Trotlines

There are dozens of species of catfish in the south. They are not defined by their whiskers, but by the shape of their head and scaleless body. The dorsal and pectoral fins have hard spines that can be locked into place if the fish is scared or in a defensive or aggressive mode. The catfish can secrete venom through the spines. I have had many wicked injuries to my hands from these barbs. Every time you take a catfish off a hook, there is a danger that you will get a nasty stick from one of those spines.

There is an art to successfully catching catfish on trotlines. A trotline is a fishing line strung across or alongside a river, stream, lake, or bayou with dangling hooks at various intervals. In the South they are used mostly for catfishing. The hooks are baited and usually left overnight. The line is held in place by tying it off on a tree limb and by attaching heavy weights to the line.

John Hill, my old “River Rat” mentor, taught me to catch the big ones with a trotline. Nothing he did was traditional or expensive or impractical, so it was the same with catching catfish. What better person to teach me how to use a trotline than Mr. Hill who grew up on a boat anchored in the Mississippi River just north of Vicksburg, Mississippi.

The French have a good word to describe John Hill: “bricoleur.” The short definition of a “bricoleur” is a handyman, but the longer explanation is that it is someone who can take whatever is available and make something useful out of it. Mr. Hill’s catfishing techniques would not impress many fishermen today, but he got the job done, and we caught some whoppers. The Mississippi River and its tributaries in the Louisiana and Mississippi Delta is the home of many species of catfish, but the three most common ones are channel, blue and flathead. The flathead has a yellow coloring on its head, and it really does not taste very good, so it was undesirable for us. The flathead could weigh up to 140-pound and the channel could weigh up to 40-pound, but the biggest we caught were no more than 30 pounds. The average was about 8-pound--good eating size.

Today, many trotliners use circle hooks that are easier to catch the catfish. The hook is not actually a circle, but it is more of a circular shape than a traditional hook.  But those circle hooks were not available to us 45 years ago, so we used a straight-shanked hook. When hooks became dull, we would toss them because the catfish has a thick bony mouth, and to successfully catch the catfish, it had to set the hook through that bony mouth. If the catfish only set the hook in the sides of the mouth, it would definitely tear away before we arrived.

The art was not only in choosing the right hooks, but in the line used—we preferred a twisted nylon twine—and how to weigh down the lines. Mr. Hill had a barrel full of window weights from the 1930s construction era and they worked perfectly. How much slack to leave in the line was crucial to whether you were able to keep a fish on the hook once the hook was set. One of the most difficult things to master was how to tie the drop lines to the trotline—until Mr. Hill showed me how to do it. The simple knot he showed me how to make was so effortless that it was hard to believe that it would work. But it did. This is a very useful knot, and if it has a name I have never seen or heard of it.

Using the right bait was essential to catching catfish. Crawdads were the best, but they were not always in season. For the most elite readers that is crawfish, and for the even more refined these are defined as small freshwater decapod crustaceans that resemble a lobster. We would go to a swamp or marsh or a bayou, slough or backwater and capture crawdads with a drag net. The second-best bait was cut bait from Shad caught with the same net in shallow back water or bayous. Shad have a peculiar odor that attract catfish.

After Mr. Hill passed away, I was fortunate to have another trotlining partner. Dr. Sam Gore, an internationally celebrated sculptor and Founding Father of the Mississippi College Art Department. Sam grew up catfishing, and he had not set out a trotline in many years, but he had not forgotten his trotlining skills. Unlike the river adventures with Mr. Hill, however, we only ventured to lakes in the central Mississippi area. When I would mention that my catfishing buddy was a sculptor, I would hear things like “I would not have dreamed that someone so refined would know how to catch catfish in the backwoods of Mississippi.” I guess they knew that I wasn’t “refined!”

As that great philosopher Bruce Lee so adequately espoused, “True refinement seeks simplicity.” Sam Gore and John Hill were poles apart in their understanding of cultural ramifications, education, and professionalism, but they were both simple men who in their own way used their talents to glorify God, and enjoy the simple life. I anticipate spending more time with them in eternity.