What’s the Hardest Part of Catfish Noodling? Nailing the Instagram Shot.
Waist-deep in a cypress swamp is not an ideal place for second-guessing. Nor, at least for most sober people, is it the place to dangle one’s arm into murky holes and hope something large inside takes the flesh for bait. On a muggy May Thursday, I have the pleasure of doing both.
An arm’s length away, Vinny “Bu” Wozniak flashes a cheeky grin, then coaches me through the art of noodling, also known as hillbilly handfishing, logging, or hogging. All of these terms refer to catching catfish by hand, a tradition once reserved for rural outlaws and now finding broader appeal in the digital age. Wozniak tells me to sink down, feel for the nest’s opening, then paw around the sides of the hole. My palm must face down toward the lake bed, he says, and my fingers must stay tightly clenched—critical if I want to go home with all ten. Then, I must simply hold my breath and wait for the bite.
Beside Wozniak is Remmy Bearden, an affable 25-year-old who moments earlier had dropped into a squat in the water, grimacing like he’d been hit in the crotch. Bearden had shimmied his leg through the entrance of a catfish nest when something bit his Achilles. The pain was a good sign: likely a male blue catfish guarding his brood, ornery after days without food.
“You don’t catch a blue, a blue catches you,” Bearden said with a grin. “This one is scary.”
I’m giddy in a way that only comes from fear of the unknown. Despite all the Internet videos I’d seen of noodling—many of them children and bikini-clad women laughing as they wrestled the prehistoric fish to the surface—waiting to get bit for the first time is maddening.
But I’m too far into this journey, which began with a four-hour drive to the northwest corner of Louisiana, to turn back now. So I plunge into the swamp, using Bearden’s foot planted near the nest’s entrance as my only guide. After a few moments with my right arm dangling, I feel a smooth surface, then a sudden jolt. The blue catfish, Ictalurus furcatus, is an omnivorous predator that will eat just about anything it catches, and its needlelike teeth sink into my hand. The fish thrashes, shaking its jaw like a pit bull in a game of tug-of-war. I try to drag it out of its hole, but just as suddenly, the blue catfish lets go and recedes into the dark.
After coming up for air I pull off my mechanic’s glove and glance at my skin, where a thin layer of blood is slowly oozing. “You ain’t fishing until you’re bleeding” is an unofficial motto in the noodling world, and the fishing has finally begun. Wozniak and Bearden pump me up like ringside boxing coaches, and I plunge below for more.
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