Red-Tailed Catfish
written by Jim Spencer
Hooking a big red-tailed cat is easy, but landing one isn't!
Previous Page
Email This Page
Print This Page
This small red-tailed cat shows the unique colors of the fish.
The braided line twitched, telegraphing the savage strikes as the school of piranha tore chunks from their dead relative at the end of my line. Half a two-pound of piranha seems like big bait, but 30 seconds of attention from its cousins will reduce it to tatters. I was about to reel in and re-bait with the other half when the clicker on my big reel made a couple hesitant ticks, then a few more. By the time I picked up the rod, the line was melting off the spool at an impressive clip.
We were just south of the Equator, fishing for pirarara, red-tailed catfish, in the Rio Unini, a blackwater tributary in the northern reaches of the Amazon River Basin. The Unini is mid-sized, and its surroundings looked familiar to this Arkansas river rat: sand bars, blackwater swamps, low bluff banks, oxbow lakes, sloughs and chutes connecting various waterways. Replace the palm, mahogany, cocobolo and other exotics with oak, ash, cypress and sycamore, and the Unini could pass itself off as the lower White River here in Arkansas.
But there the similarity ends. The Unini, like the other rivers of the Basin, teems with fish the like of which Arkansas waters have never seen. In addition to the piranha and the pirarara (which can weigh 100 pounds and commonly reaches 50 pounds and more), there are literally hundreds of other bizarre species here. A sampling: several species of freshwater stingray, some as big as a kitchen table and weighing more than 100 pounds; a thing called a piracuru that can reach 500 pounds and looks like a cross between Satchmo Armstrong, a tarpon and a torpedo; a snake-eel-skipjack-looking amalgam known as arawana that has a trap-door mouth and makes its living by spitting water at fruits, birds, insects, and other edibles and knocking them into the water; who knows how many species of fruit-eating and nut-eating piranha known collectively as pacu; and a fierce little grinnel look-alike that rarely weighs more than five or six pounds but can bite a hole in a steel plate and will wriggle across the bottom of your boat to bite you on the foot.
And, of course, there are the several species of peacock bass that all us "northerners" go down there to fish for. But it had rained almost 40 inches (yes, you read that right) in the five days before we arrived, and the rivers were high and off-color. So my host "Wild Bill" Skinner and I decided to spend our first day on a quest for big catfish, to give the river some time to settle.
Speaking of big catfish, I neglected to mention the real heavyweight of the Amazon basin - the piraiba. This guy is a streamlined, shark-like monster that grows to more than nine feet and 650 pounds and is credited with eating people alive. Actually, no one knows how big piraiba get, since the biggest ones are simply too strong to be caught, with rod and reel, nets or anything else.
But we're straying from the subject, which was originally supposed to be the story of me and this big red-tail catfish. When we left off, the line was whizzing off the reel and the clicker was chattering like a cicada on a summer afternoon. Earlier in the day, Wild Bill had landed two pirarara that weighed 30 and 40 pounds, respectively - little fellows. I had visions of a human-sized beastie at the end of my line when I finally flipped the lever that engaged the reel.
We were using circle hooks as big as a teacup, and the correct technique is not to set the hook, but instead to let the fish set it by simply holding on and until the line comes tight. If you yank, the angle between the barb and the fish's jaw gets out of whack and the hook pulls out of the critter's mouth. I'm an experienced circle-hook trout and bass fisherman, and though the size of the fish was different now, the principle was the same.
So even though I knew I was doing it right, I couldn't help thinking as I watched the line come tight that not hauling back on that rod was the hardest thing I'd ever done. I held that opinion until the line actually did come tight. That was when I decided that keeping this fish from pulling me off the sandbar and into the river was even harder.
He wanted to go downriver, and since there didn't seem to be anything I could do to prevent it, I let him. For three or four minutes we gave and took, me doing most of the giving and the fish most of the taking. I was beginning to get the upper hand, I thought, when everything went limp. I reeled in and found the fish had either broken or chewed through my 130-lb. braided line. Since we were fishing steel leaders, my guess is he broke it.
Later in the day, Bill connected with and landed a third pirarara, this one weighing 50 pounds. It came in making the chuffing, snorting, belching, farting noises typical of the species, the same noises the two smaller fish had made earlier that day. Meanwhile, I lost another big fish to another break-off.
At sundown, at our final stop for the day, I had one last run-away. When I flipped the big reel into gear and set my feet against the sudden strain of the tightening line, the fish dragged me four feet across the bar, my feet making skid marks in the wet sand. When the line snapped it made a muffled sound underwater that telegraphed itself up the line - kuchunk! - and I sat down hard in the sand at the edge of the river.
Behind the sand bar, in a thick stand of tall palms, a pair of blue-backed parrots started screaming and squawking, telling each other and all the rest of the world that this slice of the jungle belonged solely to them. A pair of freshwater porpoises surfaced and shot noisy blasts of air through their blow-holes. Somewhere back of beyond, deep in the rain forest across the river, a troop of howler monkeys started their resonant, other-worldly whooping. I slowly reeled the line in, and Bill helped me to my feet.
"You ready to go eat some catfish?" he asked with a grin. I was. We did. And it was delicious.
1
) 