Loading the Boat with HUGE CATFISH | How to catch CATFISH | Commercial Catfishing in Louisiana

welcome to my channel outside the levees i'm jared serenade today i'm going on a commercial catfishing trip with my buddy jimmy hickman and his son cole we'll be checking jimmy's line of hoop nets and loading up catfish to send to the market let's get it started [Music] all right it's back to work commercial fishing this morning i'm heading out with my buddy jimmy hickman and we're going to check hoop nets for catfish now jimmy's been doing this for a while and he follows the catfish into different areas through different seasons today we happen to be in carnarvon which is close to my house which is pretty nice saved me a long drive this morning we did this a few years ago and what he swears was a bad day which was about 300 or so pounds of catfish so today he's looking to really show what he can do all right let's get on the boat and go see jimmy's got his deckhand here mr goal [Music] welcome to louisiana y'all where eight-year-olds launch 30-foot boats with thousands of pounds of ice in them [Music] all right we're at our first net a little bit like christmas morning right now he's been promising a good catch but i've been the black cloud with this camera so we'll see the alligators are here that's for sure they like it what's the size of the nets we're checking today so the nets that we're going to check here today are 48 inch diameter they have either five or six rings on them these are built to hang in the water column so we don't need them to be as long because you have to have a lot of water louisiana in general doesn't have any you don't want to have to find 25 or so feet of water in order to hang your nets so what are you doing here so right now we have a rope in this block right here and we're going to use that block in our engine to actually get our weights up if not i would have to do it by hand which i did for a number of years how many do i believe how many do you believe are in there he's asking me how many catfish i believe are in the net i'm gonna just play a conservative and say 25 25 25 i'mma do it accurately and say 900 pounds okay so you go on pounds i i did like number of fish so that's a hoop net i can hear something is that fish oh that's definitely fish [Applause] all right remember earlier when i said there'd be probably about 25 fish in this net yeah i was wrong well so now uh generally emptying hoop nets means you roll them into the boat and either roll them into a box or you know whatever you have in the boat to hold the catfish i built this boat with a little bit taller sides on it so i personally am not able to get these nets in a boat alone if they don't have as much in them a lot of times we can roll them in but um i really don't know how to get this net in the boat without you know doing some kind of damage either to the webbing or the hoops if i damage it i have to work on it i have to work on it everything takes time so uh the easiest way that i have to get them out is to take this little net right here and uh scoop them out so we can scoop out about a thousand pounds in nine minutes so uh and i don't have to work on the net the next day so that works pretty good for me and uh it's not easy that's the way we do it so now was this an opening did you untie this i didn't see yes okay all right so you have an opening in there yep you have an opening here lace it up that way the catfish based up with this all right okay so how many pounds do we think are in here uh if i had to guesstimate somewhere between 450 and 500 in this one hopefully uh it's our worst net today so we'll see [Music] you know in a moment like this i kind of think like what would bobby boucher react to this like remember when he seen the dirty water in the movie and his reaction was like you couldn't believe it bobby and his mama would be all over this that's a lot of catfish so i fish mainly blue cat or i try to fish mainly blue cats and uh blue cat the best bait to catch them is these oily smelly little fish here the technical term is a menhaden uh the local term is a poge of north they call them a bunker they're actually worth more than the catfish so that's interesting in order to run all of our nets this week which we have about 29 to run we have a little bit over 900 in bait invested in running those so the first uh 1800 pounds of catfish are free [Music] so the anatomy of this net uh you have a guide throat that's this big square one right here they're normally made like that uh then the one behind it you'll notice is made differently uh we call that a catch throat so fish goes in like any other trap net goes in they get through this and um you know they end up in the back of the net so generally they can't get out now after they run out of bait all that catfish is interested in doing is finding a way out of that net so after the net runs out of bait you want to be back on it and running it i usually give them a day or two after i think the net runs out of bait because these blue cats eat all the bait and then they regurgitate the bait when they regurgitate it makes an oily nasty mess on the water and draws way more catfish than the actual bait did so the blue cat will actually help you catch them you know they go in they eat the bait and they spit it up that creates you know uh fish attracting sense about the net and even more of them will go in these nets are usually out of bait here in about two or three days with the water temps as they are now so uh you know these nets aren't tremendously expensive depends on who you buy them from and how they're built but uh they're definitely more expensive than i want to buy every day so we need the weight on the bottom the rope runs up to the top those two crab balls kind of hold the net up a little bit and uh whenever we get it about where we want it based upon the water depth take it out of there so that's the top so this part now is on top but it will be hanging down on the bottom after so they come in from the bottom they do they come in from the bottom so on to the next one 450 or so pounds of catfish that's a good start to me all right so what's our guess on this net uh a little bit more than the last one uh i guess 900 on the last one i was wrong it had a little bit over half of that pounds wise i'm gonna say 650. all right you want 400. gotta remember to get out the way this time we got soaked on the last one so i'm gonna get up here so i have to capture this without getting everything soaked okay 100 yards apart and the first nut had mostly smaller channel this one's got mostly big blues well we got a mixture of blue cat and channel catnip probably what you guessed probably about 650. [Music] many many men have tried to use this dip net all day and uh not too many of them have made it to the end of the day with it it is definitely a workout how many how many pounds you feel like you're filling in that uh probably 20 25 per scoop we used to have a net that was a little bigger but you know about 25 pounds of scoops really all that i want to get out of it yeah you know you have an issue getting them out of the net sometimes they get caught if you're going to get a hole in your net it's going to be in this area right here because the fish coming out of it so you have to watch that whenever you drop it back down [Music] make any money [Music] oh so there's a flounder in this net and you have to realize this is pretty much 100 fresh water so he came all the way up in here got in that net cole said is it a halibut technically he's not wrong when he pulled this one up he realized someone's trotline had gotten tangled up with the net and clearly it messed up the catch based off of you know obviously the last two nets that we pulled up had a lot more fish than this and that's one of those things you run into just by having equipment out on the water overnight a couple days at a time is things happen to the equipment while it sits out there do not throw that flounder away so it's kind of a bummer not a great catch on this one just hope we make up for it on the next view how big a fish you think that is probably 20 22 pounds or something like that like i said last week they were all that big here every single fish in fact they may have all been bigger he came out thankfully you know what he whipped me that bad i'll let him go right in the top of the foot i saw that i mean halfway through to the bottom of my soul it looks like a bone of a catfish is that what your dad just got stabbed with yeah hopefully not quite that long this isn't the easiest job in the world we do enjoy it so that makes it easier a lot of wear and tear on your body a lot of wear and tear on everything else so how many pounds do you have to catch to break even on a day well it depends on how much bait we use and how much ice you know the expense of driving down here stuff like that uh our average trip overall throughout the course of the year is probably about five hundred dollars per trip uh so we have to catch a double that catfish catfish are about a half dollar a pound so basically one thousand pounds of fish is our break-even point so anytime that we you know we don't catch them or we miss them or we don't catch very much more than that it's almost like you better off going to work that day put that in there we'll use our motor to raise our weight of course you got to watch you don't bring the engine up above the net as the nets come to the top you get it out there and start to turn it current ought to bring the net out away from the boat uh we shouldn't have any issues we do catch the rope in a prop about once a day just based upon the wind every other issue you could have wind going opposite of the current everything you can possibly imagine that can go wrong but we'll try to ain't got no so the mesh around this area of the net gets weak based upon the catfish eating on it from the outside or you know a little alligator or something might have grabbed it a snapping turtle or a big catfish grabbed it and broke through it uh so probably anything less than three or four pounds can get out of that hole uh we still probably got two or three hundred in the net that couldn't get out all big fish at least we got that the net either broke even i made a little bit of money just to compensate for you know any issue that you might have so on this one there was a hole in the net and what he's saying is normally he'll put out a few extra anticipating that little hiccups like that are going to happen so this net wasn't a total wash the bigger fish weren't able to get out they weigh more so you get a good price for fish on those anyway would have been nice to have the small ones too to help make up for it hopefully there's no holes in the net we'll get them back you know i didn't know how to build nets for a long time i went and stayed with a guy for a couple days and uh he kind of learned me how to do it so what you have here this is actually an alligator that bit the net and i'll explain to you how we know so you see right here that mesh looks unusual like it's drawn down so the knot has moved so a catfish is not strong enough to move the knot in this mesh so an alligator came by it like it i mean you know either an alligator or a little turtle or whatever and he grabbed it so whenever you're working on a hole and that try and square it off you don't leave any any ends on it or anything so on this one we're going to start right here and uh if i had a needle which i gave my needle to my buddy the other day who needed it what you definitely do not want to do is patch a hole with a different color string i don't know why but they will find that hole and they will bust it in the same place every single time so to me i see the hole and i'm like why they all like they literally all got out anything that was sized right to get out of that hole got out he said they'll find it within one minute of being in there that's how bad they want to survive [Music] holy cow son [Music] everything you know eight to 25 or so pounds that's what we had in them last week all big ones like you said they're about anywhere from 8 to 20 25 pounds most of them look like doing that 20 25 pounds sod and scale you know i feel like hoop netting is kind of a dying art there's not a lot of people doing it these days it's a it's a good way to commercial fish just not something a lot of people do and i think there's a lot of a learning curve on this as well from what i can tell i hope you got to see a little bit about where you catfish sometimes come from these are wild caught not the farm raised that sometimes you'll serve in restaurants if you do get the hunch and you want to try this there's plenty of places to go get hoop nets but i can promise you it's gonna be a while before you figure it out i ran that's for about 11 years before i really understood a lot about fish so we spent the last nine years every day that i'm off i'm running nets it's a wonderful way to spend the day a little more work than most gonna do so this one is our last catfish come out of the last net of the day so normally i give one back to the catfish gods uh that one catfish is not gonna make the world of difference in the amount of money that we make today i'm gonna let him go he swam away nice we've been doing that for a while i used to let him go out of every net the last fish out of every net that got kind of expensive [Music] taking what nature has to offer getting it out there for the people to enjoy so please keep following along we're going to do a few more of these commercial fishing videos go ahead and subscribe right now before you forget subscribe because they're going to be coming out and i don't want y'all to miss them click the notifications bell down below that puts out a little ping to you every time we put out a new video and we'll see you all soon [Music] you

Channel: Outside the Levees

Views: 664,232

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Id: Mp6jYuQvvKE

Length: 19min 17sec (1157 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 16 2021