By hook or snook

Long wait worth it to battle exciting gamefish

Capt. Erik Flett displays one of about 20 snook the writer and his wife caught May 12 in Pine Island Sound near Fort Myers, Fla.
Capt. Erik Flett displays one of about 20 snook the writer and his wife caught May 12 in Pine Island Sound near Fort Myers, Fla.

PINE ISLAND, Fla. -- Memories of my first snook sustained me for five years until last week, when new dreams came true in the barrier islands near Fort Myers, Fla.

A snook is a powerful fish with some characteristics of a pike and a striped bass. It is long and lean, with a protruding lower jaw and a body that deepens and widens with age. It is distinguished by a single black stripe that runs the length of its sides. It strikes violently, and even a small one will test the drag of heavy spinning tackle. They always run to trees, shellbeds or dock pilings. Away from cover, they jump, roll and run like a dragsters.

My first snook was a 31-inch bruiser that I caught in 2010 in a St. Petersburg canal. That was the most exciting fish fight of my life, and it sparked an obsession that rivals my love for catching smallmouth bass.

The snook fishing near Fort Myers was superb, but my wife Laura and I also caught a near equal number of speckled sea trout, Spanish mackerel, ladyfish, jack crevalle, red drum, stingray and sharks.

Laura and I met Capt. Eric Flett on May 12 at the dock outside Tarpon Lodge, a rustic and comfortable inn overlooking Pine Island Sound that captures the feel and spirit of Florida in the 1950s and 1960s. Flett, proprietor of Native Attitude Fishing Charters, had spent the early morning gathering a livewell full of scaled sardines, or pilchards, pinfish and other small baitfish. Snook anglers prefer pilchards, and many won't use anything else.

They lived up to their reputation, but we learned that snook will bite other stuff with equal aggression.

Instead of fishing docks, Flett took us to the Gulf-facing side of Cayo Costa State Park. It is a largely undeveloped barrier island with a few private homes. Flett positioned the boat a long cast from a cluster of fallen trees in the surf. Snook gather around submerged wood cover, he said, and you fish for them much as you would fish for largemouth bass. The only difference is you cast live bait instead of artificial lures.

Snook hold tight to the cover and they prowl the first trough next to the beach where the waves break. Speckled sea trout prowl away from the beach in more open water. A cast in the right spot will likely hook a snook, but a trout will more likely hit a short cast.

Flett hooked the pilchards through the head with circle hooks, which allowed them to swim freely. It's important to keep the fish bait swiveling on the bend of the hook, he explained. If the bait rides too close to the barb, or foul hooks, it will die quickly, and snook are less likely to hit it.

We caught fish immediately. Mine were all fairly small, but Laura hooked a big one that broke free when it reached cover.

"You could tell that was a big one by how dark it was when it rolled," Flett said. "That's a fish that doesn't get out in the sunlight much. We call them mossbacks."

Trout were equally active, and we generally caught them while reeling bait back to the boat.

Flett made it easy for us. He baited our hooks and unhooked our fish so all we had to do was cast, and sometimes he even did that if the presentation required a difficult cast.

The water around and behind us was only about 4-6 feet deep at most, so we could see everything that swam nearby, including a long fish that skulked in the swells behind the boat.

"That's a big barracuda," Flett said. "Looks to be about 52 inches."

I cast a pilchard about five feet in front of the baracuda. I thought it was a perfect cast, but the fish thought differently. It shot like a torpedo toward open sea, and we didn't see it again.

Meanwhile, a 4-foot shark cruised back and forth feeding on trout. Laura tried to catch it, but like the barracuda it shied away from her bait.

When that spot went cold, we went to a spot off Cabbage Key. It's an island you can reach only by boat and is famous for a restaurant that makes the cheeseburger that inspired Jimmy Buffett's "Cheeseburger in Paradise."

Nobody makes a better cheeseburger than Laura, so that made it easy to concentrate on fishing.

With the tide slack, we attacked a string of docks with low expectations, and though bites were sporadic, we managed to catch a few snook and one redfish to complete my "inshore slam" of a redfish, snook and trout in one outing.

From there we went to a mangrove flat off Pine Island, where a bottlenose porpoise waited to eat any fish that Flett threw back. It rolled next to the boat, showed its belly and drenched us with water from a slap of its tail. A snook was under our boat, and the porpoise was trying to spook it into open water so it could chase it down and eat it.

Snook wouldn't bite the pilchards there, so Flett tried a bigger snack. He hooked a pinfish, a striped panfish that looks a bit like a bream, cast it near a submerged log and set the rod in a holder.

Minutes later, the drag screeched as a fish ran with the bait. It was a huge snook that pulled so hard it that it was difficult getting the rod out of its holder. The snook scorched across the flat like a prairie wildfire. It didn't jump, but it rolled high enough to show its ample girth.

Finally, my line went slack. The fish had straightened the Gamakatsu circle hook.

We finished the day on another mangrove flat where I caught the last fish of the day, a trophy jack crevalle.

As the tide rolled onto the flat, storm clouds stacked up on the horizon. Flett calls them the "Florida Mountains."

They're higher than the Rockies, and they're all snowcapped," Flett joked.

When they started throwing lightning bolts, Flett called it a day, but my, what a day it was.

More information about fishing with Capt. Eric Flett is available at nativeattitudefishingcharters.com or by calling (239) 872-7841.

Sports on 05/24/2015

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