Besides finding the best holes, catching enough bait and the right kind of bait are the biggest obstacles to landing trophy catfish. Brian uses whatever the fish are feeding upon. He has aerated livewells running down the sides of his pontoon boat. These are big livewells -- big enough to keep a large catfish alive for weigh-in and release. He fills them with panfish he catches on hook and line and with live eels he buys at tackle shops. He uses live shad and cuts chunks of shad, eels and panfish for bait. Small bullhead catfish make the top baits for flathead catfish. To use them, he clips off the dorsal spine so they can twist up the line and so flatheads have an easier time swallowing them.

"I fish 17 to 32 lines at one time," he said. "There are so many lines it looks like a spider web. I put different baits on different lines and remember which bait is where so I can switch other rods to the best baits once the fish start feeding," he said. "If fishing is slow, I might pick up a couple times during the night and head to a new spot. I fish everything outside the main-river channel until dark. After the boat traffic quits for the night, I fish lines all across the river so anything that swims by smells my baits."

There are two depthfinders on Web Weaver, one at the bow and one at the console. Ellie and Brian watched them as they cruised the outside curve of a river bend. When they saw marks on the screen indicating catfish, they anchored and started setting lines. A pair of grapnel anchors was set at the bow corners to keep the boat from swaying: Excess boat movement makes it difficult to see strikes.

Brian uses 10-foot heavy-action rods with saltwater trolling reels. He picks up any reel he can get a deal on buying, mostly Penn 9, 109, 209 and Squidder reels with warning clickers along with a smattering of other similar reels by other manufacturers. He uses 30-pound, high-visibility monofilament lines and his rods have bright yellow tips to reflect light. He rigs yellow clearance lights to point upward, illuminating the rods once he starts fishing. He covers the boat completely with top and tarp to keep off dew and allow him to fish through rain showers so he can start fishing at sunset and stay out all night.

Once he begins fishing, the aft area sprouts so many rods, quickly finding the one rod with a nibbling fish can be tough.

"Sometimes they shake the bait, drop it several times before they take it or leave it alone," he said. "But not with a live bream fished on a trolley rig. A flathead hits a live bait and takes off like a train."

To spread the lines, Brian uses flattened river sinkers to keep bottom lines from moving through sinker roll. He uses an 8/0 circle hook and 50-pound fluorocarbon leader to make a giant version of a bass angler's Carolina rig. He also uses a pier-fisherman's trolley line with a weight that has four protruding wires by casting it to the bank and burying it in the mud. He uses the trolley rod the same way a pier-angler fishing for king mackerel does: by sliding a release clip holding the bait from the fight rod along the trolley line. It keeps the baitfish swimming just beneath the surface, holding position in the current.

"If a fish hits, you try to keep him out of the other lines," he said. "But if they get tangled, you concentrate on landing the fish and untangle the lines later. If you watch the other lines while you're fighting the fish, you can usually keep him clear of them. I try to set them staggered, some short, some long, so all the lines are separated to begin with."

He controls the fish with a tight drag setting of 12 pounds or so. The hard part is keeping a big cat off the bottom during the fight where it might wrap something and break the line. He might thumb the reel to stop a medium-sized blue cat, but never a flathead. Flatheads can take line so fast the spinning spool can blister an angler's thumb.