Also Georgia here.
Springtime in the creek behind our house
“sucker-mouths” would be running upstream.
As 12 year old fishermen, we tried to catch them
on every bait imaginable with no luck.
(what did we know?)
They were carp.
We took dads pitchfork and managed to get a few.
So boney they were not worth the effort.
Many catfish and bream came out of that creek.
Growing up in Michigan, we lived on land where Carl Creek entered the Tittabawassee River just upstream from Midland. Every spring, white and common suckers and carp would make the run up the creek to spawn and we caught tons of both. The suckers had very firm and sweet meat and the bones were easily found and removed. The carp, on the other hand, were only fit to be buried in our vegetable garden as organic fertilizer.
We caught Carp at Lake Blackshear in SW GA when my grandparents owned a house there. They are bottom feeders and we used dough balls to catch them. Then we gave them to poor black folks living along the highway back to Albany. My granddad told them they were black bass. It was a very different time. (The bream and catfish we caught stayed in our freezer until we could eat them, delicious!)