Luyen’s Reel-Time FLog

Mid-80’s air temps.  Full moon.

For the first time in five years, I didn’t book a trip with a guide out of Punta Rassa during spring break.  Instead, the week was divided in half between Disney World and Sanibel, so I made the painful decision to limit my fishing to trash fishing on the beach outside the in-laws’ condo and car-bound forays into the Ding Darling wildlife sanctuary. To make matters worse, the fishing reports from Sanibel seemed to follow a grim trend: irrigation runoff from farmlands near Lake Okeechobee continued to have a significant impact on the ecology of Pine Island Sound.  This year, instead of the red tide that had caused such devastation along the Gulf Coast two years ago, it was a tide of vibrant green algae that was killing fish along the mangrove banks and freshwater estuaries of the sound.

A notable casualty of the “green tide” was the turtle grass – and hence, the snapping shrimp that constituted the essential base of Sanibel’s aquatic food pyramid.  I bought an aerator for our shrimp bucket only to find that the usual shrimp suppliers (Bailey’s, Tarpon Bay) had nothing to offer.  Only the Bait Box had shrimp, and, as I learned the hard way, they were out of shrimp well before noon.

On the bright side, consistent warm weather had enlivened the local snook and other predatory piscatorial species.  On my first trip into the sanctuary, I nailed two snook and a small jack at the third culvert casting a Clouser around the uptide side of the road.  Back at the condo, the few shrimp we were able to horde were fastened to bait hooks and quickly devoured by trout and whiting.  Poppie caught a couple of nice fish and Alaina reeled in a big trout – so mission accomplished as far as keeping the family’s interest level at a high level.

On the last full day of our vacation (Sunday), I took my last lick tour through the sanctuary armed with two fly rods, a spinning rod, and a bucket of shrimp.  I fished the first culvert with the spinning rod and a shrimp, hoping to get the proverbial monkey off my back.  Despite the persistent sounds of snook busting bait under the road, my shrimp was untouched as it made drift after drift through the culvert. 

The second culvert was closed, and the freshwater side was filled with muck and algae.  I headed quickly for the nearby third culvert and traded the live shrimp for a Cousin It at the end of my 8-wt fly rig.  It was here that I had snagged a couple of fish the last time I had visited the park, and I worked the waters outside the culvert methodically – with a sense of quiet expectation.  After a few casts had yielded no interest, I casually drifted the fly back under the culvert.  The fly made it no farther than the first stanchion before it was devoured by a snook.  Unprepared, I set the hook as best I could, but the big fish stayed tethered for only a few seconds before pulling the tippet from the shock leader. Angler error: I hadn’t checked the terminal connections before tying on the fly, and the snook made me pay for this oversight.

The brief tussle caused a stir among the other anglers at the culvert, but after a few more drifts with a tan and white Clouser (Murphy had made damn sure that the Cousin It now firmly lodged in the snook’s jaw was the only one I had had in my fly box) I decided to make my way to the next culvert.

It took only two more drifts under the fourth culvert before I was tied fast to a big snook – this time, the fish hit the fly as I stripped it back towards the culvert’s mouth.  This time, the knots held tight and the shock leader did its job.  It wasn’t terminal tackle this time that conspired against the angler – it was the culvert itself, and the snook’s fighting instincts.  As soon as he was hooked, the fish made a blistering run towards the far side of the culvert.  Discovering that the gates were closed, he made a quick U-turn and headed in the other direction, wrapping himself around the stanchion at my side of the culvert.  I let the line go slack just long enough for the fish to unwrap himself, then reared back on the rod to force him through the nearside opening of the culvert.  A few minutes later, I lipped the snook and weighed him with a scale that had been handed to me by another angler.  Surprisingly, the fish weigh in at only five pounds – but at 24 inches, the fish seemed far beefier.