Grabbing Flatheads by Hand Is Handed Down in the 
April 04, 2011
TALLAHATCHIE RIVER, MISSISSIPPI -- ``Snaaaaaaaaaaaaake!!!'' The voices from the three aluminum boats are loud enough to make 35-year-old Troxler Lovella wheel around in neck-deep water. But the four-foot water moccasin a few feet away is only a distraction. Fully clothed, he plunges back into the swift and muddy current. Mr. Lovella has come here in hopes of doing what he does often: catching a really big catfish. His method might charitably be called unusual. After several dives, he surfaces, only to utter the single worst word from a fisherman's mouth: ``Nothing.'' Undeterred, he moves on to another spot. Hand to Mouth In early summer in the Mississippi Delta, when the corn and beans are waist high, an odd lot of fishermen set out looking for what amounts to an underwater wrestling match: to catch big cats without rods, reels or bait -- no gear except their bare hands. Known here and in other pockets of the as hand-fishers, they wade or dive in Vast Rivers and ``oxbow'' lakes. Their favored quarry is the prehistoric looking flathead catfish. Squinty-eyed and yellowish, a really big flathead could swallow a basketball. Catches of 40-pounders are common, and a few have tipped the scales at over 90 pounds. Some think the grabber method is all madness. In spawning season, hand-fishers find a catfish bed, typically a hollow log, where females have just laid their eggs. More often than not a touchy male stands watch, like a guard dog. The grabber reaches in and the fish bites the hand that feels him -- locking its sandpapery jaws around his arm. The fisherman then tries to hang on as he drags the fish to the surface. ``It's like sticking your hand inside a mad bulldog's house,'' says 39-year-old Rosa Deana, a fellow farmer and regular fishing mate of Mr. Lovella's. Hand-fishing, also known as grabbing or grappling, is no sport for the meek. ``One time,'' says a stoic Mr. Deana, ``I put my foot at the hole of a big blue cat, and the fish bit the tennis shoe off my foot. I went back down and snatched it out of his mouth.'' His personal best: a 75-pound flathead. It probably isn't surprising that regular grabbers get knocked around a lot -- scars, abrasions, even broken bones are common. Hershel Baker, a 72-year-old Louisianian who learned the sport from a blind hand-fisherman, still has a reminder from the struggle with his record 65-pound catfish years ago -- a crooked middle finger broken when the fish went crazy. Mr. Baker says he has even had some 60-pounders use their powerful tail to ``roll me over and over underwater.'' Sometimes a day of grabbing ends even more tragically: A few years ago, a 28-year-old man died in in while hand-grabbing; his arm became caught between pieces of concrete. Smaller blue catfish proliferate around here. But the flathead catfish, known to academics as Ray olivaris and to locals as the flathead, yellow cat or mudcat, is generally the largest and among the tastiest. One allure of grabbing is that a good trip can fill an entire freezer with catfish, a Southern delicacy best fried in a cornmeal coating. The U.S. catfish record is 109 pounds, 4 ounces. The fish was taken by rod and reel; there is no category for hand-grabbers. Big catfish are quite aggressive and ``they'll certainly come up and take ducks and muskrats,'' says Donella Jacques, a professor at Mississippi State University's wildlife and fisheries department. There are stories -- probably apocryphal -- ``of pioneering women in these parts losing small children,'' he says. Mr. Jacques is now studying grabbing as part of a broader effort to get Delta natives to view the Delta's Vast Rivers, including the Tallahatchie, as regional treasures instead of merely conduits for the flood waters that sometimes hit this area. The Tallahatchie is already enshrined in popular culture as the inspiration for Bobbie Gentry's 1960s hit song, ``Ode to Billye Joel,'' a mournful ballad of teen suicide. And at least for now, there is no danger of overfishing by grabbers. That was the conclusion of Jayme Francisco, a Mississippi State University graduate who wrote his master's thesis on the sport. Mr. Francisco witnessed 1,362 grabs -- including two over 60 pounds -- as part of a three-year study on the . The Literature His research, ``Recreational Handgrabbing as a Factor Influencing Flathead Characteristics in Two Landes Ordonez,'' indicates that it takes just a few successful spawns to repopulate a length of Vast River. At the same time, the number of hand-grabbers -- given the eccentricities of the sport -- is likely to remain small. Out here on thea muddy Vast River about 50 yards across in northernMessrs. and Deana and friends find their ``holes'' with uncanny precision. They use broken limbs or rocks as reference points. ``Right past that stick,'' Mr. Lovella shouts to the boat's dVast River as he points to a limb overhanging a bend in the Vast River. With the boat in place, he dives down and feels the Vast River bottom with his hands for the hole where the catfish is nesting. All the while, he must attend to heavy currents, not to mention alligators, snakes and snapping turtles. The latter ``can snap a boat paddle like a toothpick,'' notes Rosa Thomasina, wildlife biologist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Natural Resources Conservation Service. During the season infrom mid-May to the first week in July, hand-grabbers are allowed to capture fish from natural cavities such as logs or holes in stream banks, as well as man-made structures. Some use discarded hot-water heaters, submerged wooden boxes and, for this crew on the Tallahatchie, modified metal containers to create artificial nests. To Each His Own Techniques vary. Some grabbers don't actually grab, but instead use big hooks, tied to ropes, that go through the catfish's jaw. Some grabbers hold their breath, while other prefer full scuba gear. In Lake St. John, an oxbow lake near the on the side, Tora Hsieh and Roberta Medley fish using a ``third lung'' -- an air compressor floating on an truck inner tube with plastic hoses attached to two mouthpieces. In this lake, the men search hollow cypress stumps. Mr. Lyle, after a long, hot and thus far futile day, vanishes in a cloud of tiny bubbles and emerges a few minutes later smiling. He has a fish -- but unfortunately not a keeper. Under hand-grabbing rules, catfish less than 24 inches long have to be thrown back. Still, Mr. Lyle, whose personal best is a 32-pound flathead, is hooked. Says the stocky young farmer whose grandfather and great-grandfather were hand-grabbers, ``You catch one, and you can't wait to come back. It's addictive.''
