EPISODE 53

On a spectacularly beautiful morning then, we launched Sasha’s flats boat at the public ramp at Turtle Beach and headed off into Little Sarasota Bay.  The wind on the bay can be crushing and we had a little trouble at first finding protected inlets and coves to fish. Sasha found a sandbar located in the lea of a point that blocked the prevailing wind, so we anchored the boat and walked out in the shallow water with our rods in hand.

“Look over there!” she whispered.  She pointed to the shoreline nearest us.  The sandbar dropped off between where we stood and the land, creating a small channel that was about as wide as I reckoned I could accurately cast. The tide was going out and so the water in the channel moved with it.  It reminded me of fishing for trout in the rivers back home in Vermont.  The water was very clear and while I could make out a few shapes darting about in the deeper water, I couldn’t spot what Sasha was pointing at.

“Snook, Michael!”

“Where?”

“Right up against the bank.  There must be 10 of them, at least.”

I peered at the water, but I simply couldn’t see the fish.  I’d lost snook on a couple previous trips to Fort Lauderdale in the late ‘80’s.  I’d never landed or boated one before though. Sasha did what any good guide would when faced with a dolt of a client.  She pushed me off to her left and stepped in as close as she dared to the edge of the sandbar before sending a cast at the far bank.  She got a strike on her second cast and I stepped back to watch how she worked the fish.  Snook are wonderful fighters.  They run, they jump, and in my case anyway – they always get away.  But in Sasha’s hands, this fish initially appeared to be helpless.  When the snook tore along the shoreline from right to left, Sasha turned her rod to follow while still maintaining steady pressure on the fish so that it was soon forced to double back on itself.  There wasn’t a whole lot of room in the channel where all this took place and so the fish wasn’t able to jump.  Had it done so, it would likely have ended up either stranded on the land, or on the sandbar where Sasha and I stood.  As neither seemed appealing to the snook, it finally decided on an “all-in” strategy of making one long run toward the open water of the bay.  Sasha bolted after it and I followed.  The fish was frustrated, or so it seemed.  It kept angling toward the opposite shore as it fought to resist the pull that Sasha was exerting on the line.  This meant that that it had to keep correcting its position, so as to avoid hitting the oyster beds just below the surface.  These massive clusters of small mollusks could really tear things up, anything from the hull of a flats boat to the underbelly of panicking snook.  Normally, a fish trying to escape will work itself against the sharp edges of those shells in an effort to sever the line.  But it seemed like Sasha’s fish didn’t want to run afoul of them and it gave back a little line every time it altered its course to avoid them.  She was able to gain on the snook well before it made its way to open water and finally beached it on the sandbar. While she drank in the rush of beating the snook, she looked over to me, inviting me to be part of it.

“Can you help me unhook it?” she asked.  It was obvious that she could have done so herself, but she wanted me in on the fun.  I reached down and grabbed the snook by the tail with my right hand.  It twisted and jerked about, trying to free itself.  I took my left hand, gently placed under the fish’s belly, brought it parallel to the water’s surface and it stopped moving.  Sasha reached over the snook’s jaw and carefully worked the hook loose.  We admired the fish for a few seconds before then I placed it back into the water.  It darted away quickly, clearly not all that tired from the fight.

We spent another 45 minutes running around that little sandbar.  Each of us hooked into fish, and while Sasha managed to land one more snook, I got blanked, again.  With my perfect record intact, Sasha suggested we look for some less elusive species, so that her guest might actually experience a close encounter with a fish before the day’s end.  We headed further south until we came across a place where the wind blew us parallel to the coastline.  Since it seemed a whole hell of a lot easier to let the wind push us than to fight against it, we drifted from a position about fifty yards out, down the length of the shore.

We bumped along for a while without much of anything happening.  After Sasha caught and released a large ladyfish that was in the way of another school of snook that she’d spotted near a boat mooring, we found ourselves floating close to a series of five long docks.  Both of us trained our attention on casting to them, in the hope that something might be suspended near those structures.  As we neared the second dock, I noticed a series of very bright flashes near the boat, at the upwind side.  A pod of maybe a half dozen large fish came into my view and I tossed my line into their midst.

My ¾ ounce Cleo spoon lure disappeared almost instantly into the mouth of one of the now streaking fish.  I’d like to say that I authoritatively set the hook into its jaw, but the truth was that we were heading one way and the fish was heading in the exact opposite direction.  The result is that the fish had more to do with this timely hookup than anyone or anything else.  The force of the strike was extremely violent and line quickly peeled off my reel.

“Sasha!” I shouted, but the wind was a bit too loud and she was facing away from me.  She couldn’t hear me at all.  This was of immediate concern as between my fish and the strong winds, I was rapidly running out of line. 

“Sasha!!!” I yelled, more forcefully.

“What?” she called back to me.

“I need help.  The son-of-a-bitch is spooling me!”

And so he was.  Of course, this was the first that Sasha had understood that I was even into a fish and so she walked over to see what I was hooked onto.  I made several zoo-like noises and gestured frantically with my head towards my reel.  Sasha quickly stock of the situation and somewhat misinterpreted it.  Her response was to let out the anchor.  While this indeed did stop the boat from drifting any further, it had absolutely no effect on the fish’s ability to continue to take line.  In fact, it may have actually helped the little bastard, as I swore I was able to see the knot that held my line on the spool, through the rapidly disappearing coils of monofilament.

Fortunately, Sasha was suddenly on top of things.  As quickly as the anchor had been released, it was retrieved and she fired up the engine.  She backed the boat in the direction of the running fish and we made chase.  During the frantic give and take of the fish taking line and me unsteadily gaining it back, I heard and felt a decidedly painful “POP!” in my right elbow.  I knew that sound.  I knew it well.  It was the delightful noise that a muscle makes as it tears off the bone.  Some idiot of a sports doctor gave it the name: “Tennis Elbow” many years ago, but I can promise you that I never have been much with racket sports, so that can’t be right.  But no matter what you call it, I’d just done it to myself and every time that damned fish surged, it just about pulled my forearm away from the triceps (or what passed for triceps on my body anyway).

As Sasha did her best to keep pace with the fish, the damned thing turned its body perpendicular to the boat, using the current to hold its position.  This had the effect of stalling the fight completely and establishing what could only be described as a stalemate.  There were a couple of times that I put my fingers on the line, to be sure that I hadn’t hooked bottom.  The fish didn’t appear to want to give back any of the line it’d taken and for the longest time, I believed I might not be able to handle it, being a freshly crippled angler.  But slowly, I was able to make some progress and after a good fifteen minutes, the fish began to move laterally, zigzagging off the stern.  Each time it reversed course, I was able to pull it closer.  It was going to take all of the technology the 21st century could afford our two heroes to defeat this still unseen beast.  Between my Shimano reel, the Yamaha engine, and an awful lot of shouting, the fish finally came into view.  It was a big Amber Jack, the largest one I’d ever seen.  Sasha was pretty excited too.  She grabbed a glove and a pair of pliers to help me boat and release my catch.  She took ahold of the line when the fish was alongside the boat.  She looked back at me briefly and the smile on her face was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen in my life.  We held that for a second, just digging on what fun it all was, and that was all it took.  With a twitch that was so slight, my fish slipped off the hook.  Sasha had her pliers in position to unhook the fish, but it had already begun to make serious tracks for other waters.  She looked back at me in shock.  Why had the fishing gods been so cruel?

“Oh shit, Michael!  I’m so sorry!”

“No…fuck it!” I laughed.  “That was a great fight.”  I rubbed my elbow with my left hand and winced.  I’d really done it to myself.  Sasha noticed that I wasn’t feeling too well and she walked over to me.

“You okay?” she asked.  She looked concerned.  All of the fun of the moment was gone and for that I was sorry.  She looked at where I’d been massaging my arm.  She gently put one of her hands on it and looked at me.

“Did’ums hurt his little arm?”

“Pretty much,” I replied.

“Well,” she said with a smile, “Should I take you to the hospital?”

“No.”

“Really?”

“I think we have a sufficient quantity of beverages on board so that I can self-medicate for the time being,” I replied. 

Sasha reached into the cooler and retrieved a pair of beers for us while I made a mental note to call a physical therapist when we got back to shore.

END OF BOOK TWO

BOOK THREE COMING NEXT WEEK!

The next episode of SlipNot will be published on September 1st.

If you'd like to read SlipNot in its entirety, GO HERE.