Happy, Happy, Happy (14 page)

Pa helped me with projects around the place, such as building a boat launch and dock, house repairs, and a multitude of tasks that kept the place going. Both families were bent on making our lives successful. It was Granny who suggested a drop box at
the boat launch we built, where customers using it could deposit payment of a small fee. The honor system is still in place—the suggested fee is two dollars—and the boat launch is used daily by those launching their boats onto Cypress Creek and the Ouachita River.

Once I began fishing full-time, it didn’t take long for the business to become successful. Before too long, I was making more money than I did as a teacher. The fishing was profitable from the beginning and grew as I made enough money to buy more nets and trotlines. I caught about sixty thousand pounds of fish—thirty tons—the first year, and that’s about what we averaged annually.

Before too long, I was making more money fishing than I did as a teacher.

We caught a cascade of catfish, buffalo, gaspergou (freshwater drum), alligator gar, and a number of white perch. The catfish were worth about seventy cents a pound, the buffalo thirty cents, and the market always determined the gar’s price. More gar are caught and sold in Louisiana than any other freshwater fish. Fish brings a higher price during cold weather; in warm weather almost everybody in Louisiana fishes, and the surplus catch goes into the commercial market, driving prices down.

The white perch, or crappie, are game fish and cannot be sold. They are lagniappe and usually ended up on our dinner
table. The man we sold our fish to at the market ate only the poorer parts of the fish, the parts he couldn’t sell. But that wasn’t my style. I fed my family the best of my catch and sent the rest to market. My selectivity continues today, as I carefully pick the best of the ducks killed on a hunt, usually teal or wood ducks. If I’m doing all the work, why should someone else enjoy the pick of the litter?

I decided early on that if my boys were going to eat the fish, they were going to help catch them, too. Setting out the nets wasn’t too much of a task for me, but getting the fish from my boat, up the hill, and into my truck took some serious work. When it rained, it was even more arduous because the hillside was slick and muddy. After one catch, I was slipping and sliding all over the hill, struggling to carry a heavy tub to my truck.

When I got to the house, the boys were all there. Kay was getting ready to take the fish to town and sell them. We did this about two or three times a week; it was the only money we made. The boys usually went with her and always looked forward to it. I went in the house and said to them, “Y’all come over here and sit down for a few minutes. I want to explain something to you.

“Y’all are fixing to go to the store,” I told them. “There will be bubble gum and shopping—y’all are going to have a big ol’ time. I want you to realize that all that money you’re going to spend is coming off those fish out there. You understand that?”

“Yes, sir,” they answered quietly. They knew this talk was serious.

“What I can’t figure out is, if you’re getting all that money from the fish, why doesn’t someone come down there when that boat pulls up and grab the other side of that tub to help me up the hill? That’s what I can’t figure out.”

They all sat there staring at me, like I was speaking Spanish.

“Hey, just a thought,” I said. “I can get ’em up the hill. But it would be a lot easier with y’all helping me.”

From that day forward, whenever I pulled in with the boat, I’d see the whole little group coming down the hill. They’d have their tubs and be ready to help. It was a lesson that stayed with them. All four of my boys came to realize that the work was a family enterprise, and they needed to pitch in. In fact, the lesson took so well that each of them still works for Duck Commander, as do several other relatives and extended family. If you want a job with our outfit, it helps if you’re blood kin.

I also assigned my boys one of the worst jobs that came with commercial fishing: assembling the bait. I would buy a fifty-five-gallon drum of rotten cheese and let it sit until it was covered in maggots. It needed to smell really bad and be as smelly and nasty as possible to draw the catfish to my nets. When the rotten cheese was ready, I’d get my boys up at daylight. They’d reach down into the drum and grab a handful of the mess and stuff it
into socks. I know they were gagging the entire time—and I’m sure they lost their breakfast more than a few times—but it was a job that had to be done.

Later, when the boys were in high school, I decided I wanted to get into crawfishing. The problem with crawfish is you can never have enough bait. And crawfish are attracted to bait that’s even nastier than what a catfish likes to eat. A crawfish will literally eat anything—as long as it’s dead and smells really bad. So when Kay took the boys to town to sell the fish, I always told Alan, Jase, Willie, and Jep to be on the lookout for roadkill. If they spotted a dead possum or raccoon in the road, they’d pick it up and throw it into the back of the truck. They’d bring the dead animals home, chop them up, and then throw them into the crawfish nets.

Of course, I never wanted to waste anything. We had an old deep-freezer in my shop and they threw the excess roadkill in there. By the end of every summer, the freezer was filled with dead cats, dogs, deer, coons, opossums, ducks, and anything else they could find in the road. The freezer smelled so bad it would have been quarantined if health officials ever caught wind of it! My boys also hunted for snakes and put them in the freezer. They baited snake traps in the water with little perch and then pulled the traps in at night. They’d blast the snakes with shotguns, which I’m sure was a lot of fun for them.

The biggest single catch I ever made was on an early morning one June. It came after we decided to launch Duck Commander as a business, so I had recently given up commercial fishing. I was only fishing for fun and to put some fish on the family table. I was using a six-foot hoop net about twenty feet long, with two-inch mesh. My son Jase was fishing with me and I told him, “I’m going to put this old big net out and catch us some Ops.”

By the end of every summer, the freezer was filled with dead cats, dogs, deer, coons, opossums, ducks, and anything else they could find in the road.

“Ops” is short for Opelousas, which are flathead catfish. I think they’re the best eating species of all the freshwater commercial fish in Louisiana. Also called the motley, yellow cat, or shovelhead, the flathead catfish is aggressively predacious and known for eating everything in sight. Some of them weigh as much as 120 pounds.

I set the net out on the other side of the river and up from the boat a little bit. I dropped it in about eighteen feet of water with a little current, but not much, just enough to hold the net open. I came back after about three days. I reached and grabbed the rope and started up with the net. I thought, “That thing must be hung!” But it kept coming; it was heavy, heavy!

I kept coming with that heavy net. When I had about three hoops gathered up, I could feel something moving the whole net
ever so slightly. When I got the net up high enough to where I could see down into it a little bit, all I could see were blue cats! One look, and I realized there was way more fish than I could get into my boat! It was just too much weight! There were too many fish to even move them!

So I wound up with about two-thirds of my net in the boat and a third of it in the water—literally crammed with blue catfish. After tying off the hoops that I had pulled out of the water, the rest of the net formed a bag that hung straight down from the boat. It was some weight! But the fish were quietly swimming inside the net—I had ’em!

Now I was free floating. I cranked up my motor and let it idle, but I was moving forward—those swimming fish were moving my boat. I came across the river at an angle, going real slow. I made it to the mouth of Cypress Creek and almost home with a catch of biblical proportions. I headed for the bank, where the water depth begins to decrease rapidly. The net started dragging the bottom. When I got close to the bank, I jumped out of the boat and into the water, which was about four or five feet deep. I pulled the boat closer to the bank. The fish came alive in the shallow water and were making a rumble!

I went to my truck, locked its hubs to get it into four-wheel drive, and backed into the water as close as I could get to the boat and the fish. I climbed into the boat and, with a large dip net,
started scooping up the thrashing fish and putting them into my washtubs. After throwing about fifty to sixty pounds into a tub, I transferred the fish to my truck. The blue cats weighed from three to twenty pounds each. From the time I started pulling up the net, I toiled with the rascals for more than two hours.

I mean, it was work! I was sweatin’! I filled the truck bed until it was mounded up with fish. Then I drove the truck out of the water onto solid ground. Both Jase and Kay, when they came out and saw those fish, were stunned. Jase said he had never seen so many fish in one pile. When they took them to town to sell, they tipped the scales at one thousand pounds! Kay and Jase came back with three hundred dollars, and they sold them cheap—thirty cents a pound.

That’s the most fish I ever caught in one net. Another time I caught eighteen Opelousas cats in one net weighing from about fifteen to fifty pounds apiece. They were big, but it wasn’t nearly as many fish as I’d caught the time before.

The fishing business became somewhat lucrative—we were at least making enough money to pay the mortgage and utilities and take care of the rest of our needs—but I still didn’t believe it was my, ahem, calling in life. I kept going back to a memorable hunting trip I’d made with Al Bolen a few years earlier outside of Junction City, Arkansas. A large flock of mallard ducks had flown high above us, and I hit them with a long, hailing call when they
were on their way out of sight. I turned the flock, and it began to circle, dipping lower as the ducks approached our decoys and blind. When the ducks began to sail wide, I hit them again with a short
chop-chop
that turned them back toward our blind, where we waited. The flock dropped into the water directly in front of us, in perfect gun range.