How to Fish the Nile

 

My grandson, Lane Webster, and I might’ve been coming around a bend of the Nile, full of crocodiles and reeds, in our little petit dhow (boat), but we weren’t. We were in my sixteen-foot, aluminum, runabout, coming around that northside bend of the Highway 51 rip rap, just east of Freddie’s steakhouse in Mannford.

All fishing trips start out as adventures, and then adventurous memories. It’s why some of us go. We don’t need more fish. We haven’t yet eaten all we have in the freezer. Daniel Boone didn’t keep westering just to find more land. He was bored with the sameness that collected behind him everywhere he went.

Me, too.

You round that corner I just mentioned, and look due east, straight down the line of rip rap, and you will see two medium-sized cottonwoods, the only trees there for a quarter of a mile, growing right out of the rocks; the trees themselves a marvelous metaphor for the tenacity of all living things. In the shade of those two trees, some sort of gamefish were into a school of shad right on the shoreline, and busting water high into the air in their pursuit of same.

“Lane, look! Something’s bustin’ bait right up on the bank.” It was the only fish action we had found all morning, clear up to the back of Salt Creek. I motored us up close, and cut the engine so that Lane could cast up into the action area before the fish went down.

The fish had already gone back down, but he hung one anyway on his first cast into the spot where they had been. He fought the fish hard for two or three minutes, it stayed down and deep and even pulled a little drag, before I netted it at boat side, and, oh, what a surprise.

It was a drum, a freshwater drum, of about three pounds; a gorgeous fish all silver with a lavender overlay, and an underslung mouth indicating its primary food source of stuff, anything creepy, crawly, swimmy or otherwise, that is found near the bottom of a lake or river. Crawdads and small minnows definitely qualify as that sort of “stuff” their mouth can suck up off the bottom. Over the years I’ve caught hundreds of them on artificial lures (jigs mainly, but not only) fished too slow near the bottom.

My fish ID books tell me that world wide there are over two hundred species of drum, both salt water and freshwater. In America, they are listed as the most universally common freshwater fish species, laterally, found natively east to west. As an unstocked species, they are found all the way from the St. Lawrence River in Canada, south to Guatemala.

They get their common name, not from the sound of a drum, but from a croaking noise believed to be produced primarily by mating males via a calcariferous “stone” in their head when seeking out available females. Channel catfish make the exact same sound. I have heard human males make a similar sound in bars, I think for the same purpose.

Lane’s drum started croaking loud enough for my blown-out ears to hear it when he lifted it for the picture accompanying this article. Then Lane asked the most common question by people first catching a drum.

“Are they good to eat, Papa?”

“They’re very good to eat. Their meat is a light grey color, sometimes a tinted white. You don’t want to eat one much bigger than that one you caught. Bigger, their meat is still tasty, but coarse; tough, even. I don’t keep them because they’re so hard to fillet. It’s hard to get a knife between their meat and their rib bones. Their sides are a lot thinner than they look until you get into them. But, yes, they are good to eat.”

While we were talking, the school of drum, somewhere close to a dozen of them as far as I could tell, broke water again, chasing baitfish in the exact same spot as before. I had never seen drum schooled up and chasing shad before. It was not something I knew, which probably meant it happened all the time anyway.

My ego, “knowing it all”, is probably as dangerous as yours. I learn new stuff all the time which saves and humbles me. Thank goodness.

Lane cast again into the swirl of slashing fish and hooked another drum. The drum, schooled up and hungry, had saved our fishless day. Now we had something to talk about and remember years later: The day we found the drum schooled up and chasing shad on the rip rap.

It was the next best thing to having a beach house on the moon.

Copyright © 2016 Conrad M. Vollertsen