Grandpa and His Catfish – Adventure of the Week

Last Updated on June 29, 2018 by Terry

I was talking with one of my brothers the other day and we reminded ourselves of a conversation with our grandpa on our dad’s side. The conversation took place back in the 1970s. He was telling us about a giant blue catfish he and his dad caught in the mid-1920s.

Blakely Maountain Dam under construction.

The electrical power company was building Carpenter dam on the Ouachita River at that time. It was the second of three dams built in the Hot Springs area. Remmel Dam was first forming Lake Catherine. Then Carpenter Dam forming Lake Hamilton. And last was Blakely Dam which formed Lake Ouachita. These dams were going to be and still are hydroelectric plants.

Our grandpa’s dad was the guy that used his old truck full of barrels and ran drinking water up and down the construction site for the workers. The old man would work ten to twelve hours a day hauling water. He told us that they borrowed a small wooden boat and had set out several trot lines along the river in various areas and would check them in between water runs. Catching a bunch of catfish was critical in those days as money and food were scarce. They would clean and eat all they could and sell the rest to the workers for extra money.

He told us that they were having trouble with one particular line, it was continually being broken. Old great granddad knew he was dealing with a very large fish. He was a pretty good handy man back then and came up with a great brainstorm. He searched the dam site and found a broken handled pitch fork in the scrap pile. He used a cutting torch from the construction site and cut one of the teeth off the fork.

He used the torch and one of the portable welders at the work site during lunch for a couple of days until he perfected his fish catching device. He used some pretty large rope and tied it off to a medium size willow tree along the river bank and let the hook dangle in the water about 4 feet deep. He shot a red winged blackbird with his 22 rifle and used the whole bird for bait on the gigantic hook.

They arrived just at daybreak the next morning. The limb line was close to where they had their small boat tied up. When they walked to the shoreline, they could see the willow tree slapping the water. They had him! He swears it took them over a half an hour to get the river monster into the boat. (He was not drinking when he told us this story.) He said that they both were soaking wet in the process.

They wrestled him from the boat into the bed of the truck and headed for a nearby grocery store to weigh their big ole fish. You could sense our grandpa’s excitement as he relived his memory. “That fish was bigger than me” he would smile and shout at us.

Image Credit – https://www.flickr.com/photos/usfwsmidwest/14443489655

Several patrons were on hand to witness the weigh in. Their fish topped the scales at 105 pounds! If you check all the catfish records you will notice that this would have been Arkansas’s record for blue cat at the time, and maybe the record for the entire world!

And to my brother and me, the most fascinating part of the story was not the size of the fish but when they got him in the truck they found twenty seven, yeah twenty seven hooks all around the fish’s mouth. He had been destroying the trotlines and fishing equipment of everyone in the area for years.

Don’t forget to send me the details of one of your memories and I will get it into story form and post it here for everyone to read. (It doesn’t have to be about fishing.)

See you next Friday.