Fearless fish freaks

**cowherder** · 08-23-2008, 09:02 AM

Anyone ever try this, those guys are some sick puppies!

The Fearless Fish Freaks

Floods and blood are just the start for Oklahoma's handfishermen

Updated: June 18, 2008, 10:59 AM ET

Editor's note: This is the first of a two-part story on the Okie Noodling tournament in Oklahoma at the end of June.

James Overstreet
Lee McFarlin is one of the legends of Oklahoma catfish noodlers. He will lead a team in search of the three largest flathead catfish they can catch while competing in the 24-hour Oklahoma Noodling Tournament.

The flathead catfish isn't merely ugly; it is grotesque, 15 or 45 or 75 pounds of mustachioed, bottom-dwelling bile, with beady eyes bugging out of the top of its face, lips like a deflated inner tube, and skin the color and consistency of refrigerated snot.

It is exactly the sort of creature that humans would leave in peace were it not built of a flaky, tangy flesh that tastes divine when battered and fried. A 50-pound flathead might carry 30 pounds of meat on its carcass, and it's simple to catch.

All you have to do is find one hunkered among some rocks or in an abandoned beaver's den or beneath a slab of submerged concrete. Then cram your hand into its craw, and when it sinks its teeny teeth by thousands down into your arm, friend, grab ahold inside the fish and steel yourself to fight your food.

'Get 'em out'
On the drive into Stillwater, Okla., the trees are flush with green, the grass is lush, and every river, creek and stream is swollen with cinnamon-colored water, the result of a month straight of rainy days in the wettest June ever recorded in Oklahoma.

Stillwater itself consists of a truly diverse collection of fast-food joints (the first Sonic Drive-In is here) and a gargantuan football stadium with a school called Oklahoma State University tucked somewhere in its shadow.

And a few blocks east and south of the old-brick downtown area, next to a shop that stockpiles giant restaurant signs on an asphalt pad, you might notice a crowd at the home of Lee McFarlin, hunter of deer, mixer of spices, plumber of plumbing, and hand-fisher of flathead catfish.

Among "noodlers" — hand-fishermen, also called "grapplers" elsewhere — few are as famous as McFarlin, and surely none are so accommodating to the media. That's why, on the soggy eve of the big Okie Noodling tournament on the last weekend of June, his yard is a thin grass soup full of people.

James Overstreet
Media giants such as National Geographic and The New York Times have chronicled the noodling exploits of Lee McFarlin.

In addition to McFarlin's friends and relatives, he's also hosting a three-person crew working on a show for the National Geographic Channel, a two-man documentary crew working on a follow-up to the 2001 film "Okie Noodling" and a pair of weary travelers from ESPNOutdoors.com. Because of viewers' (and, yes, readers') presumed thirst for all things weird, this outing has become spectacle, and if we're not careful, we're going to overexpose this formerly clandestine sport. So enjoy this story, dear reader, but do not tell anyone else in the world about it, or else noodling may not exist in even its current semi-raw state much longer.

NBC, rumored to be a part of this mission, doesn't show by the time McFarlin is ready to go, and McFarlin is ready to go right now, before the purple-grey sky opens up again. He's a wiry redhead with freckles dotting his torso and a tummy left over from before he dieted 50 pounds down to his current 170. "I tell you what," he says, eyeing the sky, cradling a 64-ounce plastic mug of tea, "it's gonna be get 'em and get 'em and get 'em out, boys."

James Overstreet
With more severe thunderstorms closing fast, Lee McFarlin knows that the show must go on. He looks over his shoulder to make sure the other boats in his party were ready to leave the boat ramp.

The crowd — a good 15 people — piles into trucks to head west out of Stillwater, past flooded pastures and busted levees that turn farmers' ponds into spillways. Upon arriving at Lake Carl Blackwell, the group adds a fisheries biologist named Dana Winkelman, who has conducted some of the scant research dedicated to the impact of noodling.

The men clamber down the submerged boat ramp to bob. "This is gonna be bad," someone says. The rain filled the lake and swelled creeks and burst a five-acre pond nearby, all of which are pushing into these waters. The lake level is about 4 feet higher than normal. A catfish hole that should be under chest-deep water is now 8 feet below the surface, and may be entombed in silt.
Water level is no small matter for noodlers. Higher water means an even greater disadvantage when they risk groping water moccasins, snapping turtles, muskrats and beavers, for a few. (Among those, the threat of beavers is most perilous.

James Overstreet
After stopping at the first fishing spot, McFarlin points to the exact place he wants to check for catfish.

McFarlin claims to have been called to a lake once to search for the body of a noodler who apparently disturbed a beaver several feet under water and was set upon as if he were a log. Skull-chomped, the poor man drowned.) It also increases the chances that structure — rocks, old roads, wood — may shift, pinning them beneath.

Then, it rains, yet again. The recent deluges have blessed some entrants in the noodling tournament with the chutzpah to ask for entry refunds. Brad Beesley, the filmmaker responsible for "Okie Noodling," assembled the tournament, believed to be the first of its kind, in part to have an ending for that documentary.

The rules for the 2007 tournament, the eighth annual, grant noodlers 24 hours before the 7:30 p.m. Saturday weigh-in to catch fish, with awards going to the biggest three-fish stringer and biggest single fish in "scuba" and "natural" divisions.

James Overstreet
Lee McFarlin pulls the behemoth to the surface.

Fish may come from anywhere in Oklahoma. Entrants from Missouri and Kansas will begin hitting holes as soon as they cross the state line on their way to Pauls Valley, a 6,000-person map-filler of Rockwellian quaintness an hour south of Oklahoma City. But with the waters as high as they are, few river noodlers are expected even to bring fish. Over their bellyaching, lake noodlers such as McFarlin have an advantage.

"You're talking about postponing it or canceling it," McFarlin says as he prepares to launch. "I'm like, 'You've got too much riding on it.'"

**cowherder** · 08-23-2008, 09:21 AM

Editor's note: This is the second and final part of a two-part story on the Okie Noodling tournament in Oklahoma at the end of June.

Willie Lawson has been noodling for catfish since back in the 50s.

PAULS VALLEY, Okla. — Willie Lawson is standing outside of Bob's Pig Shop on the last Saturday morning in June, waiting for a pending parade of colossal catfish, when he summarizes the sport of noodling thusly: "He will peel you. If he gets ahold of you, he will peel you."

A retired elementary school principal with a full white beard and an easy grin, Lawson won today's competition, the eighth annual Okie Noodling Tournament, five years ago, when he was 65.
Lawson says upfront that cancer's got ahold of him. "They said it was just my prostate," he says, "but it exploded all through my body." This is a noodler in twilight. "The stories I could tell you," he says.

There was the time they broke in a novice by directing his hand into a hole where a huge flathead catfish clamped down on the man's arm, sending him across the lake shrieking that he'd been bitten by a crocodile.

There were close calls in the water, like accidentally getting ahold of a beaver trap. A big cat will suck the tennis shoe right off your leg, and enough gloves have been wound up in the fishes' mouths that noodlers swear them off. Too likely that a stuck glove will mean a stuck arm will mean drowning in 4 feet of water with a live catfish wrapped around your wrist, gumming your flesh with those sandpapery teeth of theirs.

"These guys noodling," Lawson says, trying to explain. "It's not a game of goosey-goosey. It's a serious sport."

Today the epicenter of this serious fish-wrestling sport is Bob's Pig Shop, a 74-year-old wooden barbecue shack with antler chandeliers and neon beer signs and old, framed newspapers mounted on the walls. The street outside is barricaded in anticipation of the thousand or more visitors who will swarm the bleachers and fences around the metal tubs where the fish will loiter after they're dragged to the scales.

Spectators stand next to the large vats used to aerate fish during the weigh-in.

Competitors have 24 hours, beginning at 7:30 p.m. Friday night, to hand-catch catfish anywhere in Oklahoma, for entry in the "scuba" or "natural" divisions. Never exactly the sort of activity the Surgeon General would recommend, the noodling this year is particularly treacherous because of record June rainfalls all over the state.

"I think the high water is going to level the playing field," says Phil Henderson. "If you accept that this is an extreme sport. And it is. It takes knowledge of your quarry. These fish are old-timers."
To that end, the event provides huge tubs of water for holding the fish, which may either be returned to their home waters, to be noodled another day, or cleaned and eaten.

'The last time I opened my big mouth, somebody stuck their hand in there and jerked me out of the water.'

"We don't want them to be stressed and horrified," Henderson says. "They're venerable old guys and girls. These fish are riding the planet just like we are." And this key ingredient: "You've got to have horse sense, or you won't be noodling long. They'll pull you out of a river."

When he hears about the noodling excursion that Lee McFarlin led at Lake Carl Blackwell, Henderson boldly predicts that the Stillwater plumber will walk away with the title this year. So when the first truck pulls up to the venue with mounds of slimy green fish, Henderson takes notice, blurting to himself: "Oh, my God. Here comes Lee McFarlin."

He and his crew unload three big cats from aerated tanks in the back of his truck. A biologist named Dana Winkelman measures the fishes' length and hands them off to be weighed in a plastic bin on a scale. The first goes 29 pounds even; the second, 38.8. As any good showman would, McFarlin saves for last the biggest of the fish, the paunchy 52.4-pounder he pulled out of Carl Blackwell the previous afternoon.

'Big in scope'
The fish were long overdue. And with them, the noodling festival finds its reason for being.

Former Okie Noodling Tournament champion Lee McFarlin was the first to bring fish to the scales.

McFarlin heads to a tray of hot oil beneath a tent, where his family has been leading a valiant effort to batter, spice and fry enough catfish to feed the mob that has begun to gather at the Pig Shop.
A crew from the Food Network interviews McFarlin about his favored techniques for flavoring and cooking the fish, and if anyone asks you later this afternoon to explain the cultural phenomenon that is noodling, remember that it's dark patch on a Venn diagram that contains the Food Network, National Geographic Channel, ESPNOutdoors.com, the local paper and a documentary film crew with about seven different cameras.
It is food, sport, environment and death-defying redneckery, all in one group activity performed half-naked and sopping wet.

"I've done a lot of thinking about it over the years, with a lot of alcohol in my system, but I still don't believe I'd do it," says Pauls Valley resident Kelton Strickland, a software salesman.
As he watches the mob, enthralled with the fish, he ponders the other big events in this small town during the year. Rodeo. The peach festival. But noodling has quietly exploded.

"A lot of people in Pauls Valley are clueless as to how big in scope this is," he says.

Not hard to guess where these hands have been. With this crowd you can bet they have been inside the mouths of some very large catfish.

Understanding the practice is critical to appreciating its foolhardy ballet. To this end, McFarlin and the others in his crew — his cousin, Mark McFarland and friends Jeff Melton and Wayne Boyd — noodle in a trailer-sized aquarium usually used for bass casting. (Overheard: "I don't want to do like last year and get in the tank with my phone.")

They dunk themselves and reach into boxes rigged at the bottom. Catfish inside nip and twist and give them the business with their tails. The men squint, reach, and grab ahold of the fish, surfacing with a violent flourish that bubbles like shaken champagne.

Mark climbs out of the tank and onto the half a bass boat cantilevered at its top. He has a fresh gash on the back of his right calf where, the men say, he skewered himself on one of the tall screws in the bottom of the tank when a drunk woman pushed him in moments earlier. She didn't get the memo, that this is no game of goosey-goosey.

**bababooey** · 08-24-2008, 07:11 PM

Budweiser should dedicate a commercial to these guys - Here's to you, you crazy catfish noodlers

**CharlieTuna** · 08-24-2008, 10:33 PM

Water level is no small matter for noodlers. Higher water means an even greater disadvantage when they risk groping water moccasins, snapping turtles, muskrats and beavers, for a few. (Among those, the threat of beavers is most perilous.

Not just the fish you have to worry about, all these other creatures? No thanks, have to respect guys that will do that.