Fishing is one of the best ways of getting ample protein in a complete apocalyptic scenario. There’s plenty of water around, but not everyone has the skills necessary to fish for their survival. This means you can have a distinct advantage here if you know what you’re doing.
That said, if you think it’s going to be easy, you have another thing coming. You need to start preparing now.
Choosing your approach
When it comes to survival fishing, you have a few different options. You can take a more futuristic approach and use rods and reels, but then you have to worry about storage, equipment breakdowns, as well as the cost of maintaining them. Or you can do what many other preppers prefer, which is a more primitive method for catching fish.
We’ll talk about both.
Rod and reel
If you want to start by gathering the gear you need to catch fish, you can start now and add a few things to your stockpile over time. You’ll want a survival fishing pole for starters. These are compact poles that are lightweight but not the most effective for catching fish.
That said, they’re better than a stick, rope, and hook.
As for your reel, go with whatever you can afford. In a survival situation, it’s not going to matter what brand your reel is or where you got it from. You just need to make sure it gets the job done.
Artificial lures or live bait
Personally, I’d go with the most basic option possible if you’re choosing artificial lures. You need to catch fish, and you need to do so quickly and efficiently. If you’re trying to feed an entire family or even just yourself, you’ll need to focus on quantity over quality and then develop ways to make the fish last.
Just make sure to have lures of different sizes from an inch and a half up to six inches in length. If you’re casting a lure into a small stream and you haven’t eaten in a while, you need to catch something, and the small lure will come in handy.
Trapping
If you’re taking a more minimalist approach, you’ve got quite a few options. Trapping or netting is one of the options, and there are a number of different nets you can use. This is a passive form of fishing which is preferred because it allows you to do something else while you’re fishing in most cases.
When you’re casting a rod and reel, you need to sit by the water and actively fish it if you expect to catch anything. Here are some of the options you have for trapping:
Gill nets – A gill net is a nylon net made of monofilament with openings large enough for the fish to swim through until they reach the gills. Hence the name, gill nets.
This is a great passive fishing strategy because you can come back and check the nets when you’re done doing something else. It’s important to have methods like this when providing food for more than one person.
Drift nets – A drift net works in a similar way but requires you to have a vessel to pull the net.
While the net is moving through the water, it’ll grab everything that passes through it. If you’re planning to use a method like this, you’ll want to bug out near a popular river or stream system. Keep in mind that this type of fishing does have repercussions on the environment, but that may not matter as much in a post-apocalyptic society.
Trotlines – Trotlines are great because they’re one of the most primitive and passive options for survival fishing. You attach a mainline on both sides of the river or pond and then hang secondary lines down into the water with bait on them.
The secondary lines get weights, so they rest near the bottom of the water, and the baited hooks will stay in place until you return to see if you caught anything.
Finding the right water
If you’ve got a few strategies in mind and you know where you plan to bug out when SHTF, then you need to plan your fishing hole based on a few characteristics.
- Cover
- Changes in water
- Structure
These three things are the most important factors because this is how you can tell where fish hang out. Structure can be anything they hide under or around, including low-hanging trees, vegetation, and lily pads.
Changes in water refer to areas where water is fed by another body of water. This brings oxygen into the water, which results in a more energetic fish. They tend to hang around these areas because the river or stream leading into a lake also brings microorganisms for them to eat.
Killing and cleaning your catch
As people of the land, we need to respect our catch, and this goes double for situations where we rely on it for our survival. Kill the fish in the most humane way possible by doing so quickly and effectively. Here is a simple and primitive method if you don’t have any other way:
- Find something blunt like a rock. Make sure there are very few sharp edges
- Put the fish on a hard flat surface
- Use one hand to secure it in place
- Use the blunt object to strike it right above the eye with ample force
- This will stun the fish but not kill it, be sure to repeat this a few times
How to store fish long term
Ideally, you keep fish alive until you’re ready to cook. But that’s easier said than done in many survival scenarios — especially in situations where you have caught a lot via passive fishing and feel like you shouldn’t waste/release any of them.
There are five main methods:
- Freezing
- Canning
- Smoking
- Salting
- Pickling
Learn more about food preservation basics and the pros/cons between methods.
Pickling is a lot like canning because it follows many of the same principles. The airtight containment and acidity in the vinegar help break down and preserve the meat. This is a great way to keep fish safe to eat for a long time without requiring refrigeration.
Smoking is the ultimate choice in the wild in terms of flavor and food quality, but it won’t last as long as some other methods. It’s also incredibly simple and doesn’t require any specific tools or equipment.
Salting works similar to smoking by putting the fish directly into the fire. Instead, you cover the fish with salt and wrap it up. You’ll then bury it under the fire.
Final thoughts
Survival fishing is a great way to acquire protein in the event of a supply chain or power grid failure. Learning to rely on the land around us is one essential piece of the puzzle when the SHTF, and starting now is the only way to ensure your survival. Good luck!
What about you?
Do you have any of your favorite survival fishing tips to add? What secrets work best for you? Share your advice and thoughts in the comments.
About Wes
Wes is a full-time freelance writer who loves spending time outdoors.
Image by Pexels from Pixabay. Article cross-posted from The Organic Prepper.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
