Captain Clyde Folse knows a thing or two about catching crappie. Maybe it’s practice and know-how...or maybe it’s something supernatural. After all, a guy doesn’t get a nickname like “The Crappie Psychic” for nothing.
In truth, it’s a lot more practice and know-how than metaphysical abilities. The moniker came about when Folse took his son Caleb, then 10 years old, fishing for sac-a-lait...the Cajun nickname for crappie, translating literally to “sack of milk.” The captain was in his element. He’d tell his son where to cast—”there’s a sac-a-lait waiting there for ya”—and nearly every prediction seemed to come true. His son, impressed, dubbed him the “sac-a-lait psychic.”
It would take more than that to launch a successful business revolving around his hobby, however. Folse decided to take crafting the perfect trailer into his own hands. Buying up existing trailers in his favorite color for fishing, limetreuse, the captain cut up his purchases with a razor blade. That decision made all the difference: The rough edges that came with his hand-hewn efforts resulted in a diamond-shaped trailer, with four water-catching edges that conventional, round options lack.
The action provided by those edges provided action that typical crappie trailers just couldn’t get, and that action also caught fish that other anglers just couldn’t get.
“I had phenomenal success,” he says. “[Other fishermen] would ask ‘where did you catch these fish’ and ‘what were you fishing on’ and I would tell them we were fishing in the same area. I wouldn’t tell them about the trailers...I would tell them we were fishing with a black-and-white tube jig and they would say ‘man we need to get us some black-and-white tube jigs!’”
Eventually Folse came clean with his secret when he established The Crappie Psychic, LLC, selling boatloads of his signature trailers, now flavored with his special recipe “Psychic Sauce.”
The captain obviously makes his money by specializing in trailers (he produces the tackle for trout and other fish now as well), but he took some time to talk knots with TYEPRO.
My First Knot
Folse is famous for his crappie expertise now, but it wasn’t always so. He first began fishing on the bayou with his father, who specialized in catfishing. The first knot that his father taught him when hunting for the delicious siluriformes was the square knot. “It’s simple, but it holds up. It’s really strong,” he explained. “That came from generation to generation to generation.”
What I'm Using Now
Folse was almost always a fisherman, but he didn’t always take knots all that seriously. As he made the transition from catfish to crappie, he took more interest in learning all the tricks of the trade. That ultimately led him to the palomar knot, a technique that he’s been using for more than 30 years of crappie collecting.
“When I’m readying my equipment to go out on a trip, all my lures are tied on with a palomar,” he explains. “To me, that is the best knot for what I’m doing.”
He admitted (and made us feel good about ourselves in the process) that the TYEPRO tool has encouraged him to change up his approach recently.
“If I happen to get hooked down on a stump and I’m pulling real hard...I don’t use real heavy line...If I pop it, I go with the clinch knot,” he says, admitting that his eyes aren’t what they once were. “I’m 53 years old. That TYEPRO tool is just awesome...I love it. It works well. I always thought I was palomar but whenever I have to switch over, I tie a clinch.”