Alright, these guys aren’t big flatheads, but they are fun to chase down in the early spring.. Its hard for me to find free time these days, but i managed to canoe around an ole marsh and chase some nice snappers and see some geese on nests. ..just wade around in the shallows and you are bound to find a few hiding underneath the waters surface…lol….
I am practicing my noodlin’ skills if i ever move down south 
PS..i cut my hair later that day, so i dont look like a complete scrub.
What the heck do you do with them things? lol I have heard of soup, but wow…thats crazy
I cannot believe you still have all your fingers. That is crazy stuff…
I can remember wrasslin’ Snappers. Lots of fun! In fact those pics make me want to do it some more.
Those Snappers are ornery all day long. 
Thanks for sharing! 
Don’t waste the meat on soup!! 
Clean them up right, soak them in water in a refridgerator for 2 days. Be sure to change the water both days.
Boil the pieces for 15-20 minutes. No need to remove the bones
Roll the pieces in flour, salt & pepper. Then fry.
If you like the meat to fall off the bone, place the pieces in a roaster and oven roast for a couple hours. Keep water on the meat so it doesn’t dry out.
That meat is too good to waste on soup!! Yum, Yum, YUM!!!
Or go to McDonalds and get a Filet-O-Fish, tastes the same, 1/2 the work. Nothing that lives underwater in a swamp can be that good… 
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Or go to McDonalds and get a Filet-O-Fish, tastes the same, 1/2 the work. Nothing that lives underwater in a swamp can be that good…
My thoughts exactly……………yuck 
I cleaned and ate a lot of snappers years ago. Now I look at it differently. You see a big snapper, heck he’s older than you are. Old and nasty and tough and they’re still around after 120 million years. The dinosaurs came and went, turtles are still here. I guess I have to respect anything that ornery and tough.
They did taste good though as I remember.
Rootski
KEWL!
Heck that’s better than noodling!
My only worry is in the first pic…if you held him a backwards you could get a higher pitched voice! 
I’m getting ready to leave…
but how do you hunt snapper…the turtle?
It’s actually pretty good meat. Tough, as I remember, but I think that had a lot to do with the way Grandma cooked it (everything she cooks tends to be tough )
Those are some beasts, though. I think that’d be fun.
We used to fish for them. I’d wire up treble hooks onto a piece of rope and bait it with fish guts. Wait until dark and throw it off the end of the dock. When something starts pulling it away, pull back. Hard. The other thing that worked really well was putting the tourist from down South on to fish. Most of them would get back to the resort and leave their fish hanging off the dock on a stringer. Just wait until you saw the stringer moving around and you knew there was a snapper down there. Grab him by the tail!
Ah, the good old days….
Rootski
Par boiled then deep fried!!!!
When I was a kid, my uncle would take us kids to the swamp and we would walk around in knee deep water. When you stepped on a “rock”, you would reach down and grab a turtle.
I was told that a snapper wouldn’t bite you underwater. I don’t know if its true, but we all do still have our fingers!
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I was told that a snapper wouldn’t bite you underwater.
Oh yes they will bite underwater!! 
those are some big uns !!! we used to catch them crawling from the lake to the swamp. the neighbor would put a vise grip in their mouth and “CHOMP” then he would proceed to butcher. That mouth would not let go of the vise grips for days !!! it was quite tasty too !!! it was like the best, tenderest chicken, if i recall correctly.
big g
We used to catch them and throw them in a water tank for three days to clean them out. Nail their feet to a hay wagon, have them bite on a needlenose and chop of the head. Cut the shell off and cut out the meat, clean it up good and freeze it, if you don’t it will twitch around in the fry pan. Fry them in flour and butter 1/2 way and then put them in the oven with some cream of mushroom soup. MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM-MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM Good 
Turtle is no good for you 
Them are 2 dandy Snappers. Turtles that size are getting harder to find these days.
Looks like you struck gold
Nice snappers!
We used to wait until there was about 1/2″ of ice on the mud hole in the creek that ran through our pasture. We would break through the ice in the knee deep water and poke around in the mud with pitchforks. When you heard a thump, reach down and dig them out. They were pretty slow in that weather. Usually get 12-15 each year. We would take them down to the basement to clean until midnight or later. Of, course when they hit the warmer basement, they woke up some. One year we must have missed one during cleaning because a couple of days later mom came roaring up the steps hollering about a turtle under her ringer washing machine.
In the summer we would keep the turtles we found in the wooden water tank for the cattle. We had some very wary cows in those days. We also kept the shiners and river chubs we seined from the creek in there so the turtles were happy until the fatal day came. We also had some 3 legged cats that were living proof that snapper heads do snap after they are chopped off.
Ah, for the good old days.
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Those Snappers are ornery all day long.
I’ll say. I tried saving a female that was on this bridge late one night. I tried pushing her with a crowbar thinking she’d try scurrying away. Not a chance. Damned if she did do a 180 to square off with me. I just looked at her and said, “You made you choice”.
Then a few years ago I see one on the south bound side of hiway 65 just outside of Mora. I was heading North, but could resist another rescue. As I approached her, I could tell she had been run over at least once. Run over and hardly the worse for wear. That one I dragged by the tail off the road. They are pretty strong critters too.
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