Outdoors columnist Dan Geddings: Fishing the swamp

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Back in the old days, we fished Pocotaligo Swamp. We used one-man wooden boats that my dad and uncles built. There was no set pattern, and the boats varied a little from builder to builder. But the basic design was a flat-bottom boat with a single seat near the middle. They were lightweight and easy to handle.

Daddy modified his boats to add a seat toward the front to accommodate me or my brother, David. Most of the boats included a live well under the seat to keep the fish alive.

The hardwood timber of Pocalla was harvested in an era before modern forestry's best management practices. Tram roads were built, streams were bridged, and the majority of the swamp was clear-cut. The spoils - tree tops, logs and limbs - were left behind to clog the labyrinth of streams and blackwater runs.

The logging debris blocked the natural flow of water, and the entire swamp was flooded. Cattails, alligator grass and willows took over the vast openings, and very little natural regeneration of trees occurred for decades.

Twelve Bridges Road crosses the swamp in southern Sumter County just before the Clarendon County line. When I was a youngster, I asked my daddy why the road had that name. He told me that the original road was a dirt causeway with 12 wooden bridges crossing the creeks and wide streams that flowed through the swamp.

I can remember when the timber was cut in the Clarendon County section in the '60s. Logging trucks hauled the hardwood timber out for years.

Some years later we fished an area in Clarendon County called Thigpen's Lake. The only access was from local farm roads.

The section of swamp that we fished was infested with snakes. Water snakes and cotton-mouthed moccasins were the main culprits. Those snakes are fish eaters, and they wanted the fish that we caught. Daddy always carried a .22 revolver and a box of bullets to deal with the snakes.

We used a rig that is called a lead line. It consisted of a cane pole with a line the length of the pole. There was no cork. A small hook was tied at the end and a piece of lead fixed just above the hook. We baited the hook with earthworms. You could drop that line in a small hole in the grass or in a submerged treetop. The lead would carry the baited hook to the bottom. The line would go slack when it hit bottom, and you could make a small lifting motion. That's when a big bluegill or warmouth would bite.

On one of the fishing trips with my Dad, when I was about 10 years old, I had a lively encounter with one of the cranky old serpents of the swamp. I can remember it as if it happened yesterday.

We were fishing the main creek at Thigpen's, and Daddy noticed a big, wide log that had drifted up against the alligator grass in one of our favorite spots. The cypress log was 3 or 4-feet wide and probably 20 feet long. It was rock solid.

The log was blocking a little stream that we wanted to fish but couldn't reach. Daddy suggested that I could carefully step out of the boat onto the log and reach the little stream with my lead line. He gave me a fish stringer out of the tackle box to put my fish on, then he pulled away into the slow current.

It was magic. I caught fish after fish and strung them on the stringer which I tied to my belt. And I let the fish dangle in the water, keeping them alive. They splashed around but couldn't go anywhere. After a while I noticed that Daddy had gone around a bend in the creek.

That's when I looked around at the end of the log and noticed a very large water moccasin crawling onto the big log that I was standing on. There was nowhere to go. It was me and that snake out there in the swamp, on the same log.

When the snake started crawling toward me, I became a little concerned and decided to smack him with the cane pole. He was not impressed and just kept on coming up the log. That's when I realized he was probably after the fish I had on the stringer. I wasn't going to give up my fish, so I called out for my Dad.

He called back that he was coming and added I should hit the snake with my cane pole, which I continued to do, more and more vigorously. When Daddy came around the bend and saw the snake, he stepped up his progress and was soon at my side. He shot the big moccasin that was now only a few feet away and helped me clamber back into the boat.

The roads to Thigpen's Lake are abandoned now and overgrown. Those days are gone but will live on with me. A few people fish the creeks at Twelve Bridges Road and U.S. 15. I guess the fish are still there and probably the snakes, too.

Email Dan Geddings at cdgeddings@gmail.com.