Catfishing Through the Year

I’m a big fan of catfish. I like to catch them and I especially love to sit down to a platter of crispy fried and tender catfish filets. I have a favorite spot where I go when my appetite is poking me in the ribs and telling me it’s time for a catfish meal.
There is a favorite eatery where catfish is on the menu, the type of fish that I described in the beginning paragraph. I won’t share the name of the place because Flying Burger might get more business than it can handle. Oops, sorry about that; it just slipped out.
My love for catfish started as a kid when it was more fun to catch them than to have them served on a platter. There is a creek that courses through the woods half a mile below the home where I grew up and Molido Creek was the focal point for all sorts of activities during summer for skinny legged bare backed kids, my brother and our two first cousins. There in the bend of the creek, Molido had a deeper hole with a six-foot bank that was perfect for diving. The spring fed water was so cool during the heat of summer that we looked for every excuse to work our way through the woods, over the railroad tracks to rid ourselves of what incumbered us, in other words, our clothes. Back there in the woods, who was going to see us if we swam in the suits we were born with?
Swimming was only one option the creek offered. There were catfish in those deeper holes. It mattered not to us boys that the only catfish in Molido were bullheads, although we never called them that. They were “mudcats” to us, fun to catch but tasting like their names suggested when you tried to eat them.
As we grew older, the mudcats on Molido gave way to bigger and tastier channel catfish, but to catch them, we had to do our fishing on nearby Saline Creek that was a more robust stream significantly wider and deeper than the sparkling trickle of Molido.
Setting out trotlines and baiting with minnows or small bream, the channel cats we caught when brought home, cleaned and our mamas fried for us would rival those at catfish eateries today. When we got more adventuresome, baiting set hooks with live bream and hanging the lines on stout cypress branches in Saline, they would occasionally fool Opelousas or flathead catfish, bigger and tastier than any of the others.
Today, folks who have the know-how are catching channel catfish in lakes and they’re doing it in unconventional ways. My brother in law, Roy Dupree, lives with his family along the shores of Clear Lake in Natchitoches Parish. For years, every Sunday lunch consists of fried channel catfish, fish that Roy catches on his trotlines.
Roy’s son, Dan, has improved on a method of catching catfish that lots of anglers use today, and that is taking Styrofoam pool noodles, cutting them into sections and hanging baited lines from the noodles and letting them free-float until a catfish inhaled the bait. This got to be a problem because the noodles, driven by a breeze or having a catfish on had minds of their own and finding all you set out was a problem. Dan solved that problem by putting the end of a line in a cup and pouring concrete to fashion anchors. When he goes back the next morning, his noodles are where he left them the day before.
From catching mudcats on Molido, channels and flatheads on Saline and channel catfish in the lake, the fun we enjoyed as kids just keeps on keeping on with each new innovation keeping what we loved from never dying or getting old.