PAULS VALLEY, Okla. (AP) - Heather Bivins’ knuckles had been bleeding badly from battling a big blue catfish all the way from Cotton County to the stage of the Okie Noodling Tournament.
The big blue was still putting up a fight as the 24-year-old carried the fish from her truck to the weigh-in for the 16th annual Okie Noodling Tournament, The Oklahoman (https://bit.ly/1eJiocq ) reported.
“It was a battle just walking up with it,” Heather said. “Can you imagine getting it out of the hole?”
Noodling is a family tradition for the Bivinses from Temple. Heather’s father, Skipper, is a past Okie Noodling Tournament champion and star of the “Hillbilly Handfishin’” show that aired for two years.
Skipper Bivins has noodled “train loads” of catfish in his lifetime.
“I was carrying her on my back before she could learn how to swim,” Bivins said. “She was along on every trip from the time she was just a baby.”
Heather is a Bare Knuckle Babe calendar girl who recently brought the biggest blue cat to the stage at a noodling tournament in Medicine Park. Her 35.25-pound blue was the biggest caught by a woman in the Okie Noodling Tournament.
“I didn’t actually go into a hole (to noodle) until I was about 18,” Heather said. “It was definitely a rush. Every time it’s a rush.”
Both father and daughter vividly remember that first catfish she caught with her hands.
“She caught a bad one, about a 50-pound blue cat, a good biter,” Skipper said. “She’s been hooked ever since. She’s not afraid of them. Her old man, I wear two pairs of socks. She just wears one. She’s a tough girl.”
Noodling also is a family adventure for Nathan Williams and his children from Okemah. Williams, 28, brought the biggest catfish to the stage to win the top prize of $3,000. He noodled his 60.95-pound flathead from Waurika Lake with his leg.
“He came up and swallowed me all the way to my knees,” Williams said. “I pinned him down with my toes and drug him to me, then put my arm down his throat and the other up his gill and came up with him and threw him in the boat.”
His 12-year-old son, Jayce, won the 18-and-younger division in the tournament with a 57.55-pound flathead.
“It started with me, but it’s getting contagious for the whole family,” Williams said of noodling.
There is now a noodling tournament somewhere in Oklahoma seemingly every weekend during the summer, but the Okie Noodling Tournament is the original, the one that spawned all the other events.
“This is definitely the Super Bowl of noodling tournaments,” Williams said.
The winner of the scuba division in the tournament was Michael Keeton of Seminole, who checked in a flathead weighing 57 pounds.
The Okie Noodling Tournament once attracted national and worldwide media attention, but that has waned in recent years. The Sportsman Channel did show up this year.
Skipper Bivins said he walked away from the Hillbilly Handfishing show after two years because of the demands of television.
“Being on television is not all it’s cracked up to be,” he said. “Your life goes on standstill while you are doing that.”
But he still does a few noodling segments for other outdoor television productions each year and recently went to Spain to noodle for giant Wels catfish.
“I still think there is a big market for noodling,” he said. “People around the world are still hungry for it. I mean, it may have ran its course here in America, but I really don’t believe so.”
He also still guides but says that is getting tougher with all the other noodlers now in the water.
“It was a lot easier when it was secretive,” he said. “Now, everybody and their dog are out there in your holes.”
This year’s Okie Noodling Tournament also attracted several fishermen from out-of-state who were disappointed to learn their fish was disqualified because they were not noodled from Oklahoma.
And they received warning tickets from Oklahoma game wardens for illegally transporting fish across state lines.
Marion Kincaid of Peru, Kansas, a former star of the Mudcats television show, drove to Pauls Valley from Mississippi with a big flathead only to find out it was illegal.
“We didn’t know that. The tournament didn’t know that,” Kincaid said on the weigh-in stage, holding his fish on one shoulder and showing the crowd his game citation with his other hand, “but the game wardens damn sure did.”
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Information from: The Oklahoman, https://www.newsok.com
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