North Park Lake family fish festival and youth event will focus on catfish

fishing event that follows will be open only to anglers who are younger than 16 years, accompanied by a mentor and hold a free mentored youth fishing permit or voluntary youth license (available at licensing locations and gonefishingpa.com). Mentors must be age 16 or older, accompanied by a kid and possess a valid Pennsylvania fishing license. Youths and their mentors can borrow loaner rods and tackle, and bait will be provided by Fish and Boat.

Catfish lesson Number 1: Don’t get stuck by the spines. One at the front of the dorsal fin and another in each of the pectorals contain a mild poison and can deliver a bee-like sting.

Of the 40 catfish species found in North America, 13 live in Pennsylvania. North Park Lake holds two catfish game species — brown bullheads and channel cats. Bullheads average 12 to 15 inches — an 18-incher is a trophy. Its sides have brown or black mottling and its tail is square-ish or rounded at the corners. Bullheads like ponds and the bays of largerlakes as well as slowmoving pools in warm-water streams and rivers. They’reusually found near soft or muddy bottoms withaquatic vegetation.

Channel catfish can reach 30 inches or longer. The sides tend to be silvergray or darker with small irregular spots, but its most distinguishing feature is a deeply forked tail that can’t be missed. Channel cats prefer clear warm lakes, large streams and rivers with clean sand or gravelbottoms.

North Park Lake was managed for channel cats before it was dredged in 2009, and surveys recorded 10-pounders, Lorson said. When it was rechristened in 2012, the management plan was continued and channel catfish in the 12- to 14-inch range were restocked. Larger adults were stocked recently in the “boathouse pond” above the upper dam for thementored youth event.

Dwight Yingling, owner of North Park Sports Shop, said anglers routinely catch the lake’s bullheads and channel catfish on everything from paste baits to live minnows, but he’s heard of no recent channel cat catches of exceptional size.

In Pennsylvania’s polluted past, the bullhead’s remarkable survival skills in warm, oxygen-depleted waters led many anglers to wrongly consider it and all catfish to be trash fish.

“That’s not so. Catfish are abundant and can be good eating,” Lorson said. “The regulations [for game species] are open season, no minimum size, and you don’t really need specialized equipment — a Snoopyrod will do.”

Catfish anglers sometimes try scented dough balls, but Lorson said there are better baits.

“Chicken livers to nightcrawlers to prepared baits, dip bait, worms, live minnows — they’re are all good for catfish in warmwater lakes,” Lorson said. “The main thing in lakes is the absence of current. [The scent] is not flowing downstream and it doesn’t take as much weight to keepthe bait down.”

Bullheads and channel cats are common in the Ohio River system, but the flathead is king. It’s a predator so perfect that fossils from 15 million years ago can not be distinguished from modern flatheads. Die-hard Pennsylvania flathead anglers sometimes use foot-long suckers for bait, and wrestle in alpha-cats of nearly 50 inches. The state record is more than 40 pounds. Loners except at spawning