Mike Toth

The Keys Kayak Experiment

Sarah Smith — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 15:17:11 -0500

You can also read this story in the December, 2011 double issue of Field & Stream magazine.

Marshall: Why The Louisiana Oil Spill Will Be Worse Than The Exxon Valdez Disaster

Online Editors — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 09:53:45 -0400

Even in the cabin of a helicopter 2000 feet above, the fumes from the vast blanket of red crude oil spreading across the teal-blue Gulf of Mexico smelled as strong as pump-side at the local filling station. Too bad that wasn't the worst of the news.

By Thursday night that oil began washing up on the most productive fish and wildlife habitat in the lower 48 states - and it's not expected to stop for two months, at the earliest. In the weeks ahead the delta of the Mississippi River will become the largest environmental battleground the nation has seen since the Exxon Valdez disaster of 1989.

The damage to natural resources, experts are now saying, will eclipse even that horrendous event. Here's why.

The area being poisoned:
1.) Produces the largest total seafood landings in the lower 48 states.

2.) Is a vital wintering or resting spot for more than 70 percent of the nation's migratory waterfowl, a place where hunters usually lead the nation in duck harvest.

3.) Produces more catches of redfish and spotted sea-trout (speckled trout), tuna, wahoo, amberjack, snapper and other top sports species than any other states. The daily limit on specks is 25, and reds is 5. In a typical year Louisiana sportsmen catch a 9 million specks and 2.4 million reds.

4.) It produces 50 percent of the nation's wild shrimp crop, 35 percent of its blue claw crabs and 40 percent of its oysters.

5.) Researchers say 90 percent of all the marine species in the Gulf of Mexico depend on coastal estuaries at some point in their lives, and most of those estuaries are in Louisiana.

6.) All 110 species of neo-tropical songbirds use the coast, about 50 nesting here, and the last week of April through the first week of May is the peak migration, when about 25 million birds a day are coming across the Gulf, many using Louisiana for their first landfall.

7.) Some 410 species of fish and wildlife - from whales and manatees, tuna and tarpon to ducks, geese and flounder - are imperiled by this spill, according to the state Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.

As the battle is joined along the coast between a massive and growing army of government and private groups, the larger debate over the future of offshore drilling was rejoined. As someone who has lived his entire life with 4,000 rigs just beyond the horizon, I can offer these thoughts for sportsmen's and other green groups.

Offshore oil drilling is like nuclear power - it has a pretty good safety record, but when an accident happens the results can be catastrophic. And accidents will happen.

We will not win the fight against continued offshore development. There is too much money at stake, and money has always been the ultimate power in these debates whether in Washington or your state house. But we can use this as an example of why the nation must proceed with stimulating development of clean energy sources. And we must press the case that fish, wildlife, and other environmental issues are considered on the front end of these decisions, even for clean energy alternatives.

For example, if we must drill offshore, there should be more redundancy built into safety features. Why wasn't there a back-up shutoff device? Why must such a device be activated by humans on an exploding rig? Why hasn't the industry developed deep-water equipment capable of performing a shutoff in 5,000 feet of water?

And - pay attention Florida - there are some areas so environmentally sensitive, so unique and irreplaceable - that they shouldn't be put at risk.

The Woodcock of Broadway: Part II

Joe_Cermele — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 09:57:23 -0500

A guest post by Field & Stream Executive Editor Mike Toth

So let's pick up where I left this story yesterday....

The woodcock is a creature of habit. Anyone who has hunted them for a while knows that you can find woodcock in many of the same places, autumn after autumn. One fall, hunting the bottom of a ridge in northeastern Pennsylvania, I kicked up a woodie from a depression in the ground not much bigger than a utility sink. I missed the easy going-away shot. The next year, hunting the same bottom, another bird (maybe the same one; who knows?) flushed from the very same hole. Having had approximately 364 days to prepare for the shot, I managed to drop that bird.

Woodcock, apparently, are also slow to adapt to changes--changes such as a teeming city being built in the middle of an historic flyway. That’s apparently why, a year ago this week, I found a dead woodcock near the corner of Broadway and 31st Street in New York City--just a few blocks from the Empire State Building, and a ten-minute stroll to where one million cold and not exactly sober people celebrate the New Year every December 31st by hooting and cheering as a glass ball descends a spire in Times Square at midnight. If you missed Part I of the story, click here.

Manhattan Island was probably a terrific place to hunt woodcock about 400 years ago—all those thickets and freshwater marshes must have made it one giant covert sitting out in the Hudson River. (You can’t hunt woodies in the Big Apple now, of course. All that pigeon scent would confuse your dog’s nose, and any birds you do flush would inconveniently level off right at stoplight height.) But the birds still fly over. And I wasn’t the only person who had found a dead woodcock in the middle of the Big Bad City.

Michael Schiavone is a wildlife biologist with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. He’s the guy who gets the letters and emails with photos of a woodcock lying at the base of a skyscraper, along with the question “What is this bird?”

He wasn’t surprised to hear of my Broadway woodcock, and had a ready explanation.

“They’re low-altitude migrators, and they fly a lot at night,” Schiavone told me. “It may have become disoriented.”

I’d known woodcock were low nighttime flyers, having stood at the edge of a New Jersey thicket one evening in late October and watched one woodcock after another pitch into the woods, their silhouettes backlit by the moon. But why fly directly over a city?

“There’s a big corridor up the Hudson River valley,” Schiavone said. “Your bird was probably following it.”

Schiavone sent me maps that recorded woodcock sightings throughout New York State from 1980 to 1985 and again from 2000 to 2005. Neither map notes birds seen on Manhattan, but Staten Island—which lies directly southwest of the city, just across New York’s Upper Bay, home to Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty—is covered with sight denotations. While Staten Island isn’t exactly bucolic, it has plenty of woodcock-friendly fields and woodlots. And the shortest route to Staten Island from the Hudson River valley goes directly over Manhattan.

Light pollution has been long known as a bird killer. My guess is that the city lights had confused the woodcock I’d found, as Schiavone theorized, hit a building, and fell to the sidewalk. It’s injuries probably weren’t immediately fatal, but severe enough to keep it from flying. That would explain why the guy who saw me photographing the bird said he’d seen it in the neighborhood days before.

The bird probably had succumbed to cold and starvation; the closest earthworm (actually, the closest earth) being in a small park almost a mile away. What’s amazing is that it hadn’t been run over by a taxi or a bicyclist or stepped on by a pedestrian, which is the fate of most injured pigeons in the City. The bird was intact and not mutilated, as if a hunter had just dropped it with a load of No. 8s.

I put the tail feather of this bird in its own envelope and put it in the shoebox with all my old hunting and fishing licenses, harvest tags, possession bands, and similar souvenirs from a lifetime of the field sports. It was, after all, a bird I’ll never forget.

The Woodcock of Broadway: A Christmas Story (Sort of)

Joe_Cermele — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 10:05:46 -0500

A guest post by Field & Stream Executive Editor Mike Toth

You see plenty of small brown objects on the sidewalks of New York City. Most of them don’t deserve more than a glance as you step widely around it on your way to school, museum, theatre, crackhouse, or restaurant. But this one, which I came upon exactly one year ago today as I was walking to work, was different. The breeze blowing in from the Hudson River and keening through the gray canyons of Manhattan were ruffling the feathers of the little woodcock, which was laying, dead, between a mailbox and a food cart on 31st Street, a long spit away from its intersection with Broadway.

I knew it was a woodie, because I’ve been around them all my life. The first wild game bird I’ve ever shot was a woodcock, when I was 15 years old and hunting the damp woods around the Passaic River suburbs in northern New Jersey. I still have a tail feather from that first bird, and the envelope I saved it in, after reading the recommendation from H.G. Tapply (of Field & Stream’s “Tap’s Tips” fame of years ago) that pulling one from each bird is an easy way to keep track of the number of birds you shot every season. (As if I would have shot dozens—isn’t the optimism of youth wonderful?) I had crept up on a peenting male in a meadow one spring evening, part of an assignment in a wildlife biology class at Penn State. I’d heard the chirping of the birds in a quiet, overgrown field across from a condo I lived in, as the males would spiral up into the night sky. I’d flush one occasionally while scouting for deer or hunting for small game, and once in a while, actually shoot one.

So the question I asked myself that cold early morning on the grimy sidewalk, as bundled-up commuters hurried past was: Why? Why did this bird of alder thickets and young moist forests, with its long bill designed to probe for earthworms in loamy soil, wearing mottled feathers that perfectly match the leaf litter of its secluded habitats, choose to fly directly over the biggest, busiest, brightest city in the country? And obviously not survive the trip?

“I’ve seen that thing around,” a fellow pedestrian said, seeing me bent over the bird with cell phone in camera mode. It came out I seen nat ting aroun.

I was surprised someone else had noticed, and wanted to know more. “Where?” I asked.

“Around here,” he said.

“On the ground, you mean? Or flying?”

“Around. You know?”

I couldn’t be sure if he was confusing the woodcock with one of the city’s brown pigeons, or if the woodcock really had landed here on the sidewalk, with 10- and 20-story buildings all around. It really didn’t matter; it was dead.

I picked up the bird, which was very cold, plucked a tail feather, and walked to the street corner. Wrapped in newspaper and placed in a New York City trashcan was a very unceremonious end to a bird of a species that I’ve always revered, so I vowed to find out why a woodcock would ever fly over Manhattan.

And I did find out. I’ll explain it here tomorrow.

On Squirrel Collaboration and Wasted Meat

Online Editors — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 10:18:46 -0500

A guest post from Executive Editor Mike Toth.

Most of us well know the inverse relationship between hunters collaborating on a squirrel and the squirrel itself. That is, the more the hunters collaborate, the less squirrel there is when the shooting is over. This rule was made abundantly clear earlier this week when Senior Editor Colin Kearns and I went after bushytails on a Wildlife Management Area in central New Jersey.

Jersey is a shotgun-only state (with exceptions for muzzleloader), and my favorite squirrel load is ...

... 1 ounce of No. 6 shot out of a Modified choke on a 12 gauge. This gives me an effective but not too dense pattern, decent penetration without overdoing it, and, when I need it, enough range.

The problem is when you don’t have enough range. That’s what happened on our hunt.

Colin puts the same amount of effort into still-hunting squirrels as he would looking for a six-by-six bull in the Grand Tetons, so any squirrel that pops up in his path is likely burying its final acorn. Not ten minutes into our hunt (we had decided to walk the woods together), Colin surprised one at the base of a tree and shot immediately, but the squirrel moved as he pulled the trigger and the pattern hit its hind end. I came around the far side and saw the bushytail hiding on the other side of the tree, where Colin couldn’t see it. I started backing up to give my load a chance to spread out. But the squirrel—surprisingly mobile--started to move toward a dense tangle, so I shot just above it, hoping to edge it with the pattern. Miss. Another high shot. Another miss. The squirrel was still moving toward the brush, and I hated to think that we’d leave a wounded creature in the woods, so I put the bead on its head. I did not miss.

Boy, did I not miss.

There was enough meat to salvage, but most squirrel recipes don’t include decimals in the ingredients, if you get my drift. Fortunately Colin got another one later in the day (shown here), which gave him enough meat to make a small pot pie.

We all love cleanly killed animals that look great for the camera, but the reality is that once in a while, you are going to mangle game, no matter how hard you try not to. On this hunt, I deliberately shot at close range so I wouldn’t risk losing the squirrel. But I do admit to occasionally having taken close shots purely out of choice—and greed. After a long day in the field with nothing to show for it, it’s difficult to hold your fire on an animal that appears right in front of your gun, because waiting for it to move farther away may result in your not getting a shot off at all.

My resolution from here on is to wait for all close-flushing (and non-wounded) game to move farther from my muzzle before I shoot. If I get a shot at a range that won’t tear up the meat, terrific. If not, I will learn to accept the game as lost, and move on. The animals we hunt, even when they’re dead, deserve that respect. --Mike Toth

The Mid-Life Slam

Joe_Cermele — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 15:36:29 -0500

Six miles from land in 8- to 10-foot swells is usually no place to have an argument
over a 4-inch fish. But here we are, seven experienced fishermen, heatedly discussing the identity of a little brown-barred creature as the charter boat heaves and yaws, knocking everyone off balance.

“Might be some kind of grunt,” says mate K.J. Zeher, grabbing a rod rack to keep steady.

“I don’t know.” Photographer Ron Modra takes four quick steps sideways as the boat rocks. “Looks like a young grouper.”

“You’re both wrong,” comes the voice from above, not God but one of several apparent close relations I will meet on this trip. This one is Alex Adler, captain of the 48-foot Kalex, looking down from the bridge. Adler has put me onto 15 different species of fish so far today and it’s not even lunchtime. “It’s a bass. Mike, check your books.”

He’s right. The fish is a saddle bass, found in 250- to 500-foot depths here off the Florida Keys. There’s a scar halfway down its flank—a souvenir from some larger fish beneath us, and there are plenty down there—but the mark didn’t throw off Adler, the expert fisherman and, I’m learning, amateur fish taxonomist.

Adler is 50, a milestone age I will reach this year. Like many men of my hairline, I have a family, a job, and a house, all of which demand most of my time and attention. So it might seem that I have better things to do than attempt to remain upright on a rocking boat about 90 miles from Cuba, some of the greatest gamefish in the world swimming in waters around me, preoccupied with a tiny fish wriggling in my hand.

But that is precisely why I am here.

Some men have a so-called midlife crisis when they turn 50. The number is a stark reminder that our lives are well more than half over. Many of us try to deny our fading and failing bodies by buying late-model European sports cars and using pills and ointments in a desperate attempt to retain the same virility, muscle tone, and short-term memory we had in our 20s.

I understood this well-documented reaction to aging on an intellectual level but didn’t really feel it until an AARP application arrived in my mailbox earlier this year. I stared at the envelope for a week but didn’t dare open it. Just what would be my reward for turning 50? A free large-print book? A discount on an early-bird special dinner at a chain restaurant? Or even (please, no!) The Clapper?

The thought was frightening. No wonder so many 50-year-olds run out to get botulism toxins injected into their face wrinkles and start using the salutation “Dude!” to begin every conversation.

What I wanted to do instead was what had always made me feel right about life—go fishing. A whole lot of fishing. And therein lay a perfect way to mark my 50th: Instead of staring aghast at 50 candles on a birthday cake, I’d spend a week trying to catch 50 different species of fish. It would be an exhilarating way to celebrate an inauspicious birthday, and cheaper than buying a car shaped like a giant Rapala Fat Rap.

To do this I needed a place that wasn’t too far from home, where I could spend a week without spending a fortune, where I’d have access to docks and boats and guides and a lot of water, so I could spend as much time as possible fishing. And, of course, where I’d have a realistic chance of catching 50 species.

The Florida Keys, a 125-mile island chain extending from the southeastern tip of Florida, seemed the ideal destination. The Keys have an incredible abundance of fish. There are billfish and dolphin a quick run offshore, bonefish and tarpon on the sandy flats, redfish and seatrout in the backcountry region, plus snapper and grouper and jacks and scores more species—various sources put the number at 400 or 500, total. No one knows exactly how many; maybe whoever started to count them got caught up in the great fishing and said to hell with the project.

It was a fail-safe plan, because if I didn’t catch the 50, I’d still be spending a week in fishing paradise. With no flaming cake to look at.

Days 1 and 2: It’s a Snap

In Carl Hiaasen’s novel Stormy Weather, Clinton Tyree, the itinerant and partially deranged ex-governor of Florida, has himself lashed to the railing at the apex of the Card Sound Bridge in order to witness a hurricane heading toward south Florida. As I drive over that bridge this late June day I don’t even see a cloud, just an expanse of brilliant blue water extending alongside and beyond Key Largo.

This bridge is one of two vehicle-accessible entries to the island chain. U.S. 1, the Overseas Highway, connects the Keys, which are formed of limestone outcroppings capped by ancient fossilized coral. Some are developed, some are not. Some are so narrow that you can stand in one spot and see both the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean, which the Keys—there are about 800 of them—essentially separate.

My destination is Upper Matecumbe Key and the village of Islamorada (EYE-la-more-AH-duh), about a third of the way down the island chain. Islamorada bills itself as “The Sportfishing Capital of the World,” and few argue the designation. Fishing boats bristling with rods occupy every dock—a wild array of party boats, offshore sportfishing boats, flats boats, cuddy cabins, walkarounds, and center consoles. Mounts of king mackerel and permit and marlin hang not just in tackle shops but in motels, restaurants, bars, and gas stations. Some are outside, so that you can see giant tarpon and great white sharks without leaving your car.

By the time I pull into Cheeca Lodge, my home for the next seven nights, it is near sunset. Cheeca is a large and beautiful resort on the Atlantic side. I am staying at this famous lodge, which I’ll only see early mornings and evenings, because my family will be joining me later in the week (my wife had eight words to say about my adventure—“You’re not going to the Keys without me”—and she and the kids will enjoy the swimming and the snorkeling here while I’m out on the water).

I’ve been traveling all day but I have fish to catch. So after checking in, I grab my rod and walk past the swimmers in the lagoon and the pool, past the outdoor restaurant. I ignore the calypso music emanating from the speakers in the palmettos and the quiet hum of a piña colada blender at the tiki bar. I resist all these temptations because of the other main reason I’m staying at Cheeca—a 525-foot-long fishing pier on the property.

I walk to the end and bait up with shrimp I bought at the Worldwide Sportsman across U.S. 1 from Cheeca. Looking down, I see a kaleidoscope of small fish, along with a 12-foot nurse shark cruising lazily around the pilings. I cast, and the shrimp flows with the tide for only a few seconds before I feel a sharp rap. I set the hook and shortly bring up an 8-inch light-colored fish with yellow lateral lines, a gray spot two-thirds back, and small, sharp teeth. I take a photo and drop it back into the water. Later that night my reference books will show that species No. 1 is a lane snapper, a common and good-tasting species.

With a dozen more fish, I add three more species—pinfish, margate, and bluestriped grunt—to my list. It’s well after dark now and I’m tempted to keep going, but 50-year-olds on a mission (who’ve been up since 4 A.M.) need their sleep.

The next morning I’m at Robbie’s Marina, a five-minute drive from Cheeca. Robbie’s is the home of the Captain Michael, a 65-foot party boat, as well as rental boats, snorkeling and diving services, and a huge school of giant tarpon that are being hand-fed baitfish by tourists at the end of a dock.

I watch the show until the boat leaves. Our destination, according to Capt. Ron Howell, is a reef 31⁄2 miles from shore on the ocean side, where we’ll go after yellowtail snapper.

The boat can hold 53 people, and we are about half full. We cross under U.S. 1 at the Indian Key Channel Bridge. I marvel at the various hues of the water—azure, turquoise, emerald—that change with depth and bottom composition.

We reach the reef 3 miles out. Howell circles it while mate Marshall Hill puts out chum bags. We anchor and drift our baits into the slick. I’m fishing a squid strip on a 1⁄16-ounce yellow jig. A school of sublegal dolphin—“chickens”—shows up, and one grabs my bait. There are bigger dolphin farther offshore, but on this trip, size doesn’t matter. It’s species No. 5.

The yellowtail show up in the chum slick, their golden tails flashing, but they’re not biting well. “The water’s too clear,” says Howell. “They’re spooky.” Hill has me change to a No. 4 bait hook with a small strip of ballyhoo, a baitfish common to these waters, and I’m quickly on with what will turn out to be my only yellowtail.

From the bridge, Howell eyes my fluorocarbon leader disapprovingly. “Twelve-pound pink Ande mono will outfish fluoro here,” he says. “See that guy?” A customer who has spooled up with the stuff is fast into his seventh fish. But I already have my yellowtail, so I can’t focus on this terrific fishing for one of the most delicately flavored fish in the ocean, anyway. But I’m okay with that. I think.

Hill has me change rigs again, and I luck into a blue runner (No. 7). Yet another change gets me a smashing hit from a barracuda, but I can’t stick the hooks. Still, I’m up to seven species.

Back on shore I grab lunch and return to Robbie’s, where I paddle one of their kayaks out to a mangrove creek on the Gulf side of the key. I’ve been instructed to go past the second bend, tie off to a branch, drop a chum bag, and toss a lightly weighted live shrimp into the slick.

The creek is narrow and shady with a deceptively quick current, but I’m comfortable in this setup because I fish Barnegat Bay from a kayak back home in New Jersey. That’s also why the feel of a fly landing on my inner thigh as I sit spread-eagled in the ’yak doesn’t seem out of place. I am concentrating on the fishing and try to shake the fly off without taking my eyes from my line. When it doesn’t move and I look down to see not a fly but a silver dollar–size crab disappearing up my shorts leg, I nearly capsize.

I quickly remove the crab, the creek eventually settles back down, and the orange-finned schoolmasters and gray (mangrove) snappers smack the shrimp. That brings my species count up to nine; my phantom-itch count in bed that night reaches about 3,000.

Days 3 and 4: Too Many Snook

When I was 15 years old, I was fascinated by the book A Journey to Matecumbe by Robert Lewis Taylor. In it the young Davey Burnie travels by dugout canoe through the Everglades on his way to the Florida Keys, sleeping on island hummocks and eating stew made from alligators that were captured by Seminoles.

What backcountry guide Jim Willcox and I are looking at, however, is nothing so mundane as a gator. It is an American crocodile, a 12-footer resting in the dappled shade of the mangroves out here where the Everglades meet Florida Bay. This is one of about a thousand crocodiles that inhabit the southern tip of Florida, and Willcox has beached the bow of his 18-foot Action Craft flats boat on the island so we can get a better look at it.

American crocs are a threatened species, downgraded from the endangered list last year. Right now, though, I’m the species that feels unsafe. The croc is 30 feet away.

“That’s a big one,” says Willcox. “But even big ones are fast.” I shift my weight from starboard to port to make sure that the hull isn’t stuck fast in the marl.

We’ve motored about an hour from Bud N’ Mary’s Marina in Islamorada through Florida Bay to get to this maze of islands, shoals, broad expanses of water, and snakelike creeks. Willcox, 52, seems to know every inch of it.

The day before, Willcox and I had fished a number of patch reefs—isolated coral outcroppings within a mile or two of shore—and added eight species to the list. Willcox wanted to fish the backcountry today so I could reach my halfway point.

And we’ve done well. So far today I’ve caught sea catfish (No. 18), jack crevalle (No. 19), spotted seatrout (No. 21), snook (No. 22) and, in a model of fishing efficiency, a 100-pound bull shark (No. 23) that ate a ladyfish (No. 20). I also jumped and lost a tarpon, but my self-imposed IGFA tournament rules dictate that a fish isn’t considered caught unless I bring it close enough for me to touch the leader.

What I need to catch is a redfish. But here, in the slow current of the creek bend, I am hooking snook after snook.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” says Willcox. “The snook are biting like crazy.” He looks at me. “I’ve never said that before in my life.”

We motor through open water to a heavily shoaled shoreline. We have to anchor the boat and walk through shallows to get to the mouth of a tiny mangrove- and cypress-lined flowage that Willcox says is home to my redfish.

The outgoing tide is very warm, exposing shoals that are ankle-deep with seashells that would cost a dollar each at a Miami airport souvenir shop. Along the shoreline I see cuts and holes, channels and dropoffs, eddies and deadfalls. We haven’t seen another fisherman in hours. I want to stay right here for the next four to six weeks and fish it all. But Willcox points to the creek. “Cast a shrimp upcurrent,” he says. I slowly wade toward the mouth, working the waist-deep water as I go. On my fourth cast my line wraps around an overhanging mangrove branch, and I have to cross to the steep opposite bank to free it.

I swing the rod to loop the line off the branch, and that, of course, is when the redfish sucks in the shrimp.

The creek is about 10 feet wide, the red is about 6 pounds, and I can see about 300 places for him to wrap me. But I’m not going to lose this fish, which now wants to swim back through the Everglades and all the way to Lake Okeechobee. I hear Willcox rapidly sloshing through the water toward me. “Just beach it!” he’s yelling.

I’d once lost a 5-pound smallmouth trying to do just that on a Pennsylvania lake when my landing net was lying forgotten somewhere, but I have no other option. I crank down on the fish and in one motion sweep the rod back, take two steps up, and drag the red onto the bank. Then I fall like a sack of cement so my body is between water and fish, and pin it with my forearm. Willcox gets there a few seconds later. “Smooth,” he says. “You’re not ready for AARP yet!”

By the time we get back to the dock, I’ve reached 27 species. More than halfway, and time to get out on the big water.

Days 5 and 6: Preparing for a Sword Fight

In The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway’s Santiago battles an 18-foot blue marlin from a skiff in the Florida Straits, where the Gulf Stream begins between Cuba and the Florida Keys. I am in those very waters now and much better equipped than Santiago, who had only a hook and a handline. I’m sitting in a fighting chair on the deck of the 56-foot Catch-22, piloted by Capt. Scott Stanczyk. I watch as mates Nick Stanczyk, Scott’s nephew, and K.J. Zeher carefully put a rod with a Penn International 80 reel loaded with 100-pound-test line in the gimbal between my legs.

The reel’s giant spool looks sparse at the moment, though, because at the other end of the quarter mile of line leading from the rod tip and practically straight down from the transom is, we hope, a big broadbill swordfish.

To get here we passed through the waters I was in yesterday with Adler on his Kalex, where I caught that little saddle bass (No. 43) we all argued about, and 19 other species. Some were truly incredible—from the impossibly tiny-mouthed filefish (No. 32), to the blue parrotfish (No. 35) that looked like wet sapphire, to the 2-foot-long remora (No. 34) that Adler insisted could adhere to my belly and hang there (it did, and the sensation was like having a vacuum-cleaner hose with a thousand tiny needles at its end stuck to your skin).

I ended the day by catching a behemoth 25-pound permit—my 47th species, and a trophy fish on any trip—and we whooped and hollered our way back to the marina.

Here on the Catch-22, though, everyone is quiet as the boat rises and falls in the swells, as if the big billfish more than 1,500 feet below could sense us. I knew that Richard Stanczyk—the owner of Bud N’ Mary’s, who is on board today, directing operations—had perfected a method of fishing for swordfish in daylight, involving 10 pounds of concrete weight, several large lightsticks, a large baitfish (today’s was a butterflied 5-pound cero), and a hell of a lot of line. What I didn’t know was that we would troll up a blackfin tuna and an almaco jack on the 40-mile ride out here, meaning I’d have a shot at a sword for my 50th species.

Nick is perched on the transom, the line from my rod in his gloved hand. “He’s on,” he says to me, almost casually.

“Huh?” I say stupidly.

“He’s on! Start cranking!”

It takes me a few minutes to feel the fish but there’s no doubt when I do. Zeher—who mates on a number of boats out of Bud N’ Mary’s—slips a fighting harness around me and clips the reel to it, so I can lean back to gain slack, then reel it in as I drop forward. Do this a couple of hundred times with a fish almost as big as you on the other end of the line, and you start wondering how much ibuprofen is on board.

I’m alternating between cranking, cursing, and praying as the fish turns and peels off a football field’s length of my preciously gained line, then seems to have shaken the hook when the line goes slack. But he’s still there. He’s swimming toward the surface, and in a few minutes I see the electric gray of his flank. Nick and Zeher are ready with gaffs, and the 125-pound sword is eventually in the boat, thumping and thrashing. There is a lot of emotional yelling from everyone on board.

I’ve done it. But I realize something else.

Among all the backslaps and grins and handshakes, I know that these men and all the other guides on this trip are happy not just for my accomplishment but for their contribution to it. Like me, fishing makes them feel good about life. Besides, my 50-species one-week midlife slam became a personal challenge for them; a test of their fishing knowledge and prowess. Helping me attain that goal was a way of proving their ability.

“You did it!” says Nick.

“We sure did,” I say.

Day 7: A Bone to Pick

My last day here is with Capt. Vic Gaspeny, a bonefish and tarpon fishing legend on these waters. My 16-year-old son, Joe, is with me, and he wants to catch his first bone. I’ve never caught one either, but after the largesse of the week and hitting my goal of 50, I’m content to watch.

Gaspeny anchors on a flat within shouting distance of U.S. 1 and casts out lightly weighted shrimp from four rods. One of them twitches less than 10 minutes later, and Joe is soon running miniature laps around the boat, trying to keep a straight line angle to the bone. Gaspeny eventually nets the 4-pounder.

Joe repeats the exercise a few minutes later, and again soon after that. He’s caught 11 pounds of bonefish in about an hour, and when a rod twitches for the fourth time, I grab it. Joe and Gaspeny laugh. “Change your mind, Dad?” asks Joe.

“One for good luck,” I say. The bone tears off, the spool spins, and I think, I never caught a tarpon. Could I catch 60 tarpon in a week?

untitled image 6328

fieldandstream-editor — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 09:39:45 -0500

Captain Jim Willcox throws a castnet for baitfish in Florida Bay.

"We'll need some bait,-Â¿ said Willcox, and he slowed down in an area that to my Northeast eye looked like any other part of the expanse of blue around us. Willcox dropped a bag of chum over the side, told Joe to shake it, and started draping sections of a 10-foot-diameter castnet over his shoulder. After four throws we had about six dozen 2- to 4-inch pilchards and pinfish in the baitwell. "These work well, especially the pinfish,-Â¿ said Willcox, as we scrabbled around the deck, grabbing the bait that flipped out of the net. "Ow!-Â¿ said Joe, wincing as one of the sharp-dorsal-finned baitfish snapped out of his palm. "That's why they're called pinfish,-Â¿ said Willcox. "OK, this is fun, but we have enough bait. Let's go.-Â¿

TIP: Live shrimp are the default bait for most Keys shore species--snappers, grunts, bonefish, even "baby-Â¿ tarpon, which means a fish weighing up to 20 pounds or so. Don't take up valuable luggage space by packing a bait bucket; buy an inexpensive one at any tackle shop and give it to a fellow fishermen before you go home.

untitled image 6327

fieldandstream-editor — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 09:39:45 -0500

Joe Toth and Willcox get a handful of Toth's first tarpon.

We ran another mile or so and entered the mouth of a slow-moving river bordered on both sides by mangrove roots and seemingly unending scrub. The tide was going out. We heard the smacks of jumping fish as soon as Willcox slowed the motor.

"Oh, this is good,-Â¿ said the guide, anchoring from the bow and getting out a couple of medium-weight spinning rods rigged with hook and cork bobber. He handed one to me, then baited and cast another. "Rig it up with a pilchard, put it as close to the roots as possible, and let it drift,-Â¿ he said. "I'm going to drop one downcurrent with no bobber and get one out on the other side. Fish everywhere here. Oh, this is good. Here we go!-Â¿ The back rod dipped and Willcox grabbed it and handed it to Joe. "He's on!-Â¿

Joe started reeling, pausing when the fish took line. I took my bait in, quick-stepped back onto the stern, and started looking for a net. Joe and Willcox were struggling to get the third outfit out of the way. A rod dropped in the water and Willcox clawed down and got it before it sank. Joe's drag started peeling again. Then the fish jumped--a tarpon, about 10 pounds. I hooted, Joe pleaded with the fish to stay on, and Willcox was giving urgent instructions and encouragement: "Tight line! Good! No slack! Bow when he jumps! That's it! OK, bring him over!-Â¿

We'd been anchored all of ten minutes, and already it was turning into the kind of day I'd been hoping for.

TIP: A 15-pound-test spinning outfit will cover most of your needs from shore. If you think you'll fish a bonefish flat, drop down to 12-pound test. If you're going to be casting to tarpon at night, go up to 20.

untitled image 6326

fieldandstream-editor — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 09:39:45 -0500

Joe Toth's beautiful Florida Bay backcounty snook, caught on a live pinfish.

Joe got that tarpon, his first. We put it back and I shook his hand. "So what do you think? Fun?-Â¿ "Awesome!-Â¿ he said, using the word appropriately for once. "Now you get one.-Â¿

A good plan, but it wasn't my turn. Not yet, anyway. Joe's rod went down again, and time it was a nice snook. The fish raced back and forth in the river and we did our three-man dance on the flats boat, switching rods, cranking in line, trading spots, lunging for the net.

The snook, about a 20-incher, finally slowed, and Willcox got it in the net. There's a limited season on these fish--it's open from September through April, and only those between 26 and 34 inches are legal--so back in the river it went.

We had a few more hits and misses, and two fish that threw the hook. Willcox saw a school of small mullet go by and readied the cast net. "Good bait,-Â¿ he said. "They're worth going after.-Â¿

TIP: Many larger species--tarpon, barracuda, grouper--feed on baitfish, and pinfish are tops. You can cast-net for them from a boat, but that takes time and expertise that you may not have. I baited small hooks with pieces of shrimp to catch the small fish and used them as bait for the bigger species.

untitled image 6325

fieldandstream-editor — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 09:39:45 -0500

The author, pleased with his Florida Bay redfish.

I put one of the three-inch mullet on my hook and cast out next to the mangroves. The bobber drifted, slowed, then jerked nervously. "Something there,-Â¿ I said, and the bobber disappeared. I reeled in and avoided the urge to set the hook, which was unneccesary with the Gamakatsu Octopus circles that Willcox used. The fish bulled its way toward the bank. "Keep it out of the roots!-Â¿ shouted Jim, not a second too soon. I put some pressure on the fish and got it out into the current, where it kept its head on the bottom. Eventually I got it to the surface-a beautiful bright redfish, "Jim, I said, "we're not looking to fill the cooler. But my whole family's here, and we all eat fish. So if this one's legal, we'll bring it to a restaurant tonight.-Â¿

The fish measured 22 inches--right in the middle of keeper range, which is 18 to 27 inches. "Your dinner fish,-Â¿ said Jim, and he put it in the box.

Three different species, and a lot of excitement, and a great-eating fish to bring back.

TIP: Many area restaurants will prepare the fish you catch, so it pays to take a cooler filled with ice. We brought our fish to to Lazy Days Restaurant in Islamorada (305-664-5256), just a stone's throw from Bud N' Mary's Fishing Marina. They can prepare your catch in a number of different ways, from blackened to battered. We had the variety platter, and it was superb.