to yellows and blues, and big ones. The Big Black River is well known for its giant blues and flatheads, as is the Yazoo and Sunflower and their tributaries.

“I think some of the best yellow and blue cat fishing is in the Delta oxbows, and that includes some of the old lakes like Wolf and Broad, Bee and Dump and even George,” said Art Mott. “We love hand-grabbling in those old lakes because of the natural stumps and logs that have helped maintain yellow and blue populations even when fishing pressure has gotten so bad.

“All of those lakes have natural blue and flathead populations. They are some of the most popular grabbling waters, so we have to be careful to let as many of the females go as we can. We only take the males, and let the bigger females go. I wish trotliners would do that, too.”

Fishing styles differ on those lakes, owing to their shallow waters. They lack the deep holes that help concentrate focus, and all the water is less than 10 feet deep. “You just try to find the deepest water you can relative to the surrounding waters, whether it’s 8 feet surrounded by 4 to 6, or 10 to 12 feet surrounded by 8 or 9 feet,” offered William Thomas of Yazoo City. “That’s where the big fish hang out, but I only do that on occasion for the challenge -- I don’t trust eating any catfish over 4 or 5 pounds because of the warnings they’ve put out. And to catch the small ones, I just fish anywhere where there are stumps. I trotline and I use rod and reel. I fish in between running lines,” he concluded.

All of Mississippi’s five main reservoirs -- Barnett, Grenada, Enid, Sardis and Arkabutla -- are solid yellow and blue cat fisheries, as are the bigger pools of the Tenn-Tom Waterway -- specifically, Bay Springs, Aberdeen, Columbus and Aliceville.