PLATE 147 Willie Underwood
Talmadge York told us, “We used to fish in these little ol’ trout streams for specks. Original specks [native speckled trout] won’t get but about six inches long. That’s all. They don’t have no scales on them at all. They’re just as slick as a catfish.”
Willie Underwood shared with us his feelings about why there aren’t many speckled trout left in Rabun County “The speckled trout is a small species. They don’t have scales but do have little specks on them. There are only a few in the streams because they have to have more oxygen than anything else. It’s got to be pure, clear water. The speckled trout are a thing of the past. There has been so much pollution in this clear water, and the lakes have been fished so heavy, the speckled trout are just nonexistent now. Speckled trout cannot compete with the fish that eat one another.”
L. E. Craig agreed with Willie Underwood. “I don’t know where a creek in this country is that’s got any speckled trout. They can’t stand for one bit of mud, silt, or anything [to be in the water]. I’d like to see just one more speckled trout. They are the best eating fish. A lot of people call brown trout a speckled trout, but they’re not.”
Andy Cope, who owned a trout fishing resort, told us, “Brown trout is a stream trout. It’s not a good trout to grow in lakes and ponds. They bite slower than the other trout, and that’s why there are some large brown trout caught in our streams. The main Betty’s Creek stream is stocked with brown trout by the Game and Fish Department.”
Jake Waldroop explained, “The brown trout doesn’t have any scales, and he’s brown all over. I’ve fished for the brown trout. They grow big. I caught one out there in the creek by my house that weighs three and a half pounds. Got him in the freezer right now.”
FISHING EQUIPMENT
The fishing equipment of today is fancy but fairly easy to use. Yet it wasn’t always easy to get fishing equipment. Some people made their own fishing poles out of cane or bamboo, their lines out of horsehair or string, and their sinkers from a piece of lead beaten out thin and folded around their line. People back then had it hard just to go fishing.
Willie Underwood explained the basic equipment. “Our fishing poles would be made out of creek canes, alder bushes, sourwood, or whatever we had.
“Fly rods have been around for years, but they wasn’t used in this area until after the Depression. Fly rods was for people that had money. People didn’t have them much around here because they couldn’t afford them. I was forty years old when I got my first fly rod, and I bought it myself.”
Melvin Taylor told us, “My daddy used a cane pole, and that’s what I started fishing with. The people that had a lot of money had a reel and rod. The rest had cane poles, which you can find on creek banks.
“Daddy caught bass that weighed eight and a half pounds with a cane pole. That’s the biggest fish I could remember. It came out of Burton Lake. Boy! They put it in a tub at that store on display. That one was a whopper on a cane pole! That’s the biggest I’ve ever heard of.”
Andy Cope said, “We would make our fishing poles out of birch saplings. We’d cut a birch sapling and peel the bark off it, then hang it up by the fire and let it dry. When it was dry, we would use it for a fishing pole. Sometimes folks who lived in an area where there was a river would get river cane poles. Where I grew up, there wasn’t any river cane.”
PLATE 148 “My daddy used a cane pole, and that’s what I started fishing with.”—Melvin Taylor
“Years ago, I used to fish with a cane pole—only thing we had to fish with,” L. E. Craig remembered. “There wasn’t much bamboo in this country, but you could buy ’em at almost any store for a dime—big, long-tipped ones. Boy! You could catch bass on that thing that weighed two or three pounds. You talk about sport! It was! Have your line just about as long as your pole.
“I used to go down to Seed Lake in a boat and catch eighteen or twenty bass in a couple of hours. Bream could make your line whistle if they got on your pole. A few people had level winding reels to cast for bass.”
Jake Waldroop said, “We would make our own fishing poles. Mostly we would get out there and hunt us a little straight hickory. Hemlock, black gum, and hickory was hard to get. I would always prefer a cane if I could get it. Cane is almost like bamboo.
“I have made lots of cane poles. We would go to the Litde Tennessee River and cut sometimes ten or fifteen of them, take them home, and hang them up by a string in the barn. We would cut them off the length we wanted them and tie a great big rock, three or four pounds, to them and let them hang there. Keep ’em from crooking up. Keeps ’em straight as a gun barrel and makes good fishing poles. If you didn’t hang ’em up and put a weight on them, they would be warped. The pole should be a little bit bigger than my thumb by the time it’s through hanging up. The tip will be as little as a knitting needle, but it will be strong. We could always get them from eight to ten feet long. A cane pole is hard to beat!”
Talmadge York reminisces, “Back when I was a boy, we made our line. We’d take a spool of thread and double it and beeswax ’em. And then we used to use what they called a silk line. You could buy lines made of silk before plastic came out.”
Willie Underwood told us, “We used to use sewing thread off a spool for fishing string. It would break easy, so you would have to double and twist it. Sometimes we’d twist it four times because the lines weren’t that long. We just had poles. We didn’t have any reels to put it on. We’d buy standard fishing hooks at the store, but we didn’t have fishing floats like we do now.”
Minyard Conner said, “I can remember when I used to fish with horsehair for a line. All you would have to do to it was twist some horsehairs together. You had to have a good smooth place to make ’em. Put them horsehairs on your leg and rub them. That’ll twist ’em together, and then when you want to set another one in there, just stick it in and keep a-rolling. They just roll on out there—make it as long as you want—and not have a knot in it. It’ll hold too, about three or four horsehairs twisted together. Some of them would put four or five horsehairs together to catch a big fish. A three-horsehair line will catch a twelve-inch rainbow. I’d say it’s six-pound test leader.
PLATE 149 Minyard Conner
“Put a sinker on your horsehair line to fish underwater. A horsehair won’t tangle up like your other lines. If you throw it over a limb, it might wrap around it three or four times, but you give it a little pull, and it’ll unravel by itself, and it’s straight. You take a cotton string and throw it around a limb, and it ties right there.”
Jake Waldroop recalled, “Sometimes we would buy hooks and tie them to the line, and sometimes we’d get them already made with the leader tied to them. Sometimes it’s faster getting the hook out of the fish’s mouth, if you can fish with bait with a sinker. ‘Cause if they’re bitin’ good, when he grabs the bait, he’ll just swallow hook and bait plumb down, and I have had to tear a fish’s whole mouth open to get the hook out.”
Leonard Jones told us about an alternative to using store-bought hooks. “I know one feller that said he wasn’t never able to buy him no hooks. He’d fish with a straight pin. He’d bend it, you know. It didn’t have that barb, and when he hooked one, he had to throw it out on the bank. If he didn’t, it’d come off, and he’d lose it.”
Leonard also explained how to make homemade sinkers. “Before they got to making sinkers, you’d just get you a piece of lead, cut it in strips, beat it out right thin, and then roll it around the line. You can buy any size sinkers now, great big ones or small ones. You want a sinker on it if you’re fishing with bait, but if you’re fishing with a fly you don’t.”
Andy Cope recalls, “We used store-bought hooks, but we made our own sinkers out of shot from a shotgun shell. It was folded and put in a big spoon and melted on a fire. That run the lead together. Then we’d hammer the lead out flat and cut it into little pieces and roll it around fishing line for sinkers.”
Talmadge York told us how to fi
x up a trotline. “To make a trotline, first tie the hooks to two-foot lengths of string. Then tie these to a long piece of binder twice about six or eight feet apart to keep the hooks from getting tangled up. Then go to a good root or something on the edge of the lake and tie one end of the line to that. Take your boat across the lake, maybe a hundred yards, somewhere where the lake’s not too wide, and have the other end of your line tied to a big rock. If you don’t tie the string to a big rock, it’ll stay right on top. Put it down to where it’ll be four or five foot under the water.
“I have set ’em and gone back the next morning, and every bait was still on. You work two or three hours to fix one up and set it and then go back and don’t get nothing—that’s hard work. I just quit fooling with it.”
Leonard Jones explained what to do with the fish you catch. “I use a stringer instead of a chain to put the fish I catch on. All you do is run the line up through the gills and out their mouths. The first one that you put on, you’ve got to run it back through, make a ring. The rest is just strung through the gills and out the mouth without having to make the ring. You carry your stringer along with you, but most of the time you’re setting down somewhere. So just throw your fish out in the water and take the end that has the sharp metal cover and stick it down in the ground. That’ll hold ’em.”
BAIT
“Trout will eat crawfish,” L. E. Craig told us. “If you ever clean a trout of any size, and you don’t find one in him, there’s something wrong. Nearly any kind of fish will bite a crawfish. If he sees one, he wants to get him. Boy! It hurts to get bit by a crawfish.”
Minyard Conner informed us that “minnows are good bait, but they don’t live long.” Talmadge York added, “I used to fish in the lake with minnows, and I fished for crappie with them. I reckon minnows are the only thing crappies will bite.”
Lots of fishermen think red worms are the best bait. Jake Waldroop told us, “Red worms are good bait. Sometimes I have caught six fish with one red worm. I’ve tried them all, and red worms are the best.” Buck Carver believes that “trout will all bite red worms in the wintertime and the early spring, but not all year round. They’ll go for flies a lot of the year.” Melvin Taylor told us, “Bass bites red worms and night crawlers real well in the spring. They’re better than a lizard anytime.” And Lawton Brooks said, “Red worms are pretty good for wild trout. Just regular earthworms. Them little ol’ speckled trout—you can catch them with those worms. Just pitch a little ol’ worm over there where the water ain’t real deep. He’ll come up and bite that worm, and you don’t know where he come from.”
Willie Underwood recalled, “We’d catch those ol’ black crickets that you see in the fields, but that was hard to do. They’re good for trout.”
Carl Dills told us about flies used by fishermen. “These old mountain people calls ’em stick bait, but the regular name for them is caddis fly. They live among sticks and rocks in the edge of the creek, and you just pull them out.”
Lots of fishermen preferred night crawlers. Blanche Harkins told us how her sons caught them. “My sons uses night crawlers and red worms. Night crawlers come out at night, and fishermen catch ’em. They’re just like red worms but a whole lot larger. The later at night they wait to catch them, the more they come out. If you wait till real late, they’ll be out on top of the ground, and you can just pick them up. You use a flashlight, and if you don’t dim your light, they jump back in their holes.”
PLATE 150 Carl Dills
Parker Robinson explained how to create a “bed” for night crawlers. “You can make a place in your yard to raise night crawlers by putting your food peels in a pile. That dirt’s gonna be rich where you have all that stuff, and your worms will come to that.”
Willie Underwood told us to “burn a hornets’ nest or yellow jackets’ nest and get the young larvae. They make awful good bait, but they’re tender enough that if you don’t catch your fish when he first hits that bait, you’ll have to bait your hook again.”
Talmadge York told us about some of the different baits he uses. “I have got these little fellers [hellgrammites] out from under rocks and fished for trout with ’em. They’ll sting you if you don’t catch ’em just right. They look like a great big worm. We used them for when we trawled for bass. You can find what they call stretcher worms in the edge of the water.”
Jack Waldroop recalled using mayflies as bait. “That’s a fly that’s down in the water. When he begins to come on top of the water and starts trying to fly, them fish come up to eat him. I’ve seen seventy-five to one hundred fish coming up at one time for those flies when they started hatching out. If you put a different kind of bait in there when the mayflies are in season, the fish won’t strike as much. Just about all fish like mayflies.”
Buck Carver reminisced about using wood sawyers. “The best luck I’ve had on a sinker or an eagle claw snail was these big of white sawyers that you get out of trestle timber. Used to, they would repair these railroad tracks and would throw out the old timber, and them of big sawyers would get in there. A sawyer is a termite-type worm. They’ll be anywhere from a quarter of an inch to three or four inches long. Sometimes you can find them in rotten pine logs.”
Another kind of worm used was the catawba worm. Minyard Conner told us, “The old catawba worms that are on the catawba trees—they’re good bait. You’ll never find the catawba worms on any other tree, just that certain kind.”
Talmadge York agreed that those worms were good bait, especially for bream. “Old pea trees is what we call the trees they grow off of. There’s another name for them but we always called ’em a pea tree. They have big of long peas on ’em. Bream bite catawba worms pretty good. Take a little stick or match and turn him wrong side outward. Take his head and push him plumb through. When he turns out, he’s white. They’ll bite him better white than green. If you fish with them, you usually catch big bream. Little ones won’t fool with ’em.”
Many fishermen used lizards for bait. Talmadge York recalled, “I have fished with what they call a red dog. It’s a type of lizard except he’s redder, like blood. They are good to fish with for bass. We used to go spring lizard hunting and stay out ’til twelve or one o’clock if we were going fishing the next day. You’d tear your fingers all to pieces scratching under rocks and catching them with a flashlight. Them spring lizards are awful good bait for bass if you fish slow with ’em. You get more big ones that way because the little ones don’t pay much attention to the lizards.”
L. E. Craig told us he used spring lizards to catch the biggest fish he ever caught. “I like to use spring lizards for bait. I don’t like artificial bait. The largest fish I ever caught weighed seven and a half pounds, and I was using spring lizards. I’ve caught lots of trout with little-bitty lizards about two inches long. Bream and trout bite them small lizards you get out of a spring. Them ol’ lizards live for half a day almost.”
Jake Waldroop described using chicken parts for bait. “A good thing to bait your hook with for trout is chicken innards. Just throw a great big wad of them out in the water. Directly a fish will come and get ’em and start dragging them off. All you got to do is drag your fish out.”
Corn is commonly used here to attract stocked fish. Jake Waldroop recalled, “Corn is good bait. Put a little red worm on a hook and then put a piece of corn on after it. Throw your line out there, and the stocked fish will come right for it. You can catch them better than natives with corn. The natives don’t care too much about that corn.”
Talmadge York told us, “Here, lately, the stocked fish bite corn better than anything, whole-kernel corn. The reason they bite this whole-kernel corn is because they’ve been fed on pellets, and they’re used to that.”
Many fishermen debate the use of artificial or real bait. Talmadge York told us, “I’d rather use artificial bait because it’s less trouble. Fish bite ’em just as good. At times, I believe they hit ’em better. I’ve been fishing with boys that’s been fishing with ’em whil
e I was using live bait, and they’d catch ’em out of a hole where I wouldn’t.”
Carl Dills disagreed. “Fish go after live bait better than they do artificial bait. It’s like if you went down here to the café, and you ordered a steak and they brought you a hot dog, you’d tell them you wouldn’t take it. A fish is smart. They don’t grow up to be twenty, twenty-five inches biting every hook that comes along either. They get smart as they grow. A big trout hardly ever feeds himself of a night. Once in a while, he’ll bite, usually if you use a big enough tackle to hole ’im.”
Other fishermen change bait as needed, depending on what the fish are biting. Buck Carver said, “When you find a good fishing hole, and one day you come down there and throw your hook in, and they don’t bite, you know that they’ve got tired of the same of thing. Fish are just like women—they change their minds all the time.”
PLATE 151 “When you find a good fishing hole, and one day you come down there and throw your hook in, and they don’t bite, you know that they’ve got tired of the same of thing.”—Buck Carver
FISHING BY THE SIGNS
Many of the old-timers believe the signs of the zodiac play a part in whether or not the fish will bite. Buck Carver recalled, “Different times of the moon makes a lot of difference when you’re fishing. When the sign is in the heart, they will bite better than usual.
“I tell you what you can do at home. Find a bottle like a small Coca-Cola bottle that’s round and fill it to the top with water. Place the bottle upside down into a glass. When the water in the bottle rises in the glass up to the neck of the bottle, get your hooks and go!”
Leonard Jones doesn’t follow the signs when fishing. “Lots of people go by the signs of the moon, but I never did pay it much attention, just to be honest with you. I go anytime. There’s days you can go out there, and I don’t care what kind of bait you’ve got. They won’t bite. There’s times you can go, and they’ll bite like anything. Now, I don’t know what causes it, whether it’s the signs or what. Lots of people notices the signs to a great extent. I never did pay much attention to them.”
Foxfire 11: Wild Plant Uses, Gardening, Wit, Wisdom, Recipes, Beekeeping, Toolmaking, Fishing, and More Affairs of Plain Living Page 30