Nobody loves walking a backwoods creek bank, tossing small baits to hungry spawning white bass more than I. The white bass run is eagerly awaited each year by countless anglers. But timing the peak of ‘the run’ can sometime be as challenging as predicting the exact date of the last frost of winter, especially in small feeder creeks above lakes with a healthy white bass population.
Spawning white bass in river systems are much easier to pattern than in creeks where they are here today and gone tomorrow. A few days ago, my friends Jeff Rice and Phil Zimmerman and I loaded our trucks with all the necessities for a successful white bass creek-fishing adventure. Fried fish is never tastier than when cooked on the banks of a remote creek, right out of the water.
We also packed all the gear for a midday fish fry. We all
enjoy a lunch of crispy fried fish fillets with all the trimmings and we had checked our list more than twice to insure we didn’t forget and of the necessary items to make it happen!
We each carried light-action rods with spinning reels spooled with fresh 10-pound test line and a generous supply of Road Runner and Beetle Spin jigs in a good assortment of color patterns. Plastic 5 gallon buckets were handy to pack our gear along the remote creek. Oh yes, we also packed our catfish rods and plenty of cheese bait and a couple tubs of pork liver cut into cubes; these we stashed on the banks of the creek before making the trek back to what we hoped would be white bass catching hotspots.
Why, you ask, would we want to pack liver for a white bass fishing trip?
Being veterans of many spring white bass fishing trips, we all knew, way in the back of our minds, that we might strike out on ‘the whites’. We gave no mention to this fact, probably fisherman’s superstition, but we knew there was a distinct possibility those spawning ‘whites’ might be back in the main lake or further up the creek!
We also knew success should be very good on channel catfish that would be attracted to the creek by the recent run off and rise in the creek from rainfall earlier last week. Eating spam sandwiches for lunch was way on the back burner and just like any good stock broker advises, we wanted to diversify and cover all the bases to insure we would be crunching fresh fish come lunch time!
After tossing our little downsized baits for an hour or so without a single strike, it became obvious if we were going to be eating fish for lunch, it would have to be channel catfish fillets. To be perfectly honest, white bass are very tasty but there’s a very good reason for the popularity of catfish restaurants.
Were we disappointed we didn’t have buckets of white bass? If so, we didn’t ‘let on’.
We simply grabbed our catfish rods, baited our #4 treble hooks with fresh liver, set our corks at the proper height to keep our baits a few inches up from bottom and shifted into catfish mode in less time than it takes to tell about it.
No walking muddy creek banks for this style of fishing. We fished off a nice dock that Jeff had constructed a couple years ago. With a Vineyard Max fish feeder positioned near the end of the dock that distributes catfish pellets twice a day, we felt confident we would enjoy some great action on eater size channel cats.
There is just something special about watching a cork disappear and we were all as excited about catching catfish as we had been the white bass an hour or so earlier.
The runoff water from recent rain and regular feeding of pellets had the catfish in feeding mode. We began fishing with a couple rods apiece but soon discovered that was one too many. It was tough to concentrate on watching two corks and at times. On a couple occasions, we had fish on both rigs and once I almost lost my rig to a feisty catfish that tried to drag my rod and reel off the dock, best to keep the reels in free spool if we didn’t have them in our hands!
In the first twenty minutes, we had landed more than enough catfish for a huge lunch but we are all serious fish eaters and continued fishing until the thought of fresh fried catfish fillets, potatoes with onions and pork 'n' beans caused to gravitate toward the cook fire and go to work as the finely tuned cooking team we are, Jeff on the fillet knife, Phil cutting potatoes and onions and yours truly heating the grease in the huge frying pan and dropping the fillets gently into the sizzling oil.
There is no telling how many pounds of fish I have fried through the years. I still fry fish the old-school way, no modern thermometers needed. I simply watch the grease until the little circles begin to form on the surface then pinch off a small piece of fish at toss it in. If it sizzles, it’s time to begin cooking, as simple as that. Phil fell in with his potatoes and onion after I had amassed huge pile of crispy fillets in the pan.
There is an art to cooking potatoes as well. Add the onion pieces too early and they will become black and take on a bitter taste. Phil waited until the potatoes were almost done and added the onion and let them cook a couple minutes. The potatoes were almost as tasty as the fish… almost!
I guess a day spent in the backwoods fishing could be accomplished without the ensuing frying of fish and a shoreline lunch but definitely not with the friends I fish with. Cooking very fresh fish after a fishing trip is a time honored ritual that is as engrained in most of us as hunting the rut for whitetail deer.
May the outdoor traditions such as this go on forever!
Listen to Luke’s weekly podcast, “Catfish Radio with Luke Clayton and Friends” just about everywhere podcasts are found. Contact Luke through his website www.catfishradio.org
