Although I think cheese is by far the best, some people have good luck with cotton seed meal cake, rotten cabbage, lettuce, bananas and other produce.” “For bait, I recommend spoiled cheese that I purchase at Ron Smitherman’s Bait Shop in Clanton. Hendrick says it is a fallacy that you can’t put them on sandy bottoms, but you do have to check them more often to make sure they don’t sand in. I like to fish my traps in water that is 10 to 12 feet deep.” “I construct a simple three-prong grab hook that I can throw out and draw across to snag the line so I can retrieve and pull the trap up to the boat. “I like to use an old head from a V8 motor for an anchor and about 50 feet of green nylon cord attached to the trap,” he says. Hendrick says when he sells someone a fish trap he likes to give them a lesson on where to place them and how to use them before they leave. Those who know him well know that he is quite a perfectionist especially when it comes to painting signs or building fish traps. Hendrick is a well-known sign painter in Crenshaw, Covington and Coffee counties area. I use galvanized staples, as I found they are better than nails or screws.” I actually like red oak better because it is tougher wood and retains the bait odor longer. “I build all of my traps with either red oak or white oak strips. “These are what the catfish go in to get into the box but the limber slats close up and prevent the fish from getting out,” he says. I soon realized that this box was too big and bulky and I could catch just as many fish in a smaller scaled down version.”Īfter much experimenting, Hendrick settled on a box 14 inches square and 4 feet long with a built-in bait box with double throats or muzzles. The first box I built was the same dimensions as the one tangled in mine. I had my measuring tape on my belt and so I measured the dimensions and decided I would build one of my own. “His trap was full of fish and I had nothing in mine. “One day I was checking my wire fish basket and when I pulled one up, someone had thrown a wooden slat box trap over my basket and they had become entangled,” says Hendrick. S everal years ago, Eugene Hendrick decided he would try his hand at fishing with wire fish baskets. When this Brantley, Alabama native wants a fish fry, he grabs one of his fish traps and heads to the river. Eugene Hendrick displays some of the catfish traps he’s built.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |