All American: Okie Noodling

2 Comments

For centuries, a unique breed of fishermen has been catching monster catfish with their bare hands in the rivers and lakes of Oklahoma. Today, the tradition of “noodling” still has Okie anglers hooked – the noodler motto is No Hooks, No Bait, No Fear. Once a year, competitive noodlers and handfishers meet in Paul’s Valley, Oklahoma for the world’s largest noodling contest. Pictured here are some of the 2011 contenders, along with their prize catfish. Wowzers! All images are by photographer Matt Rainwaters (see his full collection of Okie Noodling images HERE).

Over the last decade, noodling (also known as catfisting, grabbling, graveling, hogging, dogging, gurgling, tickling and stumping) has enjoyed a surge in popularity due to a documentary, and two cable network shows.

-Watch full episodes online of The History Channel’s Mudcats and Animal Planet’s Hillbilly Handfishin.
-Learn how to Noodle In Ten Easy Steps

2 thoughts on “All American: Okie Noodling

  1. This is so cool, jack loved it. We recently saw a show about this.

    Reply
    • I could see Jack rolling up his sleeves and giving it a go :)

      Reply

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. ( Log Out / Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s