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Speaker 1: Welcome to this country Life. I’m your host, Brent Reeves from coon hunting to trotlining and just in general country living. I want you to stay a while as I share my experiences in life lessons. This Country Life is presented by Case Knives from the Store More Studio on Meat Eaters Podcast Network, bringing you the best outdoor podcast that airways have to offer. All right, friends, grab a chair or drop that tailgate. I’ve got some stories to share. Fish bait. It’s what’s for dinner. It’s kind of an overlooked part of fishing, not in the physical sense because you’ve got to have it before you go, whether it’s the first thing you get or the last thing. But bait is interesting to me. I’m gonna tell you a few stories out about experiences that I’ve had bait and maybe teach you something along the way. Y’all join me at the fire and let’s get started. Fishing means bait and bait comes in three main categories. There’s live bait, cut bait, and artificial bait. Being a fly fisherman, I tend to lean toward making my own. When I’m trying to coax the worst tasting fish. I pursue into my net. I don’t remember the last trout I ate. I love to catch them with the bait we call them flies that I’ve tied myself, and then turn them loose to maybe catch again. I will eat them if the situation is right. If I’m camping where I’m fishing, I’ll grill some up for supper. And I don’t care if you do or not. I’m not one of those elites who think they should all be released back in the water with nothing more than a sore lip. I turn them loose because I don’t really care for how they taste. If he’s prepared right, he’ll taste more like butter, garlic, salt, and lemon pepper than trout. They say the lemon in Arkansas is like two or three trout of any species. I don’t know or even care to look it up, because I ain’t taking none of them home. I will stand in an Arkansas tail water from sunrise to sunset and catch more than you’d ever want to clean. But the only krell I own is a decoration that sets in my office that has never been fishing. If trout tasted like bluegill brim, well, that fool wouldn’t stand a chance, and I’d be in prison because stopping at two or three would only make me mad, especially when the taste of a deep fried brim makes me feel like I’m five years old and my grandma is hugging me with everybody and that gum. It’s good. But my fly tiding stories are not the focus of today’s episode, and neither. It’s cut bait, which, if you don’t know what that is, it’s a bait that used to be alive and is now literally cut into pieces and stuck on a hook. When I’m fishing for catfish, I’m usually targeting flatheads. They taste the best out of all the catfish. According to popular opinion, of which everyone in my family would agree. Flatheads are more predatory than blue or channel cats, meaning they like live food more than scavenging something off the bottom, but they ain’t vaccinated against it. Here’s a case in point. My dad and I were staying down in Uncle Dobb’s camp on the saline river. That raised cabin that sets on poles to keep the river from getting in the camp when it flood Sits seventy two yards northwest of the boat ramp that now bears my father’s name and like the game and fish commissioner told me at the meeting when they voted unanimously to name it in his honor, he was shaking my hand while his offhand pad in my shoulder, look at me in the eyes, and he said, congratulations, Brent, to you and your family. This is a big deal because it will be named this forever. If you’re interested in seeing where it is, plugged thirty three point eight five zero one comma dash nine two point one five nine eight eight in your on ax map and bingo, there it is. But this was decades before that ramp would be named after him, and a little over one since I came to be. We’d bream fish that morning and caught some pretty good ones. We had plenty to eat for our dinner that we cooked around ten that morning, and then fished again for our supper that we fixed and finished about an hour before dark. We saved a few brim alive in a basket that we had tied out in the river, and on our way back to the camp that afternoon declared fish and fixed our supper, we stopped and tied out a trout line that we were going to come back and bait before dark. We jumped in the boat and we drove down and we raised our basket. We put them in a five gallon bucket with some river water and tooled on down to where we had our line tie. Dad moved up to the front of the boat and grabbed the trout line that was anchored to a big cypress kneel on the bank and began pulling us along the waited line that hadn’t been baited. We used it a week before with some cut bait and some stink bait, and the whole thing could have run a buzzard off of cutwagon. When Dad pulled the lid off of that old styrophonm ice chest he used to keep it in, there was a couple of all most empty packages of bait that had set in that ice chest in the boat. Unshaded sun had done a number on the contents by permeating that whole ball of line with the smell of the stink bait is just as it’s described and smells to yonder and back, and the aroma is quite off putting unless you’re a bottom feeding channel or blue cat who’s one hundred thousand taste sensors are targeting anything biologically organic that might offer an easy men Catfish have nostrils called naires that work just like IROs, except they’re not breathing with theirs. They’re smelling for victials, and they can do so up to one hundred yards away. If it stinks, named smell it. While Dad is baiting the first hook with a brim we caught earlier, he’s talking about how he can still smell that trot line even after it had been soaking in the river for the last three hours. Then all of a sudden, the line started jerking in his hand. Brent, there’s a fish on here. I looked at him with the same expression I’m sure I looked at my college algebra professor ten years later, when she told me she looked forward to seeing me next semester, and since duck season would be over by then, I might pass her class this time. Well I didn’t. Who cares? Still have yet to be in a spot where I thought, dang, if I’d only gone to algebra that day instead of duck hunting, I wouldn’t be in this mess. It ain’t happened yet anyway. Dad was sitting in the front of the boat with his left leg crossed under his right, facing me, as his left arm jerked around like he was tied to a paint shaker at Sharon Williams. First of all, I wasn’t one hundred percent sure he was jerking me as hard as that line appeared to be jerking him. If it weren’t for the crazy look he was giving me, I would have bet anything that he was. But then I looked past him down that line that he grazed from the water, and six feet down the line, and saw it making little circles as it bobbed up and down with whatever was pulling on it. Being further down the line, deep enough that only large bowls of water surfaced where all the violence was taking place beneath the surface. He wasn’t kidding, but I couldn’t have imagined while we were fixing the pull in the boat. For all I knew it was a gator, But my anticipation, along with my imagination, grew dramatically with every pull Dad made that drifted that boat along the line and closer to whatever it was. And what it was was a flathead catfish that was about as long as I was, and weighed every bit of thirty pounds, or so he looked to a ten year old boy. More accurately, he was probably closer to half that size. But he’d gotten himself in that predicament by biting a bare hook, just as if he was biting one loaded with bait, And what he would biting was the scent of where that bait had been. Either way, it tasted the same when we cut him loose in the peanut hole the next day. What I’m about to tell you now is about a fishing bait that is almost as prized as what we were fishing for when I was a kid, and it would catch everything to swim. I don’t hear a lot about them anymore, but back in the day it was at the top of everyone’s list for all types of fishing, and that’s Katapa worms. Katapa worms are unique to Katapa trees and are caterpillars that morph into the aptly named Kataupa sphinx moth. But back then I didn’t know any of that, nor did I care. I just knew if you knew anyone that had one, come June and July, you had better have your call. If cans ready. It seemed to be the universal repository for what we called katabo worms. I would be in my first semester of Forester school when I learned that katapa caterpillars and katabo worms were the same thing regardless. The yellow and black striped worms can get as long as three inches and have a thick, tough hide that can withstand more than one bite from a blue gill. It wasn’t like a brim mangling a cricket to smither rings after one bite. A katabo worm put multiple in the brim basket before having to tag in by a fellow and patriot from the nearby coffee Cain. And catfish love them too, all three models, flathead, channel and blue. The worms have a bad taste that protects them from birds. But the very thing that keeps birds from bombing what’s left of them on your car after they eat one is the very thing that makes catfish hunt them up when they’re hanging on your Get enough of them in a can or some worm juice on your hands when you’re baiting the hook, and you can smell what is bringing the catfish to the party. You can also freeze them and always have them on hand to use instead of having to wait for them to start crawling next summer. Easy way to preserve them is to blanch them for about ten to fifteen seconds in boiling water, dry them on a paper towel, and then seal them up in a zip lock bag with cornmeal to cover them up, and chunk them in the freezer. They’ll be ready when you are. Crickets and worms were always our go to bait for brim, and crickets being the choice ten to one. They’re easier to get on your hook, and the faster you can get that hook back in the water, the more fish you can. Thend today with it was a numbers game with my dad every time you went fishing with it, and not just a total number of fish, but how many each of you caught, especially if he caught the most, numbers would be repeated and be told that anyone was in earshot until the next trip. It was always a competition, unless I happened to win. Anyway, we’d buy crickets and declare warm on brim. Wherever the best chance of catching a mess presented itself Crane’s Lake, clean River, or if the spring rains had flooded the bottoms, A little gnome and hard to get to a place called Little Lake. Little Lake had only a trail leading into it, and not much of that, and I only fished it a handful of times growing up. The conditions really needed to be right to make getting in there worth the effort, and when we went, we’d camping and stay a couple of days. We never raised crickets, but we’d probably have been money ahead to do so. We did have a worm bed one time, but they were pretty easy to come by around the barn just about any time he wanted to go fishing but didn’t have any crickets or want to take the time to go get them. One thing I learned early on is black crickets that you could catch by the double handfuls for free won’t catch nearly as many fish as the brown crickets you have to buy. The black ones have a tougher, more rigid exoskeleton that the brown ones, and apparently brim for further sft texture of the brown ones. Did you know that major US cricket producers ship in excess of five million crickets weekly. Now on the retail level, the average cricket costs a consumer ten to thirteen cents each the use of crickets for bait shares a significant portion of its infrastructure with the pet, food and edible insect industries. That’s right, I said edible insect industries, as in folks eating them. The global cricket mark, which includes crickets used for feed, bait, and human consumption, is valued between one point six billion and three point eight billion dollars and is expected to grow rapidly at a compound annual growth rate of over twenty six percent. Now, you folks that look at me like I’m crazy for liking to eat squirrels and coons, it don’t sound so bad, now, does it. I must admit that I have had a live cricket in my mouth on purpose twice. The first time, I was just a young official with my dad, and I broke my line after getting hung up. I was retying my hook on the leader of my line when crawling up the bill of my overalls was an escaped cricket that had been eluding capture for a prolonged period of time. Grabbed it with my right hand and I attempted to continue tying my hook, but I couldn’t manipulate the line the way I wanted to for fear of losing the cricket again. In the meantime, my father was catching one fish after another and laughing at me for not having my hook tied on. By now, I was feeling the pressure and I was in a hurry. I quickly looked for my cricket bucket, but didn’t see it immediately. I didn’t have time to look any longer, so I stuck him between my lips like I was going to smoke him like a camel cigarette, concentrated on getting that hook tied. For those that may be wondering, crickets have once referred to as mandibulent mouth parts. Mandipulent means having mandibles or jaw like mouthparts that are specifically made for bite, chewing, and grinding food. You may have known that I did not, but I was about to find out everything was going according to playing. I was a couple of raps away from sensing up that six pound test into my number eight long shank wire brim hook. When whammo Old Jim and the cricket exercised his mandibulated ability to chew by biting a hole in my lower lip, an action he committed it with malice and extreme prejudice. I took great pleasure in running that hook in behind his collar and out his exhaust pipe, and dropping him into the depths of Crane’s Lake, where he was promptly exchanged for a hand sized bull bluegill brim as I wiped the blood off my lip with the back of my hand. The next time I purposely poked the cricket inside my head was when I was fishing with my oldest daughter Amy. Amy’s scared of bugs and just about everything else. The fact that it was demonstrated to me recently as I pulled up for a visit only to see my grandson Trip running her around the yard with a lizard he’d caught while he laughed and she cried threat and then to beat him up. I tried to fix her one day while we were fishing decades before Trip terrorized her with his captured reptile. Amy hand me a cricket, oh, daddy, I don’t want to. Amy had me a cricket, Daddy, I don’t want to. I’m scared. Scared of a cricket. What’s this. In a moment of sheer genius, I devised a plan not only to show my firstborn child, that her father was a woodsman, but that he was also fearless. I reached in and grabbed one, held it in front of her with two fingers as the cricket’s legs churned for freedom, as she sat on the boat seat next to me, and with one deliberate and exaggerated toss, I lobbed that squirming insect into my mouth and closed it, looking at her like she was the crazy one, her face reflecting the whole seven years of her life up to that point, and the bewildering thought that with one and a half billion fathers in the world, she got this one. Now. On a side note, no idea how that edible cricket market is doing so well and projected to get better. Crickets taste about like they smell, and if you haven’t had the malodorous opportunity to experience the unpalatable aromatics of an unwashed legion of Grelodi’s sigilettice, consider yourself. Fortunately bait it is the middle man between me and my aquatic vitals. You can use bait you buy in the store or that you gather yourself. It doesn’t really matter because either way it’s one of the first stepping stones that gets you from the couch to the outside. And outside, well that’s where all the fun is. Thank y’all so much for joining me this week. The Beargrea Survey is live until June fourteenth. You can find it in the show descriptions no where. You can just google bear Grease Survey and it’ll lead you right to it. That’s all for me until next week. This is Brent Reeves. Sign it off. Y’all be careful.
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