BAY ST. LOUIS, Miss. - My first cast in Mississippi stuck a 35-pound redfish.
Could it get any better?
Oh, yeah, a lot better. In fact, the two days I spent in the Gulf of Mexico off the Mississippi coast produced the best fishing of my life.
Tommy Akin, a friend from Tennessee, and Mike Jones of Vicksburg, Miss., organized the trip on behalf of the Mississippi Department of Tourism. Frankly, I’d never given much thought to fishing Mississippi’s coast. I’ve had some great inshore trips in Louisiana and some epic trips in Tampa Bay. I used to cover Alabama’s saltwater scene for Outdoor Life in the late 1990s, but saltwater fishing in Mississippi is virtually unknown.
“Fishing is huge here,” Jones said. “Everybody does it, but they don’t promote it.”
Sonny Schindler of Shore Thing Charters was our guide. We met him at 5 a.m. Tuesday, just as the sky was brightening on the other side of the Gulf. As we reached the mouth of the bayou at the bay, Schindler idled his engine and said a short prayer. He requested success for all the other fishermen and for safety from rain, wind, lightning and waterspouts. Finally, he requested plenty of hard-pulling, edible fish.
With that, he put the visor back on his head and throttled down his 250-horsepower Yamaha outboard for a long ride into the waves.
We stopped at a short, thin mud spit in the middle of nowhere. In the distance on a larger island were the ruins of an old hunting and fishing camp.
“You need to take a picture of this,” Schindler said, pointing to the sliver of mud. “This used to cover several hundred acres. This is all that’s left, and soon it’ll be gone, too.”
Schindler talked wistfully about wade fishing the marsh when he was in high school and college. It has eroded away, as has much of the marsh at the mouth of the Mississippi River Delta.
Current poured through a gap between the island and a submerged reef. We all used light spinning rigs with tandem Strike King Redfish Magic swimbaits. Schindler spooled his reels with braided line. The braid ended at a swivel, to which he tied heavy monofilament.
My first cast was parallel to the boat. I let the lures hit the bottom and retrieved them by lifting them off the bottom, letting them fall and reeling in the slack.
Quickly, a big fish slammed the rig and took off like a race car. It stripped line off the spool while the drag hummed. I handed my son Matthew the rod. It was his first time fishing in the salt, and he was about to experience a different class of fish than the smallmouth bass we pursue in Arkansas.
“What are you grinnin’ at?” asked Akin, amused.
Matt’s smile was so broad that the corners of his mouth practically stretched around his neck.
“I’ll bet that’s a great big bull red,” Schindler said.
It took about 30 minutes, but Matt finally got the fish into Schindler’s net. It was indeed a big bull red, about 35 pounds. After taking some photos, we released it to grow even bigger.
My next cast produced a big speckled trout, and then the action went strangely silent. The lull lasted several hours as Schindler tried one spot after another. Finally, he found a flock of seagulls diving after baitfish on the surface.
“Cast at those birds,” Schindler ordered. “Throw right at them! Trout’ll be under them!”
He was right. Trout struck the baits the instant they hit the water. All of us caught doubles at the same time, and soon we had big trout flopping all over the boat.
The gulls left, as did the trout. A flock of terns dove on bait, and we cast at them, too. Instead of trout, though, we caught ladyfish, a long, slender fish that fights hard but has no table value.
“My experience out here is that the gulls tend to follow the trout, and the terns tend to follow the trash fish, you know, ladyfish and things like that,” Schindler said.
Around 11 a.m., we circled another island. Gulls and terns rode at rest on the lee side. On a hunch, Schindler dropped anchor. That spot produced the “melee” that Schindler wanted in which everyone in the boat had one or two trout on a line at once. We finished with 65 keeper trout in the box. We caught and released countless sub-legal trout, too.
On the way back to the dock, Schindler made a milk run of derelict crab pots. He ran close to them all, looking for tripletail, a big, meaty fish that looks like an overgrown bluegill to the power of 100. He finally saw one and circled back. He cut the motor within casting distance. A big fish lolled beneath the buoy.
“They just kind of become whatever they’re around,” Schindler said. “They change color to blend in. They always face into the current, so we’re going to put a live shrimp under a popping cork and cast just beyond. We’ll let the shrimp be a shrimp, and we’ll reel it right by him. He won’t be able to resist.”
It happened just as Schindler described. Once he set the hook, he handed the rod to Matt, who reeled it in and landed it.
“That’s some good eating right there,” Schindler said. “It’s a lot like grouper.”
Wednesday was a blur. We didn’t get a redfish, but we boxed another 65 trout by 9:15 a.m. Schindler shot a one-minute video of one “melee” in which four of us battled trout at the same time.
We found another tripletail under a crab buoy on the way back, and I caught it. Jones recorded it on video from cast to net.
Our total haul in less than 24 hours of fishing included 130 keeper trout, 2 tripletails, 1 bull red, 1 blacktip shark which we released, scores of ladyfish and several catfish.
Schindler, who said he guides about 200 days a year, cleaned and bagged all the trout and tripletails.
We returned home Thursday evening and had fresh trout for supper. The memory of catching them made them that much sweeter.
Sports, Pages 26 on 06/30/2013