It took a lot of practice to learn to catch these fast fish. Most of
the time I used an old tennis ball tube and caught the ~2" long
babies, but a few times I caught 6" fish by hand. I would never have
been able to do this easily in bigger rivers, but the summer I chased
fish the most there I spent so much time-in-the 200' or so of brook
behind my house that I knew exactly how many fish were in each pool
and could identify almost all of them. No one else went there and it
was kind of like having a huge aquarium.
At the time it was just entertaining, but looking back I learned a TON
about brook trout. They are fairly smart but also fairly predictable,
especially when you get to know the individual fish. To this day I can
predict what the fish will do most of the time although they still
surprise me from time to time. Last summer there was a nice 4-6"
brookie that got stuck in a puddle when the river receeded after a
rain. The puddle was maybe 4' wide on average and about 20' long.
Similar to the catfish story earlier, I decided to save it. Within 5
minutes, its tail was sticking out of the top of the cardboard coffee
cup which was all that I had with me to chase it with and I was madly
dashing across the gravel to release it in the river.
This same puddle had about a gazillion young dace and suckers in it. I
spent all day the next day chasing those stupid fish with a 10"
aquarium net with very little luck. I just didn't know where the
little buggers were going to dart off to! Goes to show what a little
experience can teach you.
By the way, some of the blacknose dace, creek chub and white suckers
from that pool became my first locally native fish that I kept in a
tank for a while. I took them home to identify them and fell in love
with how active they all were.
Anyway, enough rambling.
Jim
On Wed, 29 Dec 2004 10:23:14 -0500, Bruce Stallsmith
<fundulus-in-hotmail.com> wrote:
> Nobody else has listed this yet, so I'll take the plunge--Missouri has
> legalized catching catfish by hand (my dialect for it is guddling, yours may
> vary of course...). If I recall correctly, only three other states allow
> this form of fishing, Oklahoma and Tennessee being two of them (I forget the
> third, Arkansas?).
>
> The link below may break on to two lines, beware.
>
> http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/12/28/missouri_approves_fishing_with_bare_hands/?rss_id=Boston.com+/+News
>
> --Bruce Stallsmith
> no legal guddling in the Tennessee
> Huntsville, AL, US of A
>
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