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Pastimes : FLAME THREAD - Post all obnoxious/derogatory comments here -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rainy_Day_Woman who wrote (8614)	5/15/2000 1:29:00 PM
From: Druss	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12754

Gar Fishing in Arkansas Lee and I decided to go fish a small pond in Arkansas that he knew about. It was a stagnant looking pond with God's own number of mosquitos and surrounded by big cypress tree and heavy brush. It looked for all the world like the setting for 'Swamp Thing'. This is not something that takes any imagination at all either because at any moment a swamp creature may suddenly erupt out of the brush. It will be hairy, utterly savage looking, filthy beyond belief, grunting, howling, and growling. Then if you look closer you will see it is wearing bib overalls or blue jeans with suspenders. Then Lee will say something like "That is the guy wut owns the farm over the hill. He wants ter know if we is catchin anything." Lee and I set out on his boat fly rodding for smallmouth bass, crappie, largemouth bass and things of that nature. Things that are considered worth catching. However the lake teemed with gar. They ranged in size from a foot long or so to these giant log shapes running over 5 ft long. Gar are somewhat long and thin with a hard toothy bill, slimy, taste bad from all reports I have gotten, the roe is toxic, and are normally difficult to get to hit a lure. When they do hit a lure they ruin it with their teeth. All in all the South's premier trash fish. I decided to go for them. Lee figured this was a typical activity for a Yankee and continued to fish for something worth catching. I did start getting strikes like crazy. However I was not hooking any of them as the bill was too hard and I was casting mostly to the small ones trying to see if I could get them to strike. The hook was too big for them to get in that small bill. Then I started going for the bigger ones. After losing one of about 4 1/2 feet long or so I got into one of the biggest we saw of around 5 1/2 feet long. He towed the boat around the lake a fair amount. This did get Lee somewhat interested in fishing for them. I finally got the fish to the boat and there we are with some 40 pounds plus of gar right beside us. It was pretty calm acting in the water at this point so I suggested to Lee he grab it by the bill and haul it in. So he did. Lee claims that this was a dirty Yankee trick, that I knew that gar teeth don't just mesh together, that they jut out at an angle. This is really untrue, if I had known that, I would have told him to grab him with both hands to make sure he didn't get away. They are really toothy fish. A little one would have probably 40 teeth to the inch. On this big one though from the pattern of piercing on his hand the teeth were a bit more than 1/16 apart. Due to the slowness of an alcohol numbed nervous system Lee did hang on and drag him in. At this point I knew I had a fly rod line weight world record for Alligator gar. I was using 16 pound test line and the record was only 24 pounds. My fish was way over 24. So I started doing all the documentation I needed to record it and we were going to go get it officially weighed. The fly however had come off the leader so I stuck it on my vest with some other flies. I forgot I had done this. We took pictures, I cut the leader off my fly line so they could test the strength. Then I couldn't find the fly. I had to send in the fly to get the record approved. We finally gave up looking for it and turned the fish loose. [We had sort of mellowed him with a paddle so he didn't exactly swim off in good condition.] I didn't find where I had put that fly until packing to go home that evening. So when we drove home neither of us were quite willing to tell the other how dumb he had been. I lost a fly that was the key to a world record and Lee was driving with a lacerated hand. So we both sat there thinking "Boy, was I stupid." All in all a typical day of fishing. Druss