Walter Pratt faced a problem any angler would be happy to have.

Standing at the edge of the water on an island in Lake Houston earlier this week, the 50-year-old Splendora resident was smiling as he held a fishing rod and fought what turned out to be a 3-pound blue catfish.

But as the catfish wallowed on the surface a few yards off the bank, the tip of Pratt’s second rod, propped on a nearby holder, began nodding with the telltale signal a fish was gobbling the chunk of threadfin shad hiding a hook.

What to do?

Pratt hurriedly battled the blue cat to the bank, lifted it far enough onto the sand that it couldn’t easily flop back into the lake, dropped that rod, grabbed the other, set the hook and was fast to another fish.

He turned, grinning as he reeled in what proved to be a 14-inch channel catfish.

“Now you see why I say Lake Houston is the best catfish lake I’ve ever fished,” Pratt said.

He and Lake Houston’s catfish had already made a strong argument to that effect.

Pratt, whose Walt’s Guide Service specializes in rod-and-reel catfishing trips on the 12,000-acre reservoir on the San Jacinto River in far-northeast Houston, picked up my fishing partner and me at Lake Houston Marina at dawn. We carefully motored up the lake, dodging stumps and sandbars and islands uncovered by the reservoir’s shrinking water level until easing ashore on a heavily timbered island where we set up chairs and ice chests on a shady, sandy strip of beach.

We baited hooks with chunks of fresh shad, heaved them into the lake, sat down and settled into chairs to wait. But we didn’t have time to get comfortable.

Almost immediately, we began catching catfish. Lots of catfish. Channel cats. Blue cats. The smallest we landed were at least an inch over the 12-inch minimum for blue and channel cats. The largest was a 28-inch blue that weighed 8 pounds. And we had a handful of 3-5-pounders.

It seemed as though the flat between the island and the old San Jacinto River channel was crawling with catfish.

“We always catch a good mess of fish,” the gregarious Pratt said. “I’ve fished for catfish all over Texas. I used to think Lake Livingston had the best catfishing — and it is good. But for numbers and average size, I haven’t found a better lake than Lake Houston.”

Numbers don’t lie

Empirical evidence supports Pratt’s anecdotal observations.

“Lake Houston has really strong populations of blue and channel catfish,” said Mark Webb, district biologist for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department’s inland fisheries division. “And the fish are fat and healthy.”

Results of TPWD gill net surveys of Lake Houston earlier this year produced averages of 40 blue cats and 24 channel cats per “net night,” Webb said.

“That’s huge,” he said, adding the fish taken in the samplings showed a wide range of sizes of catfish, which indicates strong recruitment of young fish and good numbers of older, larger fish.

“Lake Houston’s catfish fishery is really underutilized,” Webb said. “It’s by far the strongest fishery in the lake, but doesn’t get that much pressure.”

That’s in large part a function of Lake Houston’s physical character and reputation.

The lake, built in 1954 as a water source for the City of Houston, is mostly an open-water reservoir with very little shallow-water habitat (willows, aquatic vegetation or other “structures”) conductive to largemouth bass, sunfish and crappie.

Considerable bulkheading along the shoreline by lakeside property owners hurts shallow-water aquatic habitat. But it’s the lake’s often muddy water, caused by runoff from sand and gravel operations along the San Jacinto River upstream from the lake, that really limits shallow-water habitat needed by largemouths. All that muddy runoff causes siltation and limits the amount of sunlight able to penetrate the water.

“You just don’t have the littoral habitat to support a premier largemouth bass fishery,” Webb said.

But Lake Houston does provide just the kind of habitat in which catfish can thrive, he said. The water is rich in nutrients that support a healthy population of threadfin and gizzard shad – primary forage for blue catfish.

Channel cats, which focus primarily on crawfish, aquatic insects and other benthic creatures, also find plenty of food in Lake Houston.

“Lake Houston has a good, strong forage base,” Webb said. “You see that in the body condition of the catfish. They are extremely healthy.”

So is the lake’s water.

“The lake’s water quality is excellent; it’s just muddy,” Webb said.

Add low predation on young catfish (largemouth bass are big predators on small catfish, but Lake Houston’s bass population is modest at best), and you have the ingredients for a booming catfish fishery.

Somewhat surprisingly, given that catfish are the second most-popular target species among the state’s 2 million or so freshwater anglers and the lake sits within 50 miles of nearly 5 million people, Lake Houston’s catfish fishery is relatively ignored.

TPWD surveys of anglers fishing the lake indicated 43 percent of them were targeting crappie, 28 percent were after largemouth bass, and only 15 percent focused on catfish.

Also, most of the fishing pressure on Lake Houston is concentrated in Luce’s Bayou and adjacent waters on the northeast side of the lake – not surprising, as the Luce’s Bayou area holds almost all of the best bass/crappie habitat in the reservoir.

That leaves the rest of the lake to people like Pratt, who have discovered just how good the lake’s catfishing can be.

“I can’t remember a day when we didn’t catch a bunch of fish,” Pratt said of his seven years targeting Lake Houston’s catfish.

A typical trip produces a mix of channel and blue cats, he said. And it’s traditional, laid-back catfishing – from the bank in chairs set on a shady, sandy shoreline or, when the lake level is up and he can use a larger boat, from an anchored pontoon boat.

Best-kept secret

Most of the catfish Pratt’s clients land are well over the 12-inch minimum. Channel cats, which don’t grow as large as blues, average 13-17 inches. Blues average 15-25 inches, with occasional fish weighing 10 pounds or more. (The heaviest LakeHouston catfish he’s caught on rod-and-reel was a 44-pound flathead, and the heaviest blue was a 36-pounder caught on a jug line.)

Experienced anglers commonly land 25-fish aggregate limits of blues and channels, Pratt said. And they almost always have the fishing and the wildlife-rich islands to themselves.

“We see deer and pelicans and roseate spoonbills and even bald eagles,” Pratt said. “But we hardly ever see any other people catfishing.

“They don’t know what they’re missing.”