LOCALS FIND 18TH CENTURY CANOE IN TALLAHALA

By MARK THORTON, - When Vincent Spradley went fishing recently, he came away with the catch of a lifetime from Tallahala Creek.

He and 15-year-old daughter, Brittany, who live in the Glade Community, and buddies Tommy Elias, 35, of Purvis and Jacob Livingston, 25, of Laurel returned to shore with a dugout canoe that could be more than 300 years old.

Spradley could only see about 7 inches of the 17-foot canoe sticking up at an angle in the middle of the creek, between the boat launch off Highway 29 South at Spurline Road and Tuckers Crossing.

“I saw it Saturday while I was riding the creek with my dog and fishing,” Spradley said. “I started fishing, but I kept thinking, ‘I better go back and look at that.’”

When he went back and took a closer look, he was glad he went back to check out the “log” that caught his eye.

“I felt of it and I said, ‘That’s a canoe,’” Spradley recalled. “I must have drove by it a hundred times.”

It was upside down in the creek, so what couldn’t be seen was a hollowed-out log with a seat sculpted into the wood at the end.

“They told us we needed to keep it wet or it could dry out and fall to pieces,” Elias said as he poured water from a pitcher onto the canoe. “We want to do things right. This is history.”

Conservation officer Keith Jones, who met them at the Highway 29 boat ramp, reiterated the advice about keeping it wet as they tried to figure out how they were going to transport it. There wasn’t much question what they were going to do with it.

“It’s not on sale, it’s for sale,” Spradley said. “This is the find of a lifetime.”

His daughter said she had done some research and learned that Native Americans would bore a hole in a canoe’s hull to “free the spirit” of the recently departed owner. There was a hole in the bottom of the canoe, a couple of feet from the seat.

Elias’ father is longtime Bassmaster pro fisherman Paul Elias.

“He ain’t never caught nothing like this,” his son said with a laugh. “This is something.”

State Historic Preservation Officer Jim Woodrick said that the canoe is likely from the 1700s, and officials can’t speculate about what tribe it could have come from — or even that it was made by Native American hands.

What he does know is that it’s a “remarkable find” to have anything that was hand-made in the 18th century.

“We have at least one (Indian dugout canoe) in the museum’s collection,” he said. “I’ve been here since 1997, and I’ve only heard of two or three being found in the state during that time.”

There is some question about who the owner of the canoe is, though.

“As I understand it … anything found in the streambed of a waterway belongs to the State of Mississippi,” Woodrick said, “but we need to do a little more investigation and have some more discussions.”

While the find’s keepers are holding their breath waiting for the ruling, the canoe is still submerged in a safe place.

“We want to preserve it ourselves,” Livingston said.

From Kneelin’ and Reelin’ to Smashing Records

Photo by Phoenix Moore - BRANSON, Mo. – What were you doing in January of 1976? It’s possible you weren’t even born yet, as is the case with this author. For Paul Elias, it was the start of a long and storied career as a professional bass angler. 

The 1976 Bassmaster Florida Invitational on St. Johns River was the beginning of what would lead to many innovations from the legendary bass angler, who is still slugging it out 43 years later, on the MLF Bass Pro Tour.

Along the way, Elias has won a Bassmaster Classic, set a weight record that still stands, and also introduced the masses to the Alabama Rig after a 2011 FLW Series victory on Lake Guntersville, Alabama. The Mississippi native has been a significant force of change and altered the way we fish to this day.

Getting Off the Bank

As we watched the anglers of the Bass Pro Tour fish Table Rock Lake, several all of them were offshore, and using their electronics to locate bass. That wasn’t always the case, and the field should thank Paul Elias and other pioneers for helping lead the way to fishing structure in deeper water.

“I’ve made my career by fishing off the bank, and it used to be much harder to locate the spots – now the mapping cards are so good, and everything is on your GPS,” he points out. 

There was no idling on your big motor and dropping waypoints in those days.

“I looked at an old paper map of Logan Martin recently: I had things written down like ‘line up this tree and the end of this gable and then line up with this power line’ it was so funny to see,” Elias recalls about having to triangulate every offshore location instead of relying on a GPS waypoint to get back to the spot.

“During practice in those days, I would study maps and ride around to search and search, and if I could find two or three spots with a few stumps or a rockpile, I was lucky to find that many places. I would also have them all to myself.” 

It wasn’t until he won the 1982 Bassmaster Classic on the Alabama River that folks started to see the power of getting off the bank, and that event itself spurred two other innovations: deeper diving crankbaits and longer rods.

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