The lone upside of flooding: great catfishing

‘Catfish ... by the tons’
The buzz of Dockery’s two-stroke Evinrude flushes a bird-watcher’s delight of cormorants, swans and blue heron from a flooded vale where the lines are set. Bobbing green floats telegraph the coming bounty. “There’s catfish in here literally by the tons,” Dockery says.

For $25 a year, his commercial Missouri fishing license allows him to purchase an unlimited number of $5 tags, one for each 150-foot trotline on which he could tie as many as 50 stainless steel, single-barb straight hooks. Dockery prefers about 35 hooks, baited with night crawlers or tiny crawdads and placed on 10-inch woven nylon leaders about four feet apart along the parachute-cord trotlines. He uses recycled plastic bottles for floats, old sash-window irons for weights and antifreeze containers as marker buoys.

Dockery pulls the first line in hand over hand as Redd, 24, stands ready with the net. Overnight, the channel cats’ whiskers, which are called barbels and are much more akin to a highly sensitive tongue than a mustache, have helped them find their way through the murk to the baited hooks.

Ten feet down the line, the first cat is kicking up a fuss, but Dockery expertly slips it from the hook and holds it high. “This is just the size fish you want to catch right here,” he says of the 2-foot fish. “That fish will fillet out at two pounds. That’s a six dollar fish.” A half-dozen of the fish’s comrades in fins soon join it in Dockery’s boat: “Not the best, but not bad,” he says of the haul. The pungent, fresh-earth aroma of fish fills the boat and he is off to the next line.

Every trip is an adventure, he says, even after decades of fishing. Some of the lines hold much larger fish; one has just a few small ones. He keeps a couple of carp for one customer, measures to make sure a smaller catfish is over the 13-inch minimum limit.

The finer points of catfishing
As he works beneath the fiery June sun, Dockery, a retired high school math teacher, offers a running lesson in the fine art of catfish angling:

• A good fisherman checks, or “runs,” his lines early: “The later you wait in the day to run lines, the more likely you are to lose fish.”
• Some fishermen will keep bullheads, an especially spiny catfish species, but they are not worth the trouble to Dockery: “They will stick you and they will stick you good.”
• “See how that catfish is scraped up there?” Dockery asks, holding up a three-pounder with what looks like almost a rash along its scale-less body. “A big catfish has been eating on him.”

Dockery cleans and fillets his catch at the gorgeous 40-acre knoll top ranch north of town where he lives with his wife, Mary, black labs Max and Sadie, and Charlie, a beagle puppy. Their grown son and two daughters are currently scattered by careers and college from nearby Louisiana, Mo., to Mexico and Arizona.

It will take him about two hours to get his catch cleaned, wrapped and into the refrigerator.

The river has been good to Dockery today. It usually is. He can’t imagine ever living anywhere else.

“That’s the No. 1 reason I live in Clarksville, Mo. — the Mississippi River,” he says. But while it is giving so generously to him, it is taking plenty from others.

Cleaning his fish on the tailgate of his pickup truck, he quickens his pace so he can finish up quickly. “I want to get downtown and see if they need me to man a pump,” he says.

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