Finnell Forrest has been fishing off the Causeway in the Mobile-Tensaw Delta for nearly a decade. His dad, who gave up fishing years ago, started taking him here when he was a kid.
At this little spot on the Blakeley River, not much more than spitting distance from the Causeway, Forrest and his buddy David Stallworth angle for largemouth bass, brim, crappie, redfish, and speckled trout. But no black drum — they let that go. “Too many worms in them,” he says.
Finnell likes fishing in the spring and fall best. He watches the tidal calendar and prefers fishing this locale to a falling tide. “The Blakeley is a pretty spot,” he says. “I get in my boat sometime and go up the river a bit. It’s a 17-foot-center console called a Bayhawk. It’s my first boat.”
On most days, Finnell uses a spinning rod with a J-hook and cork, with about three to four feet between bobber and hook. “[These freshwater fish] don’t eat down, they eat up,” he says. “They’re an ambush fish so they have to look up at their prey and eat them.” Today he and David are fishing with shiners and live shrimp they picked up at the bait shop just down the road, “Hooked By The Bay,” the last of its kind on the Causeway.
After a day on the water, Finnell cleans his haul at home and fries them up, using a mixture of cornmeal and wheat flour, and that seems to work pretty well, he says. Pan-fried mostly. Sometimes a deep fry. Baked occasionally.
Asked what he likes most about fishing the Delta, he says it’s “the relaxation, the wildlife. It’s peace of mind.”
But even among the scenic splendor, threats loom. From the patio of the Bluegill Restaurant, where I find myself later — just a hop, skip and a jump from Finnell’s fishing spot — you cannot see the candy-striped smokestacks of Plant Barry rising twenty miles away in north Mobile County, at the site of Alabama Power’s 600-acre coal-ash pond. The back-end of the restaurant, which sits on the eastern portion of The Causeway in Spanish Fort, looks out over Pass Picada channel — a veritable honey-hole for redfish, speckled trout, and largemouth bass— before flowing into Chacaloochee Bay. Families stand along the rickety dock after dining and kids angle for privileged glimpses of alligators loitering idly for scraps.
Standing along the Pass in the magic hour, among the cattails and cordgrass, hyacinth and lotus blooms, it’s easy to forget the elephant that looms northward in the Delta. Before the 2008 coal-ash spill in Kingston, Tenn. — a spill that resulted in nearly $3 billion in damages, and the deaths of cleanup workers — the issue of coal ash was not part of the public imagination.
Over the past seven years, due to the work of Mobile Baykeeper and others, coal ash is now very much on the minds of coastal Alabamians. And there are other threats you’d soon as well forget, as you soak up the Amazonian wonder: things like the BP oil spill, the dangers posed by dredging, and the increased stormwater runoff brought on by rapid development.
In the lower reaches of the Delta, where it traverses the Causeway and flows into Mobile Bay, there are no fish consumption advisories issued by the Alabama Public Health Department. But northward along the Mobile River, at the Cold Creek location, the state advises that no species of fish be consumed due to mercury contamination.
At David Lake, also on the Mobile River, advisories are issued for largemouth bass and black crappie. It’s worth noting that if a location or species does not have an advisory, it means there is not enough data on that site, not that it is automatically safe to consume fish from there. So it stands to reason that a largemouth bass, or black crappie, or any freshwater fish coming from up river and traveling to the lower Delta, is likely at risk for contamination. For subsistence fisherman who rely on those fish to feed their families, that’s not good news.
Read more at Mobile Baykeeper.
Caine O'Rear 