Page 142 - South Mississippi Living - August, 2016

SPORTS & OUTDOORS a sh out of water
Memories of shing for ounder in Biloxi
story by Walter J. Blessey, IV photos by James Edward Bates
remember the fun times I had as a young boy after World War II going floundering with my grandfather, Henry F. Fountain, Sr. Grandpa was a master boat builder who
also made the best floundering gigs around. He used the long shafts of worn-out one-eighth-inch drill bits that he sharpened to a needle point and inserted into the end of shovel handles with a metal band at the base that added to the strength of the gig.
Grandpa had a kerosene torch, like many other Biloxians, that provided the light to see the outline of the flounder in the water at night. This torch had a one- gallon cylinder tank with a shoulder strap. The kerosene was gravity fed through a six-foot, one-half-inch galvanized pipe to a small wire basket at the end that held a ball of canvas or asbestos cloth that was lit. The
burning torch emitted soot that the person who carried the torch had to endure.
We floundered south of the seawall (before the sand beach was pumped in) and a real treat was to row a skiff to Deer Island to flounder around the island.
The best time to go gigging for flounder was at night when the tide was out and just beginning to rise. The flounder would bury in the sand at low tide and wait for the small minnows and shrimp to come in with the rising tide. With some experience it became easy to see the outline of the flounder in the shallow water. One learned quickly to recognize the difference in the image of a flounder and that of a sting-ray.
You had to slowly approach the flounder and plunge the gig just behind the gills. To pick up the flounder the person with the gig in one hand would place his other
142 SOUTH MISSISSIPPI Living • August 2016
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