Fishing Techniques That’ll Keep You Alive When All Hell Breaks Loose

fish wall trap

Learning a variety of techniques in order to feed yourself when SHTF is of vital importance. Even if food isn't an absolute priority right away, you never know how long you'll be stuck in your survival situation.

Fishing is an excellent way to keep yourself fed, and for some of the most effective fishing techniques you'll ever need to know, check out the tips below.

Some of these techniques are a bit rougher than normal techniques, so please bear this in mind. The act of survival should trump the local game laws anytime, whether you are trying to get back to civilization after being lost, or bugging out because of the breakdown in civilization.
First, you need a water source. A stream or river is the most desirable, and you will need to think like a fish to get the most out of this information. Your primary goal is to collect fish and keep them alive so you don’t waste energy unnecessarily. It’s likely that you will be best served along a river while looking for a way out of a desperate situation. Water attracts people, and rivers have water. Generally speaking, follow the river to civilization. While you trek however, you need food, so begin making the preparations to catch some.
For those who came prepared
Set a control line (hopefully with the paracord you also brought in your kit), and attach it across a narrow, fairly shallow, portion of the river to two opposing trees. From this line, hang down leaders (pre-cut, pre-sized pieces of line with hooks attached to the ends) so that they float a couple inches or so down into the water. The fish swim directly into their path when bait is attached.
The narrowness of the placement will keep fish funneled into the path of the hooks, so you will be able to spread the hooks 8-14 inches apart and have a reasonable expectation of catching fish.
The fact that there is a passivity built into the technique means your time is spent doing other things, and the fish aren’t scared off by your movements in or near the water, or by you looming over them.
The full-time deployment means that it’s just a waiting game until you get something to eat.
Turn over a log and find grubs, worms, or even flying bugs to bait your hooks. Anything like that will work, but try to make it as natural as possible.
This is the simplest method, and can be quite effective if you packed your survival kit. However, just because it’s easy, it shouldn’t be a foregone conclusion that it will be all that you need.
You can fashion fish hooks out of just about anything, including a piece of hardwood. Bones from previously caught fish, bone pieces from a carcass on the ground, natural thorns, and pieces of scrap metal you may find near the riverbanks can all serve the purpose. The hook doesn’t need to be fancy. Remember, the goal is to lodge the sharp object into a spot on the fish, preferably in the inside of it.
You can use straight pieces of wood shaped like a beefy version of a toothpick to create a fish hook that, once swallowed by a fish, is very difficult to dislodge, even though a hook design isn’t a natural part of the equation. Use what you must to catch the fish for food, up to and including the following resources.

Natural Poisons
While poisoning shouldn’t be practiced outside of a survival scenario, you can use natural poisons in shallow pools of water to kill a generous amount of small fish in a short period of time. What do I mean by “natural” poisons?
The following things are readily available (depending on geographic location) to poison fish, yet are usually harmless to humans.
In large enough quantities, young nut husks from walnuts can poison fish.
Lime, which can be made by burning seashells and crushing them up, can also poison fish in shallow pools.
Setting Up a Fish Screen
Take three sticks of substantial size (2 inches in diameter will work), and lay them out on the ground about 8-12 inches apart. Weave supple, sapling branches (which are thin), in and out of the three sticks, so that the combination forms a wall of wood with obvious space for water to flow through.
The tension caused by the sapling’s flexibility will keep the three sticks in place and, if needed, you can strip thin strips of the bark from young saplings to tie down the different pieces. The thin strips can even be combined and braided to create a makeshift cord to use as a low-strength rope. Create enough screens (7-12 of them) to make a substantial fence line in the water. You will anchor these fences by sticking the ends of the three sticks into the sand or mud at the river bottom.

Start on one side of the river at a narrow spot (make sure it’s down current from your baited leader hooks) and cut in perpendicularly for the first screen and then angle the rest so they mimic the flow of the water, until at the other side of the river, you complete the fence by attaching them to that river bank also.
Fish will not know they’re being obstructed as water flow will still be normal (remember it’s flowing in between the sapling branches like a screen).
Fish will be corralled into the far corner of your “fence line,” which can then be closed off and your fish kept alive by leaving them in the water until you need one.
A significant amount of fish can bet gathered this way, and you should check often to be able to corral more and more of them.

Create A Fish Wall
A more active approach might be achieved by damming a river a few feet past a bend so the fish don’t realize that the water flow has been impeded. They swim straight into the dam and then you (lurking on the banks nearby) can spear or even grab them.

In order to truly expect to survive, you have to let go of any idea of fairness or good sport. If an animal's life, or even multiple animals as in the case of many of the techniques above, stands in the way of your own, you need to set aside your “humanity” and take the threshold of the predator our species evolved to become. After all, we didn't climb to the very top of the global food chain just to feel guilty about wiping some fish off the map in order to survive. Keeping that in mind, it's also important to only use these techniques when you absolutely have to.

For more skills like this visit Eco Snippets.

Featured Image via Tim Jones/Flickr


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