Author (in foreground), with sister, Kathy, fishing in the Bahamas, circa 1995.
My husband and I
are anxiously waiting for our new pontoon boat to be delivered. Though we haven’t even broken ground on our
new lake house (septic system placement problems—don’t ask), we have a dock
slip. It came with the land. Thus, we
put in our order for a new pontoon boat before we even have a pot to p*^$ in. Literally.
This should come as no surprise to those of you who know us. We’re native Miamians, and we fish.
As I’ve mentioned in previous blogs, my family has been in
Miami since the early part of the 20th century, and throughout that
hundred years’ time, we’ve fish everywhere from the Florida Keys, to the
Bahama Islands. Unsurprisingly, we have quite a few fish tales
to tell, and while all of them may not involve record-winning fish, or even the
actual catching of them, the stories resulting from the trips were well worth
the effort of going.
Take for instance the story of my dad and uncle fishing for
snapper one day off of Miami , in Biscayne Bay . The
fish had been biting well, and the men had a whole stringer full of them hanging
off the side of the boat in the water.
All of a sudden, Uncle Lew whispered to Daddy, “Don’t breathe.” Slowly turning to see what it was that had my
uncle depriving him of air was a shark that had risen to the surface like some
giant enemy submarine, checking out its next target. The aluminum boat they were in was 12’ long,
and, terrifyingly, the shark was longer than the vessel. Obviously, the scent of bloody fish had
attracted it, and the shark eyed the string of snapper, as well as Daddy and
Uncle Lew. Then, for whatever miraculous
reason, the mega predator decided there was better fare to be found elsewhere
in the bay, and it submerged back into the depths.
Firing up their small Johnson outboard engine amidst a flurry of
exclamations, the men decided they’d had enough of fishing for one day, and
they pushed that throttle has hard as they could getting back to shore…but not
before pulling that stringer of fish aboard. Which brings me to the long-held, unspoken rule about
fishing in my family: Never go home empty handed.
My grandfather would often go fishing with my dad and uncle,
and if they were skunked (i.e. caught no fish), then my grandfather made them
stop at a fish market to purchase whatever was freshest, and then told my
grandmother, mother and aunt that they had caught them. He
usually embellished the claim with some whopper of a tale, but the women
weren’t to be fooled: The fish were half frozen.
Another taboo among my fishing clan was that when on a mission-of-fishin’,
one was never, EVER, to be thwarted from getting a line in the water.
One evening, my cousin, Brian, and I headed out to do some
night fishing from a seawall behind an exclusively expensive private girls’
school. It just so happened that on this
particular night there was a debutantes’ ball going on, and things were looking
bleak as far as making the first cast.
“Well, that takes care of that,” my cousin disappointingly stated.
“Not so fast,” I replied, quickly formulating a plan. After all, we had plenty of bait, and, more
importantly, a cooler full of ice cold Coors.
“Grab three rods and our tackle box,” I said, jerking my head toward our
fishing gear in the backseat. Then I
went around to the trunk of the car and grabbed our cooler and a blanket.
“Hold the rods straight up,” I instructed. Then I threw the blanket over them so that
only the handles appeared at the bottom, making it look like the legs of a
tripod of some sort. “Follow me,” I said,
marching off with the cooler toward the school.
We walked through the brightly lit front yard, past the
circular drive, where men in white tuxedos politely opened the door for the
ladies arriving with their escorts in their BMW’s, Bentleys, and Mercedes, and
on into the side yard, where we were finally stopped by security guards.
“Hold up!” one exclaimed.
“You can’t be here!”
“We’re photographers,” I stated nonchalantly, looking around
as though I was scoping out where we might capture the best shots for
posterity’s sake. “Where do they want us?”
“Around back,” the guard replied, pointing. And that was exactly where we wanted to go.
We walked past the stone courtyard, where many strings of
soft white lights illuminated the beautiful young girls in their perfect white organza
dresses waltzing along in the arms of their perfect-looking escorts. On we walked, without any of the perfectly-perfects
giving us a second look, until we were deep into the dark backyard and finally
at the seawall. Then, we uncovered the
rods, spread our blanket on the ground, wound fresh earthworms around our
hooks, and cracked two cold ones. I
don’t remember catching anything that night, but it didn’t matter. Our lines were wet, a soft breeze was
blowing, and the glittering Miami
Many years have gone by since my great-greats first threw a
line into the Florida
