Meats and Small Game: The Foxfire Americana Library (4)

by Edited by Foxfire Students

  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 ol’ 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 while 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 cafe, 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 ol’ thing. Fish are just like women—they change their minds all the time.”

  ILLUSTRATION 21 “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 ol’ 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.”

  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 Tugalo 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.

  ILLUSTRATION 22 “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 ol’ 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.”

  ILLUSTRATION 23 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.”