Well big for me anyway. In northeast Oklahoma this week and caught this Gar. Toothy critters!
Big Gar
- Thread starter WaterDawg
- Start date
Great question. The only way to catch them is to tangle their teeth in nylon string. Their mouths are too hard to hook. Believe me we tried. The lure is looped nylon string attached to a steel ring. No hook. They attack it out of anger. Big fun!
We use to catch them by using small hooks #12 with hunks of pan fish. Use a float. when they take the bait the float usually skims along on the top of the water, then it stops while the swallow the bait, wait about a min. That's when to set the hook. The mouth is much softer in the back. 15-20 lbs. mono works just fine. We just did it for the fun of it, never found them to be very good eating.
That makes sense. They kept grabbing our top water bass lures but wouldn’t swallow it and we could never hook one. In town, we got the gar lures from a local tackle shop. Their hide is like armor so cleaning was really hard. The flavor was good, but it was tough. Probably won’t keep one again.
Some Indian tribes use to use their hide as armor. And make arrow heads out of scales.
I had a good friend who would pickle them. A little went a long way.
The ones we caught were common gar. The Alligator Gar gets like ten feet long and they catch them by trolling the nylon head with a spinner at the front of it. Big ones in the Red River and bigger lakes in the southeast. A ten footer would be like hooking a marlin.
