Denizens of the Deep Read online

  It was, in fact, the lowly kingfish which started me on a twenty-five-year ocean-fishing cruise. Way back then, I’d gone to Miami for my health. I was a trout fisherman in those days, a black-bass expert of sorts, an old pickerel, pike, dory and muskellunge angler, a fresh-water man. I chartered a boat, and all we caught was kings that day. But no one can imagine my state of mind. They were as big as muskies. They fought hard. And in that single day, I caught more than thirty! The very next week, I started for the Keys in a charterboat—and not that year and not the next did I take a sailfish, let alone a marlin. Just various members of the middleweight division.

  They led—at long last—and this is a general rule—to sails, marlin, tuna and the like. But let me put it this way. If I had never caught anything bigger, I’d still be out there hunting the ones in the middle. For there isn’t actually a dependable “middle.” A month or so ago I went down to the docks in Bimini to see the head of a dolphin. The island was babbling about it. And there it lay—just the head—chopped off less than a foot behind the eyes by some sea giant. But what a head! It weighed more than thirty pounds! Neptune alone knows how long, how heavy, that giant old bull dolphin must have been! The part of his dorsal left intact was eight inches tall. We estimated—and “we” includes some mighty conservative scientists at the Marine Laboratory on Bimini—that he would have run well over a hundred pounds. A dolphin, that is—a “middleweight” fish—which might possibly have surpassed the world-record weight of the Atlantic sailfish! In the sea, then, no matter what you think you’re fishing for—you never know.

  That gigantic dolphin had smashed at a blue marlin bait. But, then, innocent people trolling for groupers have hung five-hundred-pound marlin! Which is why a last word of warning is necessary, when fishing for the middle-sized denizens of the deep is under discussion. Be ready to hang what you’re seeking—or just about anything else! Exploring the kingdom of middle-sized ocean fishes is much like lighting a fuse without being exactly sure of the size or nature of the explosive charge on the other end. Fun—but brother—watch it!

  Some fishermen and fishing spots

  Miami invites you to fish

  Among the highest of high spots possible to a great many men—ladies too!—is one which occurs when the fresh-water fisherman first casts a fly, or a plug, or trolls a spoon, or drops a bait, in tropical salt water. All anglers are hereby invited, if in Miami, to take a fling at what might well turn out to be one of their greatest adventures. This invitation is also extended to that benighted group of persons who never fished—for, in Miami, anything can happen to anybody. I saw one gent, who had never wet a fish line in his life, come in from half a day on the Gulf Stream with the only broadbill swordfish taken that year! It weighed more than two hundred and fifty pounds!

  What is said in the discussion that follows will be addressed to salt-water novices. There are two reasons for this. Men who have already fished in the sea and who propose to visit Miami sometime will undoubtedly plan a spell of angling—and they will know what kind they want to try. But those who have not fished there at all, unaware of the true circumstances, and lacking suitable information, may miss the kind of fishing they would most enjoy. In some cases, the legends of the prowess required for salt-water angling may scare them off altogether. That would be an unmitigated disaster. For, while it is entirely true that certain anglers get themselves into peak condition so as to be able to struggle for hours with various marine giants, it is equally true that barefoot boys go down to the sea with cane poles and come home with eye-popping strings of this and that.

  So, at the outset, one common, false impression must be corrected. Any kind of fresh-water fishing that you have enjoyed has a salt-water parallel. Note that I do not say “equivalent”; later on, you will see why. Let us suppose that you are a shore fisherman. You like to sit with a long pole or a hand fine, on which is a sinker and a hook and some bait. In this fashion, you have taken bullheads, rock bass, sunnies, an occasional black bass, and the like. You need no different tackle—and only such a different bait as shrimp—to catch not one kind of fish but any of hundreds of sorts, from banks, the sides of brackish canals, bridges, beaches, and other points where land meets water.

  Among these may well be grunts and porgies and snappers—which may be compared with sunnies and perch, though they may run up to so many pounds in weight as to astonish you, and break your line! Among these may also be salt-water catfish, trout, jacks, grouper, and the whole gaudy repertoire (especially if you use very small hooks) of “tropical” fish—the angelfishes, butterfly fish, triggers, parrots, and so on.

  That begins to give you an idea. And summertime, contrary to the fears of some, is the best time for fishing in south Florida. There isn’t any season, actually. “It’s always,” as the slogan says, “June in Miami”—well, nearly always. And the fish are hungry year round. People who have assumed that Miami’s “fishing season” is winter have done so merely because that is when the tourists abound most thickly in the area—i.e., when the largest number of people go fishing and when the biggest tournament is held. Actually, we residents concentrate on summer fishing, spring fishing, and autumn fishing because the wintertime angling seems slow by comparison.

  I have, of course, put the cart before the horse and mentioned the humblest kind of fishing first, rather than the most elegant. It was done deliberately, to encourage the timid. Before discussing loftier and fancier methods, I wanted the reader to appreciate that, with tackle picked up in a dime store and carried in his pocket, bait bought at a butcher shop, and a couple of hours to spare, he can find plenty of company fishing from any old spot around Miami, and plenty of fish to match luck with.

  The classical fishing trip in this area is made by charterboat for innumerable sorts of quarry, of which the prima donna is the sailfish. Generally speaking, a “charterboat” is a cabin cruiser of from thirty to forty feet with an open cockpit in which are from three to five “fighting chairs”—that is, chairs fixed firmly to the deck and equipped, at the front edge of the seat, with a socket on a gimbal. The angler puts the butt of his rod in the socket, uses one hand to hold the rod and the other for reeling. Charterboats furnish all necessary tackle, bait, and other gear—everything, indeed, except the lunch you will want if you hire one for a whole day, suntan oil (and don’t think the sun in Miami isn’t a menace without it!) and cameras to snap the expression that will come over your face when you “hang” your first big, sea-going fish.

  Charterboats are manned by a captain and a mate who are called “guides.” There are several hundred available in the Miami area at numerous fishing docks. You will observe the “fleets” as you barge around the Miamis: they are characterized by their tall “outriggers” and, when docked, present the appearance of a thicket of supersized fishing poles. Most boats are equipped with ship-to-shore radio-telephones so that, if you wish, while you are trolling for big ones, miles offshore, you can call up your office in Chicago and find out what the day’s sales were. They are also furnished with comfortable day-beds for napping, with iceboxes for anything you might want to keep on ice, such as marmalade, and they accommodate from one to a maximum of six anglers.

  Arrangements for a charterboat may be made through any hotel. Arrangements may be made, also, at any of the fishing docks, with the guides direct. Your hotel will direct you to the nearest of these docks. The cost of a charterboat is considerable—about sixty-five dollars a day—although when this is split five or six ways it will not seem excessive. A “lone wolf,” incidentally, will find, by visiting any fishing dock (around five in the afternoon, when the boats come in from fishing, is the best time), that he can arrange to be one of a party on the ensuing day by signing up with any of various boats which have “openings” for one or two additional fishermen.

  To pay twelve or fifteen dollars for a day’s Gulf-Stream trolling is not, actually, out of line. No charterboatman ever got rich. The initial cost and the upkeep of their elaborate vessels
are high. They run all day long—and you would pay far more to ride the same length of time on a passenger train or boat. The guides furnish the tackle and the wear and tear on this expensive gear is prodigious; if you go charterboat fishing and have any kind of a day for it, you will see why that is.

  For, off Miami, dwell millions or billions of fishes that have no intention of being taken on anybody’s hook and line. The sailfish—a character usually six to eight feet long, with a rapier-like “bill” and a large, indigo dorsal fin with black polka dots, the exact purpose of which is not yet known to any naturalist—runs from thirty pounds up to a world’s record of a little more than a hundred. He spends much of his life on the sea-surface, chasing flying, and other, fish. He will chase a bait trolled on the surface and, overtaking it, club it with his bill. If the bait then stops dead in the water and appears to be stunned, the sailfish will generally eat same. Thereafter, depending somewhat on the weight of his tackle, the angler at the other end will have one of the busiest and most enthralling half hours in all his born days. The sail will almost certainly leap from one to umpteen times, trying to shake the hook. He will make runs like a rudderless torpedo. He may come out and “tail-walk”—raging about, boiling up an acre of the sea. He may “sound” and bull around grimly hundreds of feet under water.

  The chances of seeing and “hanging” a sailfish in a day’s summer trolling are pretty good. The matter of catching said sail is something else—a problem always involving luck and, sometimes, skill. Doughty anglers have tried for sails for weeks—and not got one. Mere housewives, frail women in poor condition, who never held a rod before, have caught three of them on their first day out. It’s like that.

  However, a man trolling for sailfish off Miami in a charterboat—unlike a man trying for some fresh-water species—say, lake trout—need not come home dispirited if it happens that no sail takes a fancy to his lure. Where the sailfish range, so do the dolphin. Dolphin often go over thirty pounds, sometimes over fifty, and higher. They leap like sailfish and are, in my opinion, the most beautiful of all the big, pelagic fish. And—where the sail and dolphin sport themselves, so do barracuda; these are big marine pike which fight like the renowned muskellunge. Here, too, is the home of the bonita and the arctic bonita, the kingfish and the wahoo—and many a charterboat, on single days, gets one of all these, or more.

  In going out to the Gulf Stream to troll, boats pass over the great coral reefs which skirt all of southeastern Florida, including the Florida Keys. “Reef fishing” is considered a specialty. On the reef live amberjack and groupers and barracudas, large snappers and jewfish and other jacks besides the amber guy—shoals and hordes of fish as big as ever you will want to tackle on rod and reel. They are taken in every sort of way—on live bait and cut bait from anchored boats—by trolling (more slowly than for the “outside” fishes) with or without a sinker—by drifting, and so on. But your guide, if he finds the fishing slow in or along the edge of the Gulf Stream, is very likely to cut down the speed of his engines, take you a little closer to shore—over the reefs—and you, the customer, are then likely to find a change of pace in the fishing. Big ones are apt to come up from the weird, coral wonderland fifty or twenty feet under your keel and take hold. Take hold, I ought to say, like a passing mail train.

  One more memorandum anent charterboat fishing. Besides the species mentioned, and scores left unmentioned for lack of space, there exist, in the Stream, such fishes as white marlin, Allison tuna, and blue marlin. If you are trolling with ordinary sailfish tackle and a white marlin swats your bait, you have a good chance of getting him—and if you do that, your relatives will grow tired to death, as the years pass, while you keep retelling the tale of that colossal scrap. If a blue marlin or an Allison tuna takes hold—unless your guide has trolled a supersize outfit—your chances of success are trivial. A few hundred yards of line, with a breaking strain of thirty or forty pounds, mean absolutely nothing to a blue marlin of, say, five hundred pounds, who is liable to run a straight, reel-spattering half mile in the first hundred seconds after he feels a hook!

  I’ve seen it happen, I suppose, a dozen times: a great, black bill behind a sailfish bait, a smashing strike that throws water twenty feet high, the appalling leap of several hundred pounds of blue-striped blue marine majesty, a run like the take-off of a jet plane—and bing! Broken line. Stripped reel. Or busted rod. But it’s worth the price of admission even without the fish. Then, too, I’ve seen things strike and run and get away that nobody was able to identify—huge, anonymous powerhouses of the ocean deep.

  If you like milder fishing in landlocked, calmer waters, there are guides with smaller boats who, for half the price of a charterboat, will take you trolling all day in the Bay. And there are several “party” boats—large ships which anchor on the reefs; from the decks of these, scores of anglers, at two or three dollars a head, with their own tackle, fish the day long in any manner they please. Information about Bay fishing (for persons worried over seasickness) or about the “party” boats may be had at the regular charterboat docks, at hotels, and from the Miami Chamber of Commerce. By the same means, fishing trips to Florida’s rivers and lakes, where large-mouth bass abound, may be arranged.

  All, or nearly all the foregoing, sounds rather foreign to the fresh-water angler. But for him, Miami and the adjacent seas have something very special. Perhaps you hate the sea. Possibly you get sick. (If the latter, you should visit your doctor and have him prescribe the new seasick remedy; it works.) But it may well be that you like to cast a dry fly for trout, or a wet fly, or that you are an old salmon man, or a plug caster who thinks it is a waste of time to fish with anything but a light rod, a level-wind reel, fifteen-pound test line and artificial lures.

  During the past two decades, anglers in the Miami area have developed what amounts to a new world of sports fishing—fishing in salt water by all the above methods. In the bays and on the “flats” off the Keys, in the salt-water canals and off beaches are thousands of fish-filled square miles of shallow water. The territory is accessible by car, rowboat, outboard motor, and by a little walking, in some instances. Various parts of it recommend themselves to the brook angler and his fly rod, the plug caster, and so on. A two-hour drive from Miami into the Keys, and a little questioning at any of the countless camps open to the public in the Keys—the hiring, if need be, of a guide for a day—will put the fresh-water angler and his fresh-water tackle solidly in that new world.

  I know. I began fishing as a rainbow-trout man, a plug caster, a Lake-George-lake and Adirondack-brook angler. It is quite exciting to have a one-pound trout rise to a well-directed fly, take same, and to bring same to hand net. Indeed, it is. How would you like to cast the same fly to a six-pound tarpon—and get him? It is pretty enthralling to cast a red-headed plug exactly between two spreads of lily pads and have an old lunker of a smallmouthed bass—a five-pounder—wham at the plug as you work it back. And get him. But how would you like to expose yourself and the same tackle, in an identical rowboat—to a thirty-seven-pound tarpon? Take it from me—the difference is marked and the excitement is vastly heightened by the disparity. With a mere hundred yards of line and a big fish jumping higher than your head—with barnacled piles or coral rock as a hazard instead of the stumps and snags in a pond—you will spend a remarkably beguiling afternoon fighting tarpon on casting tackle. And—well—I had a hundred-pounder on for two and a half hours once. Got him to the boat, too—and he broke off as the guide tried to gaff him. Standard black-bass tackle—and I couldn’t unbend my cramped fingers for two days afterward!

  Tarpon, of course, is just one kind of fish caught by fly or plug in the Miami area. Others? The devil-dancing, all-silver “ten-pounder,” chiro, or ladyfish. All sorts of snappers. The groupers—a family of marine bass, coming in all sizes and colors. Channel bass, too—twenty-pounders on black-bass gear are not uncommon; elsewhere, these are called redfish, red drum, and other names. All the jacks will hit plugs if they feel li
ke it. Barracuda lunge on them—and on flies, too. So do some of the bizarre tropical numbers. So do sharks—and you try to catch even a baby shark—a mere fifty-pounder—on a plug!

  Then there is another, other, different realm of angling for the light-tackle addict which involves a whistling, aluminum-colored fish called alba vulpes (“white wolf”), or bonefish. He will take flies and, at times, plugs—though precious few anglers will take him, that way. Bonefishing is a special art and guides with inexpensive boats in and around Miami and in the Keys will show you all about it. Just to prove, moreover, that a smart bonefisherman isn’t as good as he thinks he is, there is another, larger fish which frequents the still, shallow bonefish haunts. He is a kind of pompano called a permit; and as the marlin outweighs and outpoints the sail, so the permit humbles the world-renowned bonefish. Any charterboatman, hotel, or local Chamber of Commerce can put you onto the proper track for such fishing.

  Of course, there are more regions, more sorts of fishing, hundreds of fishes unmentioned here—six hundred kinds, in all, off Florida. I have barely begun to sample the situation—and my time’s run out! What I had in mind to say was, principally, this: If you like to fish, try Miami fishing. If you don’t like to, try it anyhow, because it may change your mind—even your life! And above all else, if you’re a specialist at some sort of inland fishing, bring your favorite tackle along, by all means. For nobody has yet showed up in these parts with a style of gear for which we Miamians couldn’t find all the fishing he wanted—and more, besides!