Gary, good evening! The fishing stories, worms, Beaver Creek...many great memories stirred by that writing, and thank you very much! I will share a short one with you, for your consideration.
Back in the days when boys and dads did stuff together, there was the Work Stuff and the Fun Stuff, to keep them occupied. Under Fun Stuff, there were all sorts of fish-catching strategies, that's for sure. One strategy that required a lot more preparation time and just took a lot longer to do, was setting and running a trot line.
According to Wikipedia, A trot line is a heavy fishing line with baited hooks attached at intervals by means of branch lines called snoods. A snood is a short length of line which is attached to the main line using a clip or swivel, with the hook at the other end. A trot line can be set so it covers the width of a creek or river with baited hooks and can be left unattended.
Back then, rules were not so frequent and complex as they are today, and trot line assembly was not regulated quite as closely as it is today. Most dads that I was aware of made their own trot lines, and the line was generally as long as it needed to be, with as many hooks as it took to fill that particular length of line. Dads knew a special knot for each dangling Snood..I didn't know Snood was a word, until I saw it in Wikipedia...there was a Snood maybe every three feet, or so, along the main line. And there was no end to the clever ways that dads devised to keep the completed trot line tangle-free.
My dad and I, with various buddies from the Osage, trot lined Beaver Creek, Salt Creek, and some creeks that probably had no names. And not only trot lines...there were many variations of this fishing style, like limb lines, drop lines, throw lines, and jug lines. I remember dad's favorite way of tying off his lines was to tie to a very "whippy" young tree or branch...one that could handle tremendous strain, if some really big catfish were to get hooked, but would not be likely to snap or break at a crotch.
So, with lines made up, and the boat and overnight gear made ready, there was the Bait Fish catching trip yet to do. Kids are really GOOD at catching bait fish...little perch and sunfish. The worms are necessary, as explained in Gary's story, to do an efficient bait fish expedition, and cane poles worked famously. Our favorite place to catch the little ones was up over the dam above Phillips Park and around to the right, near the old boat houses. And if the water was clear and still, we could dangle a small piece of bacon in the rock crevices, and judge the perfect moment to pull out some pretty impressive crawdads before they let go with their pinchers. Crawdads DO love bacon! And catfish DO love crawdads!
Now...skip over a bunch of small steps,... we are on location, boat in the water, preliminary camp set up, and trot line is out there. Right before dark we do the first baiting run, pulling the boat along the entire length of line by hand, pausing to bait each hook, and back to camp. The bait would be the small perch, hooked to remain alive, or the crawdads, or any among a whole menagerie of other baits...cut bait, stink bait, various livers...you know, stink bait, and the making of it, might be a whole nother story by itself!
At camp, the usual evening meals and marshmallows (clinically OK, as per the Locker Room story), small talk and stories, and right before bed time, the first run of the trot line. Back in the boat, very quiet in the still of the night, man-odors mingling with "6-12" brand rub-on bug repellent, again hand-pulling the boat along the line, elevated heart rates anticipating what might be on that next hook! And, believe me, it might be anything...catfish, gar, turtles, snakes, even some rare animal called a Mud Puppy!
Trot line re-baited and back at camp, any fish we brought in were cleaned and iced, or kept alive until the trip home, which meant keeping them safe from anything else that might eat them! The runs were repeated at intervals throughout the night, with something similar to sleep, in between runs. Thus, trot lining is accomplished, one more run to bring in the lines and discard unused bait, in the morning.
I knew some guys that caught some super-huge catfish that way, but mostly all I ever saw on our lines were good eating-sized fish, and the other off-the-wall things I mentioned. But the fun we had, and the etched-in non-erasable memories of trot lining, with the occasional broken off or straightened out hooks (What the heck did that?)... so rewarding in its own uncomplicated way. The biggest cats I ever saw came out of Phillips Lake (Charlotte), the year that the lake was poisoned on purpose...there were some kid-sized catfish being revived in stock tanks, and a whole bunch of carp and gar that they wanted to remove from the lake. Many times, as we bass-fished that lake, we had to untangle our lures from someone's trot lines. I think I recall that Ol' Clyde Lee ran trot lines in that lake.
Thanks Russell.
What do you learn from the Osage?
Thanks for your time,Back in the days when boys and dads did stuff together, there was the Work Stuff and the Fun Stuff, to keep them occupied. Under Fun Stuff, there were all sorts of fish-catching strategies, that's for sure. One strategy that required a lot more preparation time and just took a lot longer to do, was setting and running a trot line.
According to Wikipedia, A trot line is a heavy fishing line with baited hooks attached at intervals by means of branch lines called snoods. A snood is a short length of line which is attached to the main line using a clip or swivel, with the hook at the other end. A trot line can be set so it covers the width of a creek or river with baited hooks and can be left unattended.
Back then, rules were not so frequent and complex as they are today, and trot line assembly was not regulated quite as closely as it is today. Most dads that I was aware of made their own trot lines, and the line was generally as long as it needed to be, with as many hooks as it took to fill that particular length of line. Dads knew a special knot for each dangling Snood..I didn't know Snood was a word, until I saw it in Wikipedia...there was a Snood maybe every three feet, or so, along the main line. And there was no end to the clever ways that dads devised to keep the completed trot line tangle-free.
My dad and I, with various buddies from the Osage, trot lined Beaver Creek, Salt Creek, and some creeks that probably had no names. And not only trot lines...there were many variations of this fishing style, like limb lines, drop lines, throw lines, and jug lines. I remember dad's favorite way of tying off his lines was to tie to a very "whippy" young tree or branch...one that could handle tremendous strain, if some really big catfish were to get hooked, but would not be likely to snap or break at a crotch.
So, with lines made up, and the boat and overnight gear made ready, there was the Bait Fish catching trip yet to do. Kids are really GOOD at catching bait fish...little perch and sunfish. The worms are necessary, as explained in Gary's story, to do an efficient bait fish expedition, and cane poles worked famously. Our favorite place to catch the little ones was up over the dam above Phillips Park and around to the right, near the old boat houses. And if the water was clear and still, we could dangle a small piece of bacon in the rock crevices, and judge the perfect moment to pull out some pretty impressive crawdads before they let go with their pinchers. Crawdads DO love bacon! And catfish DO love crawdads!
Now...skip over a bunch of small steps,... we are on location, boat in the water, preliminary camp set up, and trot line is out there. Right before dark we do the first baiting run, pulling the boat along the entire length of line by hand, pausing to bait each hook, and back to camp. The bait would be the small perch, hooked to remain alive, or the crawdads, or any among a whole menagerie of other baits...cut bait, stink bait, various livers...you know, stink bait, and the making of it, might be a whole nother story by itself!
At camp, the usual evening meals and marshmallows (clinically OK, as per the Locker Room story), small talk and stories, and right before bed time, the first run of the trot line. Back in the boat, very quiet in the still of the night, man-odors mingling with "6-12" brand rub-on bug repellent, again hand-pulling the boat along the line, elevated heart rates anticipating what might be on that next hook! And, believe me, it might be anything...catfish, gar, turtles, snakes, even some rare animal called a Mud Puppy!
Trot line re-baited and back at camp, any fish we brought in were cleaned and iced, or kept alive until the trip home, which meant keeping them safe from anything else that might eat them! The runs were repeated at intervals throughout the night, with something similar to sleep, in between runs. Thus, trot lining is accomplished, one more run to bring in the lines and discard unused bait, in the morning.
I knew some guys that caught some super-huge catfish that way, but mostly all I ever saw on our lines were good eating-sized fish, and the other off-the-wall things I mentioned. But the fun we had, and the etched-in non-erasable memories of trot lining, with the occasional broken off or straightened out hooks (What the heck did that?)... so rewarding in its own uncomplicated way. The biggest cats I ever saw came out of Phillips Lake (Charlotte), the year that the lake was poisoned on purpose...there were some kid-sized catfish being revived in stock tanks, and a whole bunch of carp and gar that they wanted to remove from the lake. Many times, as we bass-fished that lake, we had to untangle our lures from someone's trot lines. I think I recall that Ol' Clyde Lee ran trot lines in that lake.
Thanks Russell.
What do you learn from the Osage?
- a Jug Line is what you fish with not what you say at a bar
- Memories are more important than the event, they last a life time
- and the moral to that is keep your eye on the goal not on the pain (fish hooks in the eye, ask Janis Harris)
gary@thepioneerman.com
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