Just looking for a "giggin' 101". My experience is limited to my childhood, where we used a 22 the head or caught em on rod and reel with a plastic frog. Figure some of y'all had a lot more experience. I have a 12' flat bottom I can maneuver around ponds in. Thanks
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School me on frog giggin'
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I never liked gigging with a barbed/clamp type gig. Barbs make a mess and clamps were never reliable for me. 22 short to the head or catch em by hand always worked best. We found that the old head lights work best(the one with the striped band) because that dimmer yellow light seemed to hold them very well.
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My brother (Johnpaul) and I go all the time on property we have or have permission to outside of Beaumont. We grew up doing this with our dad and all his drinking buddies growing up, some of my fondest memories. We grew up grabbing them with our hands, but you will quickly change your mind the first time you grab a frog that has a snake connected to its rear! We have one of those clamps, but they are HORRIBLE. Best gigs we have use our gigs are basically 4 straightened out fish hooks circled around a pole. You can buy them off the internet now fairly cheap. I know people are complaining of them making a mess, but come on, you are frog gigging, its a messy deal in the first place. We use a spotlight connected to a boat battery. We do the best in canals that have moss that comes to the surface that they can sit on and banks that have a couple feet of mud that is not under water with a few feet of can behind them. One spot hold ALOT more frogs than you think. A lot of the canals we run are only a few hundred yards long, but we make a run to the end and back, sit back at the beginning, drink a few beers then go back thru it again about 20 minutes later. We'll do this all night until we are happy with the numbers we have or until johnpaul has had a few too many and falls in the water. Here is a post from a couple of the trips we have had this year.
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Janey, from Lonesome Dove, taught me that if you're not careful, the frog legs will jump out of the pan! But back to the actual gigging.
I've tried the gigs that clamp shut, and they can't catch a cold in my experience. I prefer the barbed 4 prong gigs that you can find at most Army Navy shops.
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We always grab them by hand in South Louisiana. It seems to be much more fun and a challenge to catch them this way. Plus it gets pretty interesting when one of your buddies keeps missing them so you have something to tease him about. This is the only way I've ever done it. Most of the frogs we catch are on grass/Lillie pads near canal banks or on the very edge of the canal bank by the water's surface. This makes them pretty easy to pull up to in the boat. I do have some buddies that frog in an area where they have to get out of the boat and try to sneak up to the frogs on mud flats. Because it's more difficult to get close to the frogs the use a fabricated aluminum boiling pot paddle. It's your typical boiling pot paddle with the end bent so that when the shaft is at a 45 degree angle to the ground the flat side of the bottom of the paddle is flush with the ground. This method extends their reach a few feet and helps them strike the frog with the paddle harder and with more consistency. Then they just pick up the frog after striking it.
Also be sure to bring several bright lights (We usually have a spotter use a high powered q-beam and people grabbing with head lights ) because you want to keep light on the frog at all times. If you throw a shadow over the frog or accidentally move the light off of it the frogs will usually gone in a flash.
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