Jay’s Gar Ponds Part 2

Near each pond, a holding tank would be stocked with the gar’s primary food source — minnows. Knowing gars prefer injured minnows because they are easier to catch, Junior’s blueprint included submerged, multi-bladed industrial fans through which the hapless minnows would have to pass. With culverts attached to their inlet and exit sides, the fans would blast a minnow-filled torrent across the ponds’ surfaces when activated. Most of the hapless little fishes passing through the fan blades would be injured, turning them into gar haute cuisine. Jimmy Reed's Jay's Gar Ponds: Parts 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6,

With the blueprints in hand, Jaybird wasted no time getting started. Their farm’s south boundary was Highway 82, a well-traveled thoroughfare traversing the Mississippi Delta. Despite numerous interruptions from friends and neighbors curious to know what he was up to, Jaybird remained attentive to his task until he completed a prototype circular gar pond. On the island in its center, he fabricated a towering windmill with giant, wind-gulping blades that rotated even in the gentlest breezes, generating a constant supply of power conveyed by ingenious combinations of shafts, pulleys, and belts to the subsurface propellers and fans. After stocking the minnow pond, Jaybird and Junior made several trips to the nearby Mississippi River to net a starting supply of gars. In a week’s time, they succeeded in capturing thousands of these needle-toothed, long-snouted, foul-tempered aquatic ambushers. Finally, everything was in place, and the time for testing what people considered another of Junior’s insane ideas had come. Several hundred curious spectators gathered along the highway to watch. Not having eaten in several days, the gars were ravenously hungry and torpedoed themselves out of the water, exciting the avid anglers in the crowd, which didn’t go unnoticed by the inventors, who immediately saw another source of revenue from the gar, other than selling their fillets to grocery stores.

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When Jaybird pulled the windmill’s release lever, the huge blades began to catch the wind and spooled up to a high pitch, causing the submerged propellers to churn the circular stream into a swift current. Now that they had to swim in order not to be carried downstream, the garfish settled down. Then Jaybird yelled, “Junior, throw the fans in gear,” after which a muffled roar of approval went up from the crowd as they witnessed a stream of mutilated minnows spattering the pond’s surface, only to be snapped up instantly by gars. The thrilled entrepreneurs doffed their hats and waved as the crowd gave them a thumping round of applause. Jaybird beamed in admiration at Junior. His harebrained scheme was a huge success! Word spread all across the South, and motorists lined the roadside daily to marvel at the ingenious spectacle. The advertising billboards Jaybird had intended to erect were not necessary. Already he had more sports fishermen than his stock of gars could accommodate, begging to fish the pond. And from around the country, executives representing nationwide grocery chains jostled to corner the market on all the gar meat harvested from that ingenious invention: Jay’s gar ponds.