| | | | m Printer-friendly version of this article | | | | Canoe Snooking |  |
| | By MERRILL "CANOEMAN" CHANDLER (1929 - 2002) |  | | The strong breeze buffeted my pickup as we crossed the Skyway Bridge. "What a difference the canoe makes atop the truck." I said, trying to keep the vehicle in a straight line. "It acts like a sail." Mel stated. High above the eastern horizon the fingernail type moon and the planet Venus previewed the dawn. From all reports this is the time for snook to make their annual migration from the flats and mangroves to the comfort of the deeper canals. | |
Every year at this time when the days get shorter and the water temperature drops below the magic seventy-degree mark great numbers of these sensitive creatures seek refuge in the back bays and residential canals.
Like most fishermen, we have a few spots that will be keep as our own little secret "honey holes". In past years I have given information with the stipulation, "Now don’t tell anyone about this." Later when I would head to the "Lunker hole" there would be four or five boats depleting the fish population This past week we ventured to just one of the special holes that so far has been our secret.
That day was one of the coolest of the year and both of us were bundled up with layers of clothing. It is a lot more comfortable to be able to shed clothing rather than suffer the cold.
The first area held a bunch of mid-size snook with a few trout intermingled. Now I know this will sound like a DOA commercial but, for the people that tell me I have used the "DOA Shrimp" and have never caught a thing---- try fishing where there are some fish! For the last several years this has been our most productive lure!
The water was oozing in and the wind was quite strong when I decided to try one other "spot," but the tide was too low to find fish there, so we headed to the aforementioned secret prime location.
Each of us, remembering what had been productive in the past, tied on our favorite color artificial shrimp and began casting. Not so much as a tap when we used it the usual manner. After a bit of experimentation, we discovered that the snook would bite if we got the DOA shrimp right on the bottom and used a very slow retrieve. The difficulty was trying to avoid the many oyster shells and snags that were strewn over the bottom. Using the a highly sensitive superline like our favorite PowerPro, it was very easy to feel the obstacles down below
"Got a BINK!" Mel announced as he pulled in a frisky snook. Not usually fish counters, we realized our snook count was already ten snook caught in the last spot before the clock reached 7 AM, and this was number eleven. "You don’t suppose that we could reach our record of seventy snook, do you?" I asked. Mel was a little apprehensive about that feat, the water was quite murky, so we just continued to catch and count.
"This one is number thirty eight!" I announced later, reeling in one that was a border line, keeper. Just a couple of days ago I talked with Dr. Ron Taylor, of the Florida Marine Research Institute who told me that snook, when carefully released, had a survival rate of 97%. Another statistic that I found amazing was that trout, when released by marine biologists, had a similar high survival rate. I might add that the high trout rate was due to the biologists careful techniques.
We continued to catch and release the obliging snook with an angelfish and a small mangrove snapper tossed in for good measure.
Most of the snook we were catching were undersized juveniles, so we moved from the prime spot to see if possibly there might be one of the keeper variety, but all we caught were a few more "dinks’.
Our grand total was now at fifty-five when we decided to returned to our original, very active honey hole to see if we might be able to surpass the magic number of seventy. It was not long before Mel said. "Number seventy." I had the tiebreaker on as he spoke. We caught a couple more and then decided to call it a fantastic seventy-three snook day.
The lesson learned this trip was to try a different presentation if one is not working. The place was loaded with fish, and we would never have known it had we not experimented with our presentation. |
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