Tools of the trade for catfish jugging are thankfully plentiful and pretty cheap. Plastic bottles, some paint, fishing line or cord, hooks, sinker weights and some bait. That’s it.
One of the tools needed to recover the jugs floating in the water is a jug pole, reach pole, snag pole or whatever name you want to give it. Having such a pole will greatly ease the job reaching over the side of the boat to pick up the jugs.
There are a couple tricks to using a jug pole, too.
“I have tried out several different kinds of poles, but this is going to sound pretty silly: The best pole I have found for snagging catfish jugs are the tall, thick-walled, bamboo cane poles I cut in the corner of my backyard,” Mark Cockrell said. “They are stiff, so they don’t bend easily, and are fairly impervious to water.”
If you don’t have any of this bamboo growing in your yard, it can be found growing all over the place.
“The tricky part is how to use the pole to pick up the jugs,” Cockrell said. “I started out with a hook thing on the end I made out of a welding rod, but it fell off into the lake. Then I discovered I could actually reach over under where the fishing cord was tied to the jug and lift it up without any kind of a hook on the end.
“The move needed to pick up the jug has to be smooth and in a sort of sweeping motion as you pick it up or the fish can flip off the hook. I have had several fish come off as I lifted the jug straight up. Then I figured out in practice that if I sweep the jug over toward the boat I can get the fish; even if it then falls off, it will most often land in the boat.
“It takes a little practice, so keep trying.”
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