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 To catch fish, you have to know where they’re located
By ARNOLD MARKOWITZ
Waterfront News Fishing Writer
After running 40 minutes from the Flamingo docks across a part of Florida Bay that isn’t a secret from anyone, my fishing buddy stopped his boat and declared in a stage whisper:
“Big trout right here. Start casting.”
He looked all around us — the furtive kind of body language that would get the attention of an alert cop if we were in Phoenix without proof of citizenship.
We had been fishing scarcely five minutes when he, Don Causey, reeled in a stout splasher that we mistook for snook, and then for a sea trout until he got it aboard. It was a bluefish, unexpected at the end of April but not surprising.
In the distance, an outboard engine hummed.
“Boat coming,” Don said. “If you have a fish on when they pass, lower your rod. If they ask how we’re doing, tell them we haven’t caught much.”
The guys on the other boat waved as they passed. When they were out of sight Don repositioned the boat.
“Big trout right here,” he said again and right there I caught a little trout.
Geography lesson:
Here’s the lesson in that part of this story:
To catch big fish you have to know where they are, or at least where they were the last time you were there. The last time Don was there, he and his wife caught two limits of trout, four each.
He wouldn’t have revealed it to those guys on that other boat if they had stopped to pick our brains, but we could have told them truthfully that we hadn’t caught much.
Next we headed for one of the Florida Bay back country’s four no-motor zones.
I’m not allowed to tell which one it was, but judging by the other boats and people we found on the mangrove creek leading to it that Thursday morning, it can’t be very secret.
Still, those zones might as well be secret because so few people fish in them. Why not? Because you not only can’t use a motor there, you can’t even have one on your transom. No electric trolling motors are allowed either. If you want to take an outboard boat past the sign that says you can’t, you have to unbolt the engine and lift it into the cockpit.
How big an outboard can you handle like that without your back caving in or the engine falling in the water? You can’t step overboard to steady it because the shallow bottom’s too soft.
The solution is to muscle a canoe or kayak onto your skiff, park the boat and rope it to mangroves, ease the motor-less boat over the side and paddle into the restricted zone.
Don’s 14-foot fiberglass canoe is heavy, but he devised a way to hoist it onto the deck diagonally, bottoms up. He loops a dock line through the canoe’s handgrip and ties it around the skiff’s bow cleat. That’s pretty secure.
We loop the rope over the canoe’s hull while I hold the other end to prevent bouncing. Don knows the art of leverage well enough to slide the canoe from boat deck to the water and haul it back up, single-handed. You can do the same thing with a kayak, although foot for foot it’s likely to weigh more than a canoe.
You mustn’t bring any more tackle or other goods on the boat than you can shift to the canoe, for thieves disguised as fishermen might steal anything that isn’t tied down.
I suppose fear of theft keeps a lot of people from paddling away from their motorboats. They probably guess that hot-wiring the ignition is as easy as stealing a car the same way.
All that seems like a lot of work, doesn’t it? Not so sure you have enough physical stamina, are you?
If that keeps you out of the no-motor zones, knowing how good the fishing is back there must be pretty stressful.
No product insertion:
 When Don and I reached the place I’m not supposed to name, we paddled into an open bay, set his two mushroom anchors and began to cast. I was throwing popping flies made of balsa wood and feathers. Don had a commotion plug on a spinning rig.
That lure has a scooped front end to splash on the retrieve and ball bearings inside to go clickety-clack.
I can tell you the lure had a silvery belly with green and blue markings topside, but I can’t say its brand name.
“Don’t write what it is!” Don demanded as he boated his third or fourth hefty snook.
Several lure brands match the plug’s general description. I know fishing-doers who would argue that any of them would have worked.
I disagree, for I used other commotion lures that day. Mine were fat-bodied Rip Rollers equipped with propellers for turbulence. Retrieved as noisily as Don’s lure, in short, violent jerks (no, not like your first husband), theoretically they should have nailed as many snook. The best strikes I got were a few half-hearted misses (no, not like your last girlfriend).
After that bite ended, we paddled here and there, casting to places where Don had seen fish before. That’s not as easy to do as it is to write it or read it.
One mangrove creek looks very much like every other. Which look-alike holds fish that are ready to bite? Unless you see surface action like runaway forage fish or diving birds, you work the shorelines until something happens.
It’s known that wherever you see a current flowing around a bend or a point of land, that is where you must cast for that is where fish are.
I would modify that to say it’s where the fish should be, or were yesterday or will be tomorrow. You can cast into several such locations with scarcely a bite, and then one that looks like all the others will hand up a bonanza.
After missing more big snook than I’d ever seen in one day, I was feeling discouraged — until a half-hearted final cast with that fat propeller plug was grabbed aggressively by what I took to be a snook.
It turned out to be the one trout over 20 inches long that I was allowed to keep. Instead of changing lures I threw Fatso once more and caught Don’s 20-plus keeper for him.
In about 15 minutes, we filled both our four-trout limits. We made one more stop on the way back to the big boat and started catching snapper. We made our five-fish bag limits easily, with nine fish well over the 10-inch minimum size.
Paddling out of the no motor zone, we encountered three people on an anchored outboard boat, fishing the end of the mangrove creek there.
“How did you make out?” one of them asked.
“We got a few small ones,” Don said.
“And a lot of exercise,” I added, waving my paddle and glowing with honesty.
It’s true that we caught a few small ones. We just didn’t have space to mention the big ones. As semi-retired journalists, Don and I are devoted to truth.
And, as everyone knows, the sport of fishing deplores exaggeration.
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