00:00:05 Speaker 1: Welcome to this country Life. I'm your host, Brent Rieves from coon hunting to trot lining and just general country living. I want you to stay a while as I share my stories and the country skills that will help you beat the system. This Country Life is proudly presented as part of Meat Eaters Podcast Network, bringing you the best outdoor podcast. 00:00:27 Speaker 2: The airways have to offer. 00:00:29 Speaker 1: All right, friends, pull you up a chair or drop that tailgate. I think I got a thing or two the teacher. Brim fishing. Brim Fishing is an absolute hoot, and when you're done fishing, the best part is still ahead. When I'm shooting ducks, even after I've shot a limit, I always want one more group. 00:00:53 Speaker 2: To work in the decoys. 00:00:55 Speaker 1: Fifteen minutes after the gobbler stop flopping. I want to do it all over. 00:01:00 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:01:01 Speaker 1: A successful elk, deer or bear hunt, it's the same. I'm kind of sad it's over. I love it, and eating all those critters is a definite reward. But catching a mess of brim man, while it is as fun as a bush of basket full of puppies, catching brim and eating a mess of those jokers is my absolute favorite I'm gonna tell you how easy it is for you to enjoy this, and it's one of the best ways to spend time with your family and friends. And you get to eat. But first, I'm gonna tell you a story. Located in south central Cleveland County, Arkansas, and four miles north northeast of our house was Crane's Lake, a small ox bowl lake formed eons ago when the planets aligned and the heavens gave birth to the perfect blue gill brim Factory and the Canary Hole. Oh well, it was the perfect spot on the perfect lake. We named it after the small, brightly colored yellow birds that we called canaries. They lived all over that lake during the summer. Later I would learn their real name is prothonotary warbler. Ben Batten would call them Prodenaria citria. Ben's my friend and the assistant director of the Arkansas Game and Fish He's got a master's degree in animal smart ology. He's hander than a pocket on a shirt, and he's always grading my pronunciations of the Latin names for animals. Last week he scored me eight out of ten on the bullfrog. Anyway, these pretty little bright yellow birds with the dark wings spend their summers mostly in the eastern half of the United States, and the winter in Mexico, Cuba, and South America. If I had wings, believe I would too. 00:02:57 Speaker 2: Well. 00:02:57 Speaker 1: That summer in nineteen seventy eight, there seemed like a gillion of them around the edge of the lake, concentrated particularly on the east side. It was within easy paddling distance of the dirt boat ramp where we'd lost our boat, and always the starting point of where we liked to fish. Our plan was to fill our brim basket with supper, armed with nothing more than a john boat, a couple of fly rods, and two buckets of crickets. Spring rains had caused an overflow of water from the Slain River that filled the slews and boughs beyond capacity. Now, when the water goes down, that rich fertile bottom land and the soil and the nutrients found within them always to make the summer lake fishing better by boosting the growth of all the critters and what they fed on within the confines of the lake, especially bluegills. I sat in the back of the boat and watched my dad paddle us across that lake, and the air was slapped full of those yellow birds and the sweet sounds that they were singing. As we fished down the east bank, the bites were few and far between until we reached the area that would be remembered and talked about for the rest of my father's life. There were four or five dead sweet gum trees that stood at the water's edge. The trees have been dead for several years, making some real good fish structure. The snags that were left standing had been the home of countless woodpeckers over the years, and the canaries had taken advantage of it and were nesting in every available hole. They were everywhere and buzzing all around us. Dad dropped his cricket near one of the tree tops and his cork disappeared immediately. He pulled him in, and we were surprised at how big he was. He tied his end of the boat, rebaited and caught another one before I could get my end tied. He pulled in his third fish before I finally got my hook in the water, and no ciner had the slack gone out of my line. I was taking the line back in and catching my own big blue gill. The canaries sang and flew around under our boat, and huge brim continued to bite. With every fish we pulled out of the water, another one would take its place. It was like they were fighting amongst themselves for a chance to eat crickets. Taking them off the hook and dropping them in the brim basket that hung over the side of the boat was repeated until fish would no longer fit in that basket. It was constant, and it didn't last an hour. All the brim we'd caught seemed to have been made from the same mold. They were the biggest dash that he'd ever seen, and it only took fifty five to fill that basket. Putting my thumb on his back, keeping that dorsal fin locked down in my fingers under his belly, I could barely hold one secure enough to take off the hook. That's how big they were. 00:05:43 Speaker 2: Now. 00:05:43 Speaker 1: I don't know how many we could have caught that day, there's no telling, but when number fifty five hit and filled that basket, they were still biting as hard and fast as they had. 00:05:54 Speaker 2: When number one went in there. 00:05:57 Speaker 1: We went home clean fish froze b we wasn't going to eat that night, and had one more good supper, fish, fri tators, fresh onion, and hush pubbish man. I can taste it right now. The next day we went back to the Canary Hole, but it wasn't nearly as good as it was the first day. 00:06:16 Speaker 2: It never is. 00:06:18 Speaker 1: Sequels seldom surpassed, are even equal the original. It's hard to catch lightning in a bottle twice. And even though the original cast of Canary Hole, Brent and Buddy Reeves, had returned for a Canary Hole too, it just wasn't the same. Instead of filling the basket with fifty five, it took fifty six. 00:06:40 Speaker 2: And that's just how that happened. 00:06:46 Speaker 1: Now. I'd run into a few folks through the years that liked to fish, whole bunch of folks, I'd have to say, and we'd get to talking about what we like to fish for. 00:06:56 Speaker 2: And I like to fish for just about anything that swims. 00:06:59 Speaker 1: And that asked me what my favorite was, and I tell them brimfishing some but never had the opportunity to brim fish. And others were somewhat dismissive of it, like it was a waste of their time or beneath them. And I don't know that I'd let those folks borrow a drink of water. How could you look down on the greatest tasting fish that ever swum a swim? Name something that you like to eat, and give me the choice of that or fried brim, and I'm gonna pick brim every time. 00:07:26 Speaker 2: I could eat it every day. 00:07:28 Speaker 1: But before we eat them, let's talk a little more in depth by what we're fishing for. Bluegill, brim, green sunfish also known as rice paddy, slicks, red ear sunfish. That's the government brim. They didn't invent them, but they were preferred in the early stocking efforts around the South and earn that moniker. The last one is the brightly orange colored long eared sunfish known as the punkin seeds. They're all sunfish and in the sun charcoty family of fish. Locally we call them all brim. And our favorites that we target to catch and eat are blue gills and punkin seeds now red ears they grow the biggest, followed by blue gills and then the slicks, and in the punkin seeds. The punkin seeds they are the absolute fiercest eaters. They nearly always hit your bait like they're starving and pull way beyond what you'd think. I've always said that if they weigh a pound, they'd crawl out on the bank and take over the world. Get a little current in the river when you're catching them, and you'll think you're about to set some kind of record, And then you pull up a fish that you could lay in one hand and cover it up with the other. They're fighters, and they taste so good. Now during the early summer here in Arkansas, you'll find them bedding up to lay eggs in groups called brim beds or colonies. The male fish will go to the bottom and dig out a divid about the size of a fat hit pitching wedge. The female will swim by, checking out the new digs and hang around for a little light cording with love figuratively in the air and literally in the water. She'll drop off anywhere from twelve to sixty thousand eggs and vamoose, leaving the house and the young's for Pappy to look after. 00:09:09 Speaker 2: That have for ought to be ashamed. 00:09:12 Speaker 1: The good thing is all his single dad. Next door neighbors are doing the same thing, literally next door. The whole cul de sac is a literal donny brook a fisticuffs. That colony can host dozens of beds, and all the fathers are in town duking it out with anything and everything that tries to get in there and snatch the babies out of the crib. Now, that's when you find them bedding up and the bites are so aggressive. That's what will shake it down at the Canary Hole when me and Dad were stacking fish in that brim basket. Like cord wood, they don't cotton the trespassers and will square up with just about anything until they run it off, eat it, or eat eats them. I know of three ways to find them that are successful. First, let's narrow it down where we're gonna find our potential bed in areas. Go to the shep, usually near the edge of the bank, out to as much as twenty feet deep. My experience has found that anywhere from three to six feet is pretty normal. Now, I'll talk about the two old school methods that we've used over the years. The third one is a cool way to do it, and it will get you on the fish quicker, especially if you're fishing in an unfamiliar area or time is a limiting factor for your fishing trip. It's also more expensive by requiring some equipment that wasn't issued to you at birth. Old school way number one, use your eyes. Just fish along until you find them. If you come upon the spot and see that your cricket supply is going down add or near the same rate your basket is filling up, stop the boat for you have arrived. If you think back a few minutes to that Canary whole story, that's how we did it. We started fishing down the edge of the lake and weren't catching anything until all at once we started loading. The number two is to use your smeller, your probosis, your nose when conditions are optimal, like little to know when you can actually smell and pinpoint a brim bed. It's much harder when there's a breeze, but you'll immediately know that you're in the right area. If the wind's blowing, you'll just have to start drawing the crickets till you find them. The fragrance is aromatic, subtle, and it's not unpleasant at all. Some folks describe it as having the fragrance of a fresh cut watermelon. Now I can't argue against that. Description, but I can't say I never thought to describe it that way. It smells like we fished and to eat fish to me. My dad pointed it out to me several times when I was a kid, and I've never forgotten it. It's one of those things that if you ever get it cataloged in you'll cranium, you'll immediately recognize it, regardless of how long it is between encounters. It is there to stay. The number three is one that I've never done, but I've heard it about it and watch some real interesting videos on YouTube demonstrating the technique. Side image and sonar will give you a real time picture displayed on your depth finder that you can watch as you crew slowly along the bank looking for the neighborhood of brim beds. The bottom will be slick as a whistle, and then all at once you'll see a brim bed that looks like little craters on your screens showing you where they are. You can market it as a GPS point or float close enough to drop off a marker buoy. Then you need to back off a little bit and commence to send it in the crickets to see if any single dads are down there looking to run. Sometimes you can even see the fish gardening the nest. It's pretty cool. Coves and protected areas of lakes and slow moving portions of rivers are good places to start looking for beds. The water temperature needs to be bumping close to seventy degrees for the fish to start bedding. And if you can add a full moon in that mix, I know you better send somebody to the store for the You what you're all about to load the boat? Okay, we know what we're after, We know where and how to find them. What were gonna catch them with? Now, if you listened last week, you heard me say how inexpensive it was to gig frogs. Well, catching the brim is no different. You can cut your own pole, catch your own bait, and fashion your own hooks from wire. Heck, you could even make your own fishing line from thread. You can catch brim from the bank or by waiting. You don't need a boat. You could turn this into an amazingly fun DIY project with the kids this summer, teaching them survival skills that are enjoyable, have them make their own fishing rig, catch one, and then show them how to cook it. They'd love it and it would get them eyeballs off the video screen. Brim are just about everywhere there's water, so accessibility can't be a reason not to go. You just heard me say that you don't need any money to do this, so what's stopping you? If you look hard enough, you can always find a reason not to do something, but brim fishing. 00:14:13 Speaker 2: Come on. 00:14:15 Speaker 1: Here's my setup and I have two one I use most of the time, and that's my fly rod. It's a nine foot five weight made for fly fishing. Ideally, a smaller three or four weight rod is better. They're more limber and you can get a lot of good action playing the fish after he's hooked. My setup has a real spoon with fly line that matches the weight of my rod. If you're building your own rig, just look at the weight listed on your rod and match it with the package of line that it's indicated for. It'll say on there, and believe it or not, it makes a difference. I like floating line, and on the end where my hook goes, I'll tie a leader line that's marked appropriate for my fly line and real and then add a short length to smaller line. Maybe two pound test, and that's called tippet. Maybe I don't know, three feet long, and that's where I'll tie my hook and place my spit shot. Now, for years, I use nothing but a small cork that had my leader threaded through a hole in the middle and held in place with a separate peg inserted in the same hole preventing the cork from moving up and down. There's lots of different styles of corks and bobbers, but they're all doing the same job of maintaining your bait at a constant depth and giving you a visual clue that your daily limit is about to be reduced in number by one more fish. I could do a whole podcast on different types and styles of corks and bobbers, plastic foam, porcupine quills, turkey feathers, There's all kinds of items that folks use. Also, I don't want you fly fishing purists to be left out, so I'll talk about strike indicators too. Well. Guess what, mister fancy pants fly fishermen. The difference between a cork and a strike indicator is the same difference between a fiddle and a island. It's the cat using it. However, I have a new favorite that I was recently introduced to by my bar grease render brother and fly fishing guide, josh Spielmaker. Y'all know josh it looks like he could do stunts for Yukon coornelias with that red beard and handlebar mustache so big it's got its own zip code. But Joshua and I were flyfishing for trout recently and he handed me an in line strike indicator. That's cork for the rest of us, made by the folks at Ouros Flyfishing. That's O r S Flyfishing. These folks are based out of Montana, and as far as I'm concerned, they have created the world's most perfect cork. It's a two piece foam bobber that has a short threaded stud on one side and a threaded hole on the other. The stud is slotted, and as luck would have it, you just lay your line in that slot, put the two halves together and tighten the side with a threaded hole. Keep and you were lying straight, unkinked and held in place with tension. Need to change depths. Just loosen the whole side a bit and slide that unit to where you want it and retighten. I'm convinced, without a shadow of a doubt that if we hadn't already gone to the moon, the Oiro Strike the Indicator design team could get us there. Good job, folks, Now hooks. My dad liked a long shank number eight wire hook, and I do too. We fished around a lot of old tree tops and structure, and if you happened to snag a limb or something solid on the bottom, nine times out of ten you could pull that hook and it was straightened out enough to come loose. Then all you had to do was re bend it and keep on fishing. A stronger hook would dig in and you'd break your line trying to free it up, or require you to cut it off, losing your rigging. And while I was retying my dad to be catching fish and keeping score, you can't be in the game sitting on the bench. That long shank on the hook was easier to get a hold of and remove from a fish then a shorter one too. Now all you need is a small split shot, put it about two or three inches above the hook, and you're ready to get busy giving them brim the sore mouth. My other rig is an ultra light fishing rig with a spinning riel attached to a five foot rod. It's easy to rig and cast accurately, and it's fun to rill and fight those clowns to the boat. Some folks will go with a jig pole. It's up to nine feet. It's just whatever you want. The advantage of being able to cast into a brim bed instead of setting over it, especially if the fish or shallow, will keep your boat further away from where you're fishing, so you're not as likely to spook to fish off. Now, the last method is the tried and true cane pole. It's probably the image that most folks have when brim fishing is mentioned. And I could build a house and a good sized barn from all the cane poles I made and fished with growing up. A fella could use the tube before if that's all he had. For that matter, you don't even need a rod, just chunk of line with a baited hook out amongst them, and well rope their little fannies in when they get the chomping on your bait. It's so easy to catch them. I wonder sometimes how we didn't catch them all, because we sure tried. Now, we got a rod rigged up and we were ready to fish except for one thing. We need bait. You can use artificial or natural. Artificial baits include brim flies, jigs, beetlespins, rooster tails, man. The list just goes on and on. They'll bite anything they think they can get the jaws around, even more so if it's trespassing in their bed during the spawn. Oh yeah, don't forget about gummy bears. My son was six years old and him and my dad were sitting on the pond bank fishing one evening with a few crickets that was left over and eating gummy bears. He didn't take them long to run out of crickets, but Hunter wasn't ready to quit fishing, so he handed as grandpa gummy bear and sit here, Paul put this on the hook. Being a good grandpa. My dad did what Hunter asked, and they caught fish with gummy bears until they were gone. Dad said he didn't know who ate more of them, the brim or the boy. Bait to taste good to the fisherman too, well, that's a bonus. A few years later, that boy and I were fishing on the White River, with a guide. We were floating with the current for a trout, using cooked shrimp for bait that the guide had brought. And after a little bit, the guide gets to grumbling and digging around in the boat looking for that second bag of boill trimp, and he can't find it. I started helping him look under boat seats, in the live well, behind the tackle boxes, everywhere, no luck. Finally I told Hunter look under his seat and see if that shrimp was there. Man, he looked at me like he'd just been sentenced to life in front of a B B gun fire squad. When he stood up, the missing bag of bull trimp was located, and it was empty, but natural bait. That's my favorite growing up here. It was worms, crickets. Some folks would raise the worms in old chest type freezers or a junked out ice box laid on inside. My wife and kids, and probably most of humanity would call that refrigerator. Anyway, You fill it with dirt and meal scraps and cut a double handful of worms loose in there, and they'll do their thing making more bait. Me. 00:21:18 Speaker 2: I prefer crickets. 00:21:20 Speaker 1: They're less messy than worms, and boil those brim will wear them out. Now, we'd stop by the bait shop and get a couple tubes of crickets, that's a hundred crickets each, and. 00:21:28 Speaker 2: Hit the lake of the river. 00:21:30 Speaker 1: There's a million ways to put a cricket on a hook, but there's only one right way. Catch one cricket out of the bucket and looking at his back, job the point of that hook under his shirt collar. That's his thorax, which is right below his head, and run it through his body that's his abdomen, and have the point just barely poking out of his exhaust pipe. You know what that is. It's important that you only bring one cricket out of the bucket at a time because he can get dangerous, dangerous. Check this out. Dad and I were on Clean River one afternoon, after fishing most of the day, soaking crickets till they plumb fell off the hook with very few bites. We were fishing for our supper or we'd already quit. We were running low on bait, and all of a sudden we started smashing the brim. Those big fat rascals, squirters we called them, you know, big blue gills that pee when you pull them up out of the water. You know why they pee a stream when you take a hold of them. 00:22:31 Speaker 2: Well, me neither. 00:22:32 Speaker 1: And I asked my friendly neighborhood master's degree of Animal smart Ology Assistant Director Ben Batten, and even he didn't know. Brim Pin and stone ends two of life's greatest mysteries. Anyway, back to the fishing. It was like they'd flipped a switch. They started biting like crazy. So with only a few crickets each, we had to make every one of them count. If one got out of the bucket while you were grabbing another, you had to catch the loose one and dicking back in the bucket and then baite your hook. Now, my dad was in a cricket and fish catching frenzy when he accidentally grabbed two out of the bucket. He was like a wild man in front of the boat, trying to run the hand steer, troll the motor, get his hook baited and back in the water. I watched him stick that extra cricket he'd caught in the corner of his mouth, holding it gently but firmly like a mule wood eating a cactus, and at the same time bait his hook and make a perfect roll, cast between two cypress trees and immediately catch a fish. It was a moment in time that stood still. When he set the hook, he slowly turned and looked at me one eyebrow raised and I know it all smirk on his face, all the while holding that cricket in the corner of his mouth like Clintie's woodheld a cigar. One tick of the clock later and he was cussing and spitting the cricket out, trying to get his fish in the boat, and wiping blood off his lip where that cricket had bit. 00:23:58 Speaker 2: A hole in it. 00:24:00 Speaker 1: Try this at home, kids, you'll mess around and get a hole in your lip and. 00:24:04 Speaker 2: A boat ram named after you. The only thing left to do is to clean them and cook them. 00:24:15 Speaker 1: Lay one of them fat rascals out on a table, grab yourself a tablespoon and get the scraping against the grain, pulling all those scales off. Your fishing partner can get his pocket knife and start gutting and taking the heads off while you scrape. Be sure you get them all, because nothing looks nastier than a cooked fish with scales left on it. Somebody's gonna say, oh, just flay them, and when they do, I'm gonna say, oh, they ought to be in jail. Now, shalt not deprive brint of the fried brim tail. What you should do is have the pocket knife man making a cut along each side of that dorsal fin and removing it before you cook it. Once you get it out of the hot grease and it gets cool enough to chow down on. That's always when I first bite brim backstrap. 00:25:02 Speaker 2: You can't beat it. 00:25:04 Speaker 1: And we talked about how to cook fish back on the Catching Catfish with Troutlines episode, and I shared our family recipe with the meal that we mix up. Go back and give it a listen if you want to use that one. But there's lots of premade mixes or just about any grocery store to have one, and they're good too. But really all you need is yellow corn meal, hot grease and salt and pepper. Those fish they got a flavor of their own that can't be beat. The main thing is just get out and do it. Grab your young's or your neighbors, some old folks. Get them involved, whether it's catching them or just eating them. Catching and preparing your food is a joy and It's multiplied when you share it, just like sharing these stories. I can't tell y'all how appreciative I am from all the encouraging messages and reviews we've been getting. You folks, just keep sharing it and posting those reviews, and maybe someone that wouldn't have normally across it, we'll see it and they can enjoy it too. You ain't got to be from the country to bee country. This is Brent Reeves signing all y'all be careful