Nobody in North Florida calls them crappie. They are speckled perch, or specks, and the people who fish for them on Lake Talquin west of Tallahassee take the distinction seriously enough to correct you at the bait shop. The lake is a dammed stretch of the Ochlockonee River, eight thousand acres of drowned timber and dark water, and in October, when the first real cool front pushes through and the water temperature finally lets go of summer, the specks come up out of the deep channel and start to feed.
I fished it with a retired man named Hollis who has a pontoon boat older than I am and a dozen rods set in holders across the bow like the ribs of an umbrella. This is spider rigging. You put minnows on every line, you set them at different depths, and you move the boat across the old river channel at a speed Hollis describes as slower than that. The rods are twelve feet long. From a distance the boat looks like a spider walking on the water, which is where the name comes from, and from up close it looks like a man who has solved a problem the rest of us are still having.
The first fish was on the second rod from the left, a dip of the tip and then the slow pulsing bend that means speck and not bass. Hollis said get it, get it, and I lifted it over the rail, a slab of a fish the size of a dinner plate, silver with black freckles and a mouth like paper. You do not set the hook on specks. You lift. Set it like a bass and you tear the hook right out, which I demonstrated three times before the lesson took.
By midmorning the cooler held a limit between us and the fog had burned off the cypress. Hollis talked about the lake the way men talk about a wife of fifty years, with affection and a long list of complaints. The water was too high. The hydrilla was wrong. The specks were smaller than they used to be, which he said while holding one that was not. A bald eagle sat in a dead pine and watched us the whole time, and Hollis said it has been there since the Carter administration.
We cleaned fish at his dock in the afternoon and he sent me home with a bag of fillets and instructions. Cornmeal, hot peanut oil, do not walk away from the pan. I asked if there was a secret to finding specks on Talquin and he said yes, you find Hollis. Then he said he was kidding, and then he said he was not.
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.