Let’s Go Gigging!

When I was a boy, my family spent many of our Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays in Port Aransas, Texas. We were there for one purpose: to gig flounder. Every night we’d put on our waders and load up our equipment and head to the ship channel where we’d spend most of the night walking around looking for a flounder to stab.

Gigging is a great combination of fishing and hunting and always felt more like an expedition than a fishing trip. Sometimes the weather was warm and we’d gig in short sleeves and other times it would be freezing (by South Texas standards) and we’d put on our long johns and go for long walks on a cold night. Our belief was that the worse the weather, the better the gigging. I find this notion far more romantic now than I did then. Because we did it the dark, it was always a little spooky. I always wondered what was lurking out there in the deep water just beyond the beams of my light.

It was dangerous too.

We had to be on the lookout for ships quietly passing through the channel. Their mass would displace so much water that it would suck all the water off the bank and then it send back a minute later as a tidal wave. It was a scary experience to be walking in knee deep water and have it suddenly disappear as if absorbed by a sponge, and then look up and see a huge oil tanker gliding by. It was eerie how they could sneak up on you when you had your head down. There were plenty of giggers who found themselves bowled over by the returning wave, which washed away all their equipment (and fish) and left them with nothing but waders full of water and a good story to tell at the coffee shop.

We also had to be careful of stingrays. It was drilled into my head that if I stepped on one, his barbed tail would slash through my waders like a light saber and I’d have to get my leg amputated. As a boy, I was always on the lookout for two things. On land it was rattlesnakes and in the water it was stingrays. I was terrified of those things.

One of the best things about gigging was that it was something I was able to do with my dad and granddad. In fact, the whole experience was one of the main ways I was introduced to the “world of men” as a boy. Yes, there were women who gigged as well, but they were also kind of manly.

I did my best to fit in with the men around me. On the way to the “flounder hole” we’d stop at a 7-11 to get ice and drinks and Dad would buy me a pouch of “Big League Chew” bubble gum, which was shredded and came in a pouch like chewing tobacco. Dad was a Levi Garrett man himself, until one day his dentist told him that his teeth looked great, but that his gums would have to go. He stopped chewing that day. Big League Chew was as close as I ever came to developing the habit. It gave me great pleasure when sitting on the bank around a fire with the other giggers who were smoking, or chewing and spitting, to pull out my pouch of Big League Chew and stuff a wad in my mouth and start blowing bubbles.

I haven’t been gigging in years and it’s more heavily regulated than it used to be, but I’d love to take my boys down to the coast and show them how. We might even be able to get my dad to join us.

Once again it would be three generations of Hodges men walking around in the dark, dodging stingrays, scouting for ships, blowing bubbles, and sticking fish. Just like old times.

Let’s go gigging!