Happy, Happy, Happy: My Life and Legacy as the Duck Commander

if you’re getting all that money from the fish, why doesn’t someone come down there when that boat pulls up and grab the other side of that tub to help me up the hill? That’s what I can’t figure out.”
    They all sat there staring at me, like I was speaking Spanish.
    “Hey, just a thought,” I said. “I can get ’em up the hill. But it would be a lot easier with y’all helping me.”
    From that day forward, whenever I pulled in with the boat, I’d see the whole little group coming down the hill. They’d have their tubs and be ready to help. It was a lesson that stayed with them. All four of my boys came to realize that the work was a family enterprise, and they needed to pitch in. In fact, the lesson took so well that each of them still works for Duck Commander, as do several other relatives and extended family. If you want a job with our outfit, it helps if you’re blood kin.
    I also assigned my boys one of the worst jobs that came with commercial fishing: assembling the bait. I would buy a fifty-five-gallon drum of rotten cheese and let it sit until it was covered in maggots. It needed to smell really bad and be as smelly and nasty as possible to draw the catfish to my nets. When the rotten cheese was ready, I’d get my boys up at daylight. They’d reach down into the drum and grab a handful of the mess and stuff itinto socks. I know they were gagging the entire time—and I’m sure they lost their breakfast more than a few times—but it was a job that had to be done.
    Later, when the boys were in high school, I decided I wanted to get into crawfishing. The problem with crawfish is you can never have enough bait. And crawfish are attracted to bait that’s even nastier than what a catfish likes to eat. A crawfish will literally eat anything—as long as it’s dead and smells really bad. So when Kay took the boys to town to sell the fish, I always told Alan, Jase, Willie, and Jep to be on the lookout for roadkill. If they spotted a dead possum or raccoon in the road, they’d pick it up and throw it into the back of the truck. They’d bring the dead animals home, chop them up, and then throw them into the crawfish nets.
    Of course, I never wanted to waste anything. We had an old deep-freezer in my shop and they threw the excess roadkill in there. By the end of every summer, the freezer was filled with dead cats, dogs, deer, coons, opossums, ducks, and anything else they could find in the road. The freezer smelled so bad it would have been quarantined if health officials ever caught wind of it! My boys also hunted for snakes and put them in the freezer. They baited snake traps in the water with little perch and then pulled the traps in at night. They’d blast the snakes with shotguns, which I’m sure was a lot of fun for them.
    The biggest single catch I ever made was on an early morning one June. It came after we decided to launch Duck Commander as a business, so I had recently given up commercial fishing. I was only fishing for fun and to put some fish on the family table. I was using a six-foot hoop net about twenty feet long, with two-inch mesh. My son Jase was fishing with me and I told him, “I’m going to put this old big net out and catch us some Ops.”

    By the end of every summer, the freezer was filled with dead cats, dogs, deer, coons, opossums, ducks, and anything else they could find in the road.

    “Ops” is short for Opelousas, which are flathead catfish. I think they’re the best eating species of all the freshwater commercial fish in Louisiana. Also called the motley, yellow cat, or shovelhead, the flathead catfish is aggressively predacious and known for eating everything in sight. Some of them weigh as much as 120 pounds.
    I set the net out on the other side of the river and up from the boat a little bit. I dropped it in about eighteen feet of water with a little current, but not much, just enough to hold the net open. I came back after about three days. I reached and grabbed the rope and started up with the net. I thought, “That thing must be hung!” But it kept coming; it was heavy, heavy!
    I kept coming with that heavy net. When I had about three hoops gathered up, I could feel something moving the whole netever so slightly. When I got the net up high enough to where I could see down into it a little bit, all I could see were blue cats! One look, and I realized there was way more fish than I could get into my boat! It was just too much weight! There were too