Trotlinin’, Part 2

The second installment follows about the night spent trotlinin’ and the rest of the night spent wading the cold (to me) Brazos River.

Something was shaking me, maybe hogs? “Boy, time to go check the lines!” It was my dad and checking my watch with radium numbers, it was 3:00 AM. Wiping the sleep out of my eyes, down the riverbank and back into the cold water, and it was really cold now, but keeping a stiff upper lip, I said nothing, more growing up.

Shelly pulled up the first line there was a firm tug coming back to him. It turned out that we had 5 more cats on the first line, 2 blues, 2 yellows and a funny one, Dad called a high fin blue, but later I found out that it was a channel cat. Baiting up as we went, we found many twisted stages meaning we had lost more cats than we had caught. The toe sack was almost getting heavy and we had another line to run, lots of good eating though!

Dad ran the second line and more pulls. It had 3 more cats, all yellows, along with several more twisted stages. To me, it looked like we were loosing more fish than we were catching! We kept the 8 we’d caught in my wet toe sack and went back to bed, but Dad was up with the sun. More shaking, more hogs, no, just my dad, saying those cold words, “Let’s go check the lines.”

Gasping when the cold water hit me, saying nothing, more growing up, we checked the first line and it had 6 more cats, 2 blues, 3 yellows and another high fin. Crossing to the other side we rolled up the first line, returning, we checked the second line, no fish but probably 10 twisted stages, Dad and Uncle Shelly both said that we needed bigger hooks on the stages. We walked back across the river and rolled up our second line and set to, cleaning the fish. This was kinda’ like work, cleaning the fish, walking back and forth across the cold river, but it was worth it!

Our total for the night was 18 catfish, which meant some good eatin’ for everyone! However, I was still suffering chills from the cold water!