Tensaw dreams

My brother-from-a-different-mother, Bob Sanders, has an elegant (in a manly way) blog called Bobventures that can be found here. Bob has fished in both BASS and FLW events, and is a great angler. He would probably be on the Eite Series level if he had been born at a different time and had the opportunities presented the pros these days instead of developing into a business man, and now a genteel, southern farmer.

There's a post there where he described fishing in the Big Salkehatchie River swamp recently and he spoke of the 3 generations of men he knows who have fished there. I loved this post because it reminded me of so many stories I heard from my Daddy while I was growing up.

Daddy is from Baldwin County, Alabama and fished the backwaters of the Mobile Delta as a kid and a young adult. He skulled those bayous for catfish, bream and bass (or what my grandmother called green trout) and was also known to bring home the makings for my grandmother's famous turtle soup. My grandmother could bring home dinner from the creek herself as well.

His fishing outings circumnavigated a convenient loop that included the Tensaw River and the Mobile River which I highlighted below on the map. (You can click the map to make it bigger if you're interested.) I grew up hearing stories about places like Live Oak Landing, the Dog River, Polecat Bay, Doctor Lake and even (unfathomably now) a placename that contains a racial slur. He was known to skip school to fish all day. To think that as a youngster of 14 or 15, my Daddy would get in his little tin boat with a 25 horse motor and stay out all day in that swamp seems remarkable now. I doubt my teenaged nephews could do. No, I KNOW my nephews could not do it.

I would love to be brave enough to fish that loop today. But I would most likely find myself lost in a swamp and carried off by mosquitoes before I found my way out.

What does this have to do with professional bass fishing? Not much, other than the idea that everyone starts somewhere and I would be willing to bet almost every angler earning a living by fishing today has a story of how they got started in the sport that includes tales and memories of their father or uncle or grandfather or even a grandma.

Thanks for reviving that memory, Bob.