This column originally appeared in the March 10, 2013, edition of the Keys Citizen.
There are not many fish in the ocean that are prettier than a nice plump Florida Keys yellowtail snapper. Of all the fish I catch, the pinks and blues on the skin of yellowtail snappers (YTs) just amaze me. I sometimes wonder, if God wanted all his creatures to be able to hide from predators, why are these snappers so beautiful and observable? I would hate to have to hide from dangerous enemies while dressed in a yellowtail snapper costume. When a school of YTs balls up behind the boat in crystal-clear, bright saltwater, it looks like a Yellow Brick Road of jewels and diamonds.
Strangely enough, YTs don’t lose their color and beauty as soon as they enter the icebox like many other saltwater species do. Dolphin, for instance, jumping behind the boat glisten in eye-popping, electric-blue; or green; or yellow; as the case may be, only to deteriorate into a muddy brownish-gold color in mere minutes. So, why do YTs stay in their spectacular full range of colors like they do? I don’t know and come to think of it, I haven’t given it much thought in my decades of fishing. Someday, I just might research that question. But not today.
I had the chance to wet a line the other day. You know, when all the stars aligned, and I had nothing to do one morning. So, I put on my YT thinking cap, and headed offshore. I have a spot in 35 feet of water that always gives up small, yet legal, YTs. In fact, it is so productive that I usually leave it for last in case my other “big-fish” areas don’t pan out and I need to put a couple of fish in the box to save face.
In the past few years, I’ve noticed it has gotten harder and harder to catch the prized YT. I don’t mean that there are less YTs around, I just mean they seem more difficult to get in the fish box than they used to be. Mostly, this is because of sharks and other predators. Great, just what I need — another apex predator hunting for the same meal as I am. Sharks, cudas, bottle nose dolphins all come out of nowhere and eat what should be my meal. Usually, the predators won’t even eat the fish that are too small to legally harvest; they wait for quality fish.
I watched a barracuda, one day at Washerwoman Shoal, park himself right under my boat. Every time I hooked a YT he would zoom out of nowhere, race up to the hapless fish on the end of my line, visually measure the fish, and then turn away from less than legal size fish then, in the case of big, beautiful flag-yellowtails, eat them in one bite. I watched him do this. Over and over again.
Another time, sharks were so plentiful that I could not get a YT to the boat in time to keep it out of the jaws-of-death waiting to devour him or her. This went on for a long time. Every time a shark took a YT, he broke the line and swam away with fish, hook, swive, and most of my leader. Not only did I lose my fish and my tackle, I had to reassemble all the parts and retie everything. Lost fish, lost tackle, lost time. I hate that.
I gave the rod and reel to my fishing buddy, and started making chum balls, or as some call them sand balls. This is a sloppy-gloppy mess. You know I would only take this course of action if I were desperate. And I was desperate. The plan was to attract the YTs a little closer to the boat, have my fishing buddy hook a YT and then reel as fast as he possibly could to bring the fish aboard without it getting eaten by sharks.
The first two attempts failed. The sharks ate the YTs and we were losing the battle two-to-nothing. When the third YT was hooked, my buddy reeled the line as past as he could. We were both screaming, “Get him in the boat. Don’t let the sharks get him.” He reeled so fast, he pulled the fish completely out of the water. It flew over the boat on the end of the fishing line, went right over our heads and splashed down in the water on the other side of the boat. And then, you guessed it, a shark snapped him up within a second of hitting the water, and long before we had even stopped laughing.
I remembered that a friend had told me to reel the line as fast and steady as possible in shark infested waters and the sharks would not be able to keep up with the speeding snapper. I also heard from another friend to reel the fish in fast, but to raise and lower the rod tip violently while reeling him in. “This,” my friend said, “will make the shark lunge for the kill and miss his mark.” As you can probably guess; neither of these suggestions worked.
So, I moved to much shallower water; 32 feet of water to be exact. When I got there, there were no sharks. After a few minutes of chumming the water, I hooked, and boated, the first YT. Hallelujah, it was a keeper. I put four more YTs in the fish cooler and now I had enough for a fresh dinner of “same day” yellowtail snapper. My wife and I like to eat fresh fish the same day. We seldom eat fish after it has been frozen. The best part of this tradition is that I have to go fishing every time we think about fried snapper for dinner. This is a great system, I get to fish a lot, and my wife gets to eat fish that is so fresh it’s rude. And as always, life is good in the Florida Keys; life is very good in the Florida Keys.
C.J. Geotis is a life-long fisherman who followed his dream more than 20 years ago to live in the Florida Keys. His books, “Florida Keys Fish Stories,” and “Double-Edged Sword” are available at Amazon.com. He lives in Marathon with his wife, Loretta, and her Coca-Cola collection. His email is fishstoriescj@comcast.net.
