Talmadge York agreed. “I don’t go by the signs. But now I believe that on a dark night is the best time to fish. I don’t mean to fish on the dark night, but just that time of the month when the moon is not shining bright. It seems like when there is a light night, the fish feed all night, and they’re not hungry the next day. They take it by spells. When they’re feeding, you couldn’t catch a one. It’d be just like there’s not a fish in the water.”
FISHING TECHNIQUES
All the people we talked to had different ideas about the way they caught fish and what worked best for them. We asked each fisherman to tell how he caught the kinds of fish he does and any methods he recommends.
Lawton Brooks told us, “Crappie will bite in one place for a while, and then they’ll quit. They move a lot. They move in schools like white bass. If you get in a bunch of crappie, and they start biting good, the first one you catch in the lip where it won’t hurt him, ease him up and cut the line, leaving your hook in him. Cut you off a little bit of leader and tie it to a lightbulb and just drop it back in the water, and he’ll stay with the gang. Watch where the lightbulb goes, and just take your boat and follow him. Just keep a-catching them because he will follow the gang of crappies, and you will know where the fish are.
“I’ll tell you about a catfish. He’s so slow about biting. Maybe you’ll set there for hours before one ever bites. Maybe you’ll catch one, and sometimes you’ll be there the rest of the day and night and not catch nothing. I haven’t caught but two catfish in my life in the daytime. Caught one of them out of Hiawassee Lake and caught the other one down here above Tallulah Falls. I went down to Túgalo one time with another feller and caught a bunch of little catfish about four inches long. It wasn’t interesting. They was too small to eat.”
“Anytime my wife will let me go fishing is the best time to go,” Carl Dills declared. “When I get all my work done and she’ll let me—that’s the best time. You take one of the dark nights. The fish will bite better in the daytime than they will of a light night. I reckon they feed more when the moon is shining all night long than they do of a dark night.
“When it’s raining, it washes out the food into the water, and they’ll go to feeding. There’s a certain time a fish will go to feeding, and other times you swear there wasn’t a fish in the creek. Then in maybe ten minutes, there’s fish everywhere you look.
“You take a catfish. It feeds by smell, and they’ll bite when the water’s muddy quicker than when it’s clear. A bass or a trout feeds by sight, not by smell alone, and they bite better when the water’s clear. Dark water that’s dingy, though, and using night crawlers, trout will bite ’cause they’re looking for worms that’s washed in the water from a heavy rain. They’re out there looking for ’em.”
Parker Robinson revealed some of the secrets to his successful fishing. “I like to use two fishing poles because I’ll be trying to catch one on one pole and maybe another one would bite the other. I like to fish from land because I can catch more fish, but they’re about the same size you’d catch from a boat. I don’t like to fish in the wintertime because you can’t catch much. You can catch more fish when it’s not raining, but it don’t matter if it’s cloudy.”
Buck Carver informed us, “When you get to the headwaters of these little trout streams, and the water is extremely clear, I like to wade downstream because that stirs up the mud, and fish in their holes can’t see you. You can catch more going downstream than you will going up.
PLATE 152 “I like to use two fishing poles, because I’ll be trying to catch one on one pole and maybe another one would bite the other.”—Parker Robinson
“When you’re fishing for native trout, fish uphill. There’ll be one laying out on guard duty at the bottom of the hole. If you can, slip up behind him and throw out the hook above him and let it drift down to him. If you can get that one on guard duty, you’ll be able to catch two or three more out of that same hole. But if he sees you and sails into that hole, you’re lucky if you get any of ’em ’cause he comes in there so fast, the rest of ’em knows that he’s done set the alarm. They ain’t fools. If one comes in there like a scalded dog, the others in that hole knows there’s a dead cat on the line somewhere.”
Leonard Jones stated, “A good time to go fishing is when it’s raining, if you [don’t mind] getting wet. They’ll bite as good or better than they will any other time. I think maybe the rain causes the water to rise, and they learn that when the water rises, it washes in stuff for them to eat. When it commences to raining, they get to stirring around, and the more they stir, the apter you are of catching them.
“You take the bream. They go in droves around. Maybe you’ll catch several right now, and then they’ll be gone for a while, then come back around, and you’ll catch another bunch. They don’t stay long at the same place. Now, a big of trout, if he’s got a certain hole in the river, he’ll stay there most of the time in that same place.
“You should go fishing early of a morning or late of a evening. You can catch trout or catfish at night. From daylight ’til nine in the morning, you’ll catch more fish than you will the rest of the day ’til about five or six that evening. Any kind of fish will bite a heap better early of a morning or late of a evening. They don’t bite too awful good at noon. They’ll bite some along and along all day. When it gets on up about the Fourth of July when it gets real hot, they don’t bite good at all. They’ll bite in the winter if you can stand to stay out there and fish, but you freeze to death. I caught bream one time up yonder on Bear Creek Lake ’til I got so cold baiting my hook that I got to where I didn’t have no feeling nearly in my hands. Every time I’d throw my hook in, one would bite it. I just kept fishing ’til I froze myself good before I quit.
“In the wintertime, fish eat anything they can get. If a lake has been down and rises, why, that washes in a lot of food.”
Melvin Taylor believes the best time to fish is when it’s calm. “I don’t remember me doing much good when it was cloudy with the wind blowing and white clouds in the sky, but that’s the time my daddy said was best. I say the best time is when it’s clear and calm. The spring of the year or fall is better than any other time for bream fishing.
“A good place to fish is where the stream runs into another one. In the spring of the year, they’re looking for a place to bed. That’s when you’ll catch most of the trout. They bed on a full moon, when it’s warm. They’ll be out in the shallow water, so you just travel out ’til you find their beds. Then stop and fish until they stop biting. They’ll just bite for so long. Then you just crank up and find another bed. You can see the beds in early morning, but still you can see them plain as day in shallow water in the evening.
“Bream fish, that’s my favorite kind of fishing. One thing about it, you can always catch one of them. They bed on every new moon. In the spring of the year, you get some red worms and go on a new moon and ride around in your boat until you find a bed. If you find them in a bed, you can catch them.
“When you’re out there, you don’t necessarily have to be quiet, but the aluminum boats have to be pretty still because of the vibrations from them. The bass, they won’t hear you coming up. You can just about run across them. I’ve ran right over a bed and not even seen them.
“A good time to go catfishin’ is when it’s dark. They go to feeding then.”
Jake Waldroop shared his fishing techniques. “It’s better to catch fish early in the morning or late in the evening. Now, rainbow bite better of a night than of a day. I remember the time when they would just eat you up at night.
“I would rather fish upstream when fly-fishing. When you’re fishing upstream, just let your line float back downriver.
“It don’t take a person long to learn how to catch a fish. By the time you go fishing four or five times, you get along pretty good. You can just sit on the side of the bank and fish out in the water and catch them. Let your hook come around the edge of the bank. He’ll be laying back under there.
He’ll run out and grab it. You take that net, and when you hook one out in the water somewhere, you can pull him up to you on the pole and reach out with the net and get it under him. Lots of times, if you don’t have that net, he will float off the hook.
“You have to throw them back in now if they’re under seven inches long. It doesn’t hurt a fish much usually, but if you hook him pretty deep, you just might as well throw him on the bank. If you just catch him in the lips, you can throw him back in.
“I’ve had a lot of fish to get away. If you can miss him, that’s about it. If you hook him a little, you can tell it, you can feel it. If he struck at your hook, if you didn’t snag him, he may not come back again. About nine times out of ten, you will miss one.
“When I was a boy, and we went fishing, we had to walk about four miles, but when we got over there, we fished for about two hours and then went back home. Sometimes we would go and stay all night. When we did that, we would just fix us a mess for supper and breakfast. Then after breakfast, we would go back and catch us some fish to bring home with us. Sometimes we went on Monday morning and didn’t come back ’til Saturday. We would stay a whole week at a time.
“You don’t have to be too quick when the water is right clear. It’s best for you to keep the bushes between you and the hole you fish in. Back then, there was so many they couldn’t help from biting. They didn’t pay much attention to you. It still don’t take too long to catch a fish. I just walk up to a hole, have my hook baited, and throw it in. Jerk it right back out of that. Those trout, when they bite, they really come after it. You don’t have to wait on them too long.”
FAVORITE FISHING HOLES
“My favorite place to fish is down on the Chattooga River,” said Talmadge York. “Anywhere you can get to in the Chattooga is a good place. Sara’s Creek is a good place in the summertime. There’s so many people fishing there now that there ain’t many fish left. For the last few years, me and my wife have camped up there at Sara’s Creek—stay a week at a time. When they stock ’em up there, you can catch ’em right when they first put ’em in. We always catch our limit. Have enough to do us. It ain’t so much fun catching them stocked ones as it is catching the wild ones, though.”
Melvin Taylor prefers lake fishing. “The best fishing place is Lake Rabun. If you want to catch fish—fish Lake Rabun. They’ve got ’em all. It’s the best fishing place you’ll find. If you want to catch bream, you go to Lake Rabun anytime in warm weather up into October and November. In fact, I caught a mess down there during deer season.”
Florence Brooks prefers fishing in streams. “I’d rather fish in a stream because you can just catch them better, and then I just like stream fishing. We used to walk from Rabun Gap to the head of Betty’s Creek and then fish back down. We’d catch a pile of fish! Walk along, and if you feel something, jerk it. But in a lake, you just stand still, wait for them to get on, then jerk it. I fish right around here, all over Rabun County, just anywhere I can get a hook in the water.”
PLATE 153 Florence and Lawton Brooks holding their fishing trophies
Lawton Brooks agrees with his wife. “I like to fish anywhere there’s a good stream. I like to fish streams better than I do lakes because there is more sport in it. Just get in there with them. Trout have more action. Give you more sport.”
Jake Waldroop said, “I never did have a favorite fishing hole. Everybody could locate them just as well as I could. There is lots of rivers that runs right under these mountains here. There’s Long Branch, Park Creek, Kimsey Creek [North Carolina]. I would rather fish in them than any other. I have caught lots of fish from them.”
Minyard Conner told us, “I like to fish almost anywhere. I don’t like fishing in trout farms much. I’d rather fish after a trout where it’s raised out in the wild where you just have to outwit him to get him. If he sees the shadow of your pole, he’ll run. He knows something dangerous is on hand.”
CLEANING FISH
Leonard Jones explained, “It depends on what kind of fish you have as to how you clean it. If they’re small, take a trout for instance, I just scrape them good, take their innards out, and cut their heads and fins off.
“You have to skin a catfish. It ain’t got no scales on it. Cut it around the neck, split it down the back and stomach, and take a pair of pliers and pull that skin off. You can skin ’em just about as quick as you scrape ’em. If I catch a great big fish of any kind, I skin it. Small ones, I don’t.”
Minyard Conner told us, “To clean a speckled trout, just take a knife and split him open and take his guts out. Then he’s ready to cook.”
Buck Carver said, “The rainbow and the brown trout have scales, and you have to scrape them. Though the speckled trout has scales, they’re so fine you needn’t try to scale him. All you do is rub that slime off with some sand.”
COOKING OR PRESERVING FISH
Minyard Conner stated, “There are a lot of ways you can cook trout—bake ’em, fry ’em, or stew ’em. First, you cut their heads off and clean ’em. Now, these stockards [stocked fish], I’d stew ’em and take the bones out and make fish patties out of them because their meat’s too tender to hold together to fry.
“To bake a fish, you coat them with a little grease and lemon juice. Heat your oven to about 350 degrees and cook ’em about thirty minutes.”
Florence Brooks told us, “Mama used to fry fish for us for breakfast. Nowadays I usually give away what I catch, because we don’t eat fish. When I do cook them, I just roll the fish in cornmeal and a little salt and fry them in grease on the stove. Some people can’t eat fried fish, but my kids just like them fried brown. They eat them that way with hush puppies.”
Minyard Conner revealed, “I’ve eat fish eggs! I’ve caught a lot of big fish with big rolls of eggs under them. Boy, I like them! That’s caviar! That’s good!”
Blanche Harkins stated, “Trout are easy to cook. I scrub them with a scrub pad or dishrag gourd to get the slime off. Then I cut their heads off and cut their stomachs open to take their innards out. Then I wash ’em again and roll them in cornmeal. I have a big black frying pan that I put Crisco in and get it hot enough to smoke. I turn the heat down some and brown them about ten minutes on either side, and they’re ready to eat.”
Jake Waldroop told us, “Before we had a freezer, we had some cool springs, and we would put any fish we weren’t going to cook right then in a bucket or half-gallon jars and stand them under those springs where the cold water would run over them. We could keep them for four or five days or more.”
PLATE 154 Blanche Harkins
Minyard Conner recalled, “Well, I was raised with the Indians. They wouldn’t do like the white man. You know, catch too many of anything and have to throw ’em away. They’d just catch what they could eat, and that’s all they took. If they could eat ten, then that’s all they took. They didn’t usually try to preserve them. They didn’t do a thing with ’em.”
“THE BIGGEST FISH I EVER CAUGHT”
Florence Brooks related, “The biggest fish I ever caught lacked one inch from being two feet long. It’s been ten or fifteen years ago, I guess, when we lived at Dillard. I caught a brown trout right about Betty’s Creek Bridge. It was as long as my arm and weighed four pounds and a half. I was using an of cane pole, and my line had been on there no telling how long.
“They all took a fit when I caught that fish—thought somebody was a-drowning! I had it caught deep in its throat, and it couldn’t cut up a bit. I just drug it to the bank. Lawton [her husband] and Kent Shope got down in the water and lifted it up on the bank with their hands.”
Minyard Conner stated, “The biggest fish I ever caught was a twenty-four-inch rainbow over in Smokemont, in the Smokies [North Carolina]. I have fished all year long and maybe not caught one fish over a foot long. I seen one over there in the Smokies that was thirty-six and a half inches long that they’d caught in the Pigeon River.”
Talmadge York recollected, “I never had a really big fish that go
t away. One maybe twelve or fifteen inches long got off before I could get him out of the water. About the biggest fish I ever caught was a twenty-three-inch brown trout. I caught a blue cat one time that weighed nine pounds. I guess the biggest bass we ever caught was about a six-pounder.”
“I’VE HEARD, WHAT GROWS THE FASTEST OF ANYTHING IN THE WORLD IS A FISH AFTER IT’S CAUGHT ’TIL YOU TELL ABOUT IT.”
The first thing we thought about when we decided on an entire chapter dedicated to fishing were the stories fishermen are reputed to tell. The main focus of all our interviews was probably “Do you know any good fishing stories?”
Some of these are events that happened to people as they fished, or stories that had been told to them about people fishing, or stories they know about other fishermen. Some of the stories are exciting; some are funny; some are kind of hard to believe but are said to be true; and some are just informative.
Lawton Brooks told us, “I found this fish, oh, I guess four or five months ahead of the time I caught him. But I couldn’t get him to hit nothing. I tried everything. My wife’d catch lizards, and we’d try those. I didn’t tell nobody where I fished at. It was right down the railroad going by our house. The creek went right in beside the mountain there, hit a big rock, and turned back right under the rock there. It was right deep, and it was swift through there. It might be that when you put your bait in there, it went by too fast for him to catch it. He didn’t want to fool with it or something.
“I’d slip down there sometimes and see him out. I’d look over in there, and sometimes he’d be in a deep hole. I’d go to the house and tell Florence, my wife, I’m gonna catch him.’
Foxfire 11: Wild Plant Uses, Gardening, Wit, Wisdom, Recipes, Beekeeping, Toolmaking, Fishing, and More Affairs of Plain Living Page 31