 Fish and Breaks. This is one of my favorite things to eat in the world. Blackened catfish over cheesy grits. OSG makes some amazing grits and these catfish are so good. And that's why in today's video, we're going to be looking at building a very efficient, user-friendly, and cheap jugline to put more of these into the freezer. So let's go. All right guys, I'm sitting next to the Crispy Collector right now and I've made some noodles last night and we need to prove concept. So in a weird circumstance, my wife has said that she wants to go with me. She's never been in this boat. I don't think she understands how small it is. You know, she's been in the Silver Bullet. She understands that ride. So she's gonna come along with us, which should be an experience in itself. So this is our jug that we've built right here. It is the most simple basic construction I could think of. Just got to prove the concept and it's got a string that instead of attaching to the bottom, it runs through the foam and attaches to a toggle on the top. The toggles wedged in there. So I'm going to show you guys how I built this, but I just want to prove the concept first, make sure it works. I have a couple of concerns, but if those things don't arise, then this is going to be the most simple, easy thing ever. So let's get out of the water and let's see if these things float and stay attached and actually work and don't break. There's that beautiful rig. Are you ready for that, honey? I might get a little seasick in this. I'm already feeling it. Oh my goodness. Can you show me how to get in here? You just get in there, but watch your footing. I'm not. That's going to be like getting in a canoe. Oh my God. It's good balance. Good balance. Where are you going to sit? Back here? Yep. You just sit, find yourself a little, I got you a cushion there. Oh, can I sit right here? I'm going to sit right in the middle so I don't topple over. It's probably not a bad idea. All right. Let's see if we break down or not with the old perch. She's, uh, she's got some issues with the oil. Ready? Are you about to rip it? If it starts getting real, I got a life jacket to do back here. Okay, good. Slap on. Oh, yeah, you know, just busy weekend, pontoons, wakeboarding boats. Don't mind her. She's down here ripping. Let's give her a rip there, bud. All right. Oh, I got you that cushion. Well, she ran fine. Yeah, once we got to some flat. She ran. She ran good. I've been trying to run it hard and see if that will run some of this old gas out. Probably going to have to change the oil. Figure that whole situation out because my paddle, as you can see here, we get that out, show the folks at home. This is your paddle. That's my paddle. This is a jank. This is a rotting piece of wood. It's just like a, it's a snake whacking stick is basically what it is right now. But yeah, me and Lunker's got in the boat. I can't remember what happened, but I don't know. We hit the paddle and it, that's it. I think we have better antique paddles. Kind of need this to work. So anyway, we're going to drop some lines right here and then go run a little bit and see if they hold up. Came down and caught some bluga with the kids last night. So we got some bait that died last night in the bucket. So they're a little staunchy, but we'll see if we can make it work and see if anything wants to bite them. All right. So this is our rig. The nice thing about this is we can adjust it if necessary. So I'm going to make probably about 10 bottom anchored rigs basically and then I'll make some free floating rigs as well with lighter weights that I can just adjust. I put some some little cuts in the bottom here where I can put my line in and keep it nice and secured where it's not making a mess. And I've made some dropper rigs out of 30 pound mono. I'll show you guys how to do all this once we make sure this thing works. So we'll go ahead and bait these circle hooks up on our dropper rig. Oh yeah, that's got a nice big egg sack on it. Look at that. All right, there's one and we'll get another one. So we got an opportunity to get two fish or if you know a catfish takes one of them comes off. We'll have another opportunity. So I made these a while back. These are just concrete and I've got a clip at the bottom. So go ahead clip that on right now. We'll drop this in and we'll see what this thing does. It's rolling down very nicely. Okay, that's actually the bottom right there. So here's what's cool about this is I can take this pull that till it's pretty close to the bottom and I've got a loop tied on here and the knot that I'm using is a Marlin spike. So I'm going to show you guys how to do that after we get our our deal all set here. So that's going to go in the little crease and she's floating. She's good to go. The toggles that I'm using are actually cedar wood. I've cut off of arrows when I'm making arrows. So it's very light wood. It shouldn't want to fall out of that crack. So anyway, we're going to set up the rest of these right here or go run around, see if we get anything on them and come back see if they're all together. How do you know when you've caught a catfish? That thing will be moving around. That's the really exciting part. So you'll get close to it and you'll kind of see it bobbing and moving. I've made some others that are that tip up so it's like an indicator you see it and you already know that you have a fish on. These are just the basic version that when you get close to it, you'll see it kind of moving. You know, you got a fish on there. My main concern is if a big fish gets on and it starts pulling into that styrofoam. Is it going to hold? I've got tape around the bottom. So they should be all right. Actually, I don't think I taped the bottom. The other ones I have, the other ones I've taped around the bottom where I've made those cuts. And so if the line cuts into the foam and should hit the duct tape and hold theoretically. So big cat, we'll find out. We'll rig the rest of these, drop them and then we'll come back and see if they're still together. The lines have been set. So we got four of the deep ones out here. That's really all I want to experiment with right now. I mean, if these work, then I know the floaters will be just fine too. We're going to just run around kind of mess around with the engine, do a little sight seeing and then we'll come back here and an hour and see if we got any fish on these lines. Oh, that one's going, babe. That one's got that first one was getting tugged down for sure a bite. 100%. I see it moving though. Right? Oh, is it? Oh, yeah, it is moving. I think we got, we got one. We got one already guys. Okay. Oh yeah, he's going. Yeah, let me let me start the motor and we'll Oh, that means I have to move. We definitely got one on. That was quick. All right. You want to film babe? Give it a second. Those are circle hooks. So I don't know. I feel like it is moving. Or is it not? I don't feel like it's moving now. You don't think so? I think it is. Or is that us moving? I think it's moving honey. You think it's moving? Or is that us moving? It's so hard. It's moving for sure. I should be able to grab it. Yeah, grab it. One of our baits got cleaned. So we had a fish on. It's a good sign. Go ahead and just rebate this one before we go too far. Sometimes you get in a good area. By the time you get your last one down there, your first one's going off. Good sign, babe. I know you like that black and cat fish. That was delicious. Let's get some more of that. That's what we're trying to do out here. LFG catfish services. Only for you, my lady. That fish took the buoy and moved it probably 10 feet. So let's see how the top held up. How would it not get cut? Looks pretty good. They're good at that. The line did cut into the pre-cuts that I made, but it stopped at the duct tape. Let's drop it down again and see if we can get bit. Oh, it's moving. Oh, it's moving, baby. Oh, it's going, baby. This one's going. It's going to the other one. What's going on? Let's get a tangle up that other one. Oh, maybe not. Oh, it's going past. Look at this thing. No. Oh, oh, oh my gosh. This is a big one. This is a good test right here. All right. We definitely got one now. We were just leaving. That's kind of excited to go adventure. I looked back and this thing was just going to run over it. Oh, yeah, I feel one on here. Here we go, boys. Hopefully it's a catfish. Hopefully it's not a big turtle. It was running pretty fast. Oh, it's a good catfish. This is going to be a delicious blue cat. Whoo. Look at that big blue catfish. Whoa. This is a huge one. So wide. Let's go guys. They work. Babe, you just delivered. I just delivered that. That's one of those big ones. I was saying we can get like four meals out. Awesome. It's a big one. Circle hook did its job too. Yeah, they like to grunt. It is a grunt. Look at that guys. Whoo. It held up. We'll check it. Make sure everything's good to go. But that's exactly the size catfish. I was hoping to get these blue ones. That's what we had. I showed you at the beginning of the meal. Blackened. Unbelievable. Just great meat. I like the channel cats with the blues. They're just a little cleaner. Delicious meat. You're going to be so good. This thing's got barely fit here. I was going to say you should have brought a bear cooler. Oh my gosh. Brought a tiny little cooler. Well, as you'd expect in Mondos like this, like just trying to test out the concept. I will curl his tail and get his line. Do you have any ice in there? Yeah. Okay. Babe, I'm so excited. So this is where the line dug in. Did not rip the duct tape. I mean the top toggle. You can see right here where it did dig into the duct tape. If I hadn't put the duct tape on there, I think we would have had problems. That size catfish for this lake that I'm in. You know, that's a really big one. So I don't really anticipate. These things breaking. That is fantastic. Good job. Let's rebate this thing. Get it out there. That go. I'm pumped. After a nice joy ride, you know, SG or our back in our original spot here. Checking out the buoys right now. See if we've gotten any movement. They look to be in the same position. So I don't really don't think that we got one. But it's been long enough now. If we have one on there, they're probably just chilling on the line. They're not going to bob too much. So let's check them to see if we got any more catfish. Just saw it jump. I don't know if one just bit it or one has been on here. It's this is the farthest one out. It is going. You're right. Oh yeah. Okay. Well, we got another one on the line. We are cool. We might be really full now. Can I can I check you want to check it? I would love to watch you check it. I never thought in a million years I would be taking you fishing. All right. Throw the noodle in pull up on the line. You feel the fish throw the noodle in the boat. There you go. Oh yeah. He's running under the boat. Yep. I see it tie. Here we go. There's a channel cat. Good job. Good job. It ate the whole head. Okay. All right. Left handed. There you go. All right. Now open up the cooler. Throw this guy in there. That's a pretty good channel cat. You got to join his buddy. All right. Close him up. All right guys. All the lines are up. We didn't have any more fish on. Ended up with two catfish though. Pretty good for just proof of concept. Now let's go in the garage. Let's build some more. Y'all that was exciting to see the jugs perform. So now let's look at how to build these and let's start with the jug itself. The noodle. Okay. So what I did was I went and found some pool noodles. State of Texas. They got to be three inches wide. So these are pretty much exactly three inches wide and I can get four round 14 inch jugs out of one of these. So I paid $2.99 a piece. She's actually higher than I was anticipating they would be, but you know, when you break it down, it's really not that much per jug. I'm going to go ahead and cut one of these up and basically make one from scratch and show you guys how it works. First thing I'm doing is I'm just measuring. I've got a little tape measure that I've taped down on my workbench here. So I'm just going to go 14 inch all the way down the noodle here. All right, then cutting tool. Got ourselves a nice juicy one right here. The thing I love about this is just so simple. We'll just start cutting these up. While I'm cutting, I'm going to go ahead and make my top cut the slot for that toggle to sit in. So let me change the camera angle so you guys can see that I'm going to go in just a little bit. Maybe an inch. I'm just going to pluck those out. So it just makes a little groove in it like that down the middle. You could literally use sticks from the backyard or around the lake or wherever you're fishing. The I like to use these because it's very uniform. So it's going to fit in that groove nicely and uniformly, but you could use literally sticks from the woods or wherever. Now that's going to make a little split right there and that's a problem. So next we're going to take our tape and I'm just going to line that up right below the toggle. Make a full wrap now from here. If you're in a state where you have to put your dates and everything like that, you could just go ahead and make another wrap right here. Just stick a piece of tape that way you can write it. I put my my information on the top and then I'm putting the dates on a separate piece of tape. So when I can cross through that a bunch of times, I could just rip it off and not have to replace my my information on the jug every time. I'm just going to make four little cuts or two cuts with that makes four cuts. Just going to go in a little bit and that's just going to allow us to hold the line. When we're organizing the lines, wrapping them up. All right. So a little bit of space right there so you can tuck and you also want to have some space here that you can put your hook, hook points in. You can put them either above or below this, but obviously putting them in that tape is going to be rough. Guess what guys? You've got a joke like that's done that fast. And the reason is, you know, we're not using any thing on the inside. So like this device right here, this took a lot of time with the PVC going inside of here and the weight transfer system and gluing the pieces together. And yes, it is nice to see that whole system tipped up. But with this right here, it's just so simple and cheap. And if you screw one up, who cares? Like it, you know, it literally took me a minute to build this. Now here's the next thing you need to know and that's the main line and then the knot, the knot that's going to go on our stick here that is going to hold this whole thing together and that's pretty important, I would say. So let's move on to the line. Now for my Lake, I'm really not anticipating that I'm going to be fishing more than 25, 30 feet. 25 is probably max of the fish that we were catching today. We're around 15 to 18 somewhere in there. If I had to guess, so this is the line that I'm using. I can't remember the exact size. I will leave a link in the description. I've actually got a little Amazon store. You guys can check out of a lot of the things that I use as an outdoorsman just kind of go to things. So I've got a store link down below, but this is one of the things I commonly use, use it around the house a lot, use it in bushcraft. I use a lot of bigger style tarred bankline, but this is a smaller style, smaller size and it does have that little tar on it, little wax. Not really sure what's actually in there, but you will feel it on this line and I like that for keeping, especially if you're getting in the water, it keeps those frays from popping up. I'm going to take my wingspan is about six foot. So I'm going to go out four times. That's about 24, 25 feet give or take. All right, one more of those and that should cover me on most of the lakes that I fish. If we get really crazy, we're going out like 30 plus. I don't know. I'm not quite there yet, but I'm sure there are catfish situations that do call for it. But this will just, I don't want to put a ton of excess line on there because the next step we're going to do is probably the only drawback of this system. We'll try to get this line as straight as we can and we'll just stick it through the hole. I think by this far in the video you guys understand. You guys understand how this is working, but we're going to work through each step of just building it. So you know what you're doing. You can just break this down, watch it while you're building them if you need to. All right, so that's now through the top. Now today, what I did was I got out on the water and I basically had these things all the way out the max depth and then I checked the depth and I pulled it up and then that's how I set it. Now if you know the depth that you're going to be fishing, you can measure it out by the hand in the garage or in the boat before you even go out and you can kind of have an idea. I don't even have a depth finder on my boat, so I literally had to physically see what it was when it hit the bottom and then tie the knot and then tie off the excess because that's the only drawback of this thing. We're going to make a loop and then stick our toggle in it and this is a Marlin spike. So I'm going to go ahead and set this up about where I think that other one was around 18 foot. So I'll pull up a little bit. I'm going to make a loop in your line. I'm going to do this close up too so you guys can see it. I'm going to fold it over going towards the jug. All right. I'm not going the other way towards the tag end or the end of the line. I'm going towards the jug like that. Okay. And this is actually a really useful knot. You guys can use this on a ton of other stuff. I use it a lot of camping. Then take this end right here towards your jug. Okay. Jug end stick it through there. And this right here is what you're going to stick your toggle through. Okay. So when you pull it when you finish this not pull on the jug side when you pull on that jug side, it's going to cinch down. I can really feel it on my finger. If you pull from the other side, it's actually going to get looser. That's the beauty. That's not actually, but you pull on this side. It'll tighten up. It'll really cinch up and the other beautiful thing about this knot, what makes it a good camping knot among other things is you just pull it and it's out. It's done keeps your lines clean. You can reuse them. You don't have to worry about cutting your line and redoing it. So again, one more time folding it over towards the jug going to go towards the jug. Okay. I've got that loop right there. Now I'll actually take my toggle. Pardon my reach. Take the toggle, stick it in. Tighten it from jug side. All right. When you do it right, it should be pretty even on both sides. You'll have like a little knot on both sides. You just pop this out and it's pull it and it's perfectly straight. So lay it in that crease like that. And when pressure is coming from the fish, that thing is just going to wedge in there. It's going to get tighter and tighter. Now the only problem and this is why I wanted to test this today. The only problem that I could foresee rising is, you know, your typical jug that you buy or build the tie off is at the bottom. And so all the pressure is on something there at the bottom. This one, it's at the top. So I was thinking a big fish could pull through this this foam, but it didn't and actually even if it gets caught in one of those cuts that we've pre made in there for tying this thing up, it's going to catch on that tape and this rig is just so light that it's going to tip up and probably fall out of that crease and fish was going. I mean, you saw you saw how hard that fish is pulling today. So now the really nice part about this is we'll put it in one of those creases and that is going to make a little stopping point for for us to tie off on. So the big, you know, the biggest problem when you get a bunch of jugs is things will get kind of tangled up. Your lines will get loose and you get a bunch of them like a building. You want to make sure that everything is tight and neat. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to wrap this and I'm going to go up a few times, you know, four or five, six times and I'm going to come back four or five, six times going the opposite of the way. So that way when I drop this thing in the water, it's going to unravel nicely. We'll tie a loop on the end and now we can attach our mono rig to that. So you could go full braided system like this, use this line. I think it's thin enough. Honestly, it's not that off-putting to the fish, but I like the mono because it stretches give some more give fish is tugging on this thing. The mono is nice plus less visibility. So let's go ahead and tie up our dropper rig to attach to this before we do that. Let's Hank. So we got all this excess on the top. All right. We don't want that flopping around in the water. You could, but just to keep things neat. We're going to start at the jug end. If you've never hanked before, take Kalabanga, take your your thumb and your pinky like this. It's like this and you're going to do a figure eight, figure eight like that. And when you have a little excess line, you can wrap this up and we're going to tuck it in that hole. So second wrap, you're going to go behind that first one and that locks in the first one, then you can wrap on top of each other just making a nice little loop system there. And when you get close to the end, you just back one loop off go through here. And I did this on the water today, but it's obviously easier to do. If you know the depth, you're going to be fishing do it beforehand. Back that off and tie it and what we can do here with this excess is just stuff it in this hole. So on the jugs I ran today, I literally went to Walmart and got like the cheapest snap swivels monofilment. This is Ozark Trail Monofilment 30 pound. So this is like the cheap, cheap stuff. It doesn't tie up the best. There's definitely better monos out there, but you can use the cheapest of mono and be all right. Reason to 30 pound and you could go higher is it's going to be stiffer than using like 25, 20 and you know, bigger fish. Obviously we want to have bigger line, but also just the stiffness of this is going to aid in the dropper loop that we're going to be tying up here. If you want a real detailed look at this, I recommend watching cat fishing carp videos. He's got a ton of great knots for cat fishing and carp fishing and I actually learned this knot from watching his video and he's got a lot of great stuff. So if you want to see more detail on this really up close, you can go check out his channel. You're going to make a loop here in the line and you want to do even wraps. There's a couple ways you can tie it and I'm going to show you the way I learned it in this video. I'm going to do three loops on one end and three loops inside on the other. I'm actually going to put my finger in between where I start this next one. And the size of your dropper loop is going to be determined on how big this ring is right here that that you started with. Got three wraps on each side. I'm going to take this bottom section. I'm going to put it through in between the six wraps. So there's three on each side. I'm going to take this part right down. I'm going to start to pull pull from the sides and that's what you end up with right there. Now I'm just going to foot down from the other one. I'm doing the same thing. This time I'm bringing the other dropper loop through here as well. There's an easier way to tie this where you can like twist it up. So now we have two loops on our line. They're about a foot apart. Now I'm going to take one end. I'm just going to tie a loop for putting our weight on. This is a size number three barreled snap swivel. This is what's going to go on the top of our rig. I'm going to tie this on just using the little classic trialing knot. Works pretty well with this mono. Wet it, finish it up. The hooks I was using today were four odd circle hooks, which I think is probably a great size for if you're using cut shad. I was using cut bluegill in this case, but if you were going to go like full bluegill, you obviously want to go with with a bigger hook if you're using bigger bait. But just that medium size bait like we're using today for hot. So we're going to take one of our dropper loops. This is going to be a tight little squeeze. I can already tell you to get this palomar done. Should have made my loop a little bigger, but I think it'll still work. All right, we're going to have just enough room to tie our palomar. Slip that hook through the whole deal and then tighten it up. You could just slip the hook around that eye and go around without doing the full palomar, but it will slide around. But the nice thing about that dropper setup is, you know, it stands out away from your line. If you get too much line out here, it's going to slide down around your mono and get twisted up. So it's a it's a good balance to have, you know, a short loop on there that you can still tie your knot on with the palomar, but not have it so long so big that it's just drooping down and it gets tangled. So we've already already tied our loop on the end and we'll feed this one through and just go go around it. And if we want to change our weight later, we can just detach that off that loop and change the weight. So now all we have to do is is take our loop here on our main line attached to the jug put it on that snap swivel make sure you close it back and then we'll wrap this thing up going each way unravel nicely. Now we're starting to put our mono on here and I will put the hooks into the foam as I'm going. Now all we have is our weight. So we've got these little cuts on the end. I'm just going to slide the mono into one of those cuts and inside of this hole, we're going to stick our weight just like that. And this is how I'm storing them in a little milk crate. It's like that so that weight is putting tension on everything. It's not going to come out and when I'm ready to use it to top in with the business is already there and I can start unraveling it, put the bait on and drop it in. Another one of my big concerns today on if this thing was going to work or not was if the Marlin spike would hold tight enough on the toggle on the stick that it wouldn't slide around because potentially this is one of the flaws in the system potentially is this toggle could slide through and if it gets far enough where it will dip into that hole, then the whole rig could go through there. But that did not happen. I think keeping those little cuts in the side to make a wedge is pretty key for that. If you're pretty handy would not so you could also tie a clove hitch on there with the clove hitch. It's a little harder to get undone with the Marlin spike. It just pops right out so easily if you need to change the depth really quick. So if you had everything set you knew exactly where you wanted this thing to go didn't have to adjust it. You could put a clove hitch in there and it would wrap more tightly around the toggle and it wouldn't move at all. You could also add some supports on the sides of this toggle and prevent it from sliding. I'm not sure what the best way to do that would be but if you were going to really lock this thing down and make it full proof you could do that as well. But I wanted to try to make the most simple as possible most effective least gear used kind of jug and I think we did it right here guys. It works so I'm going to make a bunch of these. We're going to go out do some more jug fishing and try to bring a bunch of those big beautiful blue cats that blacken up in the pan so nicely back home. And so stay tuned for more catching cooks but I hope this helps some of you that are looking to get into jug fishing or maybe just want to try something different and stay tuned subscribe to the channel and I'll see you guys out on the water for another outdoor adventure.