The Mississippi Sound in late August is not a place anybody visits for the scenery. The water goes a flat opaque green, the barrier islands sit on the horizon like something drawn in pencil, the air comes in at ninety-four degrees with the humidity of a laundry room, and by nine in the morning the whole thing shimmers. Then somebody hands you a pair of polarized glasses and points at a crab trap buoy four hundred yards off, and the day acquires a purpose.
A tripletail is a fish that has decided to make a living by being unconvincing. It floats on its side, just under the surface, next to anything that is not moving. Crab buoys, weed lines, a board, a piece of somebody’s dock that got loose in the last storm. From twenty feet away it looks exactly like a dead leaf the size of a serving platter, which is the entire plan, since anything that eats leaves gets left alone and anything small enough to be lunch drifts up to hide in the shade of the leaf and is immediately eaten by it. The name comes from the rear fins sitting so far back that the fish appears to be equipped with three tails. Nature does not seem to have run this design past a committee.
So the fishing is just driving. You idle down a line of crab buoys with the sun behind you and the whole crew squinting, and you look for a smudge of dark alongside the float that is a slightly wrong shape. Most of them are actual garbage. A grocery bag out there will fool the sharpest eyes on the boat at least twice a morning, and the person who calls it gets to live with that for the rest of the day. Then one of the smudges has a white edge and a black eye, and everybody on the bow goes quiet at the same time.
The cast is the whole thing. A live shrimp under a small float, set down three feet past the fish and drifted back, because anything that lands on top of it sends it under the buoy and that fish will not be seen again. The captain we ran with, a shrimper’s son who had been reading these buoys since he was tall enough to see over the console, made everyone practice on empty water before he let us near a live one. He said a tripletail gives you one cast and no discussion. He was right four times and generous about it the two times he was wrong.
The fish itself acts insulted. Eighteen pounds of flat, deep, angry Gulf Coast fish that immediately tries to wrap you in the crab trap line it has been sleeping on, then makes three hard runs and comes to the boat in a mood. It is also, and everyone down there will tell you this before you ask, the best-eating fish in the Sound by a wide margin. Which is why nobody advertises where the good buoy lines are, and why the honest answer to how the fishing was is always the same: hot, slow, and none of your business.