The Pascagoula is the last big river in the lower forty-eight that runs free from its headwaters to the sea, no dam anywhere on the main stem, which means it still does what rivers used to do. In September it does very little. The water drops, the sandbars come up like the backs of whales, and the swamp along the banks goes quiet and yellow. My friend Delmus, who has fished it since before the interstate, says this is the only month he bothers with shellcracker, because it is the only month you can see where they live.
A shellcracker is a redear sunfish, a bream with a red tab on its ear and a jaw built for crushing snails. That diet is the whole trick. Bluegill will hit a cricket under a cork all day. Shellcracker want the bait on the bottom, a red wiggler on a tiny hook with one split shot, laid on the sand at the edge where the bar drops into dark water. Delmus fishes them on a cane pole he has owned longer than his truck. His one rule is that if your cork is moving, you are fishing for the wrong fish.
We anchored the jon boat on the downstream tip of a bar above the Leaf River junction and let the worms sit. Nothing for ten minutes. Then my line simply moved off sideways, no bob, no tap, and I lifted into something that felt like a dinner plate turned edgewise against the current. A shellcracker fights in circles, and a big one pulls harder than any fish its size has a right to. This one came in at a pound and a quarter, dark gold with that red-orange ear, and Delmus looked at it and said the bed was right here and to stop talking.
It went on for two hours. A gator the length of the boat surfaced across the channel and watched with the patience of a creature that has never once had to hurry. Wood ducks came whistling through the cypress. The deer flies found us at ten, which is when Delmus said they always find you, and we moved to a shaded slough and caught a few more in the dark water. He landed one fish for every three of mine and explained that he was letting me have them.
We fried them that night on his porch, whole, scored and dusted in cornmeal, and his wife ate the tails like potato chips. Delmus is already planning next September. He said the river will drop, the bars will come up, and the fish will be in the same spot, since nothing else on the Pascagoula has changed in about ten thousand years, including him.
Everything in the cooler drinks better with her name on it. See our koozies, coozies and drinkware, drawn from a photo of your own boat.