Ep. 485: This Country Life – Bank Poles, Flatheads, and Bradley Smith

00:00:05
Speaker 1: Welcome to This Country Life.

00:00:06
Speaker 2: I’m your host, Brent Reeves from coon hunting to trotlining and just in general country living.

00:00:12
Speaker 1: I want you to stay a while.

00:00:13
Speaker 2: As I share my experiences in life lessons. This Country Life is presented by Case Knives from the Store More Studio on Meat Eaters Podcast Network, bringing you the best outdoor podcast the airways have to offer. All right, friends, grab a chair or drop that tailgate. I’ve got some stories to share, bank poles, flatheads, and Bradley Smith. This week I’m headed to Louisiana with my friend Bradley Smith, a generational outdoorsman who’s keeping the old ways alive. Poop nets, bank poles, and the kind of hard earned knowledge it only comes from time spent on the water. This episode, it was about friendship. It’s about tradition and learning the details of where and why.

00:01:06
Speaker 1: I joined me at the fire. Let’s get started.

00:01:15
Speaker 2: It was an email link from my brother Tim. He called me before I had a chance to look at it and said, did you see that email I sent you? No, Well, look at it and call me back. Good day, and he hung up. I don’t remember what I was in the middle of, but before I could finish whatever it was, He called me back. You watch it yet, Tim, I’m busy, watch it asap. Good day, He hung up again. The love of humanity, What could this video be? I figured it wasn’t some average link to someone’s moronic, self induced buffoonery, the kind we normally send back and forth. So whatever I was working on, I stopped and I checked my email. Well three minutes into the footage from the link he sent me, I could see this was about to cost me some money. I didn’t know how much, but I couldn’t wait to get it unstove. Bradley Smith started filming his outdoor pursuits for YouTube around twenty twenty at the encouragement of family and friends. He’d been at it and posting them for the world to witness for four years. When Tim ran across the content, he sent me, Reeve was going to provide you with a link in the show description to take you right to his channel. But Bradley was fishing in North Louisiana using a type of net that.

00:02:43
Speaker 1: Neither of us were familiar with. The hoopnet.

00:02:47
Speaker 2: Fishing where we grew up wasn’t uncommon by any means. While the numbers have declined over the years. I couldn’t name all the folks who were doing it when I graduated from high school in nineteen eighty four, and that was from a town of barely.

00:03:01
Speaker 1: Seven thousand people.

00:03:03
Speaker 2: That year in Arkansas, there were over thirty eight hundred commercial licenses sold. There are only one hundred and two commercial licenses that are active now in the natural state as of the latest data. It is a disappearing way of life in a lot of places, places where catfish and buffalo markets rule supreme. And that way of life was as common in the Delta and Gulf Coastal Plain where I’m from as farming or work in construction. For some, it was a way of life. For others, it was a way to supplement their income. For me and Tim, it is just another way to experience the outdoors the way our family did. As my daughter Bailey calls it back then. Coincidentally, she also refers to the time period of my birth in the same style, but adds an emphasis to the word way before the back then and her poorly failed at verbial phrase modifying when I was born while throwing shade on me. You see, I can talk cool anyway I have my great grandfather’s net needle. It’s hand carved from a single piece of hickory, a tool used to tie knots and twine and fashion it into a net. I am a show enough rookie at it, but I bet he wasn’t. And I know my good friend Bradley ain’t. I’ve watched him tie them on his channel more than once. As a matter of fact, I learned to tie that net knot by watching him. My great grandfather passed away before I was born, and had it not been for Tim stumbling upon Bradley’s YouTube channel, that skill could have been lost on our generation. I reached out to Bradley the way folks do these days, through his Facebook page, and I carpet bombed his inbox with question after question, all of which he dutifully answered. It is a goal of mine to build and tie my own net with my grandpa’s needle. But that’s a project for another day. But I needed to know where to get those nets that he was using. I needed to know quick fast, and in a hurry. Bradley gave me the info and in a matter of a few weeks, mister Stan Smith down near farm of a Louisiana had made Tim and I three wire nets. It was June of twenty twenty four when we rolled into mister Stan’s yard, just a couple of boys from Arkansas.

00:05:41
Speaker 1: So when we left we were a commercial.

00:05:43
Speaker 2: Fisher, not really, but we had the nets and the licenses.

00:05:49
Speaker 1: The only thing we needed to add.

00:05:51
Speaker 2: Was fish to the nets, and we did literally on the first set we ever made. A few days later, we set our nets out in the areas where we knew catfish to feed small eddies of current that naturally gathered food, and all the good is that catfish liked gnaw on. Then we left and we left him to sit on the bottom of the Arkansas River. After a few sleepless nights, we returned to check our nets and were astonished at how many fish we’d caught on our very first attempt. All three nets were heavy with channel catfish, which is the most abundant and widespread catfish in the Arkansas River. Our first attempt had us hooked pun intended. I sent Bradley pictures in a couple of videos of our hall as soon as we got back home, and he invited us to come and go fishing with him, and we vowed to set up a time. It only took two years for it all to come together. It was early June of this year when we got serious about planning the trip. We’d kept up communicating through texts and social media since I first started harassing him back.

00:07:06
Speaker 1: In late May of twenty twenty four.

00:07:09
Speaker 2: I was also watching Bradley’s weekly Sunday morning drops on his and his wife Daniel’s God’s Country Hunting and Fishing YouTube channel. Danielle is the real star of that show, and Bradley will be the first to tell you, but don’t take my word for it by itself.

00:07:26
Speaker 1: Go watch it.

00:07:28
Speaker 2: There’s a video on there now mineing Bradley’s trip, a kind of behind the scenes look into my trip with him showing Danielle and my friend and cameraman David McDaniels, who was filming some bonus content for this country Life. Bradley had some regular hoop nets already soaking in the tepid waters of the Washington River, where he lives and grew up fishing in Louisiana. Isn’t that far from where I did On on Axe, I ran a line from my dad’s boat ramp on the Selectane river to the one we’d be using that Bradley frequency near his home, and that it was less than sixty eight miles as the crow flies from my spot to his. To draw the similarities even closer. The Saline and Washington Rivers converge in Arkansas north.

00:08:19
Speaker 1: Of the state line.

00:08:22
Speaker 2: We were more or less growing up on the same water, albeit the decades in which we were first introduced to it were a little different. I made the drive down on the first afternoon and met Bradley at his new river camp location. This would be our headquarters for the next two nights of fishing. We were targeting flathead catfish, but not with nets. Our plan was to catch them using bank poles. Now I’ve talked about them before on here, but if you’re I’m not familiar with them, the easiest way to describe it is is taking a fishing pole that you just job one end of it in the bank and tie a hook to the other end, bait it and drop it into water. And there’s obviously more to it than that, but that will put a picture in your mind of what we were doing. Targeting flatheads is way more involved than just chunking bait out in the water.

00:09:24
Speaker 1: Now.

00:09:24
Speaker 2: I’ve talked about catching them before, so I’m not going to go into a lot of detail this time, but I will say they prefer live bait. Bluegill brim is a favorite of theirs. Blue gill brim is a favorite of mine. It is the favorite of mine, Following behind us everything else that swims, walks, or flies, everything, every reading thing. So why would I bait a hook with something that tastes great to catch something that tastes good? That is a question I kept asking myself and stating out loud to Bradley and anyone with an earshot as he ran a ten out mustad circle hook through the tenderloins of Lapomas macrocyris. That’s the scientific name for what I can only imagine would be what an angel tasted like, should I ever have the opportunity to take a bite out of one as it flew by. But after he hooked a baitfish just below the dorsal fen and turned it loose to swim near the bottom of the river, my excitement level started to build as I thought about the possibilities of what we could catch. I’ve watched several videos with Bradley on his channel and using these bank poles. One of them is with a longtime friend of mine and his son from back home. Jeff Chester and his son Dusty are no strangers to catching fish or catching big fish. When I heard they’d started Opolus’s bank Poles, I wasn’t surprise. Also just talked to Dusty and he reported that they just sold out of all the inventory they had and they’re looking to be back in stock this winter, which is in plenty of time to get ready for primetime bank pole fishing next spring.

00:11:18
Speaker 1: Jeff is a national champion boat fisherman and.

00:11:20
Speaker 2: A highly decorated veteran of gathering his vittals from the Good Lord’s Grocery Store makes it easy to see how his son Dusty got so good at Anyway, they have a website where you can order the same poles we were using, and Bradley’s are just like the ones I got it from them a couple of years ago. Reeve was going to put a link in the show description for that too, so be sure to save.

00:11:44
Speaker 1: It and check it out later this year.

00:11:48
Speaker 2: Now, Bradley had fish for about an hour and had an ice chest full of big old grim when we got there Bradley’s an industrial electrician by trade. The folks like him are hard to put in a single category.

00:12:02
Speaker 1: He’s smart, really smart.

00:12:06
Speaker 2: Bradley first saw the light of day in nineteen seventy eight, when the average gallon of gas would cost you sixty five cents. A case many trapper would set you back fifteen dollars, and the number one song for the whole year was Mama’s Don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys by whaling and Willie I could go for another dose of all of that right about now, But that in Farm of the Louisiana, the Smith’s welcomed baby Bradley into the fold, a self described family of folks living on the edge of the law, just doing what they needed to do to survive, just like everyone else.

00:12:45
Speaker 1: Now.

00:12:46
Speaker 2: Bradley is a stickler for abiden by game laws and watched me like a hawk. Not not that I’m prone to intentionally messing up by any means, but being a non resident makes it easier if you’re not paying attention to any any differences there may be between state game laws, regardless of how similar the activity may be. The first evening we badeed up sixteen bank poles from a live well Bradley had built, leaving us twenty four brim to rebait through the night should we happen to catch any fish. Bradley’s live well consisted of an oxygen bottle, a regulator holes in a stone bubbler that works way better than anything I’ve purchased ready made to do the same thing. Bait is the critical component of the operation, and as water temperatures start to rise later in the summer, it gets more difficult to keep them alive. That’s why Bradley had a three hundred dollars bottle of oxygen fixed up to pump air into the roto molded ice chest he converted into a live well. Ideally, catching brim from the same water you’re chasing flatheads is is what you want to do. But everyone I’ve talked to has had a slower year than normal trying to find the brown beds in the river back home, and Bradley said they’ve had to deal with this as well on the washitall so he and his son Dalan fish for less than an hour to both the forty that we were about to use from over on Lake Darbone. Less than twenty miles away. For all you folks that just sat back and gaps that I’d used the name of the lake where Bradley was fishing, get your drawers out of a knot and realize he’s showing video and naming that lake in his content that has literally millions of views. Also, I specifically asked him how much he wanted me to share. That lake is fifteen miles long and three miles wide at its widest point, So look for something else to be mad about. Anyway, Keeping those bait fish alive is priority numero uno, and we couldn’t have done that without the investment of equipment and trial and error experience. Bradley’s been collecting data on all his life. Being the son of a commercial fisherman teaches you more than how to catch fish. You learn the best ways to utilize the resource with as little waste as possible. If you’re wasting the resource, you’re losing money, which defeats the reason you’re out there to begin with.

00:15:18
Speaker 1: But not only that.

00:15:19
Speaker 2: When you’re raised to protect and cherish the things that the Good Lord has given you to provide for your family, it takes on a whole other level of importance. Wasting any of it is not an option. The poles were all baited an hour after dark, and we pulled up on a sandbar and it turned out the lights and visited for a while. The dichotomy between the river I’ve been on a couple of weeks before in northern Saskatchewan in the Washita River in northern Louisiana was a sharp contrast, mostly in insects, and for whatever reason, the mosquitoes were way worse in Canada than they were in Louisiana, and I’d have lost money on that bed regardless. After thirty minutes or so, we decided to go back down the river two miles where we placed the first pole before we worked our way up.

00:16:11
Speaker 1: River checking the rest.

00:16:14
Speaker 2: The excitement of seeing that first pole start to bob up and down as the fish on the other end of the line reacted to the sound of the motor was beyond a measurable The first one was a big flathead and we would repeat that scenario nine more times until we called it a night and climbed into our bucks in Bradley’s camping around two am. After rebating the lines and icing down one hundred and twenty five quarter ice chest full of fish and three big blue cats had been hooked along with the flatheads, but they were all released back into the river. We were up early and paused only long enough to get some coffee made before we went back to the river to check the lines. Four more flatheads and some blue cats retaliate. All the blues were released except for one that had swallowed the hook.

00:17:05
Speaker 1: He got it right back to Arkansas.

00:17:14
Speaker 2: Later that day, after cleaning fish, we ran both hoop nets Bradley had set before I got there. A few catfish were caught and released, but the star of that show for me was the buffalo. I dearly loved buffalo ribs. I’ve talked about them before, but I haven’t conquered the challenge of catching them consistently. Actually, Tim and I have only had one catch a buffalo the on the only time we put our hoop nets out in the river, and we only caught three or four when we did. After that, we concentrated on the smaller wire nets and having fished the hoop net since, but I bought some new tags, renewed my commercial fishing license, and we’re looking forward to making another run at them. When this fire in brimstone weather breaks. Later summer, I learned quite a bit about net fishing and flatheads while watching and talking to Bradley. Little things I should be paying closer attention to, like the subtle changes and the current around the smallest of points along the bank, things that I’ve always overlooked trying to find a bigger one. I thought the difference wasn’t big enough to matter on such a small scale. Then I saw one hook that was placed perfectly in a spot catch multiple fish, while one rot beside it less than a yard away just beyond that zone.

00:18:35
Speaker 1: Didn’t get a bite.

00:18:38
Speaker 2: That’s the attention to details that comes from an analytical way of thinking. I watched Bradley set those hooks, but I didn’t see how he caught those fish until he explained to me why he was setting them where he was. And that’s how you learned the details of where and why are what matter. Until that day, I was looking for a likely spot. By paying attention, I started looking for a specific spot. I can think of a million places right now that I’m going to start setting those bank polls as soon as that it gets below a thousand degrees outside. Something else I learned by watching to talk to Bradley and his wife Danielle.

00:19:21
Speaker 1: The older ways are in good hands.

00:19:25
Speaker 2: There are more of us who rely on the tried and trusted ways of doing things out there than I thought. People enjoying are hunger for the kind of content that they produced, simple, close to the land, wholesome content that demonstrates a hard work and big reward ethic. Providing the majority of.

00:19:45
Speaker 1: The food for your family from nature isn’t easy.

00:19:49
Speaker 2: I can testify to that because most of the meat and all the fish consumed in my home doesn’t come from the grocery store. Preparing and packaging food to be put away properly is as big a part of the process as the hunting and fishing trips are, maybe even more so. What the Smiths are doing is not just entertainment to be enjoyed. They should be commended their efforts in allowing the rest of us to watch and learn from the lifestyle that they live. The older ways may be getting harder to find, but folks like Bradley and Danielle Smith are keeping those traditions alive, and they’re far far from gone. If you enjoy simple, close to the land, honest to goodness, good content. Check out God’s Country Hunting and Fishing on their YouTube channel.

00:20:41
Speaker 1: I think you’ll enjoy it.

00:20:42
Speaker 2: And be sure to wait and watch for some bonus content that’ll drop on from my trip down there. I think you’ll enjoy it. Thank y’all so much for listening until next week. This is Brent Reeves signing off.

00:20:55
Speaker 1: Y’all be careful, I think don