Catfish!
I used to go fishing a LOT. It was a fairly cheap hobby to have, plus you were bringing home food.
I used to love to catch catfish. You don’t need fancy lures or expensive baits. Or a boat. I had a war with a catfish one year in a pond… he was a monster and would break my line or wrap it on something and then break it… I spent that summer trying to catch that monster. I finally did, and then couldn’t bear to eat him. I won the battle, and lost the war.
Lately I’ve been thinking about that fish… we called him Jaws. We’d feed the fish in the pond… stale bread and dry dog food. Jaws would come up to the top and swim just under the surface… open his big mouth and eat whole slices of bread. That was cool.
We don’t have any catfish in the pond here. Ron tells me that there were catfish in the pond at one time, but they must’ve caught them all.
So a few weeks ago, I got an idea. A new idea… my old idea being that I would manage to make it to a fish day at the Farmers Coop on a weekend. The last time they had one, Ron let me oversleep and I missed it. I wanted to buy some catfish babies to put in the pond.
My new idea was simple: catch some catfish in one of the local lakes and bring them home and stock our pond with them. Hey, that’s how Jaws got into my Mom’s pond… someone put him in there. Mom had her own catfish that she’d stocked… and then Jaws. We never saw the stocked fish, but Jaws was cool.
So we go to a lake where the access to fish is fairly easy. Plus I know they have catfish, as I’ve caught one there. Good spots to fish without taking a boat out. We catch nothing, BUT a guy walking by gives us his 2 catfish. One was dead… the other I put into our pond. I fed the dead one to the cats, without knowing how long it had been dead I wasn’t going to eat it myself.
I don’t want catfish in the pond to catch and eat anyhow. I want Jaws. I want fish that come up when I take our stale bread down and toss it in. Basically I want the pond to be an amusing aquarium that I can’t see into. LOL!
Anyhow. We went fishing again to that lake, and again didn’t have any luck. Pfft. No one there to gift us with fish the second time. We decided that we should hook up some lights to our boat, and go fishing on the much closer lake at night with the boat. Fishing access at the nearby lake stinks… you NEED a boat.
So we did. I bought some lights (car accessories, like fog lamps but clear) and Ron wired them up, plus an actual boat light… which I wired up. We got it all together and put the boat into the lake up the road about dusk last night.
We moved out into the lake a little ways… I didn’t want to go very far because driving back in the dark even with lights would be too creepy for me. Set our anchor, and tossed out lines. Hotdogs, raw shrimp, and stinky bait were our baits. We were both fishing 2 poles at a time.
I caught the first fish. Nice pan sized catfish on a hotdog bait.
Then I caught the next 3 fish. With my 4th fish actually on BOTH lines. I wasn’t throwing my lines THAT close together, but that fish found my hotdog and then my shrimp and ate both before I noticed anything.
Ron caught the 5th fish. He said even tho I caught more, his was bigger. :) And with him finally getting a fish I wanted to come home. But wait… We have to wait a min here, because I’ve got another fish on my line. And I did.
We brought home 6 catfish. And put them in our pond. Here is a photo of them on the stringer hanging over the bin of water that we used to transport them.
There should be plenty for the catfish to eat in our pond… we have gazillions of minnows. Plus, of course, I’m feeding the fish pretty much every day. Catfish are scavengers, but they also eat live things… crawdads, worms, minnows… whatever they can find. Dogfood is good… Bread is fun, but I imagine dogfood is better nutrition-wise.
We are going to go again next weekend but in the daytime. Catfish don’t care if it’s day or night… the main reason to go at night for catfish is because the perch and such go to sleep. Perch will steal the bait you are using for catfish. We’ll see if we catch anything in the day… we’ve never tried fishing for catfish before from the boat until last night.
I like fishing a lot better when I catch something, for sure. Now to turn those fish into pets in the pond… heh.
hugs,
Vyx
