Noodling for Catfish...

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Growing up in Oklahoma, we had a way of catfishing that we called noodling. I have no idea as to the origin of this name, it’s just one of those things that somebody calls something and that’s what everybody calls it. Some of you may have used the same technique and called it noodling or maybe called it something else. This technique involved wading along the shoreline of the local creeks and rivers, feeling back up under the banks in the washouts and locating catfish by hand. Catfish can be surprisingly calm when stroked and petted, and some very large catfish can be had by simply feeling one’s way toward the mouth, lipping them, and dragging them out of the hole.


We had one favorite place to go noodling from time to time along the Washita river in south central Oklahoma. There was a farmer in the area that owned land on the river. This land was right in the middle of a very sharp bend in the river and from time to time, after a good hard Oklahoma gully washer, the swollen river would wash out a big chunk of this fellow’s land. Over the years he had allowed the local folks to push their old worn out cars off in there and this acted as rip rap and kept the bank from washing away. These old cars made a great place for them big old mud cats to lay up in, and with fifty or sixty cars down in there, this made for a prime noodling site.


Late one warm summer night a couple of friends of mine and I were down in there around the cars noodling and one of my buddies reached in through the window to the back seat of one of the cars and jerked his hand back out and called my name. He said, “Come here man, check this out”.


I waded over to where he was and he said, “Reach in here and feel the size of this catfish.”


I said, “where’s his head?”


He said, “Right up against the door.”


I reached in and gingerly felt my way. Sure enough, there was a big old mudcat laying in there. I stroked and petted him a couple of times as I worked my way down to his head. When I got to his head, I laid my hand flat out with fingers spread wide, a distance of about nine inches from thumb tip to pinky tip, and couldn’t touch the sides of the big cats head.


I gingerly pulled my hand back out and said, “Damn.”


My buddy said, “What are we going to do?”


I told him, “I’ve got some quarter inch nylon rope up in the truck, he’s pretty calm, I bet I could feed that rope through his mouth and out his gills."


My buddy said, “Let’s try it”.


I waded out of the water and crawled up the bank to the truck. I retrieved the rope and going back down I stopped at the last car before the water and tied one end to the bumper. Taking the free end, I waded into the water and made my way around to the side of the car only to discover that the big mudcat had rolled up the windows and locked all the doors.


Gridleak

 

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