Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2024 i Florida Sportsman

Florida anglers trolling the offshore reefs and bluewater rips frequently overlook some great fish-catching opportunities right in their propwash. Among seasoned fishermen, putting a bait close is a proven tactic—especially useful in kingfish tournaments. Typical slow-trolling spreads include live or rigged dead baits set at varying distances from the boat. Many anglers tend to put baits pretty far back, under the assumption that unnatural noises spook gamefish. This has some merit in tuna fishing, but king mackerel are funny. Some days the biggest ones bite right behind the outboard motor. Fort Lauderdale’s Young Guns fishing team, headed up by seasoned angler Lance Irvine, has fine-tuned their team’s kingfish tactics. When targeting tournament-winning kingfish, they’ll place a live blue runner right in their propwash. “While kingfishing out of Key West, we…

Likes, follows, shares, subscriptions—social media’s all about attracting and maintaining attention. Bass fishing’s not so different, especially in terms of soft bait accents. Seems like every year brings a nifty new rig or a clever modification of a time-honored go-to. But even if you’re not some ultra-creative rigging wiz, we’ve rounded up a handful of enhancement strategies that’ll improve anyone’s performance. DYEING FOR ATTENTION Dipping dyes, aerosol sprays, and dye marking pens—often enhanced with fish-attracting scent—will bolster your bait’s appeal and increase its chances of catching someone’s eye. Chartreuse is most common for a couple of reasons. For one thing, it’s a high-vis color that stands out in Florida’s dark, tannic waters, as well as wind-stirred shallows. Moreover, a lot of bluegill sport varying shades of chartreuse on their tails.…

In the summer of 1969, a former newspaper journalist caught the fishing bug and chose to focus his investigative chops and newly printed platform, Florida Sportsman magazine, to help shape the way we view and manage fisheries in Florida. That was Karl Wickstrom, my father. I remember asking him, nearly half a century ago, why he always wrote about conservation. I was young; to my mind, my father seemed angry and too serious in his columns. Why didn’t he write more about “our” fishing trips? Or funny things like editor Vic Dunaway? Thankfully, he didn’t give much thought to my question. My views changed as my job responsibilities evolved at the magazine and I learned more about our natural resources, the greed of our elected lawmakers and, frankly, what our…

I arrived on the saltwater scene in Florida just after the first pioneers like Willy Roberts, Bob Hewes, Lefty Kreh, Bob Stearns, Stu Apte, et al. had basically invented the flats skiff for the bonefish and permit fisheries of southeast Florida. After a few years of making my bones, I became a flats guide at Homosassa—and there saw my first true flats boats up close when the giant tarpon of Chassahowitzka Point and Pine Island were discovered by the outside world—which is to say half the guides from the Florida Keys, all gold chains and Rolex watches and attitude. One of the first I got invited to fish from was a Willy Roberts. Willy Roberts probably built the original 16-foot “flats boat” or skiff of plywood in the early 1960s.…

The Florida-Georgia game takes place along Jacksonville’s riverfront each fall in October or early November. It’s one of Jacksonville’s most popular events. In fact it’s deemed the “World’s Largest Cocktail Party” but another spectacular show on the St. Johns River that is taking place simultaneously is the fall mullet run. Often during Florida-Georgia weekend when the tide gets right you’ll see tarpon getting airborne amongst massive schools of big roe mullet migrating through the river in the middle of downtown Jacksonville. It’s like daytime fireworks with enormous blinging chrome fish airborne in the midst of thousands of mullet showering on the surface. I love fishing downtown during all of football season. When the Jaguars are playing at EverBank Stadium, one minute you’re seeing tarpon exploding and the next minute you’ll…

My grandson Parker and I hosted family friends Jeff and Corey Benischeck for the day offshore of Stuart. We hooked a double, and the sailfish were both big and hot. Corey and Jeff were screaming for joy as the sails started jumping towards each other. Despite mine and Parker’s best efforts to keep the fish separated, Jeff’s fish tail-walked right over Corey’s line, cutting himself free. I was actually not all that disappointed—now we had a chance to focus on Corey’s sail, his first ever. However, there was another problem. Corey’s sail was jumping off one side of the boat while his line was going straight off the transom. Thinking we had gotten hung on something barely under the surface—a log, maybe, or big patch of weed—Parker grabbed the 20-pound…

Up on the Great Lakes, fishermen use nets as long as 15 feet to bring salmon over the rails. For the past few years on Florida’s Big Bend, I’ve used the opposite: a short, extending Frabill that was easily hidden and took up little space in my boat. As a guide, I have an aversion to waving a big landing net, advertising to other boats that I’m catching fish. In many regions, that kind of behavior will attract other boats like seagulls to floating crackers. Yet, I’ve recently switched to a bigger landing net. Why? 1) You have to be deadly accurate with a small net. A client may have the fish of a lifetime thrashing by the boat or diving under the hull, and poking at it with a…

Emmanuel Williams popped up on my radar a few years back when he sent the magazine a picture of himself with a wahoo. We get a lot of wahoo pictures but Emmanual’s was the first I’d ever seen caught trolling on a personal watercraft. I started running into him at boat shows. He’s a lifelong angler, born and raised in Broward County. He’s cultivated a social media presence and caught all kinds of great fish. I recently caught up with him a few days after he returned from a trip to the Bahamas. FS: So, tell us about that Bahamas trip. How’d that work? EW: I ran over with my cousin. We left out of Palm Beach and ran 65 miles to West End. My cousin’s Sea-Doo has a cargo…

It was 1973 and I’d recently moved our family to Amelia Island, Florida. My fishing boat was a 21-foot StarCraft bass boat—hardly well-suited to the Florida salt. I remember launching from the Fernandina Harbor public boat ramp and casting one of my favorite freshwater bass plugs. I’ll never forget seeing that great, gold-colored fish poke its head out of the water and come crashing down on my plug. Returning to the ramp, I was excited to share news of my first redfish encounter. A fisherman remarked that redfish were nothing but bycatch. To catch good-eating fish, fish on the bottom with shrimp and catch whiting, he advised. Times have surely changed! Redfish grew immensely in popularity over the years. Tournaments evolved throughout the Sunshine State, showcasing specialized fishing boats, tackle,…

FS: Let’s talk hulls. Catamarans seem to be the rage lately. EB: There’s a tremendous interest in cats today. But vee bottom diehards will always be diehards—and vee bottom boats have their advantages. They can ride good, smooth and dry, and because they have the depth of the vee under the console, they have a place for a standup head, shower and all sorts of amenities—great family boats. Cats are tremendously stable at rest—we’re putting SeaKeepers in vee bottom boats today, but with a cat you don’t need it—you pull the engines back in a beam sea, the boat goes up and down with the waves, no rocking like in a vee bottom. Several builders have improved the ride and dryness of the catamaran ride—some of the early cats were…

WHEN IT COMES TO MOUTH-WATERING tasty seafood harvestable by Floridians, stone crab claws take the top spot on the podium as gold medalists. The texture, delicious meatiness and full-body flavor of freshly cracked claws is impossible to beat. Spiny lobsters, scallops, clams, oysters, blue crabs, shrimp all have dedicated fans and rate as top choices for anglers and divers to catch on their own. However, many residents are unaware that stone crabs roam the waters of every coastal county in Florida, are a renewable resource (since only the claws are taken), and that recreational harvesters are allowed to manage up to five traps per season, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. October 15 is start of stone crab season. Trapping is the primary method, but some are harvested…

At the boat ramp on State Road 200, just before Amelia Island, Lofton Creek is very narrow, only a good cast wide. Most passersby believe the creek offers little fishing action. However, navigating south from the boat ramp, Lofton soon widens into a fine example of a Florida coastal creek showcasing both fresh and saltwater gamefish. Downstream of the ramp, fishermen will find a deep turn in the creek. Locals call this popular fishing hole the “Horseshoe,” and they also know it for a memorial plaque for Captain Richard Sheets, posted on a cypress tree. Some of the largest bass in the creek—some over 10 pounds—have been taken close to the knees of this memorial cypress. In that first mile south from the boat ramp, fishermen will find cypress, lily…

I first flyfished for Everglades canal and creek snook and tarpon around 1975. The hallowed fishing grounds for this pursuit was and still is the famed, brackish Tamiami Trail (U.S. 41) canal from just east of Ochopee to approximately U.S. 92 leading to Marco Island. Flood tides from the Gulf of Mexico usher in saltwater and with it baby tarpon, snook of all sizes, red drum, and the occasional sheepshead. Mixed in the upper, fresher reaches of the waterway are largemouth bass, bream and nowadays every exotic freshwater fish there is. The big draw is the falling tide which flushes untold millions of mosquito minnows (Gambusia affinis) and occasional mollies from the freshwater prairies beyond the canal banks. This tidal action, plus a strong northeast wind, sets up a feeding…

My kids groan when I tell them I’m not much of an archery enthusiast because there are too many drawbacks. My bowhunting friends groan, too, when I claim I’m archery hunting when using a crossbow. “It’s not real archery!” I hear them wail. Fine. I concede the point, for the sake of preserving energy. There is, though, an alternate skill set when crossbow hunting versus using compound or traditional bowhunting rigs. With that in mind, let's run down factors to consider before jumping into the crossbow game. SELECTING YOUR CROSSBOW The crossbows used in the Florida woods today range from elite rigs that fire bolts like laser beams, to pawn shop retreads that punt bolts towards their target. Such has been the advancement of this technology over the last 20…

Offshore fishing in Florida was far different in the early 1970s. The average boat was between 20 and 23 feet, and for the areas we fished off Northeast Florida, a 40-gallon gas capacity was more than enough. Summertime in this part of the state saw most of the private boats fishing either the chum hole adjacent to the north jetties, or out in front of the old “golf ball” water tank off Ponte Vedra Beach. The chosen method for chummers was to buy a duffel bag of “chum” or shrimp boat bycatch, blow them up with a veterinary hypodermic needle, and start a chum line that imitated a shrimp boat discarding the fish they had picked out of their shrimp. The boats trolling offshore were pulling ballyhoo and bonito strips,…

In 1969, the Florida Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission, as it was then called, was a relatively small agency. It was viewed by the public as game wardens and biologists. Starting work there was not an unfamiliar experience for me since I grew up in a military/law enforcement family where uniforms and regulations were commonplace. I welcomed the opportunity to combine and use my interests in wildlife, hunting and fishing with writing and photography. In those days, the Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission was known for taking a bold position that placed “wildlife resources above politics.” The agency was constitutionally established and funded primarily by revenue from hunting and fishing licenses. No matter what the challenges of working in a bureaucracy were, I was always comforted by this…

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