CATFISH NOODLING

A Hand Grabbing History

For those who don’t know, catfish noodling also known as grabbling, hogging, catfisting, graveling, or stumping is the art of wading or swimming out into the water and penetrating underwater holes with your bare hands so that a mad catfish can chomp down them.

This enables you to get the fish and bring it to the surface area without making use of hook, line, or rod.

It’s a primal approach of fishing that puts you in a fight with a giant fish on its home turf and leaves you tired, bruised, and bleeding by the end of the day, however far from broken.

The first time I went noodling and found myself manhandling a pissed-off 30-pound flathead catfish to the boat.

I felt like I’d just been locked in a watery cage with Andre The Giant.

But by the time we got to the next fishing spot, I wiped the blood from my wrist, coughed up the water from my lungs, and was ready to dive in again.

Thanks to the increase in appeal of outdoor culture on both social media and primetime television and streaming networks, a great deal of folks consider noodling as a fairly new practice.

It’s in fact among the earliest recognized fishing approaches in the country.

It was first documented by the Irish immigrant, trader, and historian James Adair in 1775, who composed of different Native American tribes capturing catfish by hand in the rivers around South Carolina.

Later on noodling was picked up by lots of 18th-century Scottish immigrants who utilized a comparable method of hand-catching salmon and trout in their own nation called “tickling.”.

Noodling’s popularity peaked in the United States throughout the Great Depression when it ended up being the simplest way for poor and having a hard time families to put fresh food on the table.

Nevertheless, this appeal eventually led to the sport’s downfall as lots of states discovered the result noodling was having on catfish populations, who are typically spawning when they’re being targeted by noodlers, along with how hazardous the sport of catfish noodling is for anglers.

Lots of noodlers drowned while trying to fill their freezers with catfish fillets therefore noodling was eventually made unlawful in all but 4 states.

However, noodling was still carried out in the shadows, becoming a criminal fishing approach that continued to increase in appeal while staying in the background of angling society.

Much so that at the beginning of the new centuries a sort of noodling renaissance seemed to sweep throughout the South and Midwest.

Several state legislations started to acknowledge the authenticity of noodling and the deep roots the sport had within fishing culture and so between 2001 and 2018, 12 other states legislated the practice.

Today, noodling is legal in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.

This grand growth has led a lot of catfish lovers to put down their heavy rods, limb lines, and stink bait, and pull on their swim trunks to attempt their luck at capturing catfish by hand.

 

Sources: themeateater