Weoka Creek Chronicles:Midnight Monster

Have you ever been startled awake in the middle of the night, slamming your eyes open to be confronted by a huge ugly monster?

When I was a boy, one of my great pleasures was to spend a day fishing with my father. Usually, this meant leaving the house early in the morning to walk down to the creek that wrapped most of the way around our thousand acre farm. We’d walk the half mile or so, checking out how the ditches had washed out, how the fields had grown over or where the buzzards were circling overhead.


We’d start at one side of the property and take all day to walk along the banks, wade through the shallows and crawl over the numerous large rocks that blocked our way. And all along, we’d be casting bait and lures into every likely spot, tempting the bass and perch to take the hook.


We heard a story, sort of a country version of an urban legend. Just down the road a few miles,

Jordan Dam blocked the Coosa River and created Lake Jordan. Some maintenance needed to be done on some submerged equipment on the lake-side of the dam. A couple of scuba-diving technicians were sent down to do the job. After fifteen or twenty minutes, they resurfaced and refused to go back down. They feared for their lives, they said, because there were cat fish down there so big they could swallow a man whole. By accident!


Well, this got a lot of fishermen’s attention. For safety reasons, there was no fishing above the dam, but it seemed likely that at least some of those big fish would get caught in the flow and wash over the dam into the river below.


During the day the gates were open and huge amounts of water filled the river channel. But, at night the gates were closed down to a trickle and the water receded. Pools and eddies of quiet water remained. These were perfect for those big cat fish to lounge around. Fishermen started spending their nights casting with big ocean-style reel and rod rigs into those cat fish lounges.


Daddy and I started making frequent trips down below the dam at night. We were catching thirty and forty pounders, some even bigger. This was quite a bit different from the slow and languid fishing style we used along the creek. For this style you put a sizable weight on a strong line, baited up with a bait fish that was itself almost big enough to eat, twirled it around your head and, with just the right timing, released the reel and let the whole “hook, line and sinker” fly out as far as it would go. Reeling it back in took some time and did not always bring a reward, but often enough some big lunker would grab on and try to pull us in. This was fun!


Thanksgiving came around and we were invited to visit some family in another part of the state. Mama wanted to stay a couple of days, but Daddy didn’t do that. And I was scheduled to work over the holiday weekend at the grocery store. Mama took my five younger brothers and sisters off to visit leaving me and Daddy behind to fend for ourselves.


Well, the first thing Daddy decided he wanted to do was to head for the dam and spend the night camped out and fishing. He wanted me to go, but it was cold and a little rainy and I wasn’t as avid about it as he was. Besides, I had to be at work early the next morning. Daddy went fishing and I stayed home and went to bed early.


All of a sudden, my eyes slam open, the lights are on and there is this huge ugly catfish standing beside my bed. “Boy, wake up!” it said. “You gotta see this!”


Well, I finally realized that Daddy was actually standing there holding this monster, and he was the one doing the talking. After my heart settled down and I collected myself, I had a good look at my nemesis. It turned out to weigh over ninety pounds and stretched out to over five feet long. This was the biggest fish either of us had ever seen in person, and Daddy was about as excited as I ever saw him, before or since. That was one big fish!


Now, I hope I’ve entertained you a little with this story. It’s one of my fondest memories of my father. But, a good story is even better if there is a point to it, and I later realized the lesson in that episode. In life, just like me on that cold dreary night, you can’t catch the big one if you don’t go fishing.