The Mobile-Tensaw Delta is a quarter million acres of river, swamp, and cypress above Mobile Bay, five rivers braiding into each other through country that looks the way the whole Gulf Coast did before anyone drained it. Most of the year the bass are scattered through the flooded timber where you cannot get a boat and the water moccasins can. Then October comes, the first real north wind blows for three days, the rivers drop two feet, and everything that was living in the woods has to come out through the creek mouths. That is when the Delta fishes, and the spotted bass, the river bass with the rough tongue patch and the attitude, are the first ones to the door.
I fished it with a retired tugboat captain who had a sixteen-foot aluminum boat and a trolling motor he called the real engine, the outboard being just for getting there. He put us on a creek mouth off the Tensaw at first light with the tide falling and the river falling on top of it, so the current pouring out of the swamp looked like someone had pulled a plug. He said throw a small crankbait into the mouth and let it wash out, and if nothing hit it by the third cast move to the next creek, because the Delta has four hundred creeks and no time for sentiment.
The first spot hit so hard I thought I had hooked the bottom and then thought the bottom had hooked me. They are not big fish on the Delta, two pounds is good and three gets your picture taken at the landing, but they fight like something twice the size that has been personally insulted. The captain caught two on consecutive casts off a cypress knee and then a largemouth that went four pounds, and said with no humility at all that the largemouth was the easier fish and the spots were the better ones.
We ran creek to creek all morning as the tide pulled out, through water that changed color from river brown to tea to clear black where the swamp drained in. Alligators watched us from the banks with the patience of landlords. By ten the current slowed and so did the fish, and the captain turned the boat back toward the landing with a dozen spotted bass released and one largemouth in the box for his wife, who he said did not believe in catch and release and never would.
He told me the Delta is the best bass water nobody fishes, because it looks like a swamp and smells like one and the road in is not on the map most phones use. I asked if he minded me writing that down. He said go ahead, anyone who could find the landing had earned it.
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