Every September somebody on the Gulf Shores beach announces that the pompano are here, and every September that person is standing next to a cooler with nothing in it. The pompano do come. They come when the first real front drops through and the wind swings north for a day and the surf lies down flat and green. Until then you are just a person holding a rod on a beach, which is a fine way to spend a morning, but it is not pompano fishing.
The front came through on a Tuesday. By Wednesday at sunrise the water had gone from tea to bottle glass and the beach was lined with the regulars, each of them spaced exactly far enough apart to be polite and exactly close enough to see what everybody else was using. What everybody was using was sand fleas. You dig them yourself in the wash with a wire rake, and there is a whole etiquette to it: you do not dig in front of another man’s rods, you do not take the orange egg fleas without saying something nice about them, and you do not ever admit that you bought frozen ones at the tackle shop on the way in.
The trick with pompano is the trough. Between the beach and the first sandbar there is a slot of deeper water, maybe forty yards out, and the fish run it like a hallway, nosing the bottom for the same fleas you just dug. Cast past it and you are fishing for nothing. Cast short and you are fishing for whiting, which is fine, whiting are delicious, but nobody drives down from Birmingham for whiting. I cast short for the first hour. The fellow two rods down, a retired schoolteacher with a folding chair older than me, told me so without once looking over.
At nine the tip on my second rod did the thing a pompano rod does, a quick double nod and then a hard lean, and I got to it in time. A pompano on a surf rod fights sideways, flat and silver and furious, turning its whole body against the wave wash so it feels twice its size. It came up the beach on a wave looking like a hubcap somebody had polished. Two and a half pounds. The schoolteacher looked over for the first time all morning and nodded, which on that beach is roughly equal to a parade.
We got four between us by noon, and then the wind came back southeast and the water went brown and the pompano went wherever pompano go when the surf gets rude. The schoolteacher folded his chair and said they would be back after the next front. He also said I was still casting short, which I was, and which I plan to keep doing, since it seems to be the only thing that works.
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