The author recalls his days living on the banks of this southwest Georgia waterway.
Summer 2023
By O. Vic Miller
I’d been after my next-door neighbor, Vic Ransom, to take me down the Kinchafoonee Creek, the stream my house overlooks, ever since the day I saw him walking up our property line with a string of largemouth bass that I coveted sinfully. I decided to rush over and offer to help clean them. Maybe he’d offer me a couple filets for supper. Then if I was careful, maybe I could worm out of him where they came from.
They looked like “a private pond” string of fish, with one lunker like a side of bacon. The rest were more or less uniform at between 2 1/2 to 3 pounds. Maybe he’d take me with him next time. I mean, what are neighbors for?
I headed him off by cutting through my house, grabbing a rake that was propped against the portico. I wanted something to lean on while I was hinting and interrogating.
“Where’d you catch the fish?” I asked after I had hemmed, hawed, scratched, spit, and picked my teeth long enough to sound casual.
“In the creek.”
“Creek? What creek?”
“The one in your backyard. The one I just walked up from,” he replied.
“Oh, that creek.”
Who did he think he was kidding? I knew there were fish in the Kinchafoonee, but I could wade across it, and Vic Ransom was toting a string of fish. I didn’t think there was enough water in that creek this time of the year to cover the dorsal fin of that lunker he was hauling up the hill. Still, I had to admit he had walked up the bank of the Kinchafoonee just now, grinning as he carried a boat cushion, a baitcaster, a canoe paddle and those bass.
Kinchafoonee held some surprisingly good bass. Photo by Polly Dean.
Vic explained that he caught the fish between our backyards and Ga. Highway 32, the Leesburg‑Ashburn highway, about a 4‑hour float trip.
It was three years before Vic finally got around to taking me fishing. I wore out a couple of rakes hanging around like a sea gull every time he came up the bank with fish. One time he staggered up the hill under the weight of a stringer that looked like a stalk of bananas.
We got up before daylight and got a pal of Vic’s to take us to the Prison Branch Road bridge and let us out. Another pal, Robert Crawford, went with us. When it got first light and we started drifting with the mist and listening to the plaintive coos of the mourning doves, I imagined I’d died and gone to heaven. The Kinchafoonee north of Leesburg hurries along winding banks of limestone sandbars, high clay bluffs and pristine cypress swamp. The shallow water in the fall is brown ‑ ‑ exactly the color of Georgia cane syrup ‑ ‑ and the lacy cypress branches become gilded before the hardwoods turn red and gold.
Kinchafoonee means “mortar bone” in Muskogee, exotic Indian nomenclature for a practical gadget to bust up nuts and grind corn. The headwaters are in Chattahoochee and Marion counties, and it empties into the Flint River at Albany. Vic’s favorite stretch is between Prison Branch Road (S 527) and the Leesburg‑Ashburn highway (Ga. 32). Access at these two bridges is difficult but possible, and there’s room to leave a vehicle on the bank. If you are willing to drag or carry your boat a short distance to the water, you won’t have much trouble, but don’t count on using a trailer to launch or pull out. Check out the condition of the access and the water level the day before, and allow yourself a full day because, after you launch at Prison Branch, you are committed. There isn’t much civilization between there and Ga. 32. I take a flashlight and matches just in case.
Navigability on these creeks varies with the water level and season. The log you drift comfortably over one day is the one you have to drag over or portage around the next.
I was sandwiched between two hefty guys with baitcasters throwing big lures that bristled with treble hooks. These plugs could reach out and grapple anything dead or alive, be it cypress knee, sweetspire bush, bay branch or human ear. And even if I avoided getting hooked, the guys were heaving plugs big enough to deliver a concussion or a fractured skull.
Vic threw a broken‑back Rebel the size of a Presidente cigar, much larger than the fish I had caught in the Kinchafoonee previously. He flipped it expertly over logs, into nooks, in troughs between sandbars, under branches and into places I’d have trouble hitting with a pistol. While guiding the boat, Vic covered both banks, hitting places that we two fisherman in front of him with two free hands missed. Robert Crawford was chunking an infinite variety of artifacts, including some that looked like Christmas tree ornaments. Those guys cast overhand, sidearmed, backhanded, assailing the water with a series of jabs, uppercuts, haymakers and hipshots from every position imaginable while I cowered down between them, timidly flipping a Beetle Spin on an ultralight.
And they caught bass, nice ones. Some of the fish were in water so shallow they seemed to burrow out of the sand to hit lures whose treble hooks plowed along the bottom leaving a furrow.
“Gentlemen,” said Crawford playing a fish, “do you believe in the hereafter?”
I nodded, picturing a celestial stream like the Kinchafoonee in the South Georgia sector of Paradise with big‑bellied cypress trees and low hanging Spanish moss, where waters teemed with redbellies inlaid with scales of rubies, turquoise and gold.
“Well, this is what we came in here after,” he continued, not waiting for an answer. All the while he was playing a bass on a spinnerbait with a skirt like a punk toupé.
Then Vic snagged that fish’s twin sister. She buried herself immediately in an underwater network of branches, and Vic somersaulted backward over the stern into the hip‑deep water, handgrabbing his tangled fish while the boat drifted without a pilot until it stopped on a sandbar.
He waded up to us holding his bass, and I slobbered like a Pavlovian dog. I picked up my Ambassadeur 521, tied on a Redfin the size of a bowling pin, and advanced to the firing line. My first cast landed solidly in the branches of a sycamore, startling a squirrel, who arched his back and hissed like a tomcat. But I got better, hitting the water once in awhile. I even started catching bass.
One way Vic solves the problem of floating too fast is to have a leaky boat. His aluminum jonboat narrows in the stern for better paddling. It’s shaped like the old Tison‑built boat of my childhood and has seen better days. I held a naked toe over one of the more prominent ruptures in the seams, but we still had to haul out on a sandbar every once in awhile to drain the bilge. It was tricky business to let just enough water out to make the boat manageable without killing the fish that swam around in the bottom. Of course, these fish were used to swimming in the Kinchafoonee, so they didn’t need much water.
Jonboat are ideal for creek fishing – as long as they don’t leak to badly and are not over crowded! Photo by Jimmy Jacobs.
Kinchafoonee fishing has its own appeal. It’s never dull. There’s always a stump, snag or a backlash to keep you occupied, and the scenery is constantly changing. There’s always something to get over, under or around, and you get a lot of practice casting in the most adverse and challenging conditions. You get good at casting, at snatching lures out of high branches and at ducking lures your pals snatch out of high branches.
In clear shallow water you can see the structure you fish, and in the creek structure is everything.
Bass fishing three in a jonboat teaches you all about brotherly love too, as well as patience. More than once while I was absently observing the flora and fauna, I neglected my rod while Crawford was hauling back for a haymaker. His lure caught the tip of my rod and remained with me during his herculean overhead casts downstream, sending his baitcaster into high-speed backlashes that sounded like a blender and looked like moused hair. The few bass that I caught came to me coincidentally while Crawford, after giving up trying to cut one of these phenomenal bird nests out of his reel, was trying to burn it out with a propane cigarette lighter.
But the real joy was the startling reality that bass, big bass, inhabit the Kinchafoonee Creek, breathing the same cinnamon water that flows by me when I’m on my deck drinking coffee. It’s like falling in love with your wife again. It’s like finding a little piece of heaven in your own backyard.
Vic Miller is a retired educator, having taught at Darton College in Albany. After that career he sailed his boat Kestyll to Panama to live aboard among the Kuna Indians. While there he fly fished and did mortal combat on occasion with the local crocodiles. His award-winning writing appears periodically in Gray’s Sporting Journal. Vic is a member of the Georgia Outdoor Writers Association. His latest book, Buzzard Luck, won first place in that organization’s 2023 Excellence in Craft competition for outdoor themed books. Buzzard Luck is available from Amazon.com.