The Fine Art of Gigging

[Zach Matthews]

Hey guys and gals-

This one is going to take more of an essay form.  Last night I put into King’s River in Madison County, Arkansas, with my father in law, Brad Holt, for a lesson in the fine art of gigging.

We started out with two trucks in good Southern fashion, leaving one at our take-out next to a rent-house which used to be in the family and now has seen seriously better days.  I didn’t dare use the camera so I will have to describe this place just to set the scene.  The clapboard house measured approximately twenty yards on a square side, with a fine peaked roof and chipped, peeling paint that used to be red.  Where once the house had possessed an ordinary front porch, now there are merely the dangling remains of a few bits of support tress and old electrical wire.  The porch had been removed, you see, and the current occupants had seen no need to so much as paint over the missing architecture.  Instead, they had constructed a slab porch roughly the size of a Country and Western dance floor, bigger than the house, supported four to eight feet off the ground by mislaid stacks of cinder blocks.  After all, why pretty up a place you rent only to use as a meth lab?  As the chained animals and children wallowed in the yard, I tried to picture what the scene might look like when I returned at one in the morning, after our takeout.  Fortunately by then I was too tired to take in the scene a second time, so this description will have to suffice.  Apparently there are still areas of Arkansas which fit the old stereotypes.

We returned to the head of our float, four miles upriver, and eased our 12 foot aluminum jonboat into the water.  We were equipped with two paddles, a heavy duty battery, and underwater lantern on an eight foot pole, and a gig.  Now for those of you who aren’t familiar with the ancient art of gigging, let me start by saying that there is a legal season for this practice in Arkansas and we were in it.  We needed only our regular fishing licenses to take part in this ancient pasttime.  

The gig resembles nothing so much as the millenia-old trident.  It is a wooden shaft, square in our case, approximately ten feet long and an inch thick.  On the tip of this shaft is a four inch long forged steel pitchfork with opposing barbs – precisely Triton’s trident.  The entire spearhead is a mere two inches wide.

After putting in at a location known as Marshall’s Ford, we paddled awkwardly (little did I know this was the best the craft would handle all night) for around a mile, stopping at every deep hole to swing our underwater lantern.  Such a sight is this!  I wished at the time I had my camera, though with better hindsight I know that would have been the height of folly.  From my position perched on the rear gunwhale of the jonboat, I could just see Brad crouched over the water, swinging the light at a low angle so that it illuminated the pools like an aquarium and backlit him like a halo.  In his right hand he held the gig balanced like an ancient Amerindian spearfisherman.  These lights are truly amazing underwater.  On a still night with clear flows, you can light an entire pool for twenty or so yards.  Every fish stands out like a beacon, illuminated so clearly you can tell the species from yards away.  This is better than polarized glasses and I can’t wait to try it in a trout stream.  I can’t describe how educational this light could be: every holding lie for every species is laid out in stark relief.  We saw many fish: redhorse, a kind of sucker with a red tail and a humped, curved-over nose that resembles a horse’s and no doubt gave the animal its name, smallmouth and largemouth bass, Kentucky or speckled bass, many kinds of bream and rock bass, common carp… and gar.  Hundreds and hundreds of gar.

The gar is an interesting fish in many ways.  First, it is a voracious predator of smaller fish, preferring gizzard shad when they are available and the juveniles of almost all other species when shad are not present.  Longnose gar are an ancient evolutionary design, related to sturgeon and bowfin, and are actually able to breathe air for long periods of time when dissolved oxygen levels in the water are too low.  (Tarpon share this trait).  American Indians in the southeast used gar scales as arrowheads, although the Osage native to this area of Arkansas had abundant supplies of the harder flint.  Unlike most fish, when a gar dies, it sinks rather than floats.

This was the nature of our trip, you see: to kill as many gar as possible.  If you had seen the river as I did you would understand why this is needed.  Of the approximately 750-1000 fish we saw in that four mile stretch, an easy 75% of them were gar.  These fish were making a spawning run so they were concentrated, but their sheer numbers alone easily explain why we saw less than twenty bass of any kind in that four mile stretch.  These gar, along with some help from otters and herons, had almost wiped the river clean of sportfish.

Gigging is a fairly simple proposition.  The man at the front calls out directions while his oarsman gently eases him into position.  The light is used to blind, stun, and detain the fish, while the gig is positioned behind the fish’s head.  A quick stab and bang, the fish is gigged.  The gigsman swims the fish head first back to the boat and loads him up.

We were stunningly successful.  All told we gigged 122 longnose gar, along with a half dozen redhorse for the frying pan (good to eat but oddly bony), and a couple unfortunate carp which resembled redhorse too closely.  Our largest gar specimens went over twenty pounds, which in longnose gar means a fish over approximately five feet in length.  We probably averaged a three foot, four to six pound gar.  Although we intended to bring the fish out (Brad uses them as fertilizer for the garden), we found the flows too low in the entire lower stretch to float the boat.  In fact, we were forced to quit gigging long before conditions would have required due to the risk of sinking our boat.  Our craft was literally wallowing at the gunnels under the combined weight of ourselves and the approximately six hundred pounds of fish we removed from the river (gigging is limited to rough fish and there is no limit).

This isn’t exactly catch and release fly angling.  In fact, it is about the farthest thing from it.  Only dynamite and firearms could exceed the gig for sheer murderous efficiency.  However, we paid for our bounty by dragging the boat the entire last two miles, eventually reaching our takeout (a near-cliff we had to climb) and leaving the water at 1 AM.  In truth, I can barely type this today due to the soreness of my right hand, which held the gigging spear and the only handle on the rear of the boat.

I will probably never go on such a wanton fish-killing spree again but for this one night it was a thoroughly enjoyable time.  There are still too many gar in that river to allow much recovery of sportfish, but Brad intends to return before the spawn is over and further decimate the population.  

Zach

[brian dunigan]

When I saw the title of your post, I thought you were going to talk about frog gigging.

[mike trump]

That kicks ass!

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