Posted by alan truelove on May 07, 2005 at 02:51:20 from 68.100.249.14 user atruelove.
Last night (May 5th) I saw a program on this on Cable
The fish shown were of fearsome size and appearance.
Noodlers go after them at the overhung banks of lakes etc, standing in the water or more often diving unaided for long periods.
The method seems to be inserting the hand into the jaws wearing gloves, or not. I didn't see any use of gills.
Drawing blood seems to be part of the fun.
When noodling under sunken disused roads, concrete slabs sometimes trap the noodler resulting in death.
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http://www.myrtlebeachonline.com/mld/myrtlebeachonline/news/nation/11064590.htm
Posted on Sun, Mar. 06, 2005
Noodling catches on in Georgia
Fishing method has fans in legislature
By Mark Davis
Cox News Service
ATLANTA - Leave the bass boats and fancy fishing rigs to those fellows with the smooth palms and hundred-dollar sunglasses. For real fishing - that's noodling - all you need are your hands.
A six-pack or two - a little courage to help ease into the dark shallows where the monsters lurk - doesn't hurt, either.
Oh, and bring a buddy along to back you up when the water churns and a catfish with a back as broad as the 50-cent pony ride outside Wal-Mart busts the surface. You don't want to be on that slippery slope alone when he bites your hand and rolls.
Just ask the expert, Howard Ramsey, who's been yanking catfish out of rivers since that day 46 years ago when his father told him to reach into an underwater hole, and a 4-pound blue catfish chomped down on his 12-year-old hand. He's been hooked ever since.
"Once he gets out of that hole, that's when the flopping starts," said Ramsey, a Paris, Mo., enthusiast who has emerged as something of a national spokesman for noodling. "That's when you got to get on his back."
But, unlike that little pony outside Wal-Mart, this ride isn't legal in Georgia - for now, anyway.
At present, the gentle art of wrestling a catfish out of its hidey hole, also called grabbling, hand fishing or hogging, is illegal in Georgia.
State Rep. Pete Warren, D-Augusta, thinks that's just not right.
Without a ripple of dissent, the House of Representatives on Wednesday passed his noodling bill, which would amend the law that allows freshwater fish to be taken only with pole, rod-and-reel or trotline.
The Senate is the bill's next stop.
Speaking for his bill, Warren had to enlighten a few of the honorables on the finer points of noodling, which is legal in 12 states, including neighboring Alabama, Tennessee and South Carolina.
"You know, [it's] what we would do when we were young'uns," he told a curious colleague. "We'd reach up in the creek bank and pull that catfish out."
Noodlers go after catfish during the spring, when the fish whisker their way into hollow logs or into holes in riverbanks, lake beds and creeksides to spawn. There, the female lays the eggs and the male guards them, hovering over the glutinous mass with single-minded intent.
The noodlers are just as single-minded and just as intent.
"I don't think it requires any great deal of brains," said Perry Houck, 80, a retired Augusta sporting-goods store owner. "I never saw any Ph.D.'s doing it."
Noodling is a cultural thing, handed down from generations, said Wiley Prewitt of Oxford, Miss. He's studied Southern hunting and fishing traditions and is a consultant to the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi.
"It seems to be that you get introduced to it through your family," said Prewitt, whose father, 65, recently took up noodling again after laying it aside for three decades. "It's not the first thing you would think about, to get in the water and grab a fish with your bare hands."