Outdoors with Larry Dablemont: The toughest fish

I figure the toughest little fish in the Midwest, and the Ozarks, is the green sunfish. 

You might know him as the black perch. He can get over a pound in size, and I remember catching them eight or 10 inches long. They survive everywhere…in the muddiest, smallest farm ponds, creeks and rivers of any size and huge reservoirs. They can live in low oxygen waters and reproduce in almost any kind of marsh, pond or creek.

Sunfish (Photo submitted by Larry Dablemont)

The scrappy little fish has a mouth unusual for a sunfish because it is large, like a bass’ mouth. When they get six or eight inches long, they can tackle a surface lure as big as they are or a huge spinner bait. When school is out and folks want to take kids fishing, the green sunfish is the fish for that job. They are easy to catch and plentiful.

I like to go to a local Ozark lake and set a couple of trotlines, then take youngsters and move along the rocky, shallow banks with my trolling motor, letting them learn to cast a spinning outfit with four-pound line. In one afternoon, they can learn to cast well. Close to those banks from May through September, you will find scores of those black perch (that name sounds better to a youngster who is learning to fish). 

Use a hook with a small split shot about 1/16th or 1/8 ounce, and put a small plastic grub or a worm on it, and when it hits the water within two or three feet of that bank, a sunfish of some kind is likely to jump on it. Keep them all—it makes kids happy. They hate to catch a fish and throw it back. Put them in a live well or fish basket and use them to bait your trotlines or jug lines with, and you might wind up with a big flathead catfish. Flathead seldom hit dead bait or cut bait, and they absolutely love green sunfish. So do channel cat and blues. A bait shop not far from me makes a lot of money selling black perch for trotline or limb-line bait. I think they are about five dollars per dozen.

If you take a youngster out catching your own bait some of the fish you catch will be bigger hand-sized green sunfish, and they will really give a youngster with a limber little spinning rod a hard tussle. I can offer one more word of advice. You can catch more fish without ever doing any baiting, by using a one-inch strip of white fly-strip pork rind, and it lasts for a long time without replacing it. Green sunfish love it, and every now and then a nice bass will show up from nowhere to make a kid’s eyes twice their normal size. Have a net handy.

You might want to keep the larger green sunfish, scale them and gut them, removing the head. Then boil the fish for a couple of minutes and take them out and separate meat from bones.  Fry the meat left, and you won’t believe how good they are to eat. 

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I floated a short section of an Ozark river back before the rains came. Once a stream with deep eddies and clear clean water, it is now drying up, and the eddies are filling with silt and gravel. On the shoals, the rocks were covered with slimy olive green and brown slime that would sometimes wrap around my ankles when I would get out to wade.  Thirty years ago you would never wade those places; they were much deeper and there were a couple of dozen springs flowing along the stream. Most of those springs are dry now, and it will be a dead river in another 30 years. By that time, I doubt if anyone cares. It won’t be a world where anyone puts treasure in such things as clean, flowing rivers.

The day I floated it, there were huge gar ‘shoaling’ – the term old timers used for spawning fish coming up into flowing shallow water. There were dozens and dozens of them, and you could just wade out into some of those shallow shoals where they were congregated and dip them up with a net, many more than forty inches long. On that day, with a bow you could have easily killed a hundred or so gar just by wading. But though there are some recipes for gar, and a few old fishermen who say they are good to eat, they have a hide with hardened scales like armor, and it is a job to skin one. They are such a repulsive fish I have a hard time thinking I would eat one if I could get anything else.

If you like to read about fish and fishing, I think you would enjoy my book, “Recollections of an Old-Fashioned Angler. You can see it on my website www.larrydablemont.com