Ill tell you one thing about primitive fishing. If you are in a spot where fishing is very important... PLEASE.. !.. dont screw with the bears.
 
Anyone ever hear of Timothy Tredwell? What a stupid idiot! He thought bears were cute and cuddly and thought it was all Disney, and he was stupid. He even told kids not to be afraid of bears. He stayed in Alaska for two years with his stupid girlfriend and they got mauled. Even better, it was caught on tape! Really nasty, listening to them screaming.. Do a google search, I hear theyre making his story into a movie.

you can take the husks of either black walnut or horse chestnut grind them into a powder and put them into the water then wait drown stream fish will start popin up because the powder sucks the oxygen out of the water

the poision isnt that strong and i only sugest doing it for survival situations or if you have som hungry friends. also youre suppused to do it in a damed area or a pool

is it like the brazilian spear?

...and it's not primitive.  It works though.  I made one after seeing Ray Mears in Samoa (where they use it.)  I used an ash branch, and carved a groove instead of making a tube.  You'd be better off using a bow or atlatl if the water isn't deep enough to swim in and see through - the Hawai'ian spear sling is intended for underwater use.

A bow will be better.
 
By the way,can a bow be used underwater?

Bow cant be used underwater. The limbs would be too restricted moving in such a viscous environment and beyond that, they would become about 30% moisture and then rot, eventually. Spears are good underwater, though.

That's why modern materials are better in this case.Fibreglass bow won't rot.

  I'd have to say a net would be the safest bet...just not in the least bit easy to make.  What about GAFFING!
Its awesome...just a big hooked stick...wait...and YANK!

If you have been lucky hunting rabbits or other small animals like that, you can use the skin to make a fast net. By cutting. I have made a scedule, the closer together the cuts the bigger the net will get. The length of the cuts will decide the size of the mazes. You will have to experiment, (with a piece of paper before you need it of with a leaf when in the wild) how to make the cuts to be most effective.
 
Willeke
 

i once saw a carp so i went and tryed to tickle it got it out the water but it was dead already

Quote from I am Hellfire   on Sep 1^st, 2005, 12:03pm:

 
 
You're saying something a bit different than what I've read about him. From what I've read, he was a heroin addict that quit using and went to alaska to get away from his problems. The he lived there for upwards of 10 years with the wildlife and learned the bears' limits and eventually became part of the environment. The bears knew him, and weren't about to attack him unless he provoked them. He considered them his family and they just tolorated him as they would a large rock. Then he brought his girlfriend up there with him. She was frightened of bears, and they did not return to the place he was originally. The bear that attacked them was old and hungry, and it was almost time for it to hibernate. It was desperate for food.
 
He and his girlfriend weren't really stupid, he was just a very odd person. And in the wrong place at the wrong time.
 
Or at least, that's what I've read.

woops. I meant to write ten years and not two years. hmmm.. Well, thanks for the correction.

So?  The guy liked bears, he was dumb, he died, it's evolution.  Don't tell other stupid people not to play with bears - let's try and thin out the population of complete and utter no-brainers, rather than encourage them.

Quote:
 
Hopfully he had no offspring.  

Is there such a thing as primitive fish nets?  I like Willeke's skin net, but is there a way to weave nets from other materials in the wild?

If you can make cordage, you can make a net.  Native American tribes in the north east used them a lot in the lakes - lime (basswood) bark was the preferred material.  I've used willow bark to make small nets before.  I'm not great at making nets, and it had different sized holes, but it would definitely be serviceable.
  Apparently, you shouldn't use rawhide to make nets.  The hide will become slippery and fish will either slip and slide through the gaps or the knots will come undone, and the fish will get through that way.

That's interesting.  Clever.  A crate-type trap would not be difficult to contruct using hazel or willow.  Or bamboo.  Limited use, though.  Thanks for sharing that piece of information.

Indeed.

I am more interested in you telling us the short version of this article. Or any things you can remember which did stand out when you red it.
 
Willeke.
 
PS, It is hard to impossible to get hold of backissues of forreign magazines, at least for me.

anyway here is a good one i cant belive i forgot take a hollow log put some kind of thin mesh on one side and put in the bottom of a lake. in three hours check there will be fish in it

Ouch.  That sounds quite horrible.  I can understand you never eating fish again.

The bill?  You pay more for boney fish?

yes indeed i hope you are better too.

make sure you chew the bones next time then the only injury you get is bones sliding between your teeth and gums

I am glad to hear that. I hope you will recover completely soon.
 
Willeke

Quote from ben_banned   on Sep 1^st, 2005, 11:30am:

 
I'll say this - I LOVE SPEAR FISHING!!!!!

Sea fruits, anyone?
 
This morning we had to go for a diving to test our newest students, they're under examination to get their 1st grade scuba diving license.
We went on a reef nearby and after about 1 hour of examination, students get back to the boats and me and a friend of mine dived again... to fish!
That reef has plenty of life, and it's a source for a particular type of sea fruit: the so-called "Tartufi di mare", or Sea truffles in English (don't know if you call them this way!).
Fishing them is not legal, and you can buy one of them for around 5 bucks. But since we found a cave in that reef that has hundreds of these tartufi, we adopted a careful fishing politics: never fish more than 15 of them during the entire year, and pick only the biggest ones, so that the younger ones can grow and prosper.
I resumed this post because this is a very primitive way to fish: we had our scuba diving equipment, but you can go underwater in apnea and still fish the tartufi by picking them with your bare hands, it just take a bit longer to get 15 of them.
Once you got enough, you just cut them with a knife and squeeze them to eat the internal part. All very primitive  
Here're some pics:
 


This's a typical tartufo. It's 100% similar to a rock, so how do you recognize it? You touch it, and if it's soft then it's a tartufo; otherwise it's a rock (which is a bit harder to munch).
 

You cut it... careful, it will squirt water!
 

...and here's what you get! This particular tartufo had 3 living beings inside, and you can see how the central one, pale orange, is different from the others: it's older than the other two, and this makes it unedible.
 

A close-up of a tartufo.
 

Another one; I told you we only fish the biggest and oldest of them, to preserve the species. This was huge!
 


Mom using her finger to pull out the tartufo, and showing the red side of it. I prefer to squeeze the tartufo in my mouth and eat it this way, even if it's a bit less hygienical.
 
Add lemon if you want and here's a true delicacy  
Greetings,
Mauro.

Yes, it looks like a brain, but its taste is 100 times better than brain  
Greetings,
Mauro.

It depends, it's one of these classic foods that you love or hate. My friend hate it, while a new instructor that ate it today for the first time found it irresistible.
Its taste is strange, at the beginning you just feel like you're drinking a glass of sea water, but it soon turns into a bitter flavor and it leaves you a refreshing feeling in mouth  
Do you have similar sea fruits in America?
Greetings,
Mauro.
 
EDIT: and on a side, while I had to add lemon and a bit of oil to brain just to enjoy some flavor, I don't like adding lemon to these sea fruits, I love them as they are, nature.

Quote from Rat Man on May 7^th, 2012, 3:56pm:

 
I've never had the courage to eat an oyster, so maybe that's part of the issue right there  

As a boy we used to make fish traps out of willow branches using braided willow bark to bind the branches together. They worked best if you caught at least one fish and used its guts to bait the trap. We'd lay the traps into the running water of a river where the water was semi-shallow and swift; weight the traps with stones and leave them for a day or two. Fish trips were never a way of getting an immediate catch but if you were patient you would catch enough fish to not be hungry. Sometimes we caught so many trout that we'd have to smoke them right away as we couldn't eat them all. I imagine that ancient man, with waters more plentiful than now had a near endless supply of fish to cure for the long winter.

Primitive fishing.... I used to do primitive fishing.  Mid-60s.    I had a level-wind baitcasting reel that was made of solid brass.  A bait-casting rod made of fiberglass...
Collection of lures (they call 'em "crank-baits" now) that weighed in at about 1 ounce each...
 
Lines were braided nylon.
 
No Kevlar, no carbon fiber, no snazzy Japanese aluminum reels...No fish-finders.... I tell ya, it was rough.
 
To get your fly line to float, you had to smear it with a greasy "dressing", and if you wanted a proper tapered leader you had to make your own by knotting sections of increasingly-smaller-diameter mono together with "blood knots".
 

Mauro, we have a lot of wild edibles, a lot of which taste pretty nasty unless you grew up with them. I grew up in the woods so that's what I know, but I'm sure if you lived more on the southern coast, you'd know some kind of odd tasting fish or crustacian.
 
I have a friend that hiked the applachian trail with little more than a sleeping bag and a knife (he's over 50 now). Most of his food came from foraging and and he did some fishing as well. He said spear fishing was very difficult, I believe him.
   I think if I was in a situation when I needed to do some primtive fishing, I'd try to find some old bottles (or if you had to do it primitively, logs or branches could be used) and tie some line and baited hooks to them. The more hooks in the water, the better. This way I could spend my time spearing frogs or just doing camp chores while the lines were in the water.

Ladies & gentlemen, here it is, the Italian "nassa":
 

 
It's a trap that consists of a rectangular frame made of iron rods and coated with a net; it has a circular entrance made of a thin iron wire.  
Smaller iron wires departs from the circular one and are grouped together to make something that looks like a funnel; in short, they reduce the entrance's diameter and prevent the cuttlefish to escape (he gets hurted against the iron tips if he tries).
Some small laurel branches are put at the end of the frame, because cuttlefish get mad with laurel's flavor, and a black plastic bag is put there too, because cuttlefish like dark and shady areas.
 
1 - Iron frame;
2 - net (it covers the whole frame);
3 - entrance;
4 - rope to pick up the nassa;
5 - black plastic bag;
6 - laurel branches.
 
Greetings,
Mauro.

Please do.  You may have noticed that the people who come here regularly have a lot of intrest in those kinds of subjects.  And if they don't like living off the sea or land, most like to cook.  And we all like to eat.

IF I don't have time on my hands, I would lay simple wicker traps (the U.S. Army survival manuals have some easy examples). If I had my choice, I would go spear fishing with my Hawaiian spear. Despite being about 6.5' fully extended, it collapses to a handy 3', making it a permanent part of my pack. I have had plenty of practice, so the only difficulty is locating the fish.

Not in the "nassa", because it's a trap made for cuddlefish only. I like that trap because it does not consent unnecessary and unintended killing.
But there're other traps for other fish, like another one which purpose is to catch lobsters (and on a side, I almost got a lobster with my bare hands on a diving last Saturday - it was small but catching them on their own habitat is something really exciting!). I didn't get the lobster, but I found the piece of an amphorae 10 minutes later... will make a new topic soon  
By the way I'm writing the tutorial right now, just wait a bit  
Greetings,
Mauro.

It's the same... the food is the goal  
Greetings,
Mauro.

Back when I had a nice recurve/laminate bow, I tried an afternoon of bowfishing down on the Black river.  I knew from my regular fishing adventures that there was a backwater down there full of carp.    
I bought one of those cheap tape-on line holders and a couple of fiberglass fishing arrows, the ones with the rubber "fletching".
 
That would have been in the early 70s.    
 
I scared a lot of carp....  Trying to figure out exactly where the fish actually were took some doing....Refraction effects, you know.  I think I actually got an arrow to scrape one with one shot....    
 
Recently, I've seen video footage of contemporary archers shooting the infamous "jumping" carp in MIDAIR!    Looks wild.

Great!!! So between you and Greenman we have a couple of places to get rid of the bodies.

Hey Curious, good to see you.
 
I agree with the Popeil "Set-It-Forget-It" Fishmaster 2000 method but it only works when the natural wildlife isn't going to take your catch away.
 
Here in Florida we have Gators to pillage your traps, Bears, Otters, Hogs, Panthers too that will steal your fish. We have Snaping Turtles that can sever a leg and some kind of prehistoric fish that can walk on land and climb trees to get birds.
Scout Leader's honor!
No, a trap would have to be watched so you just might should just use a pole or spear or bow.
 
Swimming in gator infested water is not advised but in some clear spring waters you could spear dive safely. Knowing which ones is the trick. Most any spring fed flowing well is good. I've seen some BIG Tilapia in the springs so that's where I would start.
 
As for primitive style, I would use a 15 foot bamboo pole with a barbed and tethered head. Clear wather makes it hard to sneak up on fish but at that length you won't have too much dificulty.
The most easiest way is to just pick those tree climbing catfish off the branches although they don't taste as good as Tilapia.

Quote from ChuckRocks on May 28^th, 2012, 5:04pm:

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            Awwww. You spoil all my fun. How do you know about those bones though???

Nice work Chris, just add a cord to it so it won't get lost  
Greetings,
Mauro.

Yeah, we have the same technique here!
We call it "smazzolare", or beating the water!
Lots of fish!
Greetings,
Mauro.

DIP NET
 

 
The netting is attached to a 4' diameter iron rim of a wooden  
wagon wheel.  Three support lines lead to a long pole.  Used  
especially for shad in the Pennsylvania Dutch area where I live.
 
MINNOW NET
 
 
Netting is lashed to a metal ring made by a blacksmith.  The mesh at  
the bottom section is much smaller to prevent escape of minnows. Tony

Tony, your nets are beautiful as always!
Mauro.

Quote from asemery on Jul 25^th, 2012, 12:09pm:

 
My Dad went to Lehigh University for engineering awhile back and I live probably about 3 1/2 hours from there in York. You should really try to make the East coast meet. It'll probably be near Harrisburg.
 
I'll be on my way to Canada on the 11th but if you stick around you might get to meet up with some of the guys sometime.

Now this looks deadly!
Its technique also reminds me of our Italian "nassa" (which I showed some pages ago), but on a smaller scale.
Tell me Tony, how do you clean fish? Which tools do you use?
Thanks for sharing!
Mauro.

This net is based on cod nets once used in the Northwest US by Native Americans.  Net is held ad the crossing point.  Heavy twine attached to crossing point (not shown) goes arouind wrist.  Since I don't fish I will use it for storage of some sort.  

The wood is a fast growing weed tree (I believe sumac) that I debarked and bent without steaming.
The frame is 12" x 8".  I made the net from linen twine, 20" deep.

Welcome Alex!
Now that's interesting, why don't you introduce yourself in the proper section?
I also tried to use a fishing spear but I want to reproduce a bronze harpoon before trying to use it again!
Greetings,
Mauro.

1.5 inches long made of mahogany, bone, hibiscus and palm fiber.

Quote from Mauro Fiorentini on Apr 1^st, 2013, 12:26pm:

Friend, sugar tends to dissolve in water *duh*....
-Squirrel

I'm not sure if this has been mentioned yet. I'm not sure if it's really primitive either, but Cody Lundin used a neat tecnique to catch an eel on Dual Survival. He put bait (don't remember what) in a wool sock and tied it to a string. The eel bit it and it's curved teeth became trapped in the wool fibers long enough to jerk it out of the water and dispatch it with a stick.
 
I want to say it was a primitive technique, but don't quote me on that. Still, it would probably work on most fish with curved teeth and possible even straight teeth. Never tried it myself, but I always wear wool socks in the backcountry so it could prove very useful.

Stick a sughero in it.  

Horse Chestnuts  contain opiates. So the strategy is to crush them up, put them in an area where fish tend to gather, and wait. The fish get lethargic, and easier to catch after that.

Chamorro's use a similar method to chestnuts.

Not really SS. General dilution of moving water would take care of a large part of this kind of natural toxin and water quality would be further restored through the natural process of nature.