The Mobile-Tensaw Delta is a couple hundred thousand acres of swamp sitting on the spot where five rivers quit being rivers and turn into a maze instead. Nobody local calls it a delta. They call it the Delta, with the full weight of a proper noun, the way people in other places say downtown. From a boat it is a green wall on both sides with a gap every fifty yards, every gap looks exactly like the last one, and a healthy number of them go nowhere at all except deeper into the cypress and back out again three hours later.
It is also tidal, which catches out people who drove down expecting ordinary freshwater bass fishing. The bay pushes in twice a day and backs the whole system up behind it, and the bass move on that schedule whether or not anyone has consulted them. On a falling tide they set up on the outside of every laydown and cypress knee and wait for the water to hand them something. On slack they slide back into the grass and sulk and become, as far as a jig is concerned, a rumor. The water runs the color of strong tea from all the tannin, so the fish cannot see you and you cannot see the fish, and both parties appear satisfied with the arrangement.
The man who took us out has fished it since the sixties and navigates the entire thing from memory, which sounds romantic and is mostly just cheaper than replacing electronics. He had a name for every slough we turned into and not one of them matched the chart. He also carried a push pole, a machete, and a spare prop, and by the end of the afternoon we understood the reasoning behind all three.
Flipping is a simple job performed about a thousand times. You pitch a black and blue jig underhand into a hole in the wood, let it fall on a tight line, and watch the line rather than the lure, because in that water you will never see the bite and you will occasionally see the line move an inch sideways. It moved. What follows is less a hookset than an eviction, since you have roughly one second to get a bass out of a brush pile before the bass gets you into it. This one came out sideways, threw a sheet of tea-colored water over the bow, and went four and a half pounds on a scale everyone agreed was generous.
We caught a dozen more before the light went, none of them big, all of them out of holes identical to forty other holes we had already tried. On the run out he took a turn we would have sworn was solid timber and it opened straight into the main river with the sunset parked at the end of it. We asked how he always knew. He said he did not, that he had been properly lost in there twice, and that both times it eventually turned into a good story. On the Delta that seems to be the accepted outcome.