The St. Johns is a river that cannot be hurried. It flows north, which confuses visitors, and it drops less than thirty feet in three hundred miles, which means it mostly does not flow at all. Around Astor, between Lake Dexter and Lake George, it spreads out wide and dark as sweet tea, edged with lily pads and eelgrass. Most people here are after largemouth. My uncle Dale is not most people. Dale fishes for bluegill with a fly rod and considers bass a distraction.
October is when it gets good again. The summer heat lets go a little, the afternoon storms quit, and the bream slide back up along the pads to eat everything that falls off them. We put in at a fish camp that has been renting the same johnboats since before I was born. Dale's fly box is an old mint tin holding nine poppers, all of them yellow. He once owned a green one. He does not talk about it.
The method is to pole along the pad line and drop the popper into every gap the size of a dinner plate. Then you do nothing. Dale is firm on this point. You let the rings spread out and die, you count to five, and you give it one small twitch. A bluegill does not strike a popper so much as kiss it. There is a little sipping sound, like someone finishing a drink through a straw, and the bug is gone.
What happens next is out of all proportion. A bluegill the size of your hand turns its flat side to you and pulls in circles like it is twice that, and on a three weight rod it feels like you have hooked the river's drain plug. I caught them steadily and Dale caught them constantly. Somewhere in there a bass of four or five pounds ate his popper, jumped once, and broke him off. He looked at the limp line and said that was exactly the kind of thing he was talking about.
We kept a dozen of the thick ones, copper breasted and dark across the shoulders, and let the rest go. Back at the camp Dale cleaned them on a board nailed between two cypress trees while a heron stood close by and supervised. That night they went into cornmeal and hot oil, tails and all, with hush puppies and sliced onion. Dale says a fried bluegill tail is better than a potato chip, and that anyone who disagrees is welcome to hand theirs over.
Whatever the water, the boat looks right on a shirt. See our custom boat shirts and apparel, drawn from a photo of your own boat.