Gone Fishin’, No Kidding For Real
This is more of a photo essay than in previous posts. Not that I will remain silent.
So Friday we really did get out fishin’. The Freedom Boat Club at Little Harbor is in Ruskin, FL. It is one of several Club locations in the Tampa Bay area.
Brother–in–law Joe, hereafter just Joe, tells me that Ruskin is famous for tomatoes. I had no idea. Apparently the soil in this area is unique and produces a tomato like no other. Here is an excerpt from a 1990 Tampa Bay Times article:
Although Florida is known for its citrus crop, it produces the most fresh tomatoes in the country – about 1.85-billion pounds a year, bringing in an estimated $475-million annually, said Catherine Greene, an agriculture economist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C. Statewide, the Ruskin area is the top tomato-producer. Shipped throughout the country, Ruskin tomatoes are sold primarily in Canada and the Northeast.
At the Little Harbor location, the boat launch area leads to a network of channels. Note the cul–de–sac area at upper right, this is where we went first.
We were taken to our 23–foot deck boat with its 150 HP motor and loaded our gear:
On the way to the cul–de–sac, boat speed was restricted to idle, as the channels are a so–called “No Wake Zone”. The banks were lined with condos and private homes, many with boat docks and hoists. In this area and climate, boat hulls become overgrown with all kinds of marine life, from microscopic algae to barnacles, and it is best to keep the boat out of the water if one can afford to do so. Boating is not for anyone struggling finanically, or even getting by comfortably. I could afford to buy a boat myself, but I couldn’t afford to own one. Operational and maintenance costs would eat me alive.
We motored over, slooooowly, to the cul–de–sac, where right in the middle there is an island of mangrove trees. Mangroves are an amazing species, one of the very few that can survive in salt water. They put down a dense, tangled system of roots that become exposed at low tide.
We anchored upwind and drifted the boat back to the island, about 10 meters away, then we got our out our gear, baited the hooks with the live shrimp we picked up on the way, and began fishin’. Here are Joe and Joey getting their gear in order – incidentally, this is Joe’s best side.
The measure of fishin’ success is not so much how many fish you can catch, if any. It’s if you have a good time watching your float bob up and down in the ripples. It is not necessary to pollute the silence with conversation. Joe did catch one fish, a very small mangrove snapper which he released. Joey and I caught no fish but did reel in plenty of peace of mind. I did get a few hits, the float sharply bobbing up and down and disappearing once beneath the surface, but the fish ate the shrimp off from around the hook without getting hooked. It was fine. I didn’t mind feeding the fish that way, although it would have been more efficient just to dump the bait bucket into the water.
We hauled anchor and headed out into Tampa Bay. On the way out we passed a Snowy Egret, one of Florida’s iconic birds. The Pelican, Great Blue Heron, and Osprey are a few others.
Out in the Bay there is an area where a shelf on the bottom rises up and is covered with a lot of sea grass. Fish are supposed to like to hide in such places. As we left Little Harbor the Bay opened up, and we could see St. Petersburg in the distance straight ahead, and Tampa itself way off to the right. If you have not been to Tampa, it is difficult to grasp the immensity of the Bay if you have not been around it or out in it.
Joe cracked the throttle open, and we accelerated to a cruising speed of maybe 30 knots. For any landlubbers out there, one knot is one nautical mile per hour, with one nauticle mile equal to 6076 feet. This is one minute of latitude, favored by mariners as a unit of distance for navigation on the surface of a (nearly) spherical earth. The Bay itself is not a No Wake Zone, and we raised a not insignificant one.
If I had any hair it would have been Blowin’ in the Wind, but the fresh breeze in the face was exhilarating. There was almost no wind when at rest, and the Bay was flat as a pancake, with only a few ripples raised on the surface of the water. I am not usually one for selfies, but on this occasion I made an exception.
At the sea grass ledge, we fished for a while but got no further action. Again, you can fish quite successfully without catching fish, so by that metric we were quite successful. We had to get back because Joe had a conference call in the afternoon. We re–entered LIttle Harbor and approached the boat recovery area.
Joey brought it home, gently kissing the dock, and we tied off and got our gear back to the car for the ride home.
This was Friday. Yesterday I played in a Bridge Tournament, not entirely unrespectably, and in the evening my Sister Lisa put on a big feed. The feature attraction is (was? will be?) something called a Low Country Boil, it’s some kind of Cajun thing. Joe and his family are from New Orleans, so we get a lot of that. More later on the feast, it was epic. Gotta go!! Lisa is making French toast, woohoo!
All the best,
From Tampa, FL on Sunday, 08/15 at 1 PM.
Rex
