The author displays the stringer of shellcrackers that he took from Trace Lake in Trace State Park. Photo courtesy of Robert H. Cleveland Jr.

Larry Pugh was pointing to a stump and log in the back of the small cove with his bass rod, and was saying something about a big bass or two that the timber had produced for him in the past.

The fisheries biologist for the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks and diehard bass angler could have been talking about a potential world-record largemouth for all I knew. On that cold, windy April morning, I was too focused on something else to pay much attention to Larry Pugh.

The floor of the small, clear cove on the lake at Trace State Park was dimpled with round impressions to the point that it looked like someone had laid tile with that pattern across the lake bottom.

"Good God, Larry -- tell me those are bream beds!" I said, interrupting his bass story.

"Yeah," Pugh said rather unexcitedly. "Looks like the entire cove is just one whole connected bream bed -- but, like I was saying: I was in here one day and flipped a worm over that log and -- "

"Would you shut up about the bass?" I blurted out. "Look at all these bream beds! Ease us out of here -- and try not to spook them too bad."

That ended our bass fishing, but 30 minutes later, I was back on the water with a hundred crickets and two ultra-light spinning rods and was jockeying my smaller, lighter boat into position on the sunny side of the cove. It was the only area of the 20-by-20-yard cove without the dimpled bottom. My first cast with 2-pound line and a cricket landed in a spot where I had seen a big bream. Two seconds later, the Styrofoam bobber disappeared. The fish pulled a few feet of drag on the reel, and had the 6-foot rod bent into an arc. When I finally netted the fish, about a minute later, I was delighted.

"Would you look at that chinkypin?" I crowed, using a colloquially distorted version of "chinquapin" -- one of several names (others being "redear" and "shellcracker") for these fish. "Got to go a pound -- maybe a pound and a quarter."

Over the next hour, fishing partner Bryan Broom and I caught 33 giants, all identical to that first bigger-than-your-hand monster. We tossed back another 25 or 30 smaller redears and bluegills.

And guess who made the last few casts?

"Here -- let me see one of those buggywhips," Pugh said, easing his big bass boat alongside my boat. "All that hollering you guys were doing, it must be fun."

For hundreds of thousands of Mississippi fishermen, there is no bigger kick than to find themselves sitting on top of a hot bream hole. The action will be fast and furious, and the rewards come in the dual form of the immediate thrill and the later feast of fried fish. Fortunately, nobody in the Magnolia State, nobody has to drive far to find such a hotspot.

"There's no doubt about it," said Ron Garavelli, chief of fisheries for the MDWFP. "If you like to fish for bream, you can find plenty of places. It doesn't matter if you prefer ponds, small lakes, oxbow lakes or streams -- you won't have to make a long drive to find some action."