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The secretive, centuries-old outlaw tradition of noodling reaches its peak every summer at a Lake Tawakoni tournament with the kings of catfish

I don’t want to sound dramatic,

but I have to peer through my fingers like I’m watching a horror movie. Little pieces of concrete are flying through the sunshine—tiny bits of shrapnel shooting off in all directions, and it doesn’t look like we’re trying to catch a fish so much as free someone who’s been buried alive. Drew Moore has one leg in the water, his other knee hiked up on a collapsed section of seawall, and he’s slamming a piece of concrete the size of a human head into the corner of the crumbling causeway. With each cracking thud, the hole gets bigger and bigger, fistfuls of concrete and broken rebar splashing into the small cavern below.

It’s a Saturday morning in July and I’m at Lake Tawakoni’s 3rd Annual Big Cat Tournament, a 24-hour noodling bonanza where upwards of 20 participants are scouring roughly 37,000 acres for Texas’ biggest flathead catfish. By all accounts, I’ve come to the right place. East Texas is the epicenter of noodling in the state, an ecosystem so productive that it would be an understatement to call it a hot spot—a boiling cauldron might be more accurate. I haven’t seen the other participants, but a winner will be crowned in just under eight hours, and I’m pretty sure I’ve hitched my inner tube to the right flat-bottom boat.

The four guys I’m with are the noodling equivalent of Murderers’ Row, a lineup of hand-fishermen who consistently step onto tournament stages and hoist the biggest fish in the air. Nate Williams is the oldest of this outfit, a former middle school teacher and YouTube star who’s been noodling since 2000, the year he entered eighth grade. Williams drove down from Oklahoma with his 15-year-old son, River, and they’ve linked up with Justin White and Moore, the two guys who, back in 2023, caught a 98.7-pound flathead at this very lake. It’s billed as the largest catfish ever pulled by hand out of Texas waters.

And that’s exactly what I’m after today. I want to see something record-breaking, something wild.

A man wearing a baseball cap submerges most of his body in green water
Erich SchlegelNathan Williams surfaces while noodling for catfish during the 3rd Annual Lake Tawakoni Big Cat Tournament.
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Just a few feet up the embankment someone shouts, and when I look up, I see a bystander who’s wandered over from the nearby boat ramp. He’s stepping over the guardrail, balancing himself on a still-intact section of seawall. He looks perplexed, his mouth hanging slightly ajar, but as he starts to say something an 18-wheeler roars past. I feel the rattle through my chest.

“What?” I yell back.

“I said,” he shouts, pointing past me, “are y’all noodlin’?”

I look back down at Moore, somewhat shocked to see him crawling, headfirst, underneath the partially excavated concrete slab. I look back at the guy, and as another big rig approaches, I yell, “I believe so!”

Noodling is, to put it plainly, the process of lowering or submerging your body in water, sticking your limbs in shoreline holes or buried structures, and then wrestling out anything that bites down. The addition of light demolition is news to me, though. I know very little about razing concrete, but the slab is the length of a garden shed, and structurally it’s much less sound than it was 10 minutes ago. So as Moore climbs deeper into the hole, I feel a slight tinge of worry. If the slab decides to give way, he could literally be crushed.

While I’m not naturally a fearful person, noodling is littered with eye-popping dangers, from people being bitten by snakes and beavers to those who’ve been cut or impaled—impaled—on old pieces of metal and rusted rebar. But there’s just one thing I keep thinking about: the noodlers who never resurface; those unable to wriggle free from the grip of some watery crevasse.

A man carries a large gray catfish in murky water
Erich SchlegelDrew Moore struggles with one of two large catfish he pulled out from under broken cement and rebar.

Suddenly Moore is shouting, and White’s grabbing his ankles and dragging him out feetfirst, the former’s hands attached to the mouth of a giant flathead. He rights himself, his face flushed, chest heaving. When he lifts the fish up, cuts and gashes all over its head, the leviathan stretches from Moore’s neck to his knees. After a moment, White says, “That fish matches Drew perfectly,” and we all start laughing.

Just like a fish in a hole, it’s hard to pin down the origins of noodling in Texas. The practice was documented in 1775 among Native American tribes along the Southeastern United States, but as a rudimentary form of fishing, noodling may trace back thousands of years, predating other forms of subsistence fishing that necessitate tools like hooks, nets, and spears. These methods were utilized by the Coahuiltecans, small bands of hunter-gatherer tribes that filtered through the region of modern-day South Texas. Even today, noodling thrives as a folk tradition passed down by family and friends, then diffused outward through travel and trade.

By 1854, as the Texas Legislature was surveying land for potential Indian reservations, a New York writer named W.B. Parker took stock of the Texas landscape. He was enamored with the Brazos River, a water system he described as a cornucopia of monster fish. In one account, the men haul a catfish ashore, one that’s “4 feet, 7 inches long, and 9 inches across the head”—what was probably an 80-90-pound fish. As the Texas population expanded, so did the appetite for outdoor activities. Around 1900, resort-style hand-fishing appeared at a place called Chadwick’s Mill, a tourist and camping destination about 100 miles west of Waco. Before long, many states were outlawing the practice, and at the beginning of the 20th century, noodling became legally taboo.

“As scientists and biologists and conservationists, we’ve just kind of really frowned on it,” says Kris Bodine, a former Texas Parks and Wildlife research biologist who chaired a catfish committee with the Southern Division of the American Fisheries Society. “But some states promote noodling, like Oklahoma. It’s practically a religion up there.”

The Bare Necessities

Start your own noodling adventure by following these important steps

1 Wear a glove or forearm cover to prevent “catfish rash,” the afterburn of tiny catfish teeth tearing through your skin.

2 Start by walking down a boat ramp and wading your way around the side. Giant catfish can be found in just a foot of water.

3 Get to know your new friend: Flatheads suck your hand in like a vacuum cleaner while blue cats hit your hand like a car door. When the fish bites down, you’ll know immediately which type of fish you’ve wrangled.

4 Find a trustworthy person to hold your legs. If you don’t trust your noodling partner, don’t swim into that hole.

5 Make sure you know whether that hole goes up or down. Holes that go up have air pockets, and while that might sound promising, they can also put you face-to-face with an angry critter like a water moccasin.

A person stands in the water wrestling with a large silver fish
Erich SchlegelMoore finds plenty of prime hand-fishing under a highway embankment.

In the mid-1990s, as extensive dam projects pooled water across Texas, more people came in contact with fishing opportunities, and even in its illegality, noodling spread. By 1960, travel writer John Graves was marveling at the courage, or hubris, of noodlers in Goodbye to a River. Having found a catfish that couldn’t be reached—and one that was particularly uninterested in eating his hand—one noodler devised a plan to spear it. Before long, the fish was bowling over the noodler-turned-spearfisherman, breaking his shoulder for good measure. When the townspeople finally dragged it out of the river, they discovered a dead catfish that weighed 117 pounds.

Tall fish tales follow every angling method and species of fish, but they may be a bit weightier with noodling since the practice didn’t see statewide legalization until 2011. For most of its modern history, it’s been practiced in the shadows, hidden from the watchful eyes of the law. Noodlers fished primarily at night, wading through dark waters, quietly coming up for air like Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now. Many homeowners were happy to turn them in. More than a few noodlers were arrested, ticketed, or socially scorned for their troubles.

One such instance is legendary within the East Texas noodling community. I kept hearing the story of the “East Texas Toe-Biter” from the 1980s, when a man at Lake Tyler got into some legal trouble for supposedly throwing a 122-pound flathead out of the water because it bit him in the foot. The kicker, though, was that the fish was still alive and well, just lounging around the aquarium at the Texas Freshwater Fisheries Center in Athens. The second part of the story is not only false but also caused a bit of confusion when I called the Fisheries Center to ask about it. Turns out the world-record blue catfish, caught on a rod and reel, was actually the fish held in their aquarium for a time. All that said, the 122-pound flathead did exist, as did the legal troubles that followed the man who caught it.

Because of all this, many modern-day noodlers are former outlaws of the waterways who have broad-shouldered themselves into polite fishing society. You won’t find these outdoorspeople donning waders and fishing fedoras, then fiddling with custom-made flies between picturesque back casts. You certainly won’t catch them bedding down at places called The Moose Elk Lodge, unwinding with a bottle of Chablis. Noodlers are more likely to sleep in their boats, rally with Red Bulls and honey buns, then barrel into the water to scavenge under boat docks. One of the biggest of these former outlaws is Jimmy Millsap, a longtime Lake Tawakoni noodler who is, according to some, “the Godfather of Texas Noodling.”

“I had paved the game warden’s driveway one day and got caught by him the next,” Millsap recalls. “I told him when he caught us, ‘I guess you’re tryin’ to get your driveway money back.’”

Millsap and his wife, Kelly, along with their daughter, Lucy, are all noodling champions. Much of their collective know-how comes from Don Donahew, an old-timer who stood 5-foot-4 and weighed about as much as a trophy-size fish. Donahew had been noodling Lake Tawakoni since it got dammed into existence in 1960, and many of Lake Tawakoni’s trade secrets come directly from him, a lineage that stretches from Donahew to Millsap, and on to people like White, Moore, and Williams. When White and Moore caught their 98.7-pounder, they called Millsap, seeing if he wanted to drive over to the marina to have his picture taken with the fish.

For a sport that was illegal for so long, its practitioners brandished as criminals, the open, public celebration of a record-breaking fish is fairly new. While that doesn’t heal old wounds, it does provide a bit of recognition for all the anglers who never got their due and their monster fish that became nothing more than myths in every diner and bait shop from the prairies to the Pine Curtain. White and Moore’s fish didn’t just represent the largest flathead weighed on a certified scale post legalization; in some ways, it represented a sport that had finally been pulled from the livewell, lifted up for all to see.

A man sticks his hand in the mouth of a catfish on the shore
Erich SchlegelWilliams tries to dislodge his hand with minimal damage.
A person wearing dark gloves holds open the mouth of a catfish
Erich SchlegelFlathead catfish have strong jaws that can break the bones of other fish.

We should be done here. It’s 7 p.m., and the guys have spent 24 hours on the water, but we’re still standing around the marina’s gravel parking lot. Cops loom on the hill above us.

Williams and Moore have been declared the winners with a 60-pound flathead, and White and River receive second place with a 55.7-pound effort. While this should be cause for celebration, it’s not. We’re near a food truck, listening to the hired band perform a laudable-enough rendition of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Tuesday’s Gone,” while a nearby group of stern-faced locals deliberates rules and regulations. Off to the side, not far from the rental cabins, two shirtless teenage boys are holding up a tournament banner they’ve unearthed from the edge of the roadway. The bottom of the banner reads: Must Sign Up by 6 p.m.

“Now that you’ve been a part of this big fiasco,” Williams says, “you’re gonna be like part of the family.” It’s an incredibly nice sentiment, but like all families, bad feelings can be picked at like scabs, and that’s exactly what we’re staring at.

“Imagine if they beat us with a heavier fish,” Moore says, “and we go and do what they did and try to take pictures with the first-place check. You wouldn’t catch me dead doing somethin’ like that.” After a brief pause: “If we get the third-place trophy, I’m gonna throw it in the lake.”

“The big fiasco” started an hour ago, right after weigh-ins, when a man named Michael Burt—a local noodling guide—ripped off his shirt and got in the tournament director’s face. He kept screaming “You’re not gonna rob these boys!” his jugular vein raging, as he pointed to his son and his son’s friend. The recipient of his tirade is tournament director Mikey Kline, who just stands there and takes it. He’s wearing a rubber catfish mask pulled back on his forehead like a swim cap with whiskers, part of a tournament persona he’s dubbed “Mr. Catfish.”

The problem is one of signatures and sportsmanship. Due to unseasonal flooding, only three teams entered the tournament, and our boat held two of them: Team Adrenaline and Team Texas. The only other team—the teenagers, Team Outlaw—hauled in the third-place fish. But Team Outlaw signed up at 6 p.m., the original cutoff time, while everyone on our boat signed up two hours late. With a tournament of only one team, Kline extended the sign-up deadline, texting every noodler he knew—minus Team Outlaw. Both factions have declared themselves first- and second-place finishers, which includes $4,500 in prize money, trophies, and oversize novelty checks.

I walk over to Burt, who’s somewhat imposing with his beard, tattoos, and chiseled frame. A gold, catfish-shaped pendant dangles from his neck. “I want my son to be onstage and win tournaments and get the recognition for bein’ one of the best out here,” he says. “They don’t have a voice, but I do.” When I ask how important this is, trying to ascertain the extent to which his anger runs, he offers a wry smile: “It’s family first, noodling second.”

A man reaches down in a hole near the water's edge to reach for a fish
Erich SchlegelMoore sacrifices his body to wrangle some of the largest catch in Texas.
Two men reach into the water near concrete slabs
Erich SchlegelThe YouTube star and his partner are among the Murderers’ Row of hand fishermen.

This argument goes on for another hour, the factions shuffling together in one big group, then breaking off, then coming back together again like rivulets of rainwater on a windshield. Kline returns sans the catfish mask and asks how he can fix the situation. Everyone reminds him that it’s on his shoulders, he has to make the decision, he has to “make it right.” But he swiftly retreats again. I spot him on the hill, back in the shadows, and I can see it on his face—the pain and worry from carrying the weight of everyone’s growing frustration. At one point, he comes back down and sidles up to one of the splintered conversation circles and says, “I don’t want to go to the hospital.”

A few people roll their eyes, but several participants lower their heads and nod in agreement—the hospital would be bad, and at previous noodling tournaments, it’s been on the table. This is a sport that tends to generate arguments, accusations, and even violence. At this tournament, no one’s accused anyone else of cheating, but almost everyone has discreetly pointed at someone else here, accusing them of something in the past—bringing in fish from other lakes, fishing before tournament start times, putting weights in the fish to make them heavier, using illegal devices such as homemade gaffs, or just drumming up false accusations to cast doubt on someone’s character. You can feel the tension in the air, the same way you feel death drifting through the pews of a funeral. Noodling tournaments may be the closest thing we still have to anxious poker games at Wild West saloons.

At one point, a mediator steps into the circle and suggests a “fish-off.” It’s a brief moment of levity before everyone realizes he’s serious, and I think I’m the only person on the marina grounds who wants to see it come to fruition. In fact, I’m already gauging how quickly I can sprint to a flat-bottom boat before the last team takes off. But it never happens. After 24 hours, nobody wants to keep fishing, and to Team Adrenaline and Team Texas, it seems preposterous they’re being asked to catch another giant catfish after they’ve already hauled the two biggest fish ashore.

The congregation has negotiated and exhausted all options. Finally, one of the marina owners steps into the fray. “I’m fixin’ to have to file trespassing to make everyone leave,” he says. Suddenly, we all remember the cops on the hill. That, along with an injection of extra money to the pot, hastens a resolution. Team Adrenaline and Team Texas will walk away with the first- and second-place novelty checks as Team Outlaw walks away with the trophies. Each side gets to declare victory, though no one is entirely satisfied.

On the way out, I stop to speak with Kline. He’s sitting on a bench, looking toward the empty gravel lot, the band revving up a rendition of Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn.” The breeze is blowing off the lake, and people have gathered on the shoreline to watch the fireworks. “This is what makes the sport ugly,” he says. “I apologize for the scene.” Kline starts crying through his words, talking about gained trust, missed opportunities, and fractured friendships.

You see, he could never catch the 100-pound fish. Even as a former outlaw himself, he could never noodle the way these guys do, so he took off the wetsuit and put on the catfish mask, creating this stage for others to show off their skills. It should be a celebration, a nod to the sport these people love, but noodling has never been for the squeamish. It takes a certain type, a certain gear to get face-to-face with a thrashing monster. Not a lot of people have that kind of moxie. Maybe, as the years go by, it’s a state of being that slips through our fingers.

When Kline finally rights himself, he takes a deep breath, looks me dead in the eye, and says, “I think Mr. Catfish is retired.”

From the January/February 2025 issue

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