Hooks

Of all the long list of tools that in some way connect a fisherman to his quarry, perhaps the hook is the most basic. It is that connection which creates the link between all those needs that the family has and the thing that can make those needs accessible. The purpose to be carried out dictates certain characteristics of the tool. It must be sharp, and strong, and durable, affordable and available. It goes without saying that if these things did not describe the hook, there would be no fishermen and this story would never have had meaning.

Any tool that has had a long period of use will have developed through time, and the hook has done this. What began 100 years ago as a steel wire coated with paint evolved into a stainless steel implement of permanent durability. But the early hooks were not so permanent. Names like Kirby and Pflueger and Yellow Tag were the brands that had availability. Kirby was valued for its long sharp point and seems to have been the hook chosen by most of the Myette Point line fishermen. The Mustad limerick style followed in the latter half of the 20th century. Yellow Tag seems to be remembered as the “black hook” and was also much used. The black paint was followed by cadmium as a more durable coating. Stainless steel in the early 1980s ended the issue of rust. No matter what the general temporary nature of these early hooks was, they could still be dangerous to people who were with them all the time. Sometimes people would leave lines hanging from limbs and when the water would recede the hooks on those lines would be suspended above the water. Edward Couvillier mentioned a small item from his life this way:

…and I was going through the woods one day, we was cutting timber. I used to get on the logs…floatin…I’d float em out, I’d ride em with a pole. I had a pole, I’d push em out. And a daggone bushline on a limb, hooked me in the ear. And I was goin out with that log [the big log wouldn’t stop and was taking him with it, with the hook caught in his ear] Overboard I went, hoss! But it pulled…it pulled on through.

However, until the advent of stainless steel, durability was equally short for all of the early hooks. In the summer, with the warm water, a hook would last only two to three weeks to a month in the Atchafalaya. The point would dull gradually and would not admit sharpening except for very limited additional use. Neg Sauce “You could sharpen a lil bit with a file or somethin, but it wasn’t like a new hook”.

As bad as that was, the shaft of the hook just below the eye would also rust through where the line wrapped around it. A good fisherman knew when that was about to happen and changed the hooks, a lazy one would see fish drop off of his line or would simply retrieve the little eye with no hook attached. One of the many things that separated hunger from an easier life was this ability to know what to do before the necessity presented itself. This was a little easier in cold weather because wintertime and cold water could extend the life of hooks from weeks to a couple months.

The size of the hooks has also changed dramatically through time. When many of the first generation (born in early 1900s) fished, they used much larger hooks than had been in use at the end of line fishing in the Basin around 2000. One hundred years before, hooks approximately twice the size of the more recent ones predominated. As a matter of fact you almost never hear of the smaller hooks being used back then. Why is that? The people at Myette Point all say that the fish sought were the bigger fish and bigger hooks were needed to hold them. Because it would be very hard to describe these hook sizes in any clear way, simply know that the hooks back in the early 1900s were about twice the size of the more recent ones. Today’s commonly used size is the 2/0, whereas the older ones were 3/0, 4/0 up to 7/0. When he spoke of the difference between his generation and the later Atchafalaya fishermen, Neg Sauce said:

Huh! If they used a hook like we used to use, they’d starve to death out there. They were too big! …the smallest we would buy was 4/0 hook. Thing was that long [gestures 3 inches]!

His son Joe, born in 1949 and representing the third generation of this Myette Point story says:

Uh, I mostly used 2/0s, myself, because the size of the fish in the Basin. We even tried, like, 1/0 or 1/X hooks which caught better but didn’t hold the fish as well. Yeah, 2/0 hook was the all-around hook. In some cases larger hooks were used, and uh, for bigger fish course larger hooks…as people began to catch more the smaller size fish, you know, two-three pounds fish and under…2/0 hooks was the most common kind they used I believe. But before those times uh, in my Dad’s time, they used larger hooks 3/0, 4/0s, cause they fished for uh, big blue cats, you know.

The common thought is that the markets of today don’t want large fish, and small hooks catch a lot of smaller fish and some large ones, but large hooks always catch fewer small fish. Once in a while, though, small hooks can catch big fish. Once while looking at a photograph of a big fish, Russell Daigle told me:

In the bay, fishin at Belle Isle. That’s Paul holdin him, Jim. He couldn’t get it all the way up [off of the ground]. Paul was the tallest one out there, and he still couldn’t get it all the way up. Weighed 93 ½ pounds, it was 93 or 97 ½ pounds, I don’t remember exactly. I should of wrote it on the picture.

Noting that the fish was caught on a small 2/0 hook, he described how he got the big catfish into the boat.

With my gaff. Feel like it weigh 10 pounds when you see something that big! [adrenalin flowing] Never did pull! Never did pull. What he did, he got hooked and he rolled, and the main line tied around one of them big fins. Rolled around one of them big fins! He never did pull.

If he had pulled and fought as expected, the 2/0 hook would have simply straightened out and the fish would have departed as it probably had done many times before this.

Smaller hooks were also needed. The very small ones were used to catch bluegill and other panfish for use as live bait. These live “perch” would catch very large catfish, usually goujons or big blue cats, both of which are apex predators in the Atchafalaya. Russell Daigle told a story from his boyhood in 1940:

Umhm. Lil bitty hook. When I was a kid, that used to be a daily routine. When I was 8, 10 years old, I guess. Uh, the Old Man, every day, me and him and Momma. Get in the boat and go up the bayou. Find a brush pile somewhere and sit there and catch two or three hundred.

The first two generations of people in this story were permanently on the water in houseboats. That meant that all the materials needed for everyday life had to be brought to them, rather than them going to a source. This was the role of the fishboat, discussed at length elsewhere in this book. In some ways, it must have seemed like having The Mall come to your front door, and hooks were one of the things the fishboat sold to the fishermen. When the Myette Point community crossed the levee and came onto land permanently in the 1940s, the era of the fishboat system came to an end and some other source of goods was necessary. It so happened that the nearest general store was across the cane fields about ten miles away at Medric Martin’s store near Oaklawn and Bellview plantation between Grand Lake and Bayou Teche. Ways were found to get there, and Medric’s store was the new source and would be until the roads were built connecting Myette Point to settled communities, and vehicles were more available, allowing more freedom to explore towns like Franklin. Medric said:

I used to have…I used to keep the twine, whatever fishing lines, and the hooks, and everything else. I kept that. When they came in, I sold them a good bit of that. And when they didn’t have any money to put…I’d furnish em something so they could catch some fish. But when they sold the fish they paid me right away.

So, hooks and linefishing as a way of life came and went and now are things of the past. But this was the relationship of hooks to the Myette Point houseboat community for about 100 years. Now, how about the lines that held the hooks? This was the next link between fish and fisherman and will be the next item in this story.

The river is at 3.1 feet now on the Butte La Rose gauge. That's pretty low. Nothing on the Mississippi or the Ohio will change that for the time being.

Rise and Shine, Jim