Fishing with Guns?
 

Is it possible? I thought I remember some guys from when I was younger, fishing with .22 rifles. They would wait for the fish to move up to spawn and blast away at them. It was a very small stream so there wasn't much room to miss.

Re: Fishing with Guns?
 

I can work.

Don't ask how I know.

E-A

Re: Fishing with Guns?
 

I don't know about guns, but you can fish with Dynamite.

Re: Fishing with Guns?
 

I think it could work and could be done..... Just don't try to explain it to a game warden in Texas. heheheh

Re: Fishing with Guns?
 

Maybe in some VERY shallow water. Most bullets really lose their power within the first foot or so of water. Have you ever seen the Mythbusters show about this one? It was pretty neat, they were firing rifle rounds into a pool and it was not getting any penetration hardly at all.

Re: Fishing with Guns?
 

Hand grenades work.

Re: Fishing with Guns?
 

Be very careful if you try to go fishing with your guns.

Many here have lost entire firearms collections during fishing / boating accidents.

Re: Fishing with Guns?
 

Bow/arrow is better, as trying to collect your quarry can be a circus when "fishing" with a rifle.

I've probably never killed more than 10k alligator gar with a 22. There's no better way to learn to point shoot, and in a hurry!

Re: Fishing with Guns?
 

yup we used to shoot gar, carp and turtles off a high bank of the Brazos when I was a kid.... Man that was fun...

Re: Fishing with Guns?
 

Ahhh, yes. The famous DuPont lure!

Re: Fishing with Guns?
 

HAHAHAHA

I'll remember that!

E-A

Re: Fishing with Guns?
 

I have some young friends that shoot Chinese Jumping Carp on the Missouri with Shot Guns. They stand out front on the Gigging platform and cruise up river shooting at them as they jump. They got a couple--not many.

They were stopped by a ranger and questioned--told him striaght up what they were doing-----OK men but be careful.

They are hated by the MO Dept of Conservation.

E-A

Re: Fishing with Guns?
 

Bow and arrow, with the rope attached to the arrow (like Burt Reynolds from Deliverance). I don't know the actual name of this device.

Re: Fishing with Guns?
 

Parallax is your enemy. So is ricochet which is a real possibility. I would also be concerned with the feasibility of retrieving the kill as well as insuring the shot actually killed instead of mortally wounded the prey.
I've spent some time shooting turtles out of ponds with the intent of reducing their population so that fish populations would increase. In this instance parallax is a non-issue as the turtles surface and retrieval is a non-issue as you just want them dead not on your plate.

Re: Fishing with Guns?
 

Parallax is an issue. I found that I had to aim about 4 inches below the fish to hit them, depending on the angle and the distance the fish was below the water.

Never had a ricochet, but I was shooting down from a bridge or high bank at a pretty steep angle. It wouldn't work at all on a flat angle.

Re: Fishing with Guns?
 

True experiences:

• :banana: When I was a boy I got really good at judging paralax and killing minnow and crayfish up to 4-6" underwater with a Crossman BB gun.
  
• When I was working on a shrimp boat (in 1974) we always carried a general purpose "boat gun" offshore, much like a fire extginguisher in a way, a part of the vessel so to speak. It was, for better or worse a Marlin .444, a lengthend .44 mag case with a 240gr SPFN bullet. I trtied them on big 6-8' long blacktip sharks trailing our vessel, just inches underwater -- without exception the most they would do was bloody the shark -- unless I pulled him to the surface as with a spanish mackeral on a 6" hook and chain on a ski rope, and 1 gallon chlorox jug for a float ... it was perfectly acceptable sport in 1974 ... attitudes did a 180 on sharks, sorry. Anyway if I could pull them up to the top of the water and tie off on the stern cleat ... that .444 would blow the scat out of them blowing clear through and leave a quivering mass. I suspect the 2400fps FNSP bullet was exploding on the water's surface, but somehow penetrating a live moist shark's tissues VERY effectively if out of the water.
  :confused_ma:
  
• Later at about age 27 I was fishing from a canoe in Southern swamps and I had a Super BlackHawk .44mag on my hip -- deer were in season on this private hunt club and it was for boars or gators -- I caught a huge 3 1/2' gar on my 6lb line while using a 5" floating Rapala, a favorite lure! When I finally got the gar to alongside the boat without THINKIN I pulled my .44mag with 7-1/2" barrel and cocked the hamer and touched off onto his toothy gills from maybe 18" away --
  :36_1_25:
  -- I lived and was stunned and wet AND UNHURT, the canoe remained barely upright as about a gallon of wather dumped on my head a half second later, boat rocked to the gunnels, the gar and Rapala were just GONE, no sight, not a scale, a mystery to this day, I suppose they ATOMIZED into pink mist
  :s15:
  like elemental vapors -- but don't try this in your canoe. I suppose it is Beavis and Butthead gunplay while alone one day, and I'm admitting stupity on my educational/survival skills path.

Avoid my mistakes but learn from them. I often explore things. I bet I can kill a bass or carp with a .22 40gn RN pretty good on shallow water at the right angle -- IF I HAVE TO but...

In many situations firing into water is illegal so ... I prefer to swim with the fish and just use my 9mm… a simple solution that works, they say. I'm kidding of course ... you know.

Re: Fishing with Guns?
 

I believe you can fire a .22 lr underwater without blowing up the barrel........you know, for bass hiding under the dock.

Re: Fishing with Guns?
 

I'm not sure if you can fish with guns, but I know for a fact that you can sink floating turds with guns.

Re: Fishing with Guns?
 

I got to add ... my favorite caliber combo as a "fishing gun" might be a Ruger Single Six or reasonable equivalent with a .22LR and .22magnum cylinder. It was GREAT for carrying on a canoe or small boat and plenty cauurate enough to drill a fish if I ever had to.

One of the best things was the CCI shot capsules in .22 and .22 magnum ... the tiny #12 shot will dispatch a snake, rat or small varmint that falls or flips into the boat and NOT BLOW OUT THE BOTTOM OF YOUR BOAT - it works - safer than a whack with a paddle and a quick, accurate POW blows em away! Snakes hang from trees, often moccasins in the south.

And yet the next 5 shots in line can be say, .22mag 40gr FMJ at about 1500fps in a pistol maybe. This should be a good penetrator to take out even a 7' shark's brain stem if aimed right. Use .22 LR for food fish on survival maybe. But my limited experience says, they DO OFTEN SINK WHEN SHOT...

In stainless steel, the Ruger Single-6 would be my perfect general purpose freshwater "fishing gun" - except in grizzley country of course! Offshore I'd take a .30 cal rifle semi auto and fmj rounds, fish are secondary concerns of mine when over 50 miles out to sea. Just talkin' my opinion, thanks! :smile:

Re: Fishing with Guns?
 

Since you, Koy, confessed, I will confess also.

I moved to Florida once so I was a newbie down there. I didn't know about the Aligator gar.

One day I'm fishing in the small pond on the property of the townhouse communitiy that I had purchased in, when low and behold I caught one. They take your bait slowly, as you know, so if you are fishing for bass (which take bait quickly) you never notice it until the Gar has slowly run off with it.

I had never seen, nor heard of, nor even imagined in my wildest dreams such a fish as an alligator gar!! They look prehistoric. I imagined in my newbie little mind, that perhaps what I had caught was UNIQUE and that I should preserve it in case it was the result of some sort of nuclear genetics thingie.

And here is the point, and the punchline of the joke:

I put it on a stringer!! :rose:

(When I think back on how silly that was, I have a great chuckle on myself. What if you re-discovered a prehistoric creature and nobody was around to see it? Bwaaah.. this was my thinking... )

Re: Fishing with Guns?
 

Pretty cool gpond! I've never hooked an alligator gar, but they are a very awesome looking fish! Nat Geo channel had a piece about catching big alligator gar in Texas (Bravos River, IIRC), very cool! I've caught plenty of common gar when I lived in Keokuk, IA, fishing above the dam. Here's my gar story, I had been fishing about a couple hours and all I was catching was gar and I was getting PO'ed. The bank in front of me was littered with expiring gar and an old black guy came up to me and said "You gonna keep dem gar?" I told the guy, "They're all yours, if you want them". He thanked me profusely and gathered up about a dozen fish. To this day, I have no idea what he wanted them for, they're almost all bone, as I understand.

Re: Fishing with Guns?
 

Continuing the garfish tales - for you Ag Man and gpond and anyone who hunts them :biggrin:... they're lots more fun on a flyrod and easily fall for white, long shank, deerhair or feather streamers with a bit of silver flash, often tossing the hook or snipping the line with the bony long jaws ... that's OK and it's much more fun than shooting them ... and then when they tire sufficiently just grab them at the center of mass and swiftly lift the scaly sucker out... That's if'n they're 'runts' like this one I'm shown below holding from MANY years ago when I had lots of foolishness left.
:beer:
Too bad it's apparently the end of the world as we know it going on around us - we could just go fishin otherwise and have good times - with or without a good gun to pierce the waters... and yet I've learned sometimes a good ol' .44mag is TOO much ... I used to be crazy, now I'm frightfully become sane! Sad times now to await the coming REAL crazy days. :bear_cry: Oh well. Life is but another garfish sometimes. All in HOW WE SEE IT.:bear_thumb:

Re: Fishing with Guns?
 

ruger .44 mag for the barn door sized halibut we once in a while hooked off kodiak island in the shelikoff strait. pull up to surface on longline, gaff by one guy, shoot brain, gaff with another guy, and haul on deck. big fish like that could really hurt if brought up live and thrashed your legs with its tail. back in the younger and dumber and full of cummer days.

Re: Fishing with Guns?
 

That's pretty funny....

Re: Fishing with Guns?
 

Ya sound like my kind a guy mike......

(I editted out the cummer part) ha ha

Re: Fishing with Guns?
 

Re: Fishing with Guns?
 

Re: Fishing with Guns?
 

What would the girth and weight of an 8-10 be?

Re: Fishing with Guns?
 

When I first moved to Florida, I went out once with a guy who was "hunting" snook down in the Everglades. These big snook would be cruising the canals alongside the road and throwing a visible wake... these guys would drive along looking for the wake in the canal... then they would plink a rock near the other bank to steer the fish towards them. When the fish got close to the bank, if there was no car coming, they would pop it in the head and jump in and throw it on the bank. I really didn't understand anything about snook at the time, other than that they tasted great so I didn't realize just how big (or protected) these fish were. It was only after seeing a much smaller fish on the cover of Florida Sportsman magazine that I realized that those 4 footers were pretty nice sized snook. Oh and a .22 wouldn't do it. Their heads were too hard.

Re: Fishing with Guns?
 

Thanks for answering a question I've had for 30 years! I seem to remember that folks up here do that with smaller Northerns, as well.

Re: Fishing with Guns?
 

I'd be concerned with the bullet skipping on the surface of the water --- like a rock --- and hitting something on the other side of the river. As I understand it, this is why you're never supposed to shoot at an animal standing in front of a lake. If you miss, the bullet could skip on the water and end up anywhere.

Re: Fishing with Guns?
 

Didn't you guys see that episode of Myth Busters? Turns out that the faster the bullet the worse it performs in water. By the time you get up to 3000 fps, bullets just fragment under the shock. Subsonic hard cast bullets do the best.

Re: Fishing with Guns?
 

Your fear is well-founded. I have personally seen the effects of watching the round skip then richochet back towards the shooter off a rock face elsewhere across the body of water (i.e. not always straight across.)

Re: Fishing with Guns?
 

Some pictures for my friends at GIM ... I like to share memories some days ... please just ignore me. I'm just babbling along again... :smile:

Picture one is back in '74 when I OD'd on Jimmy Buffet and dropped out of architecture school to work on a 73' shrimper that went out 3 weeks / in 1 week and finally the captain beat me up ... but I did shoot a few sharks as demonstrated by copius blood on the deck... one day we drug in one of my dead shark carcasses in the nets ... crabs had built little cave dwellings as they devoured the 3 day old dead shark ... I was elected to dump the body overboard and it was kind of stinky as I recall now. I'd thought I was smart but I was dumb.

Picture two is a 60" (5-foot) long baracuda. The boy in the pic flipped out and cried in terror when I gaffed it for his Daddy and smacked it once with my Louisville slugger ashe 14" billy drilled out with a 1/2" bit and epoxied in 3oz of lead birdshot - a very deadly weapon in 'trained hands' but it can knock a hole in the floor otherwise! ( I wouldn't know) but no gun was needed and this is a very dangerous fish. And any big sharks in that little boat? No -- I always cut the line! I never carried a gun since I was more afraid of the USCG or FL Sherrif's Shore Patrol than other fishy dangers.

Picture three is Alaska along either the Copper or New Halen river. I did'nt fish with a gun in Alaska of course - but I DID fish WITH A GUN ... I guess ya know what I mean. This was typical everyday bear encounters over a 3 month summer of guiding. I personally never had a problem but I had a .44 Super BlackHawk too. I WISHED FOR A DOUBLE ACTION THOUGH!

Fishing with guns... I try and contribute where I can ... thanks! :bath:

Re: Fishing with Guns?
 

Excellent stories and pics Koy!
:applause_

Re: Fishing with Guns?
 

I've caught a fair number of barracuda but never on purpose. It usually happens when you are trolling near structure. Mostly I just want to get them off the line but it seems every time I catch one it is totally fowled in a $30+ lure. You then have to close and personal with them to get all the treble hooks disengaged and you really don't want to do that with a thrashing fish. I carry an "attitude adjuster" on board too.

I've done a lot of diving and saw them all the time but they never bothered me.

Re: Fishing with Guns?
 

Are baracuda's really that aggressive?

Re: Fishing with Guns?
 

FYI -- I'm not concerned with cudas watching me in the water while diving, they are not aggressive but curious and seemingly territorial as they watch their chosen attack zone. They just lurk when I'm underwater. If you're over a reef you can bet they lurk a foot under your boat, so don't swish a slimy hand to the water and wash... and I still avoid jewelry and shiny stuff on my body when diving, just in case.

But it's when you bring them OUT of the water that they can get very dangerous.
a bit of info: http://www.uga.edu/cuda/attacks.html

I'm not making this up but... people have had cudas jump AT THEM after hooking or bringing them to the boat and then inflict over 200 stiches to repair lacerations. They can and have flown at boaters like a tossed chainsaw, have many times before, really. I'm SURE to wear them out TOTALLY before I get a big one to the side for gaffing.

The one shown in my picture above leaped out of the water and flew about 14-16' lengthwise and maybe 10' up vertically -- I SWEAR, all just about one second after my man set the hook, he went FULL THROTTLE ESCAPE MODE. He almost leaped OVER my small boat! He missed is by maybe a few feet, so full of vinegar! I've NEVER seen sharper teeth than a cuda has, they cut a baitfish in half like sissors and often come back to eat it, like a missle when it launches is that torpedo baracuda!

I seldom ever wanted to kill them, or almost any sport fish, but the man who hired me was so thrilled with it, he had me kill it. He was from Scotland where they keep skulls as mounts and trophies of sport. He later boiled the head and left it for ants to clean, bleached it with peroxide and reassembled the skull and mandibles with glue. He flew it home after fishing with me a few day more. He drank a bit o whisky with me, tipped well, and seems he made cabinets for a living, fine stuff he made, as a custom hand-crafter.

The best and maybe only way to catch a cuda on a lure as I usually do is reeel as FAST as you possibly can past the cuda... If the lure is not running fast from him, he thinks it must be a fake! ... like a cat the escaping lure triggers his killer impulse and he hits on the run and never stops like a rocket whooosh! Musky fishermen have not really lived yet until they do it on salty water!

Baracuda fishing, it was fun. It brought adventure on slow fishing days. BTW, I'm intentionally not showing you my pretty fish I've caught now -- this thread is I presume to discuss the kind of nasty fish that may involve the use of deadly force like a gun. Would I ever rather shoot a cuda in the head with a .22mag pistol, rather than just gaff and then club him? ... Not unless he was a little bigger than this ......or the boat was a little smaller :s10: Thanks for askin'

Re: Fishing with Guns?
 

Back in the 80's my girlfriend and I went skinny dipping in a local bar pit. These pits were dug for sand and gravel over 20 years ago and then filled up with water and are loaded with fish, particularly small blue gill sunfish. With no fresh water stream or creek feeding the pits, there is very little fresh nutrients that flow into the pits, so the fish are hungry all the time and they can be vicious in attacking anything they perceive as food such as a mole or sore or other tender body parts-- they kind of behave like piranahs. Anyway, we were having a large time "swimming" when the blue gill attacks started. They seem to favor her over me, but the bites I was getting were very uncomfortable to say the least. She finally had enough and exited the water declaring that she was not getting back in with those vicious fish. Not wanting the fun to end so soon, I went to my truck and retrived my AR-15 SP1. I then took some leaves and dirt and threw it on the water. The blue gills rushed up to the suface of the water, thinking that food had just landed. I shot a quick 3 shot burst into the school of fish. Blue gills were floating everywhere. We must have pick up 20 or more and threw them out on the bank for the racoons to eat. We then continued with our "swimming" with no further interruptions. The bullets did not kill the fish, but the concussion from the 3300 fps 55 gr. bullet either killed or stunned the fish long enough for us to throw them out on the bank. I sold that AR-15 SP1 when the prices got so high for a pre-ban AR-15. I wish I had it back now.