Most of you received a survey from me on the evening of June 24th requesting that you let me know if you had changed your plans to vacation and/or fish here in southwest Florida since the BP disaster in the gulf. I have been shocked and saddened at the huge number of responses indicating plans were indeed changed to vacation/fish somewhere other than the west coast of Florida. I understand that folks want to protect their deposits, and want to come to a clean southwest Florida, but to make all these changes based upon reports from the national media seems misguided, at best. To quote a local fishing guide friend of mine, "No oil—No spoil---Our Beaches are Clean—Our Waters Pristine"! Florida is a long state. From the tip of the peninsula to the tip of the panhandle it is as long as Texas is wide. That's a lot of shoreline. Please go to http://ocgweb.marine.usf.edu/~liu/oil_spill_ensemble_forecast.html and take a look at the animated Deepwater Horizon oil spill trajectory ensemble forecast from the University of South Florida. It's very interesting, and helps put into perspective the distances involved, and the magnitude of the probable overreaction to this threat.
No. I'm not saying the oil won't someday show up on our shores. Only God knows that! But, whether it does or not at this point, is moot. The damage to the economy of coastal Florida has been done. Local businesses along the coast saw a 50%, and in come cases greater decline in business on what should have been the busiest weekend of the summer. Many vacation rentals are now sitting all but empty through the end of this year. My schedule is all but empty. The catastrophe off Louisiana has become a catastrophe for all the gulf states!
I had two trips this week. One in Pine Island Sound, and one out of Cortez on north Sarasota Bay.
I loaded up Monday afternoon and headed for Sarasota for the second time, to do an instructional trip with Tom Busch. The A/C compressor went out on my car on the first attempt. Tom is a good friend of David LaFleche, who has been a friend and customer since early 2002. David made the intro, and Tom and I have spent a lot of time talking via email every since. He has a vacation home on the water in Cortez, and was wanting to find a flats boat to use there without spending a fortune, or making a huge boat mistake. Long story short, Tom recently bought a Key West 17 ft. skiff with a 150 Yamaha on it, and was ready for an instructional trip. I haven't been on the waters there in many moons except for a trip to do a burial at sea, and to spend a day with my old friends Tom and Tommy Stephens a few years ago.
I headed for Cortez at around 5:30 AM, planning to stop at the QuickStop store that I had used many years ago. They make the best deli sandwiches fresh every morning. Or did. But, to my chagrin they weren't even open! I took the Longboat Key route, thinking it would be the quickest and most scenic, and the only convenience store on Longboat was also closed. Oh, no! No bananas or Gatorade!
Tom's directions were good, and I drove right to him. What a beautiful spot he has overlooking the bay just south of the Cortez bridge. We loaded up and picked up a couple of snacks at a bait shop across the street, and headed off into the breaking dawn.
Tom told me he'd had a problem with the jackplate the day before, and Cannon's Marina found a fuse blown. But, that morning, it again didn't work. He also noted that he's managed to catch a bunch of tiny little whitebaits, but that they had plugged up his well and had all died. I was puzzled by his description, but not after I saw the livewell setup. I've spent quite a few hours in several different Key West skiffs, but come to think of it, we were always chucking lures.
We got to a flat near Longboat Pass where Tom had caught his net pluggers the day before. I had brought chum, a tray for Tom's boat, and a high quality bait net I get from Sportsman's Guide. I forgot and left the tray in my car. After looking over his livewell situation, we decided to use the long center release well, as it had a strainer on the exhaust side that the other wells didn't have. Tom thought he'd killed his bait the day before because the drain port kept plugging up.
I showed Tom the basics of mixing chum, finding proper bottom and depth, and reading the vector of water and current. He had an 8 ft. Cracker net which we used to catch perhaps 40 nice shiners along with a bunch of smalls, and some pinfish. They all seemed happy when we left.
We headed to what had been one of my favorite areas back in the 80's and early 90's, until the internet brought be back to my home waters in Ft. Myers. As we approached the area I saw birds working up in the shallows, indicating the presence of some kind of bait. But, not far from where the birds were working I spotted a school of redfish pushing, and pointed them out to Tom. He didn't see them at first. Once he did, he commented that he would have never seen them and would have driven right on by.
Well, shucks. We just had to see if we could catch some of those redfish, so we went quickly from the instructional mode to the fishing mode. I already had a hammered finish ˝ oz. Gold spoon with rattle chambers tied on to one of my Stella rigs. It was very overcast and a perfect morning for topwater plugs, which I suggested Tom tie on. There can be nothing more fun in this world that tricking a redfish into smacking a topwater plug about five times before he finally makes contact.
We went to work on the fish, and I quickly had what should have been the first redfish on. It was a beautiful redfish of around 25 inches. It went into one of the release wells.
Soon, I spotted the fish right out in front of us, again, but neither Tom nor I connected with lures. I decided to show Tom how I carve pinfish for dead-sticking redfish. That's when we found much of the bait dead. Hmm Tom has some livewell issues he's going to have to figure out. I suggested the best solution, since his wells are square and have corners, is an above the deck well near the bow. That would make life much easier. After working on those fish with plastic and meat, we decided to go back to the instructional mode. That was our main purpose.
Tom told me to take the helm. We made our way to launch water, and when I rolled on the throttle, the prop blew out. Or, so I thought. The jackplate was stuck in the up position. But, it had been no problem getting on step, earlier. I tried cleaning the prop, thinking we'd picked up a bunch of seaweed around the cavitation plate. It blew out, again. That's when I realized it wasn't the prop blowing out at all, but was the shock hub in the prop that had sheared. What a bummer. Our day was done.
Our mission now became getting back to the safety of land before the weather blew up on us. We had a lot of weather in the area, and a high probability of storms. We headed in the general direction of Cannon Marina again, using the trolling motor. Along the way we figured out that if we carefully put the Yamaha in gear and kept it at idle speed, it would push us along a little better than the trolling motor. Anything more than idle would spin the hub. After a couple of hours or so, and a detour or two up the wrong canals, we finally landed at Cannon's Marina, where Tom's dad was waiting for us. The folks there were great, and quickly verified our diagnosis, but there would be no fixing the prop that day.
We grabbed our gear and headed back to Tom's place. Murphy was waiting for us at the turn onto the Cortez bridge in the form of a law enforcement officer. The bridge was closed, but we couldn't see why. We had to detour down to Manatee Avenue, and then back. As we approached Tom's place we saw the reason for out detour. There was a semi truck out around the middle of the bridge with the trailer on the bridge, and the tractor hanging over the side staring at the water.
At this point is was around noon, and we were starved. Tom made us a couple of fabulous sandwiches, and with appetites satisfied, we had a quick course on reading and understanding tides. Tom was very apologetic about the boat breaking, as if there were actually something he could have done about it. I welcomed him to saltwater boating and fishing. I explained that the worst thing a saltwater boat can do is sit and not be used. His boat had been sitting for a long time, and now he was learning the hard way that rubber rots, connections corrode, and so forth. There was no apology necessary. I told Tom that we would do our trip again on one of his subsequent visits. No charge. But, not in August!
Thursday, I was back in Ft. Myers for a trip with John Lee and his son, over from Orlando. John is a good friend of Kevin Maus, who contributed the beautiful picture of the kayak caught redfish in the fishing report for the week ending 6/12/10. John and his family were over for a week of vacation, and Kevin referred me to him. I was very thankful for that, but apprehensive about the trip because the fishing in the southern end of the Sound has been so tough. And, no! There's no oil! I told Kevin when he first began talking about putting us together to tell John that the fishing has been great, but the catching, not so much.
Our weather was still very much under the influence of hurricane Alex, and we had a 60/70% chance of storms about any time. I told John Wednesday night that I thought we ought to try to stay closer to home than I normally would in case the weather turned ugly on us. Before I got to the ramp I had been rained on. The morning dawned very overcast once again.
With bait hard to come by, I figured we would have to run up to Chino Island, and hope to find enough of it there for a morning of fishing. The remnants of storms back to the east made for a spectacular sunrise as we rode along toward Chino. God, I love that time of day.
We took up residence on the bar north of Chino in about 3 feet of water, and went to work. There was life everywhere, on, in, and above the water. There were pompano skipping as we came in. There were a few trout popping on the small bait on the surface. The scene brought to mind the favorite saying of my good friend and fishing buddy, John Franck, who passed away June 16th. "What a beautiful day the Lord hath made!" he used to say. And, it was so true.
We went to work, John chumming and me throwing the net. It wasn't easy. There is very little bait big enough to fish with. We kept at it. Sometimes there would be one shiner in the net, along with pinfish and the oddly plentiful ballyhoo, and sometimes there would be half dozen or more. But, the average per throw was about two whitebaits. Once we reached the point where I was pretty sure we had more bait than we could possibly use in this tough bite situation we've been in, I pronounced us done.
Since we were already in the southern end of the Sound, and since the tide was not yet moving, and wouldn't be for some time, I decided to see if we could find a redfish or two in that area. And, a short ride had us on a great flat looking for reds. We had shiners large and small, pinfish large and small, and ballyhoo. Surely we could get a redfish interested with something from that menu. If we could find them.
And, find them we did. We drove right to them, in fact. It wasn't long before I saw the redfish make subtle movement in front of us. We had a live shiner, a pinfish under a popping cork, and a ballyhoo Slim Jim among the offerings. We were fishing our way across this flat. After a short move, John cast his ballyhoo out. When it hit the water, it was immediately inhaled by a beautiful redfish of 26 inches. I had seen the school move, and they were right in front of us. But, we never got another one to eat. We even had one nice red swim within about 30 ft. of the boat. It stopped when it saw us, and turned and swam away. John missed getting eyeball to eyeball with that red. We were on the fish, but they were having no part of us.
There were cells building, and I didn't trust the weather, so we began fishing our way back south toward the ramp. We fished some beautiful waters and great snook spots. I really wanted to get John on some snook! But, all we got were scaled baits. We had a jack attack at one place, but after so long without a bite, the guys yanked the baits away from the fish in eager anticipation. Finally, we were ready for lunch, and headed to the Waterfront Restaurant, where the bite is always good.
By the time we finished lunch and headed out, it was obvious the weather would soon become active. We headed to the ramp. We decided to let our beautiful redfish swim free to fight another day, as John didn't want to keep it, and I figured that if I took the time to clean it I might wind up getting caught in the weather. It was a tough day of fishing, for sure. But, it was a fun day largely due to the patience of a seasoned angler, who knows the ropes.