We postponed Kansas because of wind and lightning. Wind and lightning aren’t abnormal for Kansas in the spring, but it was lots of wind and lots of lightning. The New York Times said there were more than 300 reported tornadoes in the Midwest over the last 30 days. Of course whenever I read now of weather that’s a bit more than it should be I wonder if it’s climate change, and whether I should be buying land in soon-to-be-tropical Minnesota instead of going fishing. Being reasonably short-sighted I went fishing.

We fished mid-state, halfway between Birmingham and Montgomery. I picked mid-state in part because I found a guide, East Alabama Fly Fishing. The obvious play for us was the Gulf, from Gulf Shores or Mobile, but we’d already fished for redfish in Mississippi and Louisiana, so we drove four hours further and fished for bass and sunfish. Of course I would have liked to fish for redfish in Alabama, but we only had three days. Choices must be chosen.

So bass. How many species of bass are there? Nine, though it’s not the most settled thing in the world. Fish species identification has a way of being uncertain, even for the best known game species. The nine that are currently agreed on? Largemouth, smallmouth, Guadalupe bass from Texas, Florida bass, Alabama bass, shoal bass from Georgia, Suwannee bass from Georgia and Florida, spotted bass, and redeye. Our guide, Craig Godwin, said we would fish for spotted and redeye on the Tallapoosa.

There’s a problem with that, and it’s a complicated problem. spotted bass, also called Kentucky bass, and Alabama bass, also called spotted bass, are almost indistinguishable. When I thought about it later I had no clue whether we’d been fishing for Kentucky bass or Alabama bass. There’s an easy test. All you have to do is count the pored scales on the lateral line. Alabama bass usually–note the usually–have 71 or more scales with holes. Kentucky bass typically have 70 or fewer. If you use a magnifying glass and don’t lose count you can be pretty certain of your fish. Usually. Since we didn’t have a magnifying glass, and since we haven’t yet been to Kentucky and will likely never go back to Alabama, I’m claiming victory and declaring our spotted bass in the Tallapoosa River as Alabama bass.

Since I’d caught a largemouth just last week, and a smallmouth last year on the Shenandoah, I’m only five species away from a Bassmaster BASS Slam! I may make something of myself yet.

Back to the river, I had never heard of the Tallapoosa. I’ve heard of a lot of rivers, but before we left for Alabama if you’d asked me to name a single Alabama River, I couldn’t have named one. I knew there was a bridge in Selma, but I had no clue what river ran under it. It’s the Alabama, by the way, formed where the Tallapoosa and the Coosa meet near Montgomery.

We met Craig at the put-in at Horseshoe Bend National Military Park, considerably north of where the Coosa and the Tallapoosa meet. Our raft float to the Jaybird Creek boat launch was five and a half miles and a bit more than five hours. It’s a big river by my lights, not Mississippi big, but except around island channels where it narrows it’s at least a football field from bank to bank, and where the river falls it’s a limestone boulder garden. And there’s plenty enough fall. There are Class II and and even Class IV rapids on the river, though thank goodness no class IV where we fished.

It’s a tailwater, with four separate power dams. We were below the H.L. Harris Dam and above Lake Martin and Martin Dam. Craig said that the level of the river was driven by power generation at H.L. Harris, and that the river elevation could vary greatly. Maybe I’m wrong, but it doesn’t seem that the dams have changed the fish in the river. These are native fish, the fish that were there before we were.

It’s a clean river too, though no river I’ve ever fished was clean enough that I could see bass in current. Ponds, sure, if a pond is clear I can see fish, but these aren’t stillwater bass. Spotted Alabama and redeye bass hunt in the current and we fished the pockets back of rocks and the lines where the speeds of the river changed, and as close to the banks as we could manage to cast.

They were clean, beautiful fish, perfect for the river. First things first. Redeyes do not have red eyes. Some we caught had a red spot on the gill plate, and that may be where the name comes from, but frankly we saw more red in the eyes of spotted bass. They also aren’t big, and the redeyes we caught in the river seemed to be in the neighborhood of a pound. But the dark green and black backs paired with the turquoise lower jaw and belly was so colorful, they’re an unforgettable fish. They also have on the edges of their fins the slightest tinge of white, a hint, a tell, a joy to discover.

The Alabama bass are larger, and frankly I’d have confused them with largemouth if I hadn’t known better. The colors, even the lateral markings, often aren’t that different. The most obvious difference is the jaw. The jaw on a largemouth extends back behind the eye, the spotted bass’s jaw is in front of the eye. Plus there’s the whole current thing. Largemouth don’t live long and prosper in current.

We both fished five weights with floating lines, and most of the float we fished poppers. It was funny popper fishing though. We cast the popper, let it drift like a dry fly, and now and again gave it a twitch. Do you know how to fish a popper on a pond? There are lots of ways I suppose, but my best luck is to cast the popper, let it sit until the ripples die, then give it a nudge. Then let the ripples die and give it another nudge. I guess this was similar but in the absence of pond ripples the popper drifted. It was like fishing dry flies on a drift, except for the now and then pop.

Sometimes the sunfish would hit it, but the poppers we were using were just a bit much for sunfish. Look, I have to admit it, and I had to admit it to Craig, give me a choice of any fish in the world to catch I’d probably catch a sunfish. I loved them as a child, and I love them now. I love to see their colors and to try to parse out the species. I love their ferocity. We were catching bass, yeah, and there’s no nobler calling, tarpon or trout-be-damned. But this year I’ve caught a paucity of sunfish. Late in the day I switched to a Barr’s slumpbuster I’d tied up for Kansas, because I knew I would catch sunfish. I caught sunfish. Craig said these were longears, and I’ll go with that.

Just a note on fishing with Craig. I’ve fished with a lot of guides. I’ve fished with well-known guides and I’ve fished with extraordinarily skillful guides. I’ve fished with guides who were too young to be guiding and guides who were fun to fish with precisely because they were old enough to have seen all they could possibly see, older even than me. I never fished with a guide who took as much joy from the place or from me catching a fish.

Late in the day a fish on Kris’s line went under a rock and couldn’t be brought up. Craig went in after it. That’s service, or maybe you just can’t keep an Alabama boy from noodling.

That’s Southern humor, and I can get away with it. Don’t you try it at home.