My brother, my dad, and myself spent all of yesterday afternoon fishing for catfish at our pond. I hadn’t planned to, but then my dad went to get a drink and I was left watching his pole… of course it got a bite. I freaked out and grabbed the pole, upside-down apparently, and then when I got it flipped over, my brother was shouting, “Set the hook!” Well, I didn’t understand this–I’m no fisherman. So then I tried to wench the fish in, and he felt like a monster. Dad’s fishing line was only rated for 10 pounds, and that was twenty years ago; it snapped. The big fish got away with the end of the line and the hook. When Dad came back, he set another hook on there and set me up with it again. This time, when I got a bite, he let me keep hold of it but coached me on how to reel in a big fish with a weak line: you have to play him in. Let him have some slack and only wind in the reel when he comes toward you. I bagged him, and he was the biggest catch of the day, which tickled me. My dad and brother joked about me being a city-slicker, coming down for a visit, and showing them both up. That became even more true later when I bagged another one; I swear it was the location on the bank that I was at. I got a lot of bites there and ended up bagging the two largest fish of the evening. I was so tickled to see that the second big fish I caught had a hook and line already in him–he was the one that got away the first time. Here’s a shot of my brother holding everyone’s fish at the end:
Dad caught the medium-sized catfish on the left, I caught the monster on the right.
It was a great evening after fishing, too. Dad flayed the fish for cooking, Mom cooked it all along with homemade fries and coleslaw, and we all ended up sitting around the table after dinner, sleepy and full of fish. My brother kept preparing weird alcoholic drinks for me, such as Mountain Dew and Bacardi, which was pretty tasty and surprisingly didn’t have a strong alcoholic flavor. I think the citrus taste of the Mountain Dew covered up the alcohol well. Now it’s a Monday, and I don’t have jack to do, haha. I’ve been lounging around reading, and I watched The Rear Window earlier. I’ve enjoyed all the Hitchcock films I’ve seen; I think Vertigo or Psycho was my favorite.
That is one KILLER fish!
Air y’all fum the hills er sump’n?
You have the basic facts of the day correct, but I winced as I read “wenched” and “flayed”. You attempted to use the reel as a winch, ergo, you winched the fish toward the bank. I fileted the fish.
Regarding your technique, you did not give the fish slack, which might have allowed them to get away. You handled your catches like a pro. You kept enough tension on the line to keep them from shaking the hook, to make them work if they wanted to go anywhere except toward you, and yet not enough to risk breaking the line if they suddenly bolted. You cranked in line only as they came closer and without allowing them slack.
There are a couple more factors which made your catch of the large catfish pretty amazing, beyond the fact that you re-caught the one that orginally got away. The line, rod nor reel were reasonably suited to landing either of the fish you caught.
You mentioned the age of the line on that reel. It was “10 lb. test” before it spent years outside through all kinds of weather and many days of full sunlight. It should have snapped when you set the hook.
The rod lost its tip guide sometime in the ’80s. That left you with a relatively non-responsive rod. It’s hard to gauge the amount of pull being exerted with that tip missing. Additionally, the rod is carbon fiber and resin, also subjected to years of exposure to sun, wind, rain and snow. Like me, it’s not as flexible as it once was.
The reel has an inoperative drag. What that means is that you had to provide all of the control over the amount of give and take in your “playing” of the fish, almost as if you were using a plain cane pole with the line tied to the end. If the drag system worked, we could have set it to a level where the line would feed from the reel at some force less than the breaking point. That would have allowed you to simply concentrate on keeping some tension on the line and steering the fish around all those little bushes. The drag would have protected the line from breaking.
Knowing all of these things working against you, it was hard to keep from grabbing the rod. Each time I came close to giving in to that feeling, you demonstrated superb feel for the line, rod and fish, so I was able to step back and enjoy the show.
BTW, that “medium-sized catfish” in the photo was the smallest of the bunch.