( Willow Island, WV and Newport, OH)

The Willow Island Dam is the place to start in the upper stretches of the river. To be fair, the Ohio River offers some great fishing above this dam. It is not, however, located below the dams in the tailrace waters.  The fast, churning waters here offer some good smallmouth fishing and some great sauger and saugeye fishing. January brings cold waters, but still, fish can be caught. I

There are huge populations of Saugers and saugeyes all along the West Virginia side of the river; they tend to congregate below the dams in late winter.  Most anglers will fish for them with jigs and minnows hung under a bobber. There's nothing fancy here. Find the biggest, brightest jig you can -- a 1-ounce, lime-green fluorescent model is perfect. Stick a minnow on the jig and suspend it a few inches above the bottom. After that, it's a matter of waiting for the bobber to disappear.

In May, the water in the Ohio River should be reasonably stable and about as clear as it's going to get.  The stripers become ab active sport fish taken from the Ohio river.  Ohio and West Virginia have a working agreement with their stocking programs. West Virginia stocks the Willow Island Pool upstream and Ohio stocks the Belleville Pool downstream. The end result is  about five hybrids per river acre of river, per year. The stripers have a very high survival rate, the fishable population of hybrids stays high and constant all along the river at every dam along the Ohio.  These fish are roamers and travel the channels. Striper fish have swam their way upstream from the Kentucky release points into West Virginia. And, of course, the hybrid fingerlings from all three states of Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia end up in a lot of the same places. The hybrids will be schooled up near almost any creek mouth or sizeable inflow into the river. The occasional striper will almost always be caught in the tailrace waters below the dams.

Regardless of which species you target, take along a couple of long rods. There's not much shoreline cover in the area. You'll need to make long casts out past the shallow water and into the current. The fishing is respectable down as far as Bull Creek, near mile marker 165.

In Willow Island Creek a West Virginia Stream near Parkersburg  fish for: Rainbow Trout, Smallmouth Bass, Steelhead Trout.

West Virginia is getting serious about Flathead Catfish

Of all the fish that swim in West Virginia's waters, the flathead catfish grows largest.

State fisheries officials hope to capitalize on that fact by helping Ohio River flatheads, or "mudcats," grow even bigger.

"We'd like to see the Ohio become a 'destination spot' for flathead fishing," said Dave Wellman, an assistant fisheries biologist for the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources. "Before we can make that happen, we need to find out more about the species."

Wellman heads up a DNR research project designed to learn more about flatheads.

"So far, we've captured and tagged more than 1,000 flatheads in the Ohio's R.C. Byrd, Racine, Belleville and Willow Island [navigation] pools," he explained. "We're about midway through our second year of tagging, and we expect the project to take five years."

Ultimately, Wellman and his colleagues hope to find a way to increase the Ohio's population of trophy flatheads - fish that measure at least 40 inches in length.  The state record flathead, wrestled from the Little Kanawha River in 1956, measured 52 inches and weighed 70 pounds. A slightly heavier fish was caught at Burnsville Lake a few years ago, but the woman who caught it couldn't claim the record because she didn't have her catch weighed on certified scales.  The Kyger and Gavin power plants, both in Gallia County, and Willow Island in Washington County are all good areas to target. On the West Virginia side, the Mountaineer Power Plant, across from Pomeroy and Meigs County, offers great fishing in June.