re: Which one of you baws was shocking catfish

I did my thesis on Fish genetics, so I got to legally electrofish all over the SE, from Northern VA to Eastern Tennessee. Back in the day, our setup were a small Honda generator with a AC to DC converter on it and two probes made out of fiberglass fishing nets. The whole thing weighed close to 50 lbs. At the time I was 130lbs soaking wet.

One day, I got recruited to help out on a crew of forest service Biologists because the backpack shockers were scarce at the time. They had a pretty big crew including the big ole African American kid who was a summer intern for them. He must have been 6'5" or 6'6". Super nice guy. Funny thing was is he had the most country accent you'd ever want to hear. I mean, I grew up in a small town in NC, and he put my accent to shame.

I forget exactly where we were, but it was a medium sized trout stream somewhere in the mountains. When it was my turn to carry the backpack, I was working this pool that must have been 6'-7' deep. It had a large slab of slanted, under cut bedrock. I was doing my best to get the probes under the shelf when I noticed I was slipping down the slick slab. I instinctively tired to stop myself by putting the probes down, but the pool was too deep. I just knew I was going swimming. With a AC generator on my back, that wasn't a good prospect...

Right about the time I was past the point of no return, this giant paw grabs the top of my backpack frame literally lifts me up and set me down on solid ground. The big ole kid looked at me and said his a deep southern accent, "Boy, I thought you were going swimming!" I looked at him and said, "I did too!" They whole crew had a big laugh out of it. On a serious note, I likely would have been very badly injured a long way from medical help had he not saved me.

I worked a net the rest of the day....

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Generally speaking, flowing waters have less conductivity as they have less dissolved ions in the (the ions are constantly being transported out of the system). In a pond, the ions tend to collect and the devices actually work better in most situations.

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So the eBay Seller of the Catfish Shocker is likely misinforming potential buyers. We live on a lake and 3 nearby creeks are flowing into it near where we live. I imagine this device would work. The water is more stagnant until it rains but we also almost constantly see what looks like currents but that is more likely surface water being blown by wind.

I was thinking about buying one of these as an end of times prep only. I imagine these are illegal on our lake. I wouldn't want to eat fish out of our lake anyway based on the fish toxicity reports that tell us how many and what size of each species of fish you can safely eat per month. It would have to be desperate times to compel me to eat fish from our lake. I catch mostly crappie and bass from our banks and by boat but there are also catfish in the lake. I currently just throw them back .