Last week when the winds were predicted to gust into the 20 mph range, I planned to limit my fishing to a protected part of the Cumberland River below Old Hickory Dam. As it turned out, I made a delightful choice. The lock wall blocked most of the wind but the best part was the catching - I loaded the boat!
My wife wanted catfish for supper and I wanted bluegill, so the afternoon before fishing I decided I’d use live worms for bait. I can’t remember the last time I’d strung a worm on a hook so this was going to be out of the ordinary for one who usually relies on jigs.
With shovel in hand I walked the yard, gardens and compost piles turning over dirt. With the ample rains we’ve had recently I thought there would be plenty of wiggling worms near the surface. Not so. I was pretty discouraged after about five holes.
Cathy was helping me dig in one of her flower gardens; she’s more patient than I am and was having more success. Then I had an “ah ha” moment. I remembered a bottle of Crawler Caller among the potions I’ve collected over the years. This was the time to see if it worked.
The bottle was many years old and I wasn’t sure if it was still potent but it smelled strongly of citrus – it opened my sinuses. I mixed the 1/2-ounce called for to five gallons of water and poured it over the prescribed eight-foot by eight-foot area. The directions say to allow three minutes for the worms to crawl to the surface.
Cathy and I watched to ground for signs of life. After about a minute and a half, being the impatient type, I went to make up another batch with a double dose. If some’s good then….
When I returned she had picked up several fat nightcrawlers. I went to another area to spread the Crawler Caller. It’s obvious that for the juice to sink in the ground, it needs to be applied to a flat area, which is fairly rare on our property. Duh, I figured that out by the final fourth batch. I’m slow but not too stupid.
Indeed, the Crawler Caller worked even on slanted ground. The last batch I used on a compost bed. I raked the ground fairly level in a three by five-foot area, built up a ring of dirt to keep the potion from running down hill and poured out the elixir. This site was a good choice, even though I had had dug there with the shovel first and found a few small worms, this time a lot of nightcrawlers surfaced.
I ended up with a container of about a hundred worms of various sizes –just right for big hooks for catfish and small ones for bluegill. (I don’t have much Crawler Caller left and I couldn’t find it online. I guess they went out of business.)
I’ve heard of a number of ways to collect worms from the surface – metal rods hooked to a battery (sounds painful), sawing on a stob driven into the ground, watering the lawn at dusk and picking up surfacing worms after dark. Do you have any techniques that work? I’d like to include some of those techniques in a future column. Type at me at vsummerlin@comcast.net.
The next morning, I motored my Old Man Boat to the right corner of the dam and lock wall to begin drift fishing. I had a worm under a float and one dragging the bottom. It took about 15 minutes to realize that the best catching was on the bottom from about seven to 13 feet deep. Drifting and dragging worms resulted in doubles of bluegill several times.
Two generators were running on the far left of the dam near the Hendersonville side and I was covering a lot of the quiet water across the river looking for catfish after I had enough bluegill. I found the cats in deeper water about half way down the lock wall and out about 30 feet. After about two hours I had supper – but did I quit fishing – no, sir! I was in the catching mode. But I did start culling and releasing fish.
I moved to fish the seam where the swift current eddied with the quiet water. To my surprise I found the largest bluegill there. These were the big bull bream that are easy to find in the shallows of the lakes now. Most of the bream I caught were 13 feet deep, whether near the seam or in the quiet water.
The best cat catching came when the generator to the far right came on. A boat of anglers had been anchored at that corner casting behind the boils from the time I arrived until the warning siren blew at three o’clock to let us know a generator was kicking in. They moved a safe distance away until the fresh set of boils were established and then they re-anchored near them. When I noticed they were pulling in catfish more often than before, I mosied nearer them and set up shop a respectful distance (I think a respectful distance is far enough away that they can’t hit you with the two ounces of lead they were slinging).
I dropped anchors fore and aft to keep me from waggling back and forth in the seam and put on my best and biggest worms. Lo and behold, it was magic. Catfish seemed to swarm around my worms gobbling them up like candy. Man, it was nice!
I only kept enough for supper (allowing for extra leftovers) and enough for a neighbor (allowing for extra leftovers).
I’ll be using more worms now that I see how effective they are. With summer coming when the water gets too hot for store-bought minnows to survive, worms will save the day. Happy Hooking!
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