DATE: December 26, 1995
INTERVIEWER:
LOCATIONS: Residence
of Joe Sauce, Jr.,
COOPERATORS: Joseph
Sauce, Jr., Florence Sauce; then EJ Daigle
JD: This
is the second tape with Joe Sauce on the 26 of December, 1995,
Joe: And uh, it was getting hard about that time to, to sell fish. We sold that 1200 pounds and, uh, I believe that was probably one of the last years, maybe the following year we did a lil fishing down below Calumet Spillway and that was probably the last time. Around…it was in the ’84 and ’85, because I may have fished in the spring of ’86, I don’t recall, but I sold my boat in the spring of ’86. In the summer of ’86, rather…July or August. And we used the shrimp boats, you know, as camps.
JD: In those middle ‘80s [is] when y’all were fishing in the delta?
Joe: Yeah. We also used the shrimp boats as camps, we
went around from place to place along the delta,
JD: Yeah.
Joe: I don’t know how we got on that.
JD: We were talking about castnets. We drifted away from castnets [laughs].
Joe: You might find some useful information….
JD: Oh yes! None of that is wasted. Believe me.
Joe: I know, because some of this applies to other…
JD: Other stuff, exactly. So castnets, when y’all first started using castnets it was…they were made out of cotton, I imagine. Well, no, not you, your’s would have been nylon.
Joe: I recall, Daddy’s old castnets…Daddy had, made out of cotton.
JD: And they had to dip them too? In tar?
Joe: Yeah. I remember some of em were black.
JD: Boy, it must have been hard to open those things! If they were…well, I guess once they dried, they didn’t stick together…
Joe: Umhm. They needed a light dippin, I imagine. But, uh, anyway the nylon soon came in, it wasn’t long. And uh, and that lasted long periods of time. The most damage was done, was… being caught on a stump and tearin a hole in em.
JD: The lines that pull the net up, what do you call those? [braile lines] You know, the line that came down…
Joe: I don’t know, uh, probably bridle lines.
JD: Bridle? Could have been, could have been called bridle.
Joe: You had your bottom line with your castnet balls, the hanging would get bad sometimes.
JD: Now you used a term just now, you used the term “light dippin”? that means that there was different variables…?
Joe: Yeah. Well, they dipped the nylon in that nylon net
dip,
JD: Is that what it’s cut with? Varsol?
Joe: That’s one of the things they use. If you use gasoline you waste…what’s left is wasted because it spoils it…it dries it up. If you don’t have an airtight container and the can’s full, it’s gonna dry up on you, that plastic dip. There’s no way to keep it.
JD: If you use gasoline?
Joe: Well, even if you use Varsol but Varsol’s less…
JD: Volatile?
Joe: Right, umhm. But anyway, they, most of the fishermen would probably use gasoline to thin the nylon net dip, and uh….
JD: What size were the castnets? Do you remember?
Joe: Around five foot, probly most of em. For bait. And some of em might have six foot, and uh, they was mostly used to catch bait – shads, mullets and that sort of thing. I don’t know what more we could say about that.
JD: Dipnets.
Joe: OK, that’s not the shrimpnets. The dipnet was a lil…an extra net other than the shrimpnet, or crawfish net, that a fisherman kept in his boat in order to dip a fish that was barely hooked. Or a larger fish, whether it was hooked good or not, you used the dipnet. Large goujon, or blue cat, probly anything…. Like more than five pounds, because it had a tendency to pull off the hook. And so, dipnets…
JD: How about the oldest, the earliest ones, you remember how they were made? Were they made about the same as…
Joe: About the same as a shrimpnet. Probly with the quarter inch steel because
they needed to be as light as possible.
And uh, course the nets were tarred, probly, the original ones the older
people used were probly…during the cotton time were tarred heavy, so that they
wouldn’t…
JD: The webbing? Big mesh webbing?
Joe: Big mesh, two inch. Three inch stretch. Something to that
extent. Course you wanted you wanted
something that wouldn’t get tangled, probly it was mostly nylon webbing used
for that. And uh, I really never did
carry a dipnet that much, I would use my shrimpnet. I had dipnets on occasion but mostly used my shrimpnet
because, uh, big fish…you’d catch some but it was an unusual thing, to catch a
lot of big, big fish. You’d get a lot of
nice fish, three four five pounds,
JD: Gaff hook?
Joe: Yeah, because that was also used to catch a fish that might be falling off the hook.
JD: I never…I didn’t know that…I never saw that. Gaff hook. How was that made? What’d it look like?
Joe: Well, you’d get a large hook, you could buy an alligator hook or 5 or 6 or 8/0, whatever. Hooks about that…
JD: About six inches long…
Joe: Yeah, about four to six inches long and you could, uh, either…we used a lil mop handle, or something, and tack it to the end of that and tie it up with nylon, just let the hook protrude and you knock the beard [barb] down or file the beard, part of it off and use it as a gaff. And it was real handy, you could save a big fish a lot easier with a gaff sometimes than you could with a dipnet, because is was light, easy just to…
Joe: Yeah, I saved about a 40-pound blue cat one time. It done fell off the hook, you could see his tail goin down, and I just reach down far as I could and yanked, and I got him in the tail, pulled him up by the tail. And so they were handy for that, but they…
JD: I don’t recall seeing those things, I never used one.
Joe: They wasn’t too good for, for uh, smaller fish cause what you did for smaller fish was try to gaff and most times just knock him off, and don’t get him, and so the net worked the best for smaller fish. Also, what you might not have on here…they used a lil small type gaff hook…some of the fishermen did, they made with a lil bittty hook on the end to put around the hook to unhook the fish.
JD: OK, that’s what I’ve got right here.
Joe: I never did use em too much, but a lot of the Charenton fishermen used em. I don’t know what you’d call it.
JD: I thought I had something on here like that but I don’t…OK…I’m going to put down “unhooker” on here just for the sake of not knowin better what to call it right now.
Joe: Some of em, when they would get bad, they’d want to use those things. But I thought they were a lil bit dangerous…sling the catfish.
JD: You see, Edward uses one of those
now. He takes a , he’s got about a fourteen inch long piece of
styro…of pvc pipe
Joe: Right into the well [box].
JD: Yeah. Yeah.
Joe: Saves your hands.
JD: Yeah, yeah, he never touches a fish anymore.
Joe: Could be a lil dangerous too. Slinging a catfish [laughs].
JD: It could, but then he also h
Joe: Right. Yeah, it’s also used to…to…transfer fish, and we used them…I used it…one like that quite a bit...for transferring the fish, but to unhook the fish, really I found it slower to me…
JD: You’d have to reach over again to get something else…
Joe: Well, they wasn’t hooked that well, you know, it was easier just to unhook em by hand.
JD: But I’m goin to put it in there anyway because it’s something that you…
Joe: Yeah, it’s a tool.
JD: A fish box is not something that you would have too much of a memory of, I don’t think.??
Joe: Yeah, I remember em, and uh, but uh, we never used em too much.
JD: Well, by the time you came along there was ice.
Joe: Well, some of em…right…some of em used, uh, fishing at night kept their fish…tried to keep their fish alive long as possible, maybe beginning my memory of night fishing maybe fish boxes were used a lil bit, you know? I remember…recall Daddy using a fish box quite a bit…
JD: [breaking in, talking to tape] I want to remember to put night fishing on here as a technique to talk about with all these guys.
Joe: Daddy
used a fish box
JD: As long as they could.
Joe: As long as they could, some of em died. And they just threw em away.
JD: You remember how they were built?
Joe: Uh, at first, they were built with cypress slats , and wood cages. Complete wood cages.
JD: And the cypress would sink, Joe?
Joe: Yeah, it would get water soaked
JD: Plastic?
Joe: No, steel wire, one by two inch…mash, wire.
JD: And that was for what?
Joe: Crabs. To keep crabs alive, they’d put, uh, ten twelve, up to twenty dozen crabs in probably a four or five foot box…four foot wide, maybe four-foot-high cage, or something like that.
JD: Why would you keep em in there? Crabs?
Joe: To keep em alive until you sold em.
JD: How would you sell em? Somebody would come along and buy four or five …
Joe: Right, either sell em to the public…people would come from Franklin to buy crabs, or they might have a buyer that would come around couple times a week. So sometimes slack was taken during the summer months when catfish wasn’t biting by fishing crabs in the Basin, on trotlines.
JD: On those flylines, they call em?
Joe: No, trotlines, they just use the bentlines
JD: Just hook em…hook the hook in the catfish head, or something like that…? And just fish em like you do catfish?
Joe: Yeah, right.
JD: And they would catch crabs like that pretty good?
Joe: Yeah. I recall uh, doing it in my teenage years, and fish all night and come in with about thirty, forty dozen of crabs.
JD: Off your trotlines?
Joe: Umhm.
It was a prosperous lil business for a while, you know,
JD: That’s kind of like what Edward uses now, that one by two trap that’s got a funnel…wire…that’s got a mesh throat, a webbing throat. Is that what you’re talking about?
Joe: Yeah, you seen some like that?
JD: Edward fishes those, they’re short, they’re not high, about that high and about that long and about that wide. And he puts a webbing throat in em.
Joe: Yeah, first they would make wire throats, and then a lil later they made, uh, little later they started knitting some nylon throats. Putting in em. They found the nylon throats were better cause they didn’t get out.
JD: Is that what it is? [why they did it]
Joe: Yeah, it was flatter [the flue was] …and the crab could squeeze thru [to get in]. Wire when it was stiff…and you had to have a big enough opening for a big crab to get thru, and so they could get out easier [also].
JD: Well, listen, I don’t want to wear you out here. You been talking to me steady now for about three hours, and I’m not worn out but I don’t want you to get discouraged, so what I want to offer you is a chance to stop right here and let me come back, and later, maybe in the next two weeks or so…
Joe: We goin to go over this whole thing [the list of items on the interview sheet]?
JD: I would like to hear what you have to say.
Joe: [laughs] we might be ten more hours. Did everyone else talk to you that much?
JD: Yeah, you’re the second, you’re the second person. I talked to Edward and Lena Mae for about the equivalent of three days already, about this, and sometimes y’all say somewhat similar things but you have lot more things you remember that they don’t remember, and they had some things that…
Joe: They, they…it’s just that they probably didn’t have nothing to key it off, you know?
JD: So, would you mind, like, if I was to call you back next week or something like that?
Joe: We could probably finish the material [now] if you want.
JD: It’s up to you. I meet with EJ at 1:00.
Joe: We can go a lil further…
JD: You want to come? You want to come with me to EJ’s? And we can talk together at 1:00? The three of us? I’m thinking y’all could feed off of each other.
Joe: It’s possible. I don’t know, we’ll see if I decide not to do any work today or not.
JD: That’s what I don’t want to do; I don’t want to get in your way.
Joe: Well, you not in my way, uh, we kind of in between, I could do a few lil things, you know what I mean, but…
JD: I brought another tape recorder to follow you around with, if you wanted to go work. I got a small one. But, you want to keep going say tell 12:00?
Joe: Yeah, let’s go a lil further.
JD: We did fish box; you want to do floats now?
Joe: Yeah, the fish boxes were made out of cypress slats, later used wire…, and the purpose behind the fish box was no ice. I can recall one experience where Daddy, Daddy told me about, him and his brother Monug, which is…he’s deceased now…had a box full of fish. They did real good one week and it developed a hole, or a slat came out or whatever, and they lost a whole bunch of fish, so that happened. And another bad thing, they had thieves in the Basin in those days [laughs]. Yeah, it was a problem, uh, maybe Daddy might elaborate, but I heard, you know, you had to watch your box close. You didn’t want anybody stealing your fish. But, uh, they would lose weight in the box also cause they were….
JD: They wouldn’t feed. Well, how long were the fish usually kept in the box?
Joe: I’m not certain, I would assume different periods different times, you know, because maybe the fishboats had different intervals. And some of the old people can tell you more about it. And uh, maybe later on they just kept em for their own purposes until they could get to deliver em to an ice box somewhere. Or they were out camping somewhere, you know, maybe they… I guess different reasons.
Joe: Far as lines are concerned? Uh, well, floats could be used for several things. Floats could be used to adjust the, uh, the distance from the bottom. Some lines…trotlines were used across spans without poles. These floats were put in between, you know, to keep the line a certain distance off the bottom. I never did fish too much that way, but we mostly used em, uh, during times we wanted to elevate the line a certain distance from the bottom and the currents wasn’t real strong to hold the line up. And so, uh, instead of, uh, we’d adjust the bridle somewhat, that would help, but we’d also put a float at each sinker at the bridle when it was on a pole. When you’d fish lines that were stobbed down, and the water would fall out, and you needed to raise, elevate your line, you’d use floats then, to keep em…
JD: Floats all the way at the surface?
Joe: Or you could just use em to balance the uh, sinker. Sinker a lil heavier than the float will float. To keep, you know, a certain…the line up against the weight of the sinker. Adjust your sinker line, you know, a foot, two-foot, three foot, however long you wanted it.
JD: And that would be the distance from the bottom?
Joe: From the bottom.
JD: But floats would also be, course, when you sent bentlines you put floats on the stobs…
Joe: Yeah, when you usin stobs you use a…we’d use milk jugs or…probably most used float for a trotline probly was a milk jug. [laughs]. Any plastic jug, you know? You’d drive your stub and milk jugs floated well in the current. Then you’d go back and grab your milk jug, tie your line to.
JD: What you suppose was used before plastic jugs were out there?
Joe: Probly, uh, cork floats, I would imagine.
JD: Yeah, Agnes also tells me that they used to use cypress knees. They’d put cypress knees and dry em?
Joe: Yeah, now you say it, you see I had forgotten about that. Cypress knees, I remember Lester Couvillier, and uh, when we was fishin lines, he’d use that a lot for his hoop nets.
JD: His hoop nets?
Joe: Yeah, the cypress knees?
JD: Cut and dried cypress knees? They say those things would float real high when they were dry.
Joe: Umhm. You’d tie em to your hoop net tail lines or whatever. When they’d move nets around, so you’d go back [to a marker] to it later if he wanted to fish his net in that spot again. I don’t know about far as line fishing, I guess they used em too, but it was before my time. But jugs, or Styrofoam sometimes would be used or small coke bottle [plastic] you know, to float your line the distance you wanted it off bottom with the distance of the anchor line, sinker line tied up. Lil blocks of Styrofoam. We did that quite a bit below Calumet. You know, closer to the Cut in somewhat deeper water, we’d do that. We’d keep it off bottom.
JD: Keep the crabs off of it?
Joe: Yeah, yeah, in those kind of areas they had
a lot of crabs. Places like [a] dead
lakes, like probly Lake Verret
JD: Headlights. ‘Course that’s something that people used at
night for night fishing, but…when you started off I would imagine everybody was
already using electric bulbs
Joe: Yeah, Daddy could tell you about that. And uh, there may have been a couple varieties of that, he can tell you about.
Flo: I’m pretty sure that Blue’s got one.
JD: Got one of those, those old carbide head lamps?
Flo: She had something that was Daddy’s that they used for froggin and stuff, and uh, she asked if she could have it and I’m pretty sure Blue has it.
JD: I’ll ask her, I’m going to go see her this afternoon. Maybe she’ll let me take a picture of it.
Flo: She either has it, or someone in the family has it. I saw it.
JD: Hand ax.
Joe: Uh, yeah, it was used to uh, chop poles, willow poles, ash poles…
JD: What was it like?
Joe: Uh, we used, uh, either hatchet or small hand ax. either one. Ax was a lil bit more dangerous cause it seemed to glance more than a hatchet. For some reason. So, an ax is more slicker, slimmer. But I used those, both were good for choppin poles. That’s why we used em in the boat.
JD: Did y’all use machetes at all? Big knives…
Joe: I never used it too much. E.J. and Russell probly did. Aunt Ida liked to use a machete, and a cane knife a lot, I remember. I always kept a hatchet or a lil ax and a knife for cutting equipment in a boat. Like I said, I didn’t like to clutter my boat. I liked to keep it as clean as possible. Move around much better. But there was only a certain limit of things you could get by with, that you needed. So, I never used a…I had a machete one time I used a lil bit, but I didn’t like to use it, so…I went back to the ax.
JD: Hooks, huhn?
Joe: Hooks? A necessity [laughs], for line fishin.
JD: What were the hooks that you first used when you first started. Were they…? Before stainless steel so they were still…
Joe: Probly cadmium plated limerick hooks. Buy at Medric Martin’s [a country store that serviced the community at Myette Pt., now a very old place]
JD: He had em?
Joe: Yeah, that’s where everybody got they hooks, you know? Just about, you know? Years ago.
JD: Line too?
Joe: Line, he kept line. All the things…supplies fishermen could use.
JD: He did? Medric did?
Joe: The limerick…I remember the limerick hooks, that’s mostly what he carried. He didn’t have a variety.
JD: Black hooks?
Joe: Daddy or one of the other ones could probly tell you more about it, but I know they were plated. Pretty sure they were cadmium plated, if I remember right. They may have been some that wasn’t plated before then. These processes probly came out as it was needed.
JD: What size hooks did y’all use?
Joe: Uh, I mostly used 2/0s, myself, because the
size of the fish in the Basin. We even
tried, like, 1/0 or 1/X hooks which caught better but didn’t hold the fish as
well. Yeah, 2/0 hook was the all-around
hook. In some cases larger hooks were
used,
JD: They did fish with big hooks, though, huhn? You talking about trotlines or uh, bushlines?
Joe: Trotlines, trotlines and bushlines. But uh, it wasn’t nothing for them to catch two or three 50 to 80 pound catfish, you know, in a day.
JD: Fishing with what for bait?
Joe: Uh,
what they’d use when they… they’d fish with live perch a lot. You underst
JD: Uh, bushlines?
Joe: No, bentlines. Two or three bents out, you know, from the woods area…it was good for goujon. Catch those. I remember a few experiences with Dad when I was small, those big goujons and blue cats pulling on the line, man from way off they’d take [motions a line sinking down into the water from the boatside]. You could feel it, it would take the line that much, you know. One time he caught a 70 or 80 pound blue cat or something like that…I was with him in the boat…a couple big fish anyway, and uh, right at Myette Pt., right at the cypress tree that used to stick the furthest out. Had a line right there, I remember, and we caught a couple…two or three big blue cats. I was small.
JD: How’d he get that in the boat?
Joe: Just dipped it and rolled it in with the net.
JD: The dipnet was big enough to put a fish that size?
Joe: Yeah, they were pretty big….. [laughs] you can notice that through the years the net size shrunk. Because big fish…wasn’t as many. Course I think a lot of that had to do with the situation in the Basin, you know. Conditions changing, and uh, always usually in dead-type water fishing situations you catch larger catfish.
JD: Dead-water type…?
Joe: Yeah, you go to other areas like the lil lakes down in the delta area, you know, and you’ll catch nice catfish, big catfish, like in dead-end locations below Bayou Sale and all that, you catch you know, fish like that.
JD: You do catch big catfish…?
Joe: You
go down in
JD: In dead water areas…Mermentau, yeah. Places without a lot of current?
Joe: Right, I think uh…and certainly they have a lot of big fish in, in the Basin, but you don’t catch em as well. I don’t know why, what’s the thing…cause in the summer months when you put out lines in the deep water in the channel, you know its….when the current’s [slack], you catch larger fish. Obviously the current has something to do with it.
JD: I never could figure that out. It seems like fishing in deeper water…that’s where the big fish seem to be caught, in deeper water. Are they there, I wonder, because the water’s deep, or are they there…or can you only fish there …no…are they there when the water’s clear and there’s not much current, or is it that you can only fish there when the water’s clear and there is no current? Are they there all the time or not?
Joe: I’m not sure. I think during the high waters, the strong currents, the fish come out of the channel…the deeper…come out into the shallows, the colder the wate...sometimes, after… Well specific time in the fall of the year when you don’t have much water, like they all pile up in the deep water. But there’s a point [where] they all come out of there.
JD: So, you think they spread out [in high water]?
Joe: I think they do. Cause then, they move up to the coves, like Raymond’s Cove. We used to go in there in the winter months and catch big catfish. Thirty, forty pound blue cats. Ten- or fifteen-pound catfish, five, ten pound catfish, stuff like that.
JD: On tightlines?
Joe: Uh, tightlines. Even lines a lil bit under the water on poles.
JD: Just dippin down [a weight between two poles]?
Joe: Like that also. Different ways. The bayous below, in the delta area, too, big catfish.
JD: Along the edges in those coves and stuff?
Joe: Well, no, in the bayous. Crosslines. You got a chance…you got a good feeling running those kind of lines cause you got a chance…and I notice also going fish up toward Charenton in the G.A. Cut up yonder? The water gets about 20, 25 foot deep in the G.A. Cut, way up above Buffalo Cove?. It’s just a straight body of water, G.A. Cut, it’s like a channel, and you’ll catch bigger fish in there too, I found. I fished that a lil bit …
JD: Fun to catch em but you can’t sell em.
Joe: Not nowadays. That was the big thing, you know? Catch you a couple a big fis...but now, you avoid em. [laughs].
JD: In one way, in one way like I said, maybe it’s not all bad because what it’s doin is it’s putting the breeding fish back in the lake.
Joe: Yeah, that’s true.
JD: OK, we did hooks.
Joe: You know, another thing I think, maybe, the channels were good for big fish, during their spawning I think the caves and stuff along the edge of the drop offs may have been spawning areas inside these mud caves and stuff. For these catfish…
JD: Isn’t there a bunch of logs and everything, too, that’s in that drop off?
Joe: Oh yeah, along that edge there’s logs and hangs all kind of…
JD: I understand those fish like to breed, spawn inside those logs that have holes in em and stuff…
Joe: I think so. I think that has a lot to do with it.
JD: Of course you hang a big fish on that edge like that, you don’t have much of a chance of keeping him because of he can wrap you around almost anything down there.
Joe: That’s a lot what happens. It’s hard to, to keep a line and run it cause they always hanging in the Basin all over, you know ? I guess not all over, cause a lot of sand’s done covered that up now. But in areas that’s left to fish…
JD: I saw a cross-section of the main channel of the Atchafalaya the other day…some Corps of Engineers thing I was at, they were showing what the typical…what the profile looks like, the cross section of the main channel, and they showed it just like, you know how it is, comin out from the bank with a long slope 10 or 12 feet deep, and then it hits the edge of that slope and it drops, in a short period of time usually, from 10 or 12 to well, 30 or 40 feet along that slope like that. And then a flat bottom across to the other side and then the beginning of that slope up and then another shelf up on the other side. And the thing that was neat about it was it showed like this, like that, like this, and then like that [gesturing]. … this edge right here is what we’re talking about, this thing right here. And they showed this was just packed with logs and trash and junk, and everything. For some reason [all of this is] all embedded in this slope right here. And nothing on the bottom here, it’s clean, on the main channel…the very middle of the channel, clean all across the bottom.
Joe: On the slope [logs] yeah.
JD: But right along this slope, from here to here, for some reason…
Joe: That’s where your lines would…course, your lines would go down a long ways to go across the channel, and then boy all along that slope that’s where it would hang, you know? It was a pain to pick up.
JD: That’s the first time I ever saw that, saw somebody actually say that [that the slope to the bottom of the main channel was filled with logs].
Joe: And I guess that’s how…all the logs and stuff…it must have been just trash left as the Basin filled in, you know, as the logs drifted in, it was dug out …
JD: Maybe so, stuff that was buried …
Joe: Or maybe, as nature made the Basin, or whatever, before hundreds of years, you know, old forests…
JD: Yeah, stuff stickin out that used to be live trees, that’s possible. So it’s not necessarily stuff that came drifting down. OK, so we did hooks, as much as we can. Um, how about…when were you first introduced to jigger poles?
Joe: Uh, it was probably a few years after, you know, I started fishing as a teenager and…mostly used driving poles with the malls and stuff until [we] finally got enough sense to use what the net fishermen used [laughs]. You know, when the currents were strong and the Basin was up? It was so much easier to keep the lines on the bottom, and so…course the older poles were made out of…you go cut a long cypress…lil cypress tree…
JD: Is that what you liked to use, cypress?
Joe: Yeah, or ash pole, or whatever, and put a pipe on the end. And uh, started using that, and that was much easier to keep the lines on the bottom…
JD: How long were they, usually, the poles?
Joe: Oh, about 18 foot, probably about average I would imagine. Course it was some places in the Basin, below Goat Island and stuff, where you could get further out into the channel with a longer pole – about 25 foot. We came out with the aluminum poles and got extensions and stuff like that. Go a lil further out in the deeper water... and closer into the edge of the channel cause it seemed like …obviously those stumps we talking about in the channel were hot, because the fish liked to stay on the edge. And so, uh, first bent out from the channel, you know when you were comin in…not going out into the channel...coming away from the channel, was the best …some of the best fishin, first couple a bents out from the channel.
JD: Course you tried to get as deep as you could.
Joe: Right. During extreme high water conditions you had to keep retreating…. from that situation, cause, it got just unbearable to run usually.
JD: Too tight?
Joe: Most cases, so…but poles, jigger poles
certainly came a lil later,
JD: Yes, you did. The whole thing, the whole thing. You and your daddy. You went shrimpin and your daddy took me over after you went shrimpin. [laughs]
Joe: That’s probably…what year was that?
JD: ’72…I was learning from you just about the season before that big high water came and almost came over the levee.
Joe: That’s what I figured it was. As I recall.
JD: That was 23 years ago. Doesn’t seem like it could have been 23 years
ago. We already
talked about a l
Joe: Uh, I can remember we…we probably used 27 and 30 a lot, number 27 and 30 a lot.
JD: For the main line?
Joe: Yeah. And, uh, course we wanted to get as much as we could for the money...the distance [amount of line on a one pound ball]…but we found out that 36, a lil later, was…as we…as I did it more, uh, larger and larger so to speak. 36 was probly the most, most used, and I used 42. 42 was good for channel lines. And if you get a line bigger than that, it caught more current for the crossings in the channels and stuff, so uh,…
JD: Made it too tight?
Joe: Yeah, 36…42, 36 were most commonly used. You wanted tougher line, use 42, and if you wanted all-around line, use 36. 48 was a lil too big.
JD: OK.
Joe: Then, course, we used line that had been dipped…
JD: Black line?
Joe: Black line. Now there’s…you can buy it in the plastic dip but [I] hardly ever used plastic dip for main line. Some of the guys tried it but I never did like it, I liked my black line. But I liked the plastic dip for stageons.
JD: Did you start with…did you always use white line to tie your stageons and then dip em after? Or did you use black line?
Joe: I always mostly used white…I’ve done on
occasion used black line,
JD: White line?
Joe: White. Tangles, but easier for a fish to get hooked because it was limber, and they thought that, uh, the limber stageon would cause the fish to…to get hooked quicker, you know, it was free-er.
JD: Really? I didn’t know that.
Joe: Momma’s, momma’s brother, Norman Daigle, he fished trotlines years ago before he ever shrimped and stuff like that. And he would tell us we was crazy for dippin our stageons …to his own.
JD: Well, I know there was a lot of talk about the dip might mess up the, the swivel.
Joe: It does, uh, at the beginning. You free em. You know, most of your first run you’ll have quite a few twisted [swivel didn’t turn so the fish could twist the line up and get off]. Most of em will still work. But, I find the green plastic dip…what you do, even the black dip…what I do after they were dry good, I’d take my stageons by the hooks [a bunch together], you know, in front of the hooks, fix it good so you don’t get stuck, and I’d take em and I’d beat em against a tree, or beat the heck out of em and limber em all up.
JD: A bunch of em all at once?
Joe: Yeah. Beat em, and that would limber everything up. And so they’d be pretty free. You’d get one on a fresh new line, first run, you’d get a few that would tangle up [twist] and they’d be set free after that.
JD: Even with the green plastic…?
Joe: Green plastic probly was better than the…than the black dip, for as it was a lil lighter and it did a stiffer job to the…to the line, and it didn’t interfere with the swivel as much, probably. Close to the same, but maybe not as much.
JD: We’ve already talked a lil bit about line preservative. It was…in the old days it was tar.
Joe: And, and, really, for the nylon you didn’t need a preservative. It really was used just as a stiffening agent, instead of a preservative.
JD: And a stiff line’s always good because it doesn’t get hung up, doesn’t get tangled I can imagine what it would be like to try to put out a tub of white line with no stiffener on it with the hooks on it.
Joe: Me either!
JD: Have you ever heard of anybody tryin to do that?
Joe: Yeah. They did it, the guys that fished Lake Fausse Pointe from Charenton did that. But they made, uh, lil boxes. What they did, uh, they had lil square frame of wood, about that wide, would go on the bottom, OK?. Yeah, they’d coil up some line but they’d put a hook in every one of those lil notches around the…
JD: They’d notch all the way around the edge of this box? And the box would be in a tub?
Joe: No,
the box was self contained, it was…had a bottom, build it the first layer, may
have been tacked to the bottom, ok,
JD: So, the line would go in the box?
Joe: Yeah,
JD: Really? It really worked?
Joe: Umhm. Another thing that worked for, uh, the way we
did it, in tubs. Just coil the black
line in tubs, I seen sometimes hooking em on the tub, You know, that works somewhat, but still they
get crossed, they get messed But one
way to do it, if you want to put em out fast is to take the point of the hook
