It is close to noon at Johnston's Key Channel in the Lower Keys, and I'm enjoying my first-ever fishing charter, with Captain Dale Bishop. He looks over at me and asks, "Have you fished before?" "I don't know a damn thing about fishing" is my reply.
Perhaps it was a bit of a stretch. I'd fished before, in the fresh water of Wyandotte County Lake in Kansas City, Kansas as a kid. That consisted of impaling an earthworm onto your hook, casting it into water, and waiting a very long time before feeling a bite and reeling in a rainbow trout who was never large enough to be a keeper. Yeah, I knew something about fishing, allright. It was a slow process, the province of the patient and meditative. In my advancing age, I knew I had come to posess those qualities, and that was why I was here.
After a quick lesson on how to cast and operate the bale, you may imagine some surprise on my part, as it rarely took more than ten seconds to get a bite. The tide was carrying our chum behind the boat, and the fish were taking notice. Blue runners (shark bait!) at first, then mangrove snapper, yellowtail snapper, spanish mackerel, and others. A couple times, I played tug-o-war with enormous sharks. A couple times, a very strong fish would pull my line out for what seemed like half a mile, before finally cutting it and getting away. I felt myself getting into it, getting addicted to arguing with fish, trying to outsmart the sharks, and enjoying the amazing scenery, as porpoises, as well as enormous turtles and even more enormous stingrays surfaced and splashed around. The end came too soon, and I hadn't even eaten anything or drank a whole bottle of water; The trip itself had been stimulation enough.
I didn't land anything glorious, which was okay because we weren't here for sportfishing. This charter was for educating me on the basics of going out and catching dinner, and it did well enough at that, because at the end of it, I had caught my limit of snapper. Not huge fish, but a few pounds of fillets anyway. Fully half of it made it into the night's fish curry, as we enjoyed eating fish that I had personally wrestled out of the ocean a few hours prior. It was yet another moment that if you told me it was coming a year ago, I might have giggled at you.
As you may imagine, fishing and dinner were my primary concerns, but sometimes I couldn't resist attempting to photograph the porpoises. Their jumps, however, are events that are over as quickly as they begin, and photography of them is elusive, particularly when you've got dinner to catch. Anyway, I tried:
That's all I've got for now, but it's going to be quite a month so I'll be back soon.
-Chris