All hail the River King

Top cat at Cooks Landing shares his tricks

Donald Barber of Oak Grove waits for a catfish to bite Thursday below the hydroelectric plant at Cook's Landing in North Little Rock.
Donald Barber of Oak Grove waits for a catfish to bite Thursday below the hydroelectric plant at Cook's Landing in North Little Rock.

— His name is Donald Barber, but to the catfishermen who spend their days and nights at Cooks Landing in North Little Rock, he’s the “River King.”

“You got your river dogs and your river cats,” said a weather-worn man who identified himself only as Sam. “You even got your river mice, like me, but there’s only one River King, and he’s it.”

Surely Sam has a last name.

“Not down here, I don’t,” Sam said. “You gotta earn it.

I ain’t earned it yet.”

Sam came over Thursday to get some advice from Barber about how to cast his heavy-duty catfishing rig. It’s identical to the rigs Barber uses. The “engine” is a Fin-Nor 65 big game spinning reel mated to a two-piece, 12-foot American PremierNite Stick catfish rod.

It’s about as thick as a pool clue, and with a 4-ounce lead weight and a wide-gap hook dangling from two dropper lines of 50-pound test monofilament, the thing looks as unwieldy as a mop. In a novice’s hands it probably is, too, but the River King could probably kill a deer with it.

It’s roughly 175 yards from the long jetty between the dam and the hydropower plant to the Cooks Landing parking lot. Barber hauled back on Sam’s rod and let it fly. Even without a full power heave, he launched the weight in a low arc that traveled 135 yards.

“I’ve thrown almost dry ground on the other side,” Barber said. “A hundred yards is nothing. I could throw it through a goal post. People don’t believe me when I tell them that. Shoot! I wish they had one out here. I could win me a pile of money betting on it.”

Barber uses heavy braid for his main line. At the terminal end, he uses a simple but strong knot to make a loop. He uses clinch knots to tie the two dropper lines to the loop. He doesn’t use clinch knots to attach the hook and sinker, though. Instead, he uses what he calls a “jig knot.” It’s another simple knot that also forms a loop, which allows the bait and sinker to move freely on the line while retaining almost 100 percent line strength.

“One of my bass fishing buddies showed me that knot,” Barber said. “He whupped that thing on there so fast, and I said, ‘Whoa, slow down and show me that again.’ ”

The raceway below the hydropower plant contains a lot of big rocks. If the rig snags in the rocks, it’seasy to break the loop knot on the braid, but Barber said a fish cannot break it. Losing weights in the rocks is common. Barber said he kept a log one year and noted that he lost 195 pounds of weights. At 4 ounces each, that’s 780 sinkers.

“That discouraged me so bad that I just don’t pay any attention to it anymore,” Barber said.

Fishing below dams and hydroplants depends entirely on current. There is no natural cover besides the rocks on the bottom, so fish relate to what can best be described as hydraulic structure. If current is moving through the turbines or below the dam spillway, it creates boils, eddys and slack pockets. Catfish get in the slack pockets to get out of the current, and they gorge on baitfish that washthrough.

“About 16,000 cubic feet per second is optimal,” Barber said. “If it gets above that, it just blows everything to the bank and you can’t fish. Right now it’s about 5,000 and it’s dead.”

For bait, Barber catches live shad from a nearby pond. They die quickly, but that’s not important as long as the bait is fresh, he said.

Placement is the important thing. You have to throw it into a slack pocket, or hit an eddy seam that will carry the bait into a slack pocket.

That requires carefully reading the water because eddies often carry the bait upstream. It’s important for every angler to interpret the water to keep from tangling each others’ lines.

Barber had two lines out. The butt of one rod was wedged between a pile of rocks. The current ran upstream, swinging past a bridge piling. The rod dipped lower and lower, as if a fish were running with the bait. Then, the tip popped back and pulsed up and down. Barber paid it no heed.

“It gets in those rocks and the force of the current pulls it down,” he explained. “It pops like that when it breaks loose. People that don’t know what’s going on will run over and grab it, and they’re always so disappointed. They’ll cry, ‘Oh, I missed one!’ I don’t tell ’em no different. I just say, ‘Yup, it was a big ’un.”

In such slight current, Barber only caught a few small catfish and one blue cat that weighed about 8 pounds. When conditions are right, he said it’scommon to catch blues weighing up to 40 or 50 pounds. The fishing is good, he said, but the best part is watching people.

“I’ve seen everything you can imagine out here,” Barber said, pointing up to the Big Dam Bridge, which had its usual array of brightly clad cyclists.

“You’ve got the Spandex-ers. You’ve got the people that hang out. There was seven or eight monks out here one day. I guess that’s what they were. They wore these brown robes and they all had bald heads. They were all on the sandbar, and this lady had them all gathered up taking pictures.

“I enjoy the spectacle as much as I enjoy the fishing.”

Sports, Pages 32 on 02/17/2013

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