Happy Birthday...Was up at Pawhuska cemetery on may1 and then made a quick trip to Magoos and you weren't there. Was wondering how you were doing. Glad to hear its good.
Still alive at 65.....!!!!!
- Thread starter garczar
- Start date
Breast cancer stole my soul mate of 32 years. Took a chunk out of me in the so doing. Anyone who can beat that shit has my admiration and respect!!!
Fuck cancer
Ain’t censoring that !!!!!
More like a staple to the gonads but thanks anyway.
lol
i never understood where gar czar came from? we only have garfish in yurop so i can't relate
He explains that somewhere.
used to be in the cigar business. so i'm the 'czar of gars'. hope this clears up things. nothing to do with fish although here in Oklahoma we have MONSTER size gar: https://www.oklahoman.com/story/spo...est-fish-ever-caught-in-oklahoma/60748966007/
I saw a hundred pounder and one hundred twenty pounder both caught on the same trotline by a commercial fisherman. They are a commercial fish in Louisiana and not uncommon. Sounds like a tall tale but I saw one that would dwarf even that 253 pound gar one day when fishing in a backwater of the Mississippi. It was spring, bass were spawning, and that was what we were targeting. So was a gar. It was cruising parallel to the shoreline sucking up big bass like they were minnows. It swam next to a twenty foot log and just under the surface. Even with a little magnification from the water that fish was still huge. It looked as long as the log.
I had an H&H spinner on a fairly heavy rod so thought I might at least fight with the gar awhile. Ran it in front of the gar's nose a few times, it couldn't be bothered. All of the trees and underbrush in the woods the Mississippi had overflowed into had filtered the water so it was crystal clear. I decided I would snag it and at least see it explode. I cast the bait over it's back a handful of times and let it drop down a foot or two on the other side of the gar and jerked. Those huge scales on the gar must have been almost bulletproof. I couldn't even snag it and it ignored my efforts, the string over it's back and the heavy lure hitting it.
I talked to a man that would catch huge catfish out of the Mississippi on rod and reel. He used saltwater surf fishing gear. He said most weekends that he fished he would hook something too big to turn and get a reel stripped once or twice a weekend. That was under the old Mississippi River bridge at Baton Rouge. It was pretty common for the bridge to get hit by barges and a barge had hit the bridge and sank wrapping around a piling. The corp decided they had better send a diver down to take a look, make sure the bridge was unharmed.
The diver went down and came up just a little later. As he walked out of the river he was shedding gear. He got in his pick-up and was fixing to drive off leaving his gear behind when somebody asked him what was wrong. He said he had dived all over the world with huge sharks and orcas and such but he could see them. By the time you were sixty feet down in the big muddy you are in black water. He said he bumped into a catfish nose to nose big enough to swallow him neat!
I suspect there are some huge monsters of many varieties in the Mississippi. Not far from it a friend found a dead alligator on the bank that he taped at 17'-4". Would have easily been a state record, maybe world record. Just a couple miles from where he found it my brother and I saw one longer than our bass boat that was fifteen feet and change. That had been a couple months before the one was found on the bank, probably the same one. I knew of one killed reported to have measured over sixteen feet and Big Jim measured close to fifteen feet five years or so before he had to be shot for getting too friendly with people. Once they get over about nine feet long they consider humans prey. Fortunately they don't know how slow we are!
Hu
327 is the official record for a 'gator gar.
Let's hope they never find out!!
A friend of mine made lampshades from the scales of those big gar. Sell em at county fairs and such. Beautiful things. Had an iridescent opaque color to the scales similar to mother of pearl. Cast a colorful glow.
We catch em using nylon rope melted at each end cast like a topwater jerk bait. The strands of nylon or polyester, whatever it was, get caught in their teeth and they can't spit it out. Anyone who's fished for gar will tell you they're hard to get a good hookset in that bony mouth and they'll spit a bait right back at you at shoreline.
We've got smaller breeds here too. Don't feel left out.
Happy belated Birthday Gar!
Let's hope they never find out!!
A friend of mine made lampshades from the scales of those big gar. Sell em at county fairs and such. Beautiful things. Had an iridescent opaque color to the scales similar to mother of pearl. Cast a colorful glow.
We catch em using nylon rope melted at each end cast like a topwater jerk bait. The strands of nylon or polyester, whatever it was, get caught in their teeth and they can't spit it out. Anyone who's fished for gar will tell you they're hard to get a good hookset in that bony mouth and they'll spit a bait right back at you at shoreline.
I heard of the trick with nylon rope. They recommended leaving the tail end fluffy for more appeal. Never got around to trying it although I always meant to. Garfish balls made from the meat after baking or boiling it are right tasty!
I came up on a couple men at the boat launch rigging some jugs. They were pushing a wire through a twelve to sixteen inch croaker, then a heavy string going to a two or three liter drink bottle. They said they turned a couple dozen of them loose after dark fishing for gar. They had to wait until after a hard cold snap put the alligators in for the winter although I suspect they still hooked some smaller gar. The big boys seem more inclined to stay put but the five or six feet or smaller gators seem to sleep lighter and a week or two of warm weather may see a few out. In the spring the smaller ones come out a few weeks before the big boys. Around the swamp the robins migrate down here so they are here all winter, no sign of spring. I call the bull gators over eight feet my Louisiana robins. When they come out in South Louisiana spring has sprung!
Hu
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we fished pike with jugs like that when i was a kid. it was remarkable how they could drag 5 liter jugs to another part of the lake. can't say i like eating pike, but my friend's family ate them. acquired taste i guess
Gar is a rough fish of course. Not something I would favor fried or baked but just fine as the base ingredient of basically a seafood ball, as much spices and extras as the base itself. The fish needs some taste to not get lost in the mix. Choupique which is the Cajun name for bowfin is another even worse rough fish. I got caught eating one fried where manners dictated carrying on. It had the consistency of a ball of cotton and I am pretty sure the cotton would taste better! A friend's down on the bayou Cajun aunt taught him a recipe for cooking them and after that they were all he would fish for! Might finish with redfish. A delicacy blackened but just a red drum so another rough fish. More bone than meat until they got large, required marinating and careful breading to be fried under twenty inches or so, best forgotten bigger than that. They attack baits and fight like bass though so fun to catch. I caught trout and flounder to eat and redfish for fun when fishing the brackish marsh along the Louisiana coast line.
My cousin invited me to help him run a trotline one night. Good fun so why not. Another cousin found an eight foot long aluminum bateau in the narrows between the Mississippi and Old River, a lake left behind when the Mississippi changed course. Water was high so it was all one body of water again and we were fishing with large crawfish We stretched the line which was fun in itself. Had to paddle like hell while the other person tied off the line, we were like the bobber on a fishing line in that little boat! It seemed almost as wide as it was long. We started baiting the line and hadn't put a dozen crawfish on before one person was having to hold the line while the other baited, the line was jerking hard!
Dreams of big catfish filled our head and we had to take a quick look. Choupiques, big choupiques, ten or fifteen pound ones. It wasn't dark yet so maybe the choupiques would slow down and the catfish pick up later. We ran the line a couple more times late night and once in the morning. We caught one two to three pound channel catfish. A pick-up truck bed full of choupique which we left in front of my uncle's country store for those that liked them. A huge community feast for those that did. That is what I always did with fish and game I didn't want.
Apologies for taking over with fishing stories Czar, got to go with this bream story. The bream were moving in to spawn in the spring, old river again which was in front of my grandmother's house I was living in and my greatuncle's store/home. There weren't but a scattered few small ones within cane pole range of the shore but casting out further I was catching some small but mostly half pound plus bream.
I, and all of the other fishermen and women were fishing with hand dug earthworms. I soon ran out of worms and was swapping bream for bait. I culled the smallest but soon there weren't any small bream to cull. I had about an hour and a half to fish before my grandmother got home and I wasn't supposed to be on the lake without permission so I was making hay while the sun shined! When it came time to go home I had a stringer of big bream, over my hundred limit. They stuck straight out from the stringer and were a solid mass probably five feet long. No such thing as carrying them and I had a hard time dragging them over the levee and to my uncle's store. A big wooden box out front and I started unstringing bream. I had no intention of cleaning all of those bream!
My cousin came along and I asked if he wanted some. "I only eat bass" he sounded kind of haughty about it. He wandered over anyway. One look at the size of those bream and he decided he ate bream! Fine, I didn't care who ate them. He started cleaning the bream when he got a phone call, his grandmother, the other side of his family no kin to me, had passed. I couldn't help cleaning the bream in a family emergency so I cleaned every damned one of them and didn't even get a taste of one! Later I learned to filet the bream but then I was gutting, heading and hand scaling them. I hated scaling fish! Bream are one of my favorite fish to eat though. Taste like fish but not too strong.
When my grandmother found out the big bream were running, I was authorized to fish and bring a mess home. Plenty of people fishing so nobody was going to drown.
Living with my grandmother was a bit of heaven. The huge lake and a line of barrow pits across the levee, twenty acres of woods behind the house I was allowed to hunt and play in year around and another forty-sixty thousand acres I was supposed to stay out of. Grown men, even groups of grown men, had gotten lost in that forest and never been seen again! Panthers, bears, and wolves were still in there besides just getting lost and never finding your way out. I never went in too deeply but since the twenty acres joined on to the deep woods nobody knew just how deeply I did go with my trusty .22!
Hu
They are a bitch to clean, but the meat is white and flaky, like Cod.
Getting through those scales or trying to filet one is work. I just like the sport. They fight hard. Long body, wide tail. Oh yeah!! Burnt out more than one reel on em.
I started melting the end closed bcuz the bigger gar were able to slide off the fluffy end. It pulled out. Melting that closed kept it locked in their jaws. Couldn't pull free.
Bowfin, Grennel, ol green mouth, awful eating fish. Idk how you'd get past the smell of one cooking, let alone eat it.
Big bream are treat. We catch those and the big green perch when nothing else will hit in the heat. I put em right up there w crappie, walleye being #1, crappie being 2nd on the list. Google eye and bream 3rd.
Sorry for the hijack Gar!! Just couldn't help myself when it comes to fish.
Hu…..I’ve always felt there is a book in you…..put me on the list.
I've told him that several times. Perhaps if some of the other members were to 2nd that motion, we could get Hu to consider it.
He can co write w Garczar!!!
Everybody would read that!!
Paul, I have always heard everybody has one book in them; and it is usually a good place for it to stay! I have written a few chapters a handful of times, that is about as far as I can get. I have always felt like you could write a good book. You are smarter than the average bear and you have lived a life.
Some can just toss off a book. If I am to put together one worth reading it is going to have to be outlined and built block by block, by no means a light undertaking. As it happens, I listened to Waylon Jennings talking about writing "Waylon" earlier today. He had a ghost writer and it still took him three years to get it done!
Hu
After the FBI, DEA and NSA got done redacting any book i wrote would be pretty thin.I've told him that several times. Perhaps if some of the other members were to 2nd that motion, we could get Hu to consider it.
He can co write w Garczar!!!
Everybody would read that!!