The Suwannee bass is the bass Florida forgot to advertise. It lives in a handful of rivers in the northern part of the state and a corner of Georgia, it seldom grows past sixteen inches, and a two pounder is a fish you tell people about. What it lacks in size it makes up in looks. A good one is bronze and thick through the shoulders, with a wash of turquoise on the cheeks and belly, as if it had been leaning on a freshly painted fence.
My brother in law Dale keeps an aluminum canoe near High Springs for exactly this purpose. In late September we put in on the Santa Fe with two spinning rods, a small cooler, and a bag of boiled peanuts. The river is fed by springs, one after another, each pushing out water at seventy two degrees all year. Where a spring run comes in, the river goes from tea to gin in the space of a paddle stroke. Cypress lean over both banks, and turtles stack up on every log like dishes in a rack.
Suwannee bass eat crayfish nearly to the exclusion of everything else, so they live where crayfish live, over limestone shoals and ledges in moving water. Dale fishes a small brown jig and nothing else. He owns a tackle box with forty of them, all one color, arranged by no system I could detect. The method is to drift the shoal, pitch the jig above a ledge, and let it tumble down. My first bite came on the third shoal. The rod thumped, and a fish of perhaps thirteen inches pulled as though somebody had told it that it was a largemouth and it had believed them.
We caught fourteen in four miles, along with a few redbreast sunfish and one actual largemouth, which Dale unhooked with the expression of a man pulling a weed. The biggest Suwannee went a pound and three quarters on his scale. He held it in the water a moment, turning it so the blue showed, and let it go. Around noon a family on inner tubes floated straight through the best shoal on the river, waving. Dale waved back with his whole arm, which is what he does instead of swearing.
At the takeout a man loading a bass boat asked what we had caught. Dale said Suwannee bass, biggest almost two pounds, and the man looked at us with real sympathy. Dale let him. He says the day that fish gets popular is the day he has to find a new river, and he is too old to learn another one. I have been asked not to say which shoal. I could not find it again anyway.
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