Powered by RedCircle
This week’s Mobile-Tensaw Delta Fishing Report features two strong on-the-water conversations with Justin “The Eight Mile Drifter” Dunham of Eight Mile Drifter and Darren Shirah of Reel Time Outdoors With Darren. Justin covers a full Mardi Gras-week run from the upper Delta down to Dog River and even over to the Escambia, with a clear pre-spawn bass signal and a crappie pattern that’s getting easier by the day. Darren checks in with a spring-on-the-way mindset, explaining how bream are starting to slide out of winter positioning, why live bait is still the most dependable play right now, and why the Delta often fishes on its own calendar.
Conditions Recap
The theme this week is late-winter volatility without a true reset. Air temps have been swinging hard (warm days followed by overnight drops), but the consensus is that the current cold snap is not expected to knock water temps back in a major way. Justin’s take is that it takes several days of sustained cold wind to really change the water temperature, and the forecast trend should return to “good” fishing temperatures quickly as the week progresses.
Multiple clues point to early spring momentum: bass are showing classic pre-spawn behavior (including heavy, egg-filled fish staging near flats and slightly deeper water), crappie are stacking tight to cover and showing signs of a coming push shallow, and bream are beginning to break up winter patterns and roam toward more spring-like areas. Darren noted water temperatures sitting in the low to mid 60s in many places he’s watching, and both conversations leaned toward the same window: now through April is prime time for a true “best fish of the year” bite to show up.
Justin “The Eight Mile Drifter” Dunham
Justin made the most of a full week off and bounced across multiple systems, which gave a great snapshot of how the whole region is starting to wake up. He started in the upper Delta at Majors Creek near French’s Lake, focusing on bass and deliberately getting re-acclimated to a jerkbait program for an upcoming tournament. The jerkbait produced, but mostly smaller creek fish, so he stepped up and committed to a bigger profile to hunt better bites.
The big change was a 7-inch glide bait, and that was the difference-maker. Justin reported catching a lot of his better bass in the 1.5- to 2-pound range on the glide bait and hooking a much larger fish he estimated around 4.5 pounds. He described those fish as pre-spawn, staging a little deeper near flats, and feeding with intent. His most repeatable setup detail was working the glide bait fast over shallow laydowns, forcing fish to track it across the cover and ideally eat it as it comes back toward him, which helps with hook-ups and helps avoid donating an expensive bait to wood cover.
He also mixed in a crappie stop back at Majors Creek when another gate was closed. The crappie were piled into a treetop so thick that the pattern turned into precision drops: get a small jig right on the cover, and if you didn’t get snagged, you got bit. He described dropping the jig straight down about six feet beside the cover and “flicking” fish into the boat as fast as he could reset.
Justin finished the week with a run over to the Escambia River in Florida and then a Mob Town kayak bass tournament on Dog River. On Escambia, the key was simple: fight the swift, muddy main flow just long enough to reach calmer oxbows and slack-water creeks, where fish were stacked and willing. In the tournament, he caught plenty of fish in Perch Creek, mainly on a spinnerbait, but didn’t find the size needed to move the needle in the standings.
Justin’s gear and technique notes
Several gear items came up in the “real talk” portion of Justin’s segment. On small craft mobility, the conversation touched on electric options for canoes and kayaks, including Torqeedo motors, Newport Vessels motors, and Bixpy motors. On glide baits specifically, Justin mentioned starting with the Shimano Armajoint (noting its Flash Boost-style internal flicker) and also discussed a resin, hand-finished bait style he’s been throwing more recently.
For the big-bait setup, he’s throwing the 7-inch glide on a 7’6” heavy-action baitcasting rod with a longer handle for two-handed casting, paired with a Shimano Curado 300 in a slower gear ratio range (he referenced roughly 4.6:1). His retrieve is a repeatable cadence: short “quarter-turn” handle moves with rod twitches to create a hard, walk-the-dog style chop, especially when steering the bait across a shallow laydown.
He also called out another confidence producer for the pre-spawn window: the Strike King Hybrid Hunter crankbait in a red pattern he referred to as “Delta Red,” which he likes for banging around cypress knees and stumps in backwaters that traditionally hold spawners.
Looking ahead, Justin said he expects glide baits to cross over into saltwater for him soon, specifically as a big-trout tool in places like Little Lagoon, once he gets a chance to commit to it.
Darren Shirah
Darren’s report centered on the panfish side of the Delta as spring edges closer. His read is that bream are beginning to break up winter patterns and start moving around more, but they are not locked into bed behavior yet. He described the “follow them around” phase, where location and mood can change quickly as conditions stabilize.
On timing, Darren’s baseline expectation is that bream bedding typically lines up around the first full moon of April in many years, with some variation depending on how the spring calendar and water temperature play out. He also noted that goggle-eye timing overlaps the bream season, and that they can be caught in multiple phases as the warming trend continues.
Darren was clear that the artificial bite has been slower for him right now, and he’s leaned on live bait to keep catching consistently as fish are still transitioning. He’s been doing best with crickets, flipping them around likely areas and staying flexible as fish shift by small changes in temperature, depth, and tide. He also spoke to the Delta’s learning curve: patterns that are “common knowledge” elsewhere often do not translate cleanly here, and it’s easy to be on the right water at the right temperature but still be off by a foot of water level or a small timing detail.
He also discussed crappie progression and why he prefers more active fishing styles. He’s learning more about targeting crappie by forcing himself to chase new patterns (partly driven by producing YouTube content), but he still prefers casting and hunting fish the “natural way” rather than slow drifting or spider-rigging approaches.
Darren’s gear and bait notes
Darren’s most practical “right now” recommendation is simple: if you want steady bream action during this transition window, use live crickets and fish them around likely zones instead of forcing an artificial-only approach.
In a broader spring prep conversation, the episode also mentioned tying fresh fly fishing leaders and building up spring boxes with items like Beetle Spins, plus fly-tying materials and patterns such as woolly buggers (including a jig-style, hook-point-up approach for fishing around treetops), deceivers, zonkers, and poppers. The talk here was more “getting ready” than a proven bite report, but it’s a useful reminder that March and April open up a lot of fun crossover opportunities for bream, crappie, and even pickerel on flies once fish commit shallow.
