Seven more degrees. Santee Cooper fishing guide Capt. Barb (Mouse) Witherell says that is all it will take to start the winter shad kill in the Santee Cooper Lakes and set off the annual catfish feeding frenzy.

“The water temperature is not quite right yet. We want it to be 53 degrees and right now it’s about 60 degrees,” said Witherell, the only full-time female guide on the lakes. “When it hits 53 degrees the shad start dying off and the catfish go crazy and want to eat.”

The winter frenzy may not have begun yet, but catfishing has been pretty good already this fall, she said.

“We were fishing in the wind one day this week and we caught 17 catfish. We threw back nine or ten small ones. We haven’t caught any really big ones yet, but we have had some break off the lines.”

Crappie fishing also has been good on the Santee lakes, she said. One day of crappie fishing produced half a dozen slabs that weighed 2 ½ to 3 pounds each and another eight or nine that weighed from 1 ½ to 2 pounds or more.

The only fly in the ointment is striper fishing, which appears to be in some kind of doldrums.

“Striper fishing just hasn’t done anything yet. Usually by now you can go and limit out on stripers, either by drifting or finding them schooling, and we haven’t had any schooling activity at all,” she said.

“I hope the stripers will start doing something. They are really slow this year, behind schedule big time. I have parties waiting to go striper fishing, but I don’t want to take them when the fishing is not good.”

But the catfishing has been good and is on the verge of being fantastic, she said. All that is needed is for the temperature to drop to 53 degrees and start the shad to dying off.

When the shad begin to die off, she explained, fishermen get right on the edge of the huge bait balls and fish straight down through the layer of shad to right above the bottom.

“You will mark acres of bait and you get right outside that bait and let the sinker go straight down to the bottom, then reel it back up about 3 feet.”

Witherell said likes to fish in the area the guides call the “mine field,” stumps left from the once vast forest that covered the area, where she targets little drop-offs and little structure changes.

“We fish shad – threadfin and gizzard shad. This time of year we cut the tail off the small threadfin shad. The last few weeks we have been catching them on cut bait. They are still eating mussels and they should have moved on by now.”

You can tell when a bigger fish is biting, she said, because it will pull the rod down slower than the smaller cats. “They are not in a big hurry to take the bait away from anyone else,” she noted.

“In the wintertime we don’t catch many under 5 to 8 pounds and we tend to catch the bigger fish in the winter,” she said. “I have caught all my bigger fish over 50 pounds in the wintertime. It’s fun to get a 30- to 40-pound catfish, even a 50-pounder, when you are fishing straight down and he only has 15 feet of line.”

With the cold weather on the way, Witherell said the water temperature probably will drop down to 53 degrees or less in the next two or three weeks.

“They really turn on in the wintertime. The catfish go nuts and get active. December through January is one of the best times of the year for catfishing.”

The catfish feeding frenzy will go right on through the middle to the end of January, she said, when the water starts warming back up in February with sunny, mild days here and there.

“It doesn’t really get too cold for the catfish. The lowest I’ve seen it was 42 degrees on the lake and as soon as it gets down that cold it starts warming back up.”

To book a striper or catfish trip on Santee Cooper with Capt. Witherell, call her at (803) 492-3381.