Stuck fishin, diggin and the agony of de-feet
Not all fishing trips go as planned, but the pain sometimes teaches us things
Some days you catch the big fish, other days you wake up, pull a tick off the tender side of your arm and wonder what the heck time of day it is.
Feet twisted and horizontal in the recliner with the weight of ice packs long since gone warm weighing on my toes, I sat up, rubbed the sting out of my eyes and thought.
“Damn, I hurt all over.”
This is the glory of hard night’s fishing when things just don’t seem to go right from the start.
The vision was we would have fought a bevvy of big Arkansas River flathead and blue catfish, maybe some channel cats for fun. The idea we might get into some stripers or white bass on the fly rod wasn’t outside the realm of possibilities.
My buddy Tim Fitzer and I had talked about fishing this spot for weeks, a couple years really if you count the times Tim said, “Bostian! I gotta get you down there to that spot on the river and get some of those big catfish.”
I do want to catch a 30- or 40-pound flathead on my fly rod, I really, really want to do that. I have an old 10-weight that has a 35-pound Alaska king salmon to its credit and it wasn’t to do at least that with a catfish and a striper in Oklahoma.
Fitzer wanted to see me do it, too, and all he wanted to do was sit on the bank in a lawn chair, dunk some perch, watch his fishin’ pole and enjoy a Dr. Pepper and a turkey sandwich.
Sunfish that Fitzer caught of his pond weeks earlier would be the late-night bait. They were caught “weeks earlier” because we had planned the trip weeks ago, but rain and high water kept holding us back.
Fitzer said it had been five or six years since he’d fished the riverbank but the flatheads were active after dark and the chances of hooking a 30 or 40 pounder were good. The fish move upstream and hold in some holes and hunt flats through this area off private land out toward Leonard, and Fitzer’s permission to use the lightly pressured section of river gave us an extra edge.
Fitzer did nearly land one flathead but it put a series of acrobatic rolls about 10 feet off the bank and pulled loose. At least we can say the flatheads were there. My theory is we were a little late, the water was running a little too high, and the place was just too overrun with gar.
We couldn’t figure it out at first. The rod would bend, and bend, and bend harder, and about the time you thought you should set the hook, your bait was gone. I posed a question to the Oklahoma Catfish Report public page on Facebook with a pic of one of our bare offset-shank hooks.
“What the what is smacking the line and stealing 4- and 5-inch bream and managing to avoid hooks through the back, the nose, the tail? Danged perch thieves!” I wrote.
“Gar” was the most common of the 58 replies to that question. That and people who follow that group really prefer circle hooks to the old offset hooks Fitzer uses. He has a lifetime supply.
Sure enough, a few casts later we did pull in a baitfish that looked like it had been partially scaled on each side. It just looked like something a gar could do—which is not to say some turtles or smaller cats didn’t get in on the actin here or there.
From recent noodling reports it’s clear that flatheads are on their nests now. Some will be, to a degree, into August, according to Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation fisheries biologist Josh Johnston.
Flatheads still feed while they are tending nests but it just cuts down on the number that are active. As the peak of spawning time passes, hungry post-spawn cats will become easier targets, he said.
Riverbank fishing for flatheads will likely pick up later in July.
All this not-catching fish stuff really would have been fine. I like to spend a late evening on the river. Spending all night on the river sweating my brains out is a different matter.
It all woulda been fine if the four-wheel drive hadn’t given out on Fitzer’s truck at that inopportune time. Probably would have been fine, too, if I hadn’t forgotten the propane for the lantern, which required a couple trips back out to the highway to connect with my wife, who was kind enough to bring some canisters.
Each trip helped soften up that sandy road.
It would have been easier, too, if the best fishing spot wasn’t about a third of a mile from the truck. We had a lot of ferrying and carrying to do to set up. I’m not sure how many miles we put on across that sand at the end of a near 100-degree day.
Setting up was a chore—mostly for Fitzer, however. He was determined to be the host and that I break out my fly rod and not worry about setting things up.
Later, he also started trying to dig out that truck before I realized just how stuck we were.
“We still have some bait. Keep fishing!” he said.
I think the second time he started the truck and I heard it spin out was when I actually thought, “Ohh. Uh-oh.”
In our efforts to dig out, I chopped down and hauled a forest of Christmas-tree sized willow and cedar branches to shove under the truck tires. Fitzer dug enough sand to create a small dike on either side of the truck.
Up the truck went with a bumper jack. Digging and limb shoving began. Down the truck went, we would make a little headway, and then we started all over again.
Fitzer had to walk back to the river to find a rock big enough to support the jack in the sand after every lift. The rocks kept breaking. I knew better than to follow him because my aching feet were not up that sandy incline down to the river and back up again.
Fitzer laughed at one point and said it sounded like I was in a fistfight walking out of the brush. I was marching to a cadence of “uuuh, ohh, ufff” instead of “left, right, left.”
No fistfight for me, just bunions.
By 5 a.m. our bodies were worn out and muscle cramps were shutting us down. We had sand in places we didn’t know it could get, and we’d managed to move the truck forward a total of about 6 or 8 feet.
Thanks to a good friend with an early work schedule and a four-wheel-drive truck we still did make it home a little after 6 a.m.—about 12 hours after we’d left, and about 5 hours later than expected.
Fitzer left a phone message just the other day.
He said, “Bostian! I’m ready to go again!”
We will have to go. We have to now. We can’t let the river beat us and just limp away.
About mid-July the flatheads should be a little more active and we can try that sandy spot again—then again, even July might be a little too soon.
