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The Thrill Is Gone

7K views 79 replies 34 participants last post by  sharps4590 
#1 ·
The last three years have sucked if your hobby is shooting and re-loading. Prices have gone thru the roof and availability of reloading components has been sparse. I am throwing in the towel and selling all my guns and reloading equipment. I am buying a john boat with a 20 HP outboard motor and will pursue Alligator Gar in the Trinity River south of Dallas for the rest of my life. My mind is made up and I am moving on. This is what 67 year old fat men do, I will post photos.
Water Vertebrate Organism Terrestrial animal Extinction
 
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#40 ·
Mmmm, this egg roll tastes really good. What did you put in it this time? :LOL:
 
#42 ·
I caught exactly ONE in my whole life of Fishing when I was stationed at Red Stone Arsenal near Huntsville Alabama. A civilian Friend took me Cat Fishing on some river I've forgotten the name of. Anyway, my line started dancing around and I set the hook on what felt like a submarine, After a long fight I got a glimpse of what I thought was an Alligator. My Friend said it's a Gar, I want it. I finally got it in to shore a relatively small one, about five feet. I went to kill it with a pilot's survival knife, a five inch fixed blade, and when I stabbed it just behind the gill like I was told to do the point and a bout an inch of the blade went flying off. It was like stabbing a rock. Long story short, we took the thing now dead to my Friends Cousin a Taxidermist who sold the mounted Fish to tourist's for what were then big bucks, $75.00 or so in 1968. I have never caught another nor do I want to.
 
#46 ·
I finally got it in to shore a relatively small one, about five feet. I went to kill it with a pilot's survival knife, a five inch fixed blade, and when I stabbed it just behind the gill like I was told to do the point and a bout an inch of the blade went flying off.
Basically you need a chain saw or one of those used to saw steel, a hatchet and an axe for gar and a notepad to write down all the cuss words you used that moment.
 
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#43 ·
Wow. I would have thought those knives were tougher than that. Maybe they hardened those knives more or there was a flaw in the steel or maybe those critters are tougher than they look. I've never seen one.
 
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#45 ·
I had one in my hands once. Coming back from the showers in VN, I squirted my talcom powder into the fan by a Sgt friends' bunk. He was a medic and came out of his bunk with a hypodermic needle and chased me around the bunks. As I went by an airman's bunk, I unsheathed his 5" survival knife and said, stick me with that and I'll stick you with this. He laughed and squirted me. :LOL: After I got home, he sent me a letter telling me I was an honorary uncle. That night I'd told him how a friend and I went down to DC for a weekend just before VN and ran into some nurses. We palled around and I told him of that night. Out of the blue, he guessed her name, knowing a student nurse in training there. He looked her up when he got home and they were soon married.

I ordered one of those 5" Air Force survival knives from some catalog while there, but it was a cheap repro, not worth anything.
 
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#49 ·
I get 4 different colors of meat out of a turtle. The least flavorful, but most tender is the loin and it is whiter than the neck meat. I have never found the other 3 meats, however, and the test is about the same ... kind of like dark meat and white meat in a turkey (not the taste of, but the difference in - if that makes any sense)..
 
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#54 ·
Someone mentioned turkeys and taste. One year we cooked a wild one I'd shot along with a butterball. The butterball tasted like carboard and the wild one reminded me of how turkeys tasted when many of us were kids. Flavorful.
 
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#55 ·
I have a true story to tell about a Gar, my father and Me.
My Father had polio when he was a child so his left foot just hung down when he walked so he had a bad limp. Now you have to use a little imagination because his walk is part of the story.

We lived in Tupelo, Ms. and there is bottom land all around us. There is one bottom called "20 mile" because it is about 20 miles long. 20 mile has many old slews and creeks running through it. Well dad and I were on one of those creek feed slews fishing for cat fish. We had caught maybe 5 or 6 cats when dad calls out I got a good one and he did his pole was bent almost double at one point. He had just landed a 6 lb cat and the rod bent but not that much. He said it must be a 20 or 30 pounder. He fought the fish for about 20 minutes and asked me to take over for a bit which I did for about 10 minutes, see I was only 14 at the time. Well The fish started tiring and dad took back over. The waters edge was not very steep for the first 5 feet then it went up at a steep angle making a bank. After another 2 or 3 minutes that fish gave up and started coming in easy. Dad still thought it was a big catfish. When that fish broke the surface and dad seen what it was he started backing up fast because the fish was coming on the bank and it wanted to take a big bite out of dad. Think about dad backing up with that bad leg with a fish chsaing him. LOL well Dad had a 22lr 4 barrel pistol on him and he drew and shot that gar 4 time with very little effect. Lol. Dad got to that bank and could not climb out. The gar was snapping at his heels. I had a old 6 inch bladed knife I carry so I naturally tried to put a stop to the gar and did after a minute or two. I stabbed it and it turned and started after me and almost got a bite out of my leg. lol. Well as a teenage boy I practice throughing a knife and so I threw that knife at the gars eye and it stuck in it. The gar flopped around a while before it died.
My dad and I could laugh about latter on but at the time it was serious. I can still see my Dad backing away as fast as he could from that gar lol and it was comical. Dad passed on many years ago. I am 71 years old now so this happened 57 years ago.
So if you do go gar fishing which dad and I have many times since caught gars be very careful cause they can hurt you worse than a shark.
 
#64 ·
I knew two people who ate gar. One was my great Uncle Buck and the other was a friend/customer of mine. I used to bow fish for them pretty seriously and what Uncle Buck wouldn't take, Alan did. They both said they were good but to eat it hot. According to them, when it cooled it became rubbery. I don't know as I would have to be very hungry to eat gar.
 
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#65 ·
I would grind it up and make gar balls. But then that's a lot of work and I'd rather eat Crappie, Bass & Catfish. With frog legs of course!!
 
#66 ·
Frog legs are ok. When the boys were home we'd gig 'em off the creek and farm ponds because Joyce loves them. I'll eat them once every 10 or so years. Crappie, bass and bluegill are good. The only river catfish I'll eat is flatheads or blues, I ain't eatin' a channel unless it was cage raised. I used to run limb lines and all the channels I caught were given away because of that yellow streak down their backs that made the whole fish taste like mud. We raised channels in cages for a few years and they never saw the bottom of the pond. They didn't have that yellow streak and were good.
 
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#67 ·
Sharps,

I've never had a channel cat that had a yellow strip or tasted like mud. Now, mud cats yeah, won't even clean them. I keep channels, blues & opelousas. But then all my catfishing is in lakes not rivers. Might be different in rivers.
 
#70 ·
Joyce loves catfish but, admittedly they are not my favorite. Well, flatheads and blues are good but they're predators, not scavengers like channels. Since she likes them so well I'd keep them. After a couple meals of channels she told me not to keep anymore for her, they tasted like mud. If I caught a nice one, 5 lbs or thereabouts, I'd keep it and give it to a neighbor who liked catfish but didn't fish.

There was quite a few folks around who won't eat river channels for the same reason. If that yellow streak is present, you can't miss it. It starts right behind the head and widens down the back to about the dorsal fin then narrows to nothing before it gets to the tail. It's a real pale yellow but you can't miss it. Perhaps the channels out of these much more clear, spring fed Ozark streams wouldn't be that way but up in farm country they certainly are. I'll never know as I gave up limb lining and running trot lines 30 years ago and dedicated my fishing to fly rods.

Besides, Price Chopper's fried, cage raised catfish is so good that catching and cleaning them then frying them isn't worth the effort!!

What on earth is an "opelousas" catfish?
 
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#72 ·
I don’t know where it came from but I thought Gars were poisonous to humans. Just in last 10yrs or so realized people eat them. We did fish for them on purpose in Ohio River and tributaries. We called them Poor Mans Muskies. They seemed exciting to catch compared to Cats and Carp when we were kids. I’d never herd tell of anyone eating them. Must be a ethnic or regional thing. Any thing tasty in this neck of the woods is living on barrowed time. We have Canadian Geese up the kazoo, nobody in these parts eats them. Might change if things get as bad as predicted on food prices.
 
#78 ·
Bagnall Dam that backs up Lake of the Ozarks was built in the 30's, Joyce's grandpa worked on it. Anyway, SUPPOSEDLY a diver was down at the water intake grates for the generator clearing debris and called up for a cable to pull a big log up. A little bit later he called up, "nevermind, the log swam off."

I dunno but that's the way I heard it. There's some big cats in the Osage River drainage.

There was a blue cat caught from the Missouri River not far downstream from Jeff. City that, IIRC, went 110 lbs. 50 lb. + flatheads are not uncommon.
 
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#79 · (Edited)
After my Mom passed from cancer, my Dad who was Capt. Ahab when it came to fishing, remarried my Step Mom who loved fishing, so that was the excuse to buy a bigger boat. Bigger as Dad, Step Mom, my younger brother and I would spend the whole weekend on the boat out on Lake St. Clair fishing. We always had four fishing lines in the water, even over night while asleep. Early one morning on the boat, my Step Mom wakes us all up by screaming “Carl, I have a monster on the line”. The monster was a two foot long gar pike. My Dad to groggy from just being woken up, took a side cutter and cut the line. He said it had way to many teeth for that early in the morning.

A friend of mine had a 100 gallon aquarium that he didn’t want any more. One of the fish was a 12” long gar pike. It was rather interestingly colored with the main color being bronze with dark brown stripes. He gave it to me and I kept it for two years in a 50 gallon long aquarium. I would feed it small feeder gold fish. If I turned off both water filters, I could heard it crunching the bones of the gold fish. When it finally swallowed the gold fish, a flurry of gold fish scales will shoot out of the gar pike’s gills. When ever my young niece and nephew came to visit, the first thing out their young mouths was, “Uncle Pete. Will you feed the gar pike”. They loved watching it crunch up the gold fish. Then one day my younger nephew without anyone of us not seeing at first, stuck his fingers in the aquarium. Unfortunately the gar pike thought his wiggling fingers were food. All we heard was him screaming and the gar pike which about 14” long by then, firmly clamped jaws hanging to one of my nephews finger and didn’t want to let go. I had to pry open the gar pike’s jaws which resulted in me getting jabbed with some of those needle like teeth.

One interesting thing about gar fish is they don’t have swim bouncy bladder. After they eat another fish, they come up too the water surface and take a gulp of air. Then they will expel some of the air to get a neutral bouncy. Gar fish are living fossils of which fossilized bone millions years old have been uncovered. Their physiology hasn’t changed since the early Triassic period meaning they have remained unchanged for 75 million years.
 
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