Article
By Maura Judkis June 12, 2024 at 5:00 a.m. EDT
In a secret spot on the banks of the Potomac River, just past Georgetown, a fishing rod has begun to twitch. Then it arcs with the weight of what has become Ernest Robinson’s catchphrase: “Big takedown!”
“Oh. Oh my God,” says Robinson, an urban fisherman, as the catch puts up a fight. “This joker is not ready to come.”
Everything about Robinson, 34, is big. There’s his social media following: Around half a million people watch him fish on both Instagram and TikTok. His glittering necklaces feature pavé-diamond portraits of himself in miniature, hoisting a massive catfish. He has the broad build befitting his years as a football player for Fayetteville State University. Then there are his big takedowns: big blue catfish, which he pursues year-round in these waters because “catfish is the biggest fish that we’ve got in the Potomac,” he says.
And when he says big fish, he means big fish. Catfish in the Potomac can be the size of a human child, weighing in at 40, 50, sometimes 60 pounds.
Among anglers, a fish this big is not merely a fish. It is a “hog.”
There’s other terminology that appears on Robinson’s frequent live streams from late-night fishing excursions in D.C.
On a good night of fishing, “the bite is fire.” On a bad night, “the bite is trash.” A small fish is a “dink.” A big fish is a “slob.” A really big fish is a “freaking tank” or a “river monster.” Reeling one in is a “free roller coaster” that results in the aforementioned “big takedown.”
As for the whole endeavor, Robinson has a simple catchphrase for the allure of these slimy, wily beasts:
“The tug is a drug.”
There’s the river, and then there’s the live stream.
On a late-May trip after sundown, Robinson donned a headlamp and plugged his portable lights into a generator. A thunderstorm had passed, as had a half-dozen helicopters. Now it was time to fish, and stream. He popped his phone into a tripod, sat down in front of it, and began to stream live on TikTok. He began the way he always does: “What’s up y’all, it’s your boy Hog Snatcher.”
People from all across the world tune in to watch Robinson fish, and this particular night attracted viewers from as far as Indonesia and Uruguay.
“I’m waiting for one of these rods to get folded,” he said to his audience. “Tap that screen. Let’s run these likes up, y’all.”
Catfish will eat pretty much anything. Robinson has special bait recipes: hot dogs, Jell-O powder, Quaker oats, canned corn, lemon extract. The unusual scent of Robinson’s bait attracts curious fish, who come in for a nibble of these exotic delicacies.
“I’ve got chicken, Kool-Aid, rainbow sprinkles,” he says, showing off his supplies on one particular outing. Taco seasoning is common, as is gummy candy. “They just love chicken,” he says of the catfish. When he keeps it simple, he uses fresh-cut American eel, its blood streaking a cutting board stationed next to his supplies.
Robinson’s feed is educating people about fishing the Potomac, says Hedrick Belin, president of the Potomac Conservancy. “And that’s what it’s going to take to ensure that the river becomes something that people feel safe to splash around in.”
If Washingtonians do think about what’s in our river, they might think about garbage.
In 1965, the Potomac was deemed by President Lyndon B. Johnson a “national disgrace.” It was “a river of decaying sewage and rotten algae,” he said. Much progress has been made in cleaning it since then, but generally, the Potomac is still not considered safe for swimming or consuming many of its fish. The D.C. Department of Energy and Environment recommends that people consume no more than three servings per month of blue catfish. (Robinson typically doesn’t eat any — mostly because he is more interested in catching them than cleaning and cooking them.)
But as the river’s health improved, the fish grew bigger — particularly catfish, which are an invasive species in this region, introduced via Virginia waterways in the 1970s. It’s impossible to say exactly how many catfish are in the water near D.C., says Daniel Ryan, chief of DOEE’s Fisheries Research Branch, but “the population is extraordinary.” On one trip last month, using four rods, Robinson caught 20 catfish ranging from 3 to 10 pounds — dinks — in the span of 2½ hours.
Cleaner water means more fish, and local catfish are massive partly because they’re at the top of the Potomac food chain. They have no natural predators — aside from Ernie the Hog Snatcher. Big catfish eat smaller native fish species, and that’s why D.C. recommends that people who fish not release them back into the river.
“It probably won’t be too long before we see a 100-pound fish that’s taken from the Potomac,” Ryan says.
The odds are good that Robinson will be the one to catch that 100-pounder. Growing up in Prince George’s County, he began fishing as a child, before he was old enough to remember his first catch. His grandmother Annette would take him out to fish on the Potomac with his less-enthusiastic cousins, and he was the only one to say, “Hey, Grandma, let me put the worm on.” They would eat the fish back then, he says.
Robinson, now a contractor for the Navy who lives in Waldorf, Md., picked up the hobby again after covid hit, as a way to be outdoors. He did a few tournaments and caught some big ones. “After that, I was hooked,” he says, without any acknowledgment of the pun.
After his fishing videos on YouTube began to attract an audience, he started live-streaming his fishing sessions on TikTok, setting up his phone on a tripod and letting people watch him reel in catches. Before long, he was attracting audiences of thousands of people “watching us, you know, in disbelief,” he says. “People really didn’t know that we have big fish on the Potomac, in Washington, D.C.”
Robinson is “100 percent city fisherman,” says Richard Jackson, director of the D.C. DOEE. “Everything he’s doing — when I was a kid growing up, my father, grandfather and uncles would go down to the riverbed and set up and do the same thing.”
When Robinson reels in a slob, he takes his trophy photo, gripping the fish by its mouth. Aside from their distinctive whiskers, blue catfish have a few other peculiar qualities. They don’t have scales; instead, they have skin covered in a protective coating of slime. They make stridulatory sounds, the term for the bony parts of their pectoral girdle grinding together; when removed from the water, this sounds like the fish are grunting. Their teeth feel like sandpaper, and sometimes sharper.
“When you grab them in their mouth, you know, your hand is kind of rubbing up against their teeth, right?” Robinson says. “If my knuckles ain’t bloody, … then it wasn’t a good day of fishing.”
Social media fishing fame comes with some perks. Some of Robinson’s equipment is sponsored by fishing companies. He recently took several members of the Commanders on a night fishing trip. He soundtracks his videos to a rap song called “Big Takedown.”
Put on the bait
He be pulling up hogs
These ain’t no babies
He pulling them slobs
For his birthday this year, his girlfriend commissioned a Kehinde Wiley-esque painting of Robinson kneeling, gripping two big slobs in triumph, wearing his diamond fish necklace.
The tug is the drug, but don’t forget the lure: bigger audiences and more sponsors. Robinson is more interested in those than in tournaments, which he says take the fun out of fishing. He doesn’t want to compete against anyone but himself.
Going fishing is a little bit like gambling, with its combination of skill and luck. And each time you cast some bait into the river, you never know what will come back or how long it will take for something to bite. Sometimes it’s a bunch of small fish. Sometimes it’s nothing at all. Sometimes it’s nothing for hours, and then — just as you’re about to call it quits and pack up your gear — your rod bends over with the weight of an enormous catch.
“If you don’t got patience, you’ll never catch a big fish,” Robinson says. “But pure luck is like, you cast out and boom: There goes that 50-pounder.”
In May, Robinson caught the largest catfish he has ever pulled out of the Potomac. It took 10 minutes of fighting for him to reel it in. He then weighed it: 63 pounds of utter slob.
Could this have set a D.C. record for heaviest catfish catch? Yes. But to set a record, anglers must bring their fish to the Aquatic Resources Education Center in Anacostia Park to be officially weighed. Because bureaucratic business gets in the way of a good day of fishing, Robinson has never done this. (No catfish fisherman has. The D.C. record for this fish is vacant.)
Besides, he doesn’t want to kill the fish. Because a 63-pounder now could be a hundred-pounder in the future. These disgusting slobs can live longer than 20 years.
“Once you catch that good fish, that big fish, you’re always going to want to get that feeling again,” Robinson says.
Instead, he made some videos with the 63-pounder, removed his hook, and set the slob back into the water, where it swam toward Rosslyn before disappearing beneath the surface — at least until a hot dog, coated in Jell-O powder, lures it back to Ernie the Hog Snatcher.
By Maura Judkis June 12, 2024 at 5:00 a.m. EDT
In a secret spot on the banks of the Potomac River, just past Georgetown, a fishing rod has begun to twitch. Then it arcs with the weight of what has become Ernest Robinson’s catchphrase: “Big takedown!”
“Oh. Oh my God,” says Robinson, an urban fisherman, as the catch puts up a fight. “This joker is not ready to come.”
Everything about Robinson, 34, is big. There’s his social media following: Around half a million people watch him fish on both Instagram and TikTok. His glittering necklaces feature pavé-diamond portraits of himself in miniature, hoisting a massive catfish. He has the broad build befitting his years as a football player for Fayetteville State University. Then there are his big takedowns: big blue catfish, which he pursues year-round in these waters because “catfish is the biggest fish that we’ve got in the Potomac,” he says.
And when he says big fish, he means big fish. Catfish in the Potomac can be the size of a human child, weighing in at 40, 50, sometimes 60 pounds.
Among anglers, a fish this big is not merely a fish. It is a “hog.”
There’s other terminology that appears on Robinson’s frequent live streams from late-night fishing excursions in D.C.
On a good night of fishing, “the bite is fire.” On a bad night, “the bite is trash.” A small fish is a “dink.” A big fish is a “slob.” A really big fish is a “freaking tank” or a “river monster.” Reeling one in is a “free roller coaster” that results in the aforementioned “big takedown.”
As for the whole endeavor, Robinson has a simple catchphrase for the allure of these slimy, wily beasts:
“The tug is a drug.”
There’s the river, and then there’s the live stream.
On a late-May trip after sundown, Robinson donned a headlamp and plugged his portable lights into a generator. A thunderstorm had passed, as had a half-dozen helicopters. Now it was time to fish, and stream. He popped his phone into a tripod, sat down in front of it, and began to stream live on TikTok. He began the way he always does: “What’s up y’all, it’s your boy Hog Snatcher.”
People from all across the world tune in to watch Robinson fish, and this particular night attracted viewers from as far as Indonesia and Uruguay.
“I’m waiting for one of these rods to get folded,” he said to his audience. “Tap that screen. Let’s run these likes up, y’all.”
Catfish will eat pretty much anything. Robinson has special bait recipes: hot dogs, Jell-O powder, Quaker oats, canned corn, lemon extract. The unusual scent of Robinson’s bait attracts curious fish, who come in for a nibble of these exotic delicacies.
“I’ve got chicken, Kool-Aid, rainbow sprinkles,” he says, showing off his supplies on one particular outing. Taco seasoning is common, as is gummy candy. “They just love chicken,” he says of the catfish. When he keeps it simple, he uses fresh-cut American eel, its blood streaking a cutting board stationed next to his supplies.
Robinson’s feed is educating people about fishing the Potomac, says Hedrick Belin, president of the Potomac Conservancy. “And that’s what it’s going to take to ensure that the river becomes something that people feel safe to splash around in.”
If Washingtonians do think about what’s in our river, they might think about garbage.
In 1965, the Potomac was deemed by President Lyndon B. Johnson a “national disgrace.” It was “a river of decaying sewage and rotten algae,” he said. Much progress has been made in cleaning it since then, but generally, the Potomac is still not considered safe for swimming or consuming many of its fish. The D.C. Department of Energy and Environment recommends that people consume no more than three servings per month of blue catfish. (Robinson typically doesn’t eat any — mostly because he is more interested in catching them than cleaning and cooking them.)
But as the river’s health improved, the fish grew bigger — particularly catfish, which are an invasive species in this region, introduced via Virginia waterways in the 1970s. It’s impossible to say exactly how many catfish are in the water near D.C., says Daniel Ryan, chief of DOEE’s Fisheries Research Branch, but “the population is extraordinary.” On one trip last month, using four rods, Robinson caught 20 catfish ranging from 3 to 10 pounds — dinks — in the span of 2½ hours.
Cleaner water means more fish, and local catfish are massive partly because they’re at the top of the Potomac food chain. They have no natural predators — aside from Ernie the Hog Snatcher. Big catfish eat smaller native fish species, and that’s why D.C. recommends that people who fish not release them back into the river.
“It probably won’t be too long before we see a 100-pound fish that’s taken from the Potomac,” Ryan says.
The odds are good that Robinson will be the one to catch that 100-pounder. Growing up in Prince George’s County, he began fishing as a child, before he was old enough to remember his first catch. His grandmother Annette would take him out to fish on the Potomac with his less-enthusiastic cousins, and he was the only one to say, “Hey, Grandma, let me put the worm on.” They would eat the fish back then, he says.
Robinson, now a contractor for the Navy who lives in Waldorf, Md., picked up the hobby again after covid hit, as a way to be outdoors. He did a few tournaments and caught some big ones. “After that, I was hooked,” he says, without any acknowledgment of the pun.
After his fishing videos on YouTube began to attract an audience, he started live-streaming his fishing sessions on TikTok, setting up his phone on a tripod and letting people watch him reel in catches. Before long, he was attracting audiences of thousands of people “watching us, you know, in disbelief,” he says. “People really didn’t know that we have big fish on the Potomac, in Washington, D.C.”
Robinson is “100 percent city fisherman,” says Richard Jackson, director of the D.C. DOEE. “Everything he’s doing — when I was a kid growing up, my father, grandfather and uncles would go down to the riverbed and set up and do the same thing.”
When Robinson reels in a slob, he takes his trophy photo, gripping the fish by its mouth. Aside from their distinctive whiskers, blue catfish have a few other peculiar qualities. They don’t have scales; instead, they have skin covered in a protective coating of slime. They make stridulatory sounds, the term for the bony parts of their pectoral girdle grinding together; when removed from the water, this sounds like the fish are grunting. Their teeth feel like sandpaper, and sometimes sharper.
“When you grab them in their mouth, you know, your hand is kind of rubbing up against their teeth, right?” Robinson says. “If my knuckles ain’t bloody, … then it wasn’t a good day of fishing.”
Social media fishing fame comes with some perks. Some of Robinson’s equipment is sponsored by fishing companies. He recently took several members of the Commanders on a night fishing trip. He soundtracks his videos to a rap song called “Big Takedown.”
Put on the bait
He be pulling up hogs
These ain’t no babies
He pulling them slobs
For his birthday this year, his girlfriend commissioned a Kehinde Wiley-esque painting of Robinson kneeling, gripping two big slobs in triumph, wearing his diamond fish necklace.
The tug is the drug, but don’t forget the lure: bigger audiences and more sponsors. Robinson is more interested in those than in tournaments, which he says take the fun out of fishing. He doesn’t want to compete against anyone but himself.
Going fishing is a little bit like gambling, with its combination of skill and luck. And each time you cast some bait into the river, you never know what will come back or how long it will take for something to bite. Sometimes it’s a bunch of small fish. Sometimes it’s nothing at all. Sometimes it’s nothing for hours, and then — just as you’re about to call it quits and pack up your gear — your rod bends over with the weight of an enormous catch.
“If you don’t got patience, you’ll never catch a big fish,” Robinson says. “But pure luck is like, you cast out and boom: There goes that 50-pounder.”
In May, Robinson caught the largest catfish he has ever pulled out of the Potomac. It took 10 minutes of fighting for him to reel it in. He then weighed it: 63 pounds of utter slob.
Could this have set a D.C. record for heaviest catfish catch? Yes. But to set a record, anglers must bring their fish to the Aquatic Resources Education Center in Anacostia Park to be officially weighed. Because bureaucratic business gets in the way of a good day of fishing, Robinson has never done this. (No catfish fisherman has. The D.C. record for this fish is vacant.)
Besides, he doesn’t want to kill the fish. Because a 63-pounder now could be a hundred-pounder in the future. These disgusting slobs can live longer than 20 years.
“Once you catch that good fish, that big fish, you’re always going to want to get that feeling again,” Robinson says.
Instead, he made some videos with the 63-pounder, removed his hook, and set the slob back into the water, where it swam toward Rosslyn before disappearing beneath the surface — at least until a hot dog, coated in Jell-O powder, lures it back to Ernie the Hog Snatcher.
