Fishin' in Kansas has been purty much ruint by the fish & game guys who've decided several decades ago that they needed to stock "game fish" in all the lakes so that the sissy boys can have somethin' they can catch with their 300 HP bass boats, and fancy lures and stuff.

While the few millions of dollars they weasel out of the fancy-assed sissies is probably good for the economy, the artificially stocked "bully fish" haven't been particularly good for the native fish.

No true Kansas good-ole-boy would particularly feel the need to participate in stalking anything but the native catfish, even if the ones still around are a puny charicature of what used to be here.

The "modern" record is something like 100 pounds, for a flathead, and the people who fish for "trophies" occasionally nudge the record up a few pounds at a time, but old tradin' post photos show several taken before the Corps of Engineers favored us with a lot of dams (creating more artificial lake surface in Kansas than anywhere else in the US).

There are a half dozen or so authentic old photos showing catfish longer that any of the men in the photo were tall - possibly as much as 400+ pounds - probably blues, although a couple might have been channels or flatheads. (Yeah, those were probably taken with dynamite, but they were here.)

A few of the g.o.b.s who specialize in tryin' to catch the big 'un still rumored to have been "seen" in a nearby lake called Lake Afton have developed a specific mode of fishin' that's downright pleasurable. They bait a "very large hook" (actually, technically, illegal here) with somethin' like a large jackrabbit (about 6 pounds) or maybe a full growed rooster, or a perhaps a baby piglet. Then they row out into the lake and drop the bait, attached of course to about a 1/8" or 3/16" aircraft cable for a line, and hook the line to the back bumper on the truck with the slide-in camper on it.

Then they crawl up into the camper and have a few. If the truck/camper shakes enough to spill the beer, they'd pull in the line and see if they got something; but so far they've all just run out of beer and had to go home to plan the next trip.

Now the stories about the "big-un" in that particular lake are sometimes questioned by doubters, but ca 1957 there was a "party" at that particular lake where the purty good ole' boys got a little rambunctious and let one of their pick-em-up trucks roll down the front of the dam into about 40 or 50 ft of lake. Since they all knew this other feller who'd bragged about being an ex Navy UDT commando, they rented him a scuba set and kinda badgered him into goin' down and hookin' a line on the pick-em-up so they could try to drag it out.

Well he went down, and he says he felt his way around (Kansas waters are all kinda murky) until he saw a sort of a shadowy object about the right size to be the truck. He swam up closer to it, and just about the time he got close enough to begin to make out some details with his submersible high-watt light, the shadow opened one eye and blinked at him.

The story told by the guys up on the lake bank was that he came out of the water "real fast" (and lost one of the scuba tanks on the way up, which of course they had to pay for) and he refused to go back in to finish the job.

He visited my dad at the shop three or four days after this event, and while he was a little reluctant to go into details, I talked a little to him personally, and can personally guaran-damn-tee ya that guy was NOT GONNA GET WET ANYWHERE CLOSE TO THAT LAKE EVER AGAIN.

(We did check for the pink elephants that sometimes followed this here fellow around, but they must'a been scared off when the thing winked and weren't there this time. And reports were that the guy stayed sober (a rare thing) until he quit shakin' 'bout three or four weeks later.)

Now those of us who fished for eatin' instead of for trophies generally preferred smaller catfish.

Bullheads generally are the best eatin' but rarely get over 3 or 4 pounds here; but the flavor's better because they generally only eat live stuff so they don't pick up the carrion flavor like some of the others. Unfortunatley, they're not too widespread and there are only a few places I ever found where you're likely to catch 'em. A 2 pound bullhead on light line will give you just as much fight as a 5 or 6 pound bass if you want to play with them a little.

Channel cats are more common in slightly larger sizes, and up to (rarely for the food fisher) 30 or 40 pounds are generally good eatin' if you hang the bigger ones up, kill 'em without too much excitement to work up a lot of adrenaline, and cut the tail off to bleed 'em out before you put 'em on ice. Most who just want a meal will prefer channels up to about 3 or 4 pounds, or only a little more, for the better flavor in the smaller ones.

Cat fish in general prefer live food, so minnows work pretty well and are probbly best for the big 'uns. The best bait for catching enough for a good breakfast is probably fairly large night crawlers, but since all Kansas waters have silt/mud bottoms the worms will burrow in and hide. A small hypodermic syringe, to blow an air bubble in the long end of the worm is the absolutely most essential piece of fishing equipment anyone goin' after pan sized catfish can have. It makes the tail float, so that even if the worm tries to "dig in" the tail looks like one of the common leeches waving at the fish saying "dinner is here."

Amateur wannabe g.o.b.s seem convinced that catfish bait has to stink, but these deluded people are the ones who catch all the turtles and get enough of them out of the streams and lakes for the good fish to survive for the people who know better.

The alternative for those who catch for eatin' here are the carp. Lots of people think they're too ugly to eat, but a 3 lb or larger carp, skinned and with the red "blood vein" cut out, is about the best there is. The loose bones that bother some people are exactly the same as are found in salmon and the meat is mild and tasty. (Better than frozen Sole, which is about the closest thing available in supermarkets here.) Fifteen minutes at 15 psi in a pressure cooker eliminates the "loose bone problem" and chilled carp is a good snack.

Carp aren't native here, but they're everywhere. They're almost exclusively vegetarian and although they'll sometimes take a worm the best bait is fresh corn on a tiny hook. (They "suck their food" rather than biting it, and have a very small mouth.)

They only non-edible fish here is the gar. They usually smell so bad it's hard to get close enough to get one off the hook, so I've thus far refused to see if anyone might have a recipe I could use. Fortunately they're very rare in most lakes and rivers.

Fly fishing in Kansas is rare, since there's little flowing water to drift a fly on. (Rivers here, since Colorado and Nebraska stole all the water, don't flow, they just sorta ooze downstream.) A few small impoundments have been stocked with some trout, but they don't survive our winters in sluggish water, so it's "shootin' into the barrel" to go fer 'em. Not my style.

John