Do you fish?

If I asked you, do you fish? And you reside on planet earth... your response might be, why of course I fish. Then if I asked how……it gets interesting real quick.

Take the folks in the southern United States that fish with there hands…its called noodling. The fisherperson simply reaches into a catfish hole and hopes the catfish latches on and is hoisted to shore. In Great Britain it's called trout ticking. You slowly rub the trout's stomach, numbing it abit, and toss it ashore.

I don't know if this is legal anymore but in days of old they had "trout binning". Large rocks were slammed with a sledge hammer in a river. The force of the blow stunned the fish long enough for a fisherman to scoop them out of the river.

"Free diving" is still practiced in many places. You simply scuba dive or snorkel in the ocean with a basket and grab any shellfish you might find.

Spear fishing, bow fishing, harpoons or gigging has been around since time began. Single sharp poles evolved into pronged tridents and morphed into bows for longer shots or more power. Gigging was popular at night with torches, lanterns or flashlights for forking frogs.

Seines, trawlers, gill, trap, cast, hoop, drift, are types of nets used in the art of taking one or more fish in any myriad water conditions not to mention how the mesh screen dictated the catchable fish size from the smallest alewives to massive heavy gilled salmon.

Kite fishing took a boatless shore angler and got his lure trolled along the coast in hopes of hooking anything shore cruising. Not to popular, wasn't too effective. But it may have been fun all the same.

Dredging fish had two different methods. One is being done away with as it is very destructive to the ocean floor. Basically a heavy metal scoop dragged, filled and winched topside. In some Asian countries small channels were built by mounding or digging small trenches or dredging out the soil and rough fish would navigate these small impoundments.

Electro fishing is still widely practiced, usually reserved for research, but not always. There are some who walk on stilts and zap fish from as high as ten feet in the air in low surf conditions. It's a long pole with a battery that does the trick. It looks like a human stork on stilts and the youngsters follow or retrieve the catch with baskets.

If you want you can teach or train cormorants to do the fishing for you. Birds that naturally prey under water for fish are neck restricted with rubber bands, dive and harvest and resurface. Then you basically get the bird to upchuck in your hand.

Mild toxins, poisons and explosives are no longer legal for the average Joe. But lakes are reclaimed (poisoned) in many instances if rough fish or an undesirable invasive takes over a once productive water body. State agencies do this style of terminal fishing.

If that doesn't work there is basically one method left. It's called angling. You just use a hook line and sinker. You can spice it up in a variety of ways with fly rods or trolling but it's a pretty popular way to fish no matter where you live these days.