Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
Modern fishing has become part science, part ingenuity, and largely, marketing. Like everything else in our ever faster-paced society, fishing has become a sport dedicated to the newest, fastest, latest technology.
Why just pick a spot and work the water when you can have sonar imaging that would have been the envy of every navy on earth, just a generation ago, spotting schools, or even individual fish for you. Gadgets abound in the fishing world, from custom flies to holographic imaged spinners and spoons. You can drop a lot of coin without ever hitting the water if you’re not careful.
It wasn’t always this way.
I learned to fish in a little muddy stream near Blytheville Air Force Base in Northeast Arkansas 60 years ago this summer. My dad wouldn’t take me out until I could land a casting plug inside an old tire 30 feet away with every cast. With that motivation, I mastered the ancient baitcasting reel loaded with 30-pound test braid. One afternoon, near a highway bridge, I caught an eight-inch “bullhead” catfish. I was hooked.
Word spread from my father to my grandpa, great-uncle Fred, and my dad’s cousins Dude, Buck, and Hop (not their real names, but it was 1960’s Arkansas).
My dad, grandpa, and great uncle took me fishing on adventures in nearly every style of angling you can do in the south, except one. We didn’t go noodling. My grandma Sally wouldn’t have it.
Dad’s cousin Hop was missing his left little toe from an earlier noodling expedition. As the guys worked the banks of the tributaries of the L’Anguille River, itself a tributary of the St. Francis, which flows into the Mississippi a few miles north of Helena, they were feeling with their feet for catfish. If they felt one, they had a short piece of rope that they’d shove into the big cat’s mouth and tie off through the gills. They grabbed some huge 10-to-20-pound channel cats that way.
Poor Hop wasn’t lucky one day. As he felt along, he had his little toe severed by a snapping turtle. It was one of the risks of the game. (And yes, that’s how he got his nickname “Hop.”)
All I heard were the stories of noodling, a sport that has experienced a recent revival across the American South.
Jug fishing was another style that I was able to do. We’d load grandpa’s 12-foot Johnboat with quart to gallon plastic jugs, usually an empty Chlorox bottle. We’d tie heavy braided line, with a monofilament leader through the jug handle, add a heavy weight and a size 2 or larger hook with a hunk of sucker meat, or maybe a big gob of nightcrawlers then toss them into backwater lakes and ponds. We’d string out a few dozen and then head home. The next day, or maybe the day after, we’d go back to check the jugs. Many of them were moving. On the other end were bream, small and largemouth bass, catfish, perch, and crappie. If we’d baited with smaller hooks, we’d often have bluegill, sunfish, and pumpkinseed as well.
This type of “trout line” fishing is illegal in Wyoming but is still practiced widely throughout the south.
They often used spark plugs when out on the lakes and rivers. A sparkplug with a swivel attached to it and a heavy line connected can be used to “knock” a lure loose from an underwater snag. They can be used as a bottom bouncer style weight too. A sparkplug is much heavier than most lead sinkers, but it takes a line to the bottom and slides along without hooking as easily on underwater obstacles. My fishing relatives used spark plugs often when working deep, fast-moving water for blue and channel cats. The spark plug held its position on the bottom in the fast-moving current without getting snagged. The bait on those days was usually putrid chicken hearts or maybe a bit of old liver aged to perfection in a glass jar placed in the sun. It was revolting to smell, but the cats it attracted were excellent eating.
One day, I watched Dude catch a monster largemouth bass with a mouse. He put a live mouse on a wooden shingle. He put a rubber band around the middle of the mouse with a line connected to a treble hook a few inches behind it. He put the rodent on the shingle and pushed it out into the water. After floating a few dozen yards, he flicked his line, knocking the mouse into the water. As the mouse swam furiously toward the shore, the water boiled as a big largemouth swallowed the mouse and hooked itself in the process.
When we lived in Puerto Rico, the natives were masters at shore fishing with just the simplest, inexpensive gear they could find.
The most fascinating thing I witnessed was how they tossed bait over a hundred yards into the Caribbean Sea with no rod at all. They wound heavy monofilament line over large Coke bottles. The glass Coke bottles they used dated from the 1940s and 50s and had been worn smooth by decades of fishing. The line was skillfully wound around the quart-sized Coke bottle just right, not too tight, and not too loose. Too tight and it wouldn’t play out right, too loose and it would snarl. In their left hand, they held the bottle with a little slack line, in their right they began spinning the weight, bait, and hook around their head on about four feet of line. They spun it several times, sort of a “David and Goliath” sling technique, before releasing it. It flew farther than the best surf caster could reach on his best cast.
They played the line until a resounding “slunk” hit the water. They reeled it in just enough to keep tension on the line and pulled out a wide variety of fish. These guys were pros.
Not to be outdone, my dad’s buddies at Ramey Air Force base came up with their own method of getting a line far into the ocean.
It was a two-man operation, one guy flew a kite with a fishing line connected to it on a clothespin. The other one played out the line on his spinning rod until the kite was high over the water. When the moment was right, he jerked the line, releasing it from the clothespin and the bait, hook, and sinker dropped into the water, far from shore.
I don’t remember if they caught anything, but the process was fascinating.
Fishing on a budget remains an All-American pastime, and we live in the heart of some of the world’s best freshwater angling.
Here’s to ingenuity wherever you may find it.