Season of the Gar: Adventures in Pursuit of America's Most Misunderstood Fish

1. Getting a Garfish

1 Getting a Garfish “It lies sometimes asleep or motionless on the surface of the water and may be mistaken for a log or snag. It is impossible to take it in any other way than with the seine or a very strong hook; the prongs of the gig cannot pierce the scales, which are as hard as flint . . . They strike fire with steel and are ball-proof!” —C.S. RAFINESQUE. “It has a bad reputation, and there is a difference of opinion concerning its value.” —EDWARD C. MIGDALSKI. IT WAS THOSE PICTURES in fish books I saw as a kid. Particularly that one of two guys in Arkansas, posing beside a ferocious, steely alligator gar longer than themselves. According to Maynard Reece’s Fish and Fishing (1963), their hook was rigged to a piano string; but according to my imagination , what they used for bait was a whole chicken. So that’s why I wanted to get a gar. Growing up in Minnesota, though, there weren’t too many gar around. Living in the Colorado Rockies and France in my twenties also didn’t help. But in my early thirties, I went back to graduate school, this time in Louisiana, where people still fish for gar. And bowhunt them. And eat them. That is, if they’re not despised for belonging to that ichthyological underclass of scavengers known as “trash fish,” the enemies of game fish. One reason I wanted to get a gar was to get a good look at le poisson armé (the armored fish), as the French explorers called it back in the 1700s. I wanted to check out that prehistoric alligator head, those razor-sharp fangs, 1 and that serpentine body dating back to the Paleozoic—making garfish (along with coelacanth, bowfin, and sturgeon) one of the oldest living fish families on the planet. So I asked a tire-repair guy in Lafayette where I could catch a “Cajun barracuda” (as they’re sometimes called in Acadiana), and he told me to find Old Henderson Road and drive out to where it dead ends at a rotting bridge. The gar swam so thick there, he told me, that I could pick out the biggest one and drop some bait in front of it. He also advised taking a jack handle along for calming them down once I got them up on the bridge. It didn’t take long to find the spot. I went out there, looked down, and sure enough, a skinny, snaky gar was swimming on the surface, snapping sideways at bugs because of its peripheral vision. It was the first wild gar I had ever seen, and it was hungry. So I dropped my worm in front of it, steel leader and everything. The gar bit, I fought it, it got away. And though I went back to that spot at least thirty times, and even managed to hook a few, I could never seal the deal. But I did get familiar with the Atchafalaya Basin, driving around on the levees, going to bars with six-foot gator gars mounted on the walls 2 Getting a Garfish White River gar, Arkansas. This fish weighed 230 pounds and was seven feet eight inches long. The photograph appeared on postcards in the late ’50s. This picture sparked the author’s imagination, leading to a lifelong gar fascination. Photo by Johnnie M. Gray. (like the two-hundred-pounder at McGee’s), and fishing in the cypress swamps—where locals told me to use a piece of frayed nylon rope so their teeth get tangled in the fibers. For years, I tried all sorts of methods. But I just couldn’t get the barbs to stick. The size of gar has been greatly exaggerated. For some reason, the mythical figure of twenty feet is associated with the alligator gar, the largest of its species. In The Angler’s Guide to the Fresh Water Sport Fishes of America (1962), for example, Edward C. Migdalski writes, “Many huge sizes have been recorded by word of mouth; even statements of ‘20 feet long’ . . . have been published in past years by reputable scientists.” Similarly, Fishes and Fishing in Louisiana, published by the Louisiana Department of Conservation in 1933, notes that the “Mississippi Alligator Gar” attains “a length of as much as twenty feet.” J. R. Norman, in A History of Fishes (1948), then repeats this misinformation, noting that...