Frog-Giggers and Other Greenhorns

July comes, and the habits of a grizzled old veteran outdoorsman changes a little. One of them I know goes out on Norfork Lake in the morning to fish just after the first hint of light. Jim Spencer, one of the finest outdoor writers in the country, and grizzled old outdoorsman if there ever was one, sent me this message just a while ago…. “I caught nine fish this morning - four hybrids, a white bass, two largemouths, a smallmouth, and a bluegill as big as a salad plate!”

Spencer likes to catch hybrids, the cross between white bass and stripers. They can get up to twenty pounds or so, but you don’t catch many above ten pounds. Nevertheless, a six- or seven-pound hybrid fights like nothing you have ever seen of a comparable weight. I wrote about catching a ten-pounder not long ago on the upper tributary to Truman Lake, and it took me twenty minutes to get that fish close to my boat. If you have ever used a medium light action spinning rod with only six-pound line, and caught a hybrid or striper above that weight, you know what it is like to have your drag stripped. A properly set drag is the only way you can land one. You give line and you take it, and you wear down the fish with constant pressure against him.

I am going to go see my old friend Spencer, and see if I can help him down there on Norfork. I have helped him with his hunting and fishing before and he doesn’t even acknowledge it. We have had some times in the past, like that turkey camp in the Arkansas Ouachita mountains twenty years ago when he arrived before daylight on a mountain ridge-top with a big old gobbler sounding off nearby and found a half a brick in his shot-shell box in place of his shells. He has always thought I done it!

But what we have in mind now is setting up my pontoon boat on Norfork some evening, putting out submerged lights to try to draw in threadfin shad, and catch fish beneath us in the darkness most of the night, then fishing with lures at first light from his fishing boat. We’ll have the pontoon boat right there to sleep on, sometime during the night or later in the morning. I can’t wait to try it, and in doing so, escape the mid-day heat.

Spencer lives deep in the woods next to the national forestland south of Calico Rock, Arkansas near a little creek called Sylamore, which flows into the Buffalo River. If Jim writes about something, he has done it, and seen it. You don’t much see that in outdoor writing nowadays. Most outdoor writers live in the suburbs not more than a few minutes from an interstate highway and a Wal-Mart shopping center, a long way from any woods or waters.

Last week I read an article in a large newspaper’s outdoor section about bull-frog season, and I knew just by reading it the writer had never been frogging in her life. She just found someone who said they had done it and wrote their comments. I don’t know if he was a grizzled old outdoor veteran or not but I doubt it, because his wife was concerned about how frogs jump around in a skillet while they are being cooked. Any experienced frogger knows that will happen UNLESS you cut the nerve sheath in the small of the back above the back legs before you fry the frog. With that done, they just quiver a little while they cook.

And another thing, why do writers talk about shooting frogs? No experienced river-man shoots frogs, because he knows you will lose some of them if you shoot them. They can be shot and still jump off into deep water and lost. Besides that, firing a twenty-two bullet at the water is a really stupid thing to do. Those bullets ricochet, and travel great distances after they do.

I am beginning to accept gigging of frogs, but when I was a youngster on the Big Piney, we looked on frog-giggers like a rodeo cowboy would look at a visitor at a dude ranch. You catch frogs by hand, using a headlamp to blind them, and you aren’t really a frogger until you have done that most of a night on an Ozark river. Gigs are for kids, old folks who can’t bend over so well, (and I am getting there) and greenhorns, and suburbanites.

I was thinking the other night about the rivers I have frogged, and they include the Big Piney, Gasconade, Niangua, Pomme de Terre, and a half dozen small creeks in Missouri. But then there are those in Arkansas, many years back, Crooked Creek, the Kings, the War Eagle, Eleven Point and the Buffalo. Those were the days! I will never forget one trip down the Buffalo on a summer night way back when bullfrogs were so abundant you could sometimes catch one in each hand.

I was Chief Naturalist for the Arkansas State Park System, when there was still a Buffalo River State Park, just before the National Park Service took it over. I hired a half dozen young outdoorsmen from Arkansas Tech College, to work as park naturalists that first summer. One of them was a country boy by the name of John Green, and John and I became long-time friends. He had never been frogging, so one night after our evening program in the park had ended, about 9 or 10 p.m., we set out down the Buffalo with two burlap sacks and paddles and headlamps. John had left his pickup about six miles downstream at a take-out point known as the old Rush mining camp, pretty much a ghost town after it’s heyday in the 20’s.

It was a night to remember, as we selected only the biggest frogs and had a limit even before we paddled alongside the Rush access road about two in the morning. And that’s when John began looking for his pick-up keys and couldn’t find them. Finally he realized he had changed out of his park uniform before we left and his keys were back at the park in his uniform pants.

I fired John on the spot, and we paddled back up the river to the park, arriving about daylight. Knowing we had to take a group of people out on a three-hour hike in only a couple of hours, I rehired him. John is still a hand-grabber frogger today I think. I haven’t seen him in awhile, but I don’t think he ever sunk to such a low level that he would gig a frog.

I hesitate to mention this, but if you are a frogger who floats a river at night in July and August, you can catch some gosh-awful big smallmouth bass on a jitterbug. Just turn the lights off, and fish that topwater lure in the slowing eddies beneath a river shoal. Don’t use spinning gear, use casting gear and twelve- or fourteen-pound line. If you aren’t a grizzled old outdoor veteran, it will be difficult to learn how to cast and fish at night in the dark, but you can learn how if you work at it, and you may catch the biggest bass you ever caught in the quiet of a dark night off down the river where greenhorns and suburbanites and frog-giggers seldom venture.

Write to me, if you want to protest my ‘grizzled old outdoorsman’ attitude, at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613. E-mail me at lightninridge@windstream.net. The website, where you can contribute your own comments, is www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com