River tale to remember

• By JOE MACALUSO
• Advocate Outdoors writer
• Published: May 8, 2008 - Page: 10C - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

• Print
• Email
• Save
• Share

• Del.icio.us
• Digg
• Facebook
• Reddit
• 

Eric White and Damien Kinchen know a good thing when they see it — and hear about it.

The still-high Mississippi River has beckoned fishermen to its levees for weeks. Whenever North America’s largest river gets this high, lots of things happen.

For fishermen, catfish move onto the levees to take advantage of a feast, a years-in-the-making banquet laid out in the batture.

Best if you don’t need a boat, and the expensive gasoline that goes into the engines that power the vessel.

Just get to the levee, make sure there are no posted signs in the area and the levee is yours for a few hours or a day.

For White and Kinchen, it was a day they remembered from childhood, a morning spent on a riverbank with a can of nightcrawlers dug the day before from the family garden.

So, Saturday, they drove to the levee at Gardere Lane, turned left and found a spot about five miles south where they believed they could catch a few catfish.

Hours later, they showed up at The Advocate office off Bluebonnet Boulevard — less than six miles as the crow flies from their fishing hole — with a giant fish and a whopper of a tale.

Except for the conveyance (a truck), the means (rods and reels) and facial hair, the scene, the enthusiasm of the two fishermen and the quarry parallel Tom Sawyer-Huck Finn tales.

And, Mark Twain, the Sawyer-Finn storyteller, undoubtedly would have reveled in the story White and Kinchen told.

OK, who caught the fish.

Well?

White said he first hooked a tackle-taxing blue catfish, fought it for many minutes, got it to the bank and just about had the giant played out when the 30-pound test line broke.