Bank Poles

I wouldn’t call bank pole fishing a sport. It is more of a harvest of available food. It involves baiting up to five poles and sticking them in the muddy bank along the river. Thus, the name bank poles. All of the poles must be tagged with your name and address and be checked regularly. If you don’t follow the regulations you are very likely to get a ticket. Typically, the poles were just five to six feet long branches cut from trees. On the big end it was chopped to a point so it would stick easily in the bank. On the other a length of line is tied.

I usually used some strong line or string not much longer than the length of the pole. My bait of choice was always a three or four inch sunfish that I had caught in a pond somewhere. I would stick the pole in the bank and let the hooked sunfish swim around near the surface. It was best to fish with a bank pole when the river is rising as the fish feed on what is a new area for them so the lines are often only a few inches from shore.

Most often I did this kind of fishing with a group of two or three friends. We would each put out our lines early in the evening and then go and run them every four hours or so for the next 24 hours. Five lines usually yielded two or three catfish each time and sometimes more.

One guy in our group was particularly annoying. If he knew where your lines were he would run them before you got there and then show the fish off as ones he caught. He was soon out of the group. Another guy liked to do the fishing but didn’t like to do any of the work involved. He always had something he had to do right now when it came time to clean the fish or anything else that required much effort.

I remember once when I put out poles down river about a mile from Oakland Mills. A run of the lines about eight o’clock that evening had produced good results including a three pound cat. Nobody was willing, that night to run them again around midnight so I ended up going out to run mine by myself.

It was pretty dark but I thought I could see well enough with the light of the moon and stars so I left the flashlight in the car. I am actually kind of fond of a dark night in the woods. If you couldn’t see the fish you could certainly feel it when you grabbed the pole.

Anyway, this first pole had a pan size catfish. I rebaited it and moved on. The second was empty. As I approached the third I could tell it must have a fish on cause the line was moving around wildly. I grabbed the pole and I could feel the fish or, at least, what I thought was a fish.

I lifted the pole and reached for about where I thought the fish would be. Just a split second before I grabbed the line I saw in the moon light something that was four or five feet long and not much bigger around than the pole. It was a snake! I dropped the whole thing on the ground and took about 10 steps backward falling in the brush.

I got to my feet as quickly as possible and went to the car to get my flashlight. Back at the pole I found the huge black snake angrily trying to get off the hook. How do you get a snake off the hook in the middle of the night? I didn’t know either. I ended up cutting the line as close to the snake as possible and then I got out of there as quickly as possible.

When I returned in the daylight the snake was nowhere to be found. I pulled all of my poles out and went home. I fished with bank poles after that but was a lot more careful when I ran the lines.