To a Different Drum

 

“Get the net. Get the net. Good fish.” 

My brother, Vernon Vollertsen, up for the day from Edmond to visit and fish, was indeed into a good fish of some sort, his rod bent into a deep bow, drag screeching line from the reel. Whatever it was, was going deep.

We had been tossing jigs towards the shoreline back up in the Mud Creek Arm of Lake Keystone. All reports and history for this time of the year indicated that’s where the crappie should be, but they weren’t. Almost two hours of throwing variously colored jigs had proven that they weren’t. 

This spring’s fishing season has been a roller coaster ride of frontal passages, moving the fish in and out, in and out, and anybody’s guess as to where to find them from day to day. And now, after the rains have come, after four years of drought, the water is rising, and becoming murkier than it has been in four years. 

Even the hardest headed German can be hammered into shape by the events of the day. A change was in order, and I had opted for trolling, dragging lures at the slowest speed possible behind the boat forever how long it takes to drag one across the nose of whatever fish takes an interest, no matter the species. Beggars can’t be choosers.

It can take hours, or minutes, but covering a lot of water non-stop will eventually find fish you might never have found using more traditional methods. It’s a method made illegal where any professional bass fishing tournament is concerned, don’t ask me why; perfectly legal for any Tom, Dick, or Harry that just wants to get attached to something that pulls hard. 

My father taught me the method years before Vernon was born. Following Dad’s naval career all over the country, never completely knowing bodies of water continuously new to us, using the method always found fish for us before the day was over. We were into catching, not specializing. Dad wanted fish that pulled hard. 

Now, Vernon was into a big fish of some type. To me, from the very beginning, the mystery at the end of the line was always one of the game’s biggest draws. What is it? What is it? Nobody knows what everybody wants to know until the fish is at the boat. Easy, Easy. Better not break the line. My gosh, look at that! Would you look at that! 

Vernon had hooked a big drum on a blue-over-silver, shallow running Rapala. The fish had fought hard, taking almost five minutes to bring up alongside the boat. All fish are pretty to some of us, and certainly none more so than the common freshwater drum, all silvery with gorgeous lavender highlights seemingly air-brushed onto a clean, scaled body. Vernon had caught a real beauty. I netted the fish, laid it in the bottom of the boat, still in the net, and let Vernon remove the treble hook from its lip. 

“Can you eat these things?” Vernon asked warily as he eyeballed the fish. 

“Sure. I’ve eaten several. You might not like it, though.” 

“Why? Bony?” 

“No, not at all. They fillet up real nice. But their meat is what I call ‘coarse’. Tough. It tastes good, but, to me, it’s like chewing leather. We can keep it if you want. There’s no limit on them, size or numberwise.” 

“Naw. Let’s throw ‘im back,” which is what we did. 

The common drum is the widest spread freshwater fish species in our hemisphere, occupying rivers, streams, and lakes from the Rocky Mountains all the way to the Atlantic and south to the gulf of Mexico, on down into Guatemala. You won’t have trouble finding one if you want to catch one. They’re lots of fun to catch. Keystone is choked full of them. 

Drum get their name from their ability to make a croaking, or “drumming” sound using their internal gas bladder as a resonating chamber. I grew up hearing from my grandfather, Austin Howell, that the sound was produced from an unusual looking, pearlescent “stone” in their head. It is not so. 

That object is colored like mother of pearl, almost like abalone shell, and I have two friends who have dug the object out of the drum’s head and had it set it in silver, one in gold, to make a nice looking piece of jewelry. By the way, some channel catfish will make that same drumming sound when you grab them around the middle. As a boy, I operated on many a channel cat skull looking for that same “head stone.” Never found it. 

The ID books tell me that there are over two hundred species of drum in the world, most of them living in the ocean. Two of them are called the red drum or redfish, and another the black drum, both of which have the same underslung mouth that the freshwater drum has. There’s no question that all three are first cousins by blood. All of them have that same coarse flesh I mentioned earlier, also. I grew up catching redfish, nice ones, and throwing them back. Nobody ate them back in the day. 

That all changed when famed New Orleans chef, Paul Prudhomme, came up with a recipe he called “blackened redfish”. He originally called his recipe “burnt redfish” but none of the yuppies liked the sound of that, thus the change. That name change about wiped the species off the coastal waters of Louisiana so popular did it become before commercial fishing regulations were put into place to save the species. 

The freshwater species is unique in another way. Freshwater drum produce an egg and larva that float at the surface of the water rather than far below it. 

Then, too, that strange drumming sound is now believed to increase during the spawning season so as to call both males and females of the species to the spawning grounds. Think in terms of the last time you sat in stalled traffic, maybe at a stoplight, and heard the booming bass of a car’s sound system several car lengths away. Did it make you start to sway, rhythmically, and make you want to get out of your car and wend your way closer to the source of the sound and make friends with someone you have never seen in your life? Maybe not. People are not that way, maybe. 

The same aforementioned underslung mouth tells you not only what they eat (anything near or on the bottom) but why you are catching them if you are. If you are fishing very slowly (trolling?) a lure that comes close to the bottom, sooner or later you will catch a drum, whether you want to or not. I can’t remember once catching a freshwater drum near the surface. Redfish, I have. 

I remember lots of good fights from drum, always deep, and pulling hard. It’s that pull, drum or not, that keeps pulling me back to water. 

“I’d take another one of those”, Vernon said. “Nothing wrong with a fish that pulls hard.” 

It’s in the blood, maybe.

© 2015 Conrad M. Vollertsen