Rick Towers of Rossville, Kan., can attest to the fun of catching big freshwater drum in Kansas.
By Brent Frazee
Don’t get Clyde Holscher wrong. He doesn’t want to be known as a drum guide.
Holscher is a multispecies specialist who has been known to gets his customers into as many as 100 fish per day – a mix of smallmouth bass, white bass, wipers and catfish – on reservoirs in northeast Kansas.
If a fair number of that catch is freshwater drum…well, he doesn’t complain. He sees the attributes of the nongame fish that few fishermen do.
“I’ll see the look on some of my customers’ faces when they find out they’ve caught a big drum,” said Holscher, who runs the Guide Lines Guide Service. “They’ll be fighting this fish and they think they have a big walleye or a wiper, and they’re disappointed when they see it’s a drum.”
“I’ll ask them if they want me to take a picture and they’ll say, ‘No way.’ But I’ll tell them to just close their eyes. That fish just gave you one heck of a fight.”
Get the idea? Holscher is a big advocate for the often-maligned rough fish.
When he and his customers are casting the riprap and rocky banks of Coffey County Lake in eastern Kansas, they target smallmouth bass. But they often catch hard-fighting drum as well.
It’s no accident, Holscher will tell you. The two species prefer the same habitat and the same forage.
“You find smallmouths and you’ll find drum,” said Holscher, who lives in Topeka, Kan. “They like the same rocky habitat and they both prefer to eat crustaceans.”
“I think that’s what makes Coffey County so good. Crustaceans are the main forage there, not shad.”
Coffey County, a 5,090-acre power-plant cooling reservoir, is home to a thriving population of freshwater drum. “Many of the fish weigh from 3 to 5 pounds, but catches of 8 to 10 pounds aren’t unusual” Holscher said. On medium-action spinning tackle, that amounts to a big tug.
Most of the big drum Holscher and his clients land are incidental catches. They often are lured by Z-Man plastic baits. But the fighting ability of the drum is so impressive that some repeat customers request that they target the rough fish when they move shallow in the spring to spawn.
Bruce Anderson, a nationally known bird-dog trainer from Overbrook, Kan., is among the few fishermen who will actually target the freshwater drum.
He became hooked on the saltwater version of the drum when he was training dogs in Texas years ago.
“The red drum and black drum are popular fish on The Gulf near Port Aransas,” he said. “We would fillet them and fry them, and they were delicious.”
Many freshwater fishermen stick up their nose at the thought of eating a rough fish like the drum. But they don’t know what they are missing, Anderson said.
“The only people who say they don’t taste good are the ones who have never tried them,” Anderson said. “You need at least a 5-pound fish so that you can fillet it, and you have to cut the red line out. But once you do that, they’re delicious.”
Coffey County isn’t the only Kansas reservoir that produces big drum. Other such as Perry, John Redmond, Glen Elder and Tuttle Creek also have some big fish.
The Kansas state record weighed 31.50 pounds. It was caught in 2008 by a fisherman using a trotline baited with a crawdad in the Blue River.
Because drum are considered a nongame fish, the Kansas Department of Wildlife, Parks and Tourism doesn’t specifically manage for the species. But fisheries biologists get anecdotal reports of large fish being caught.
“In general, they feed near the bottom and their diet consists of a variety of prey,” said Kyle Austin assistant chief of fisheries for the Kansas Department of Wildlife, Parks and Tourism. “Their diet and aggressive feeding behavior make them quite catchable when angling for other species.”
“Bouncing a jig and nightcrawler off the bottom while fishing for walleyes will produce a lot of drum action. I’ve also seen anglers catch them under floating lights at night while fishing for white bass.