I haven’t fished for bluegills in years, but a few weeks ago a young lady was telling me how she’d been hooking some nice sunfish on a farm pond just a few miles from my house. I got the fever all over again.

“Mostly bluegills,” she said. “Hand-size, on average, but every now and then you’ll hook a really nice one. Last week I caught a 10-inch pumpkinseed. Got it on a fly rod.”

Now if you know anything about sunfish, you know a 10-incher is a veritable monster … and that a pumpkinseed is about as pretty a fish as God ever made … and that catching sunfish on a cane pole rigged with a bobber and hook baited with a twitchy cricket, grasshopper or worm is the all-time favorite method of farm boys and southern country folk. Catching them on a fly rod is a kick in the pants, too — or as the young lady said: “Entirely too much fun.”

She’s right; it’s all about the fun, and the most fun I ever had fishing took place on a bluegill pond in southern Alabama while visiting my son, who was stationed at Fort Rucker. He introduced me to a group of local sportsmen that included the garrison commander, a town constable and a guy named Billy Bob Blackwell, who was a bank president and the apparent leader of the pack. As luck would have it, they invited me to fish their bream pond with them. Bream (pronounced “brim”) is the universal southern designation for sunfish, also referred to as copper bellies, pond perch, punkies, sand bass or shellcrackers — depending on variety.

These were serious suit-and-tie men who tended to weighty matters by day, but after hours on their bluegill pond, they were true-blue southern boys right down to their farmer jeans, floppy hats, cane poles and crickets. Access to their bream pond was via a two-track through a hay field to the edge of a monstrous oak wood. From there it was downhill by footpath through a 100-yard jungle of poison-green flora thick as a Peruvian rain forest.

At pond side, they’d erected an elaborate oak pavilion with a concrete floor and storage cabinets stashed with drums of cornmeal, jugs of cooking oil, propane fish fryers — the works. Several johnboats lay upside down on the bank. The pond was stained a murky olive, “nutrients from the barnyard runoff,” they told me, and the biological explanation for “the biggest, tastiest shellcrackers in all of Alabama.”

I have no idea how many bream we caught, but eventually someone hollered “That’s enough, y’all.” The boats were beached, and the fish were cleaned, dusted with cornmeal, dropped into the hot oil and served with piping hot hush puppies, thick slices of Vidalia onion and cold beers. Later, a harmonica appeared and we sat round a campfire laughing, singing and telling jokes into the wee hours. For just a while there, we were all 12 years old again.

It was entirely too much fun.