Denizens of the Deep

by Philip Wylie

  A final note to the super-wary. Everybody unfamiliar with this unique and gorgeous landscape (which is half marinescape) seems to ask about hurricanes. The answer is—yep. Hurricanes are brewed, occasionally, a thousand or so miles from here. Most of them miss Miami. The worst one stirred up recently went to Long Island and New England. September and October are the likely months. Once in a while they do hit in other months. But we know they are coming several days ahead of time—so we don’t get caught out fishing. And we have built all our houses, apartments, hotels and other structures to stand them. What we do, come a “blow,” is to ensconce ourselves in merry parties in hotels, well provided with victuals and other refreshments, and hold our own galas until the wind dies down. A “hurricane party,” as it’s called, is not unlike a good convention.

  If that’s a worry—forget it. Indeed, Miami is designed to banish worries. And, for the angler—be he a novice or a veteran tier of his own flies—Miami is not far from Paradise.

  The compleat Florida angler

  I

  The tourist angler generally approaches Florida in a mood of worried excitement.

  He may be an old salmon man from Maine or Puget Sound; he may be a caliph among the pike and muskellunge of Wisconsin; perhaps he is a trout wizard whose waders know the upland brooks of half a dozen states; still the name of “sailfish” and the awesome reputation of the Gulf Stream will put him on his mettle.

  “Tarpon” is another word calculated to shake his aplomb. Quite often, at about the point in his drive south at which Spanish moss begins to dangle from the trees, he bolsters up his intrepidity by telling himself that salt-water fish are a brutish, sluggish sort and the taking of them is hardly a fine art.

  The sad thing is that the tourist angler may go back home with that opinion—even after a good deal of conventional fishing. For much of the best of Florida fishing is unconventional: as sporting as any quest with rod and reel can be—or not sports fishing at all, but odd and fascinating.

  Sailfish and tarpon, the standard quarry, are commonly taken from charter boats, operated by two guides in the case of the former and one or two in the case of tarpon. And while I would be a great hypocrite to disparage either sport, I would be less than honest to deny their handicaps, especially for the novice.

  Consider sailfishing. The cost of chartering the boat runs from thirty to sixty-five dollars a day. The tackle supplied by the boatmen is generally designed for durability in the hands of beginners rather than for sporting qualities. Chances of getting a sailfish to hit on any given day are far less than even; chances of catching a sailfish, if it does hit—less again than that. Many anglers have trolled for months without taking a sailfish. And sailfishing is not a sport for persons subject to seasickness. These conditions apply in a lesser degree (except for mal de mer) to the commonest forms of tarpon fishing.

  A tourist angler who spends days in green-gilled queasiness and gets no fish, or who takes a sailfish on a line that would do for blue marlin, or who hunts tarpon for a week and catches nothing but jack and snook on heavy tackle—one who goes home lighter by a good deal in the pocketbook but not much heavier in the creel—will hold a dim opinion of Florida’s piscatorial possibilities. And one who thinks that the beginning and the end of Florida fishing lies in the conventional, guided trips, together with the bottom-fishing which one observes from every bridge and even from front yards, has missed endless adventures.

  Suppose you are such a tourist: an old black bass and pickerel man say, with your eye on Florida. Naturally you leave the bait-casting rods at home. The two-ounce tip, the hundred yards of twelve-pound test line, your favorite bass plugs—in Florida? In the ocean? Crazy, you are sure. So you fondly store them away—and make one of the major blunders of your life.

  Down around the end of Florida lie the Keys—accessible by a dramatic highway—and around the Keys lie thousands of square miles of water—some of it only a foot deep, very little of it over your head. At a hundred spots along the road you can rent an outboard motorboat. Then with your bass tackle (and only one change: a wire leader for the gut you may have used) you are set for a style of angling with which you are familiar. In a sense, that is. You are set for lake-calm water, warm sun, shore line with coves and weed beds, fallen trees, channels and holes—all of them ideal for a well-aimed plug.

  You run your boat over toward some rotted pilings off shore—a spot where a pickerel might hang out in fresh water. You cast, and work your plug. From here on I leave you to yourself—with these hints:

  Plug casting is tied, in my own mind, with trolling for the great game fishes, as top fun in salt-water angling.

  Your cast may bring a rushing hit that knocks the plug into the air—and a second hit which takes it under water. You may find yourself engaged in a hard fight that resembles the battle of a smallmouth bass—and finally bringing in a perchlike fish of one, two, six, even eight pounds—which will prove to be a member of the snapper family. I think you will agree that a snapper on a plug is the equal of a bass—to fight—or to eat!

  But it may not have been a snapper that was lying in the shadow of those piles. Could have been a snook—which is a pike-like character. Or a sea trout. Or a jack—and a minor jack on a casting rod furnishes a very interesting ten minutes.

  Suppose though it is a twenty-pound jack. That ten minutes will stretch into half an hour—or an hour—of very hard, fast fishing, before you, or the jack, gets the decision. Snapper? Snook? Trout? Jack? Mister, you have only begun to cast.

  Could be a barracuda longer than your leg—and I recommend this guy, on casting tackle, to my muskellunge colleagues. Could be a grouper. Or a ladyfish, also called Chiro—which pinwheels and jitterbugs in the air like the fastest rainbow—and ladyfish grow up to be ten-pounders. That cast might attract any of a score more species which there isn’t space to list here—and it is also a fine way to locate and make contact with a tarpon.

  I hold, with considerable expert backing, that no man’s fishing days are complete until he has attached himself to twenty or thirty or forty pounds of tarpon via a rod intended for black bass. Standing in a rowboat, with his fish leaping higher than his head or running away like something out of a roman candle—and with only a hundred yards of line and the drag of his own thumb between himself and a shellacking—an angler will learn things about tarpon that are unknown to those who go after them with heavy rods, guides, large boats, strip baits, and other accessories.

  Of course, if you are the perennially unlucky angler, that cast up to the pilings—or the hundredth after it—may be picked up by a shark. Or possibly by a three-hundred-pound jewfish. Or maybe a tarpon as heavy as yourself will grab your plug, feel its hooks, and start across the Gulf of Mexico by the air route.

  Against such common extremities, the Florida caster carries a good supply of plugs along—and several extra lines. Furthermore, the Florida caster is sometimes embarrassed by a strike—and a catch—that is not in the finny league. Among the critters taken thus inadvertently are terns, gulls, pelicans, turtles, alligators, crocodiles, and rattlesnakes.

  Reeling a pelican down from the sky is quite an experience, I guarantee—and how to turn loose an alligator is a problem never encountered in northern ponds.

  Now get a grip on your chair and consider this: all the fish just mentioned, and the many more implied, take flies.

  Your old salmon rod or the delicate favorite with which you pursue brook trout may also be imported to the Keys and when you get them out, no one will laugh. People may think you are piscatorially foolhardy but they will also assume you are among that rare and dangerously living breed, the salt-water wet- or dry-fly angler. A small tarpon on a trout rod—or a nice snapper—but I think all fly fishermen get the idea.

  The fresh-water angler usually casts into likely places. But in Florida’s vast reaches of fish-thick “flats”—the angler often sees his fish and stalks it—casting to his quarry personally, as it lies, swims or feeds, plainly vis
ible in the gin-clear water. Such fishing is like hunting.

  Barracuda, for instance, are often to be seen before they are heard from—and more than once I have watched a casting wizard of a lake or river region get buck fever as he tried to aim his plug at five feet of sabre-toothed malice leering at him from a quiet nook forty yards off.

  Jacks, which travel in schools, and which feed with a roaring splash like fifty women beating fifty rugs in the water, are among the fishes that may be taken by this sort of dead aim.

  In my Florida home, on the Bay, I kept a casting rod with a plug ready to fire hanging on the front porch. Often, while deep in the production of literature (or as near as I could get to same), I would hear the roaring splash of jacks in the water outside, rush downstairs, grab the rod, cast from my front lawn, and enjoy the next quarter hour in nonliterary excitements. At night, ladyfish feed on shrimp with a surging surface break—and the rod on my porch was handy for that too.

  Bonefish occasionally—and, once in a great while, permit—take plugs. These are fish which feed in shallow water, showing caudal and dorsal fins as they do so, and stirring up mud. They too are stalked by rowboat or even by an angler in waders. Crab, shrimp, bits of conch, and the like, are the proper bait for them—but it is no mistake to try a cast at one when you encounter him, excepting of course for the tackle risk involved.

  Bonefish and permit are commonly alleged to be the fastest fish alive; fishing for them gives thousands of savvy anglers an extended, slap-happy, old age; it is a cult—but anybody with ambition and a few bucks can join the cult.

  The channel bass, alias, redfish, alias red drum, is a potent swimmer who often grows up to weigh twenty-odd pounds, and he too haunts the shallows and feeds nose-down, tail-up—so that he may be approached cautiously by poling or rowing and set into violent motion by feeding him a plug with an easy cast.

  To stalk the channel bass is to enjoy a particular sport. On reddish, greenish or violet banks, where an incoming tide provides inches of water enough to float his skiff, the hunter prowls like a man with a gun. He takes care not to flush his game. And once a redfish is spotted—once the cast is made and the plug taken—a contest follows in which, as a rule, the angler has his fish in sight the whole time—and, no doubt, the fish has the angler in his alarmed view.

  II

  Some of my friends are experimenters and of these one is very lazy. It is about a hundred and eighty miles from Miami to Key West over the famed “Highway That Goes to Sea.” This thoroughfare, besides furnishing some of the most dazzling marinescapes in the world, crosses many scores of bridges—the shortest of which is a few feet across, the longest seven miles. These bridges connect the Keys and carry the road over such waters as we have just been discussing. Plain bottom-fishing with shrimp for bait provides most bridges with a quota of anglers. My lazy friend, who does not cast but who likes to troll, realizing that the running tide would keep his bait clear of the bridge bastions, now carries a bicycle in his car. It is his practice to rig up a bait, drop it over the bridge rail, mount his bike, and ride sedately along the rail, trolling. He has caught a good many fish in that fashion—but he has one problem: when he hooks a big one a mile or so from the shore end of a bridge, he has to battle it the long way back before he can land it—for the line he uses will lift nothing over twelve pounds.

  Another gentleman, known personally to me, conceived the notion—doubtless on a day when fishing was slow—of looking for them in an autogyro and harpooning them from the wing of same. It was some time ago—and I presume that today he would employ a helicopter; but he did manage to harpoon a shark, several ’cudas, and one loggerhead turtle—all of which were retrieved by a boat following below. This method, though interesting, is expensive and somewhat hazardous. I have heard suggestions made for trolling from blimps—and the blimp which takes passengers for a sky ride from Miami’s causeway uses its shadow to scare and pursue porpoises and sharks. But, again, the blimp angler would run the risk of hanging a fish that would pull the blimp down, rather than the fish up.

  An editor I know once told me of some Florida boys who were taking largemouth black bass in unlikely waters by a method which, again, has certain hazards, but the appeal of novelty. The boys attracted the bass by catching several live bumblebees, putting them in a one-gallon glass jug, and weighting the jug so that it descended to bottom. There the flying about of the bees brought the bass and the lowered baits did the rest. The editor, however, did not tell me how to catch bumblebees safely.

  In my own way, I have discovered a means of initiating Florida novitiates to the fish-teeming facts of life in that area. On my front lawn stood a large Australian pine. To this I affixed a long sash cord. On the far end of that I put a cable leader and a large hook. Near the tree end of this line, I took up a couple of yards of slack and tied in it a bundle of eight heavy door springs. This rig, in other words, was a set line—and the springs were to give it play in the event of a strike. For bait I used a whole crawfish tail or a whole fish of half a pound or so. Under the scrutiny of scornful tourists, friends, and new arrivals, I would tie a heavy sinker to my rig and toss it overboard from my sea wall. I would then fix an elephant bell, which someone had brought me from India, to the tree end of the line. Then I would go about my business.

  Bear in mind that the rig lay in water which surrounded a suburban tropical community—a place where people swam, aquaplaned, and bottom-fished for grunts. Often I have been interrupted at dinner, or during a bridge game, or even in my slumbers at night, by the melodious chiming of the elephant bell. Then, with my skeptical guests, I have gone out and battled, on my own lawn, two-hundred-pound sharks and rays as heavy—both leopard and stingaree. Furthermore, on half a dozen occasions, this powerful rig has been snapped and carried away by—what? I don’t know. Enormous sharks, perhaps. Big jewfish. Something. Don’t ask me. When an unseen fish gets away in Florida—even in the middle of a city, it could be a lot of things.

  Harpooning fish in lakes, rivers, and brooks is regarded as a tame, even unsportsmanlike, activity. A harpooning expedition around the Florida Keys at night—is something else. A rowboat will do; a square-ended boat is better. A square-ended boat with a pipe railing is better still; the rail will keep the harpooner from falling overboard—and it is not good to fall into Florida salt waters in the dark. A gasoline or electric light is needed, with shade and reflector to throw a broad beam into the water and to shield the harpooner’s gaze. An outboard motor is valuable for propulsion.

  In such a craft, on a calm night, “prowling” through creeks, channels, into bays, across sand banks, coral bottom, and over the flats, a man with a fish spear for the small ones, and a good harpoon with rope and a buoy for the big ones, will find himself embarked upon one of the most fabulous experiences of his life. At night the fish are out. In the light they may be seen. As his boat moves slowly here and there he will see the salt-water kingdom and its denizens in thousands: fish of every species, color and size; sharks and rays; crabs and spiny lobsters; morays; the great, slow, but dangerous sawfish—and all the mats, millepores, fans, corals, plants and weird formations which make a tropical bottom look like jungle on some other planet. There are, I should say here, some six hundred species of fish in this territory.

  Even the amateur spearman, when he becomes accustomed to the angle of refraction, can “strike” a fair number of fishes. I have known men to become so enthralled by this sport that they have preferred to do their “fishing” at night only. They bring in big jewfish—big sharks—and huge rays—as well as smaller specimens and the highly edible spiny lobsters. There is a primordial satisfaction in slamming home a harpoon—and a prodigious excitement in following a buoy as some monstrous fish—harpooned and “marked” by the shining can—rages through the mysterious dark. This sport is called “progging” and I have always wondered why so few engaged in it. The initial cost is small but the thrill tremendous, and a night’s sport may be had for a few gallons of gasoli
ne, once a boat is equipped.

  Bottom-fishing is the simplest and—presumably—the tamest kind of fishing. Everywhere in Florida that water is to be found, bottom-fishermen may be seen—in rowboats, with expensive tackle—on banks and bridges, with handlines or cane poles. It is true that in Florida the bridge-and-bank angler has an opportunity to “hang” any of the great game fishes excepting those that confine themselves to the Gulf Stream. Usually, however, his intentions and his catch are confined to pan fish. But I can tell you a way to turn this pedestrian style of angling into one of the most fascinating adventures on old Ike Walton’s list: take along a glass-bottomed bucket. Better still, have a glass-bottomed “well” set in your skiff.

  Through the glass bottom, you can watch your bait descend—and keep an eye on it thereafter. You can see the approach of every fish—the nibble, the gulp. You can see the fish that approach—and do not bite. You will decide—as you watch your bait instead of as you wait to “feel” something—that there are many other fish you’d like to catch than those you are taking. And you can figure out why you’re not getting them. The glamorous angelfishes, and the parrots—which not only have “beaks” like that bird but more and brighter colors than macaws—aren’t being caught because your hook is far too big. Get a minnow hook and use a rice-grain-sized bait—and you may find yourself battling a three-pound angelfish. The panorama of the bottom is yours for the price of a glass-bottomed bucket—and so is a brand new Indian sign on the fish—for you can see them, but they don’t recognize you.