ALONG THE WAY

Let's get something straight right from the top: this sucker has got to be one of the ugliest critters to come out of the water. It has whiskers. It has a pair of the beadiest eyes you'll ever see. It has three count 'em, three spines, making it ungainly and even more unattractive. It's slimy, too. We're talking catfish more particularly, the catfish of the Colorado River. And now the good news: that larger member of the species is known as the flathead, and the flathead in the lower Colorado runs to humongous poundage. The record, as of this writing, is 57 pounds 4 ounces, hooked by a Californian named Mike Hughes in April, 1985. The catch was made'The reason nobody has ever caught one is that they're so big they keep breaking the lines.' near Yuma, in a stretch of the river where most of the biggies reside. Fifty-seven-pounds-plus undeniably qualifies as a lunker. Wait, though. Hang around that lovely Western river for a few days, as I did, and you'll hear all manner of tales about flathead catfish running up to 100 pounds. Nobody has caught a hundred-pounder, or, if anyone did, nothing official has been recorded. But listen, for instance, to Mike Thomas, the youngish, black-bearded, good-natured proprietor of the His and Hers Barber Shop in Parker: "I know there are Flatheads in this lower river that are close to a hundred pounds, darned close. I've seen 'em. I've even hooked into 'em. Use a 40-pound test line [for you non-cognoscenti, that's pretty heavy] and they just turn around and snap your line. I've had 'em up so close I could reach down and grab 'em, but they take one look at you and run." Thomas coasted his electric clipper around a customer's right ear. "Guy here named Bob Rinebold has hooked into a couple of 'em," he mused. "He estimated them at a hundred pounds. He's had some monsters. And he don't lie. Of course, fishermen never lie!" Well, I talked to Rinebold, who's a retired bricklayer living in Parker. And he said no, the biggest he ever caught was 38 pounds. But he's hooked much bigger ones and lost them.Like one a few months ago down near the Agnes Wilson Bridge, below Parker, that Rinebold estimated at about 50 pounds. "He just decided to go down, and that's what he did and broke the line," said Rinebold and the line was 80-pound Dacron. "Do you really think those 100-pounders exist?" I asked. "I really do," said Rinebold. "And if not, I guarantee you some are going to push 100 pounds awful hard." And there are the stories about the divers who work for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and swimdown to the bottoms of the Colorado River dams to clean the grates and make repairs. Anglers say a diver saw a flathead so big that, as Rich Beaudry of the Arizona Game and Fish Department puts it, "You'd have to have a jack winch on a truck to pull him in. And the reason nobody has ever caught one is that they're so big they keep breaking the lines." And then Beaudry adds, sadly, "Trouble is, it's always 'my friend the diver' who's seen it, but you can never find the diver." Well, you know how it goes with fish stories It's no fish tale, though, that catfishing has become one of the most popular piscatorial pastimes along the old Colorado since the critter was first imported from its homeland in the central and gulf states and planted in the river in the '50s.There's another species of catfish the channel cat that entices even the choosy angler. It's somewhat smaller than the flathead (35 pounds 4 ounces is the record). But while the flathead mostly hangs around the Yuma area, channel cats can be found upriver, as far north as Bullhead City and beyond. You fish for catfish channels or flatheads at nighttime. That's because they're nocturnal feeders. And fishing for catfish isn't the frenetic activity (cast-and-reel-in, castand-reel-in) that, say, bass fishing is. What it is, as Jay Rankin describes it (he and his wife, June, run June's Bait in Parker), is "a lazy man's way of fishing." You wait until dusk, and then you settle down on the riverbank or go out in your boat and throw your line in and, well, just sit. "That's one of the pleasures of catfishing - it's peaceful," says Olyer B. Glover, Jr., a Yuma locksmith who will fish all night. And this from Jeanne Branson, who runs Branson's Resort on the Parker Strip: "How can you help falling in love with an area where you can sit out at 11:30 at night in the wintertime with a rod in your hands, hoping a fish will come along and bite, and all of a sudden wham-bam you catch a five-pound catfish?" Bait? Rarely is it artificial lures. Something preferably live and/or smelly: goldfish, blue gill, anchovies, shrimp, mackerel. Those whiskers on the catfish are used for feeling and smelling, and so you go to the bait store and you ask for "Bowker's." The stuff comes in a bottle, and it's called "stink bait," a most appropriate description. It contains things like liver, cheese, dried blood, and dead shad. Dorothy Marler, who lives at Fisher's Landing on Martinez Lake north of Yuma, says she mixes Bowker's with canned milk and egg and dips a mackerel in it. "It smells," she says with a slight shudder. Yeah, but what it fetches is something else a fish as delectable as anything that comes out of water. Says Dorothy Marler: "It's the epitome of fish, the best." These cats may be big-time ugly, and their eating habits may be disgusting, but they're always welcome at dinnertime. -Joseph Stocker