Mike Malczewski used to make his living fishing year-round for channel catfish on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. But then one wintry day about a decade ago, he went out to retrieve his baited pots from the Choptank River and found them full of a different kind of catfish.
Since then, the waterman from Cordova, MD, said he’s had to diversify. He now spends about five months a year also targeting blue catfish, an interloper from the Mississippi River that in recent years has turned the Chesapeake Bay into its domain.