Just Reel Fishing Charters Anna Maria Island – Fishing Report 7/16/24

Rainy day fishing and memories from the past

 

It was a cloudy morning in November 1985 — I was 10 — and I sat in the living room getting ready to watch my morning cartoons. I stood in front of the TV and turned the dial to channel 44 hoping I wouldn’t have to go outside and adjust the antennae to get a good picture. 

I had faked being sick that morning so I could get a day off from school and found pleasure knowing that I had the house to myself. My mother was at work and so was my father. 

I settled into the couch in my pajamas and commenced to watching Elmer Fudd chasing Bugs Bunny around when I heard the latch on the door to the patio open. 

It was my dad. 

He was home for some reason. 

He came in and saw me on the couch.

“Danny why are you home from school?” he asked.

“I didn’t feel good, so mom let me stay home. Why are you home from work?” I asked.

“I got rained out so I can’t paint today.” My father owned his own painting business “Afterglow painting” and had been working on an exterior job and if it rains you can’t paint, so he was home. 

Although it was raining out it was just intermittent showers — a few sprinkles here and there but not large storms.

It was good fishing weather.

My father headed out to the garage where I could hear him making noise moving some stuff around. I got up to see what he was doing and saw he was getting his fishing tackle ready.

I stood at the door to the garage watching as he gathered his rods and a 5-gallon bucket with the cast net in it and another 5-gallon bucket which had all his terminal tackle, pliers, hooks, leader material, rags and the aerator.

“Are you feeling better already?” he asked.

I smiled and nodded yes.

“OK get your rod and let’s go,” he said.

I quickly ran to my room and got dressed and came back out, grabbed my rod and ran outside. 

My father was loading his tackle into his work vehicle a light blue 1974 LTD Ford station wagon. He was busy unloading the extension ladders off the roof and putting them on the side of the house. The back window of the wagon was down so I slid my rod into the back next to his rods among all of the painting tools.

It was a tight fit to get the rods in on top of all the drop cloths, paint buckets, rollers and extension cords and brushes.

The smell of paint, mineral spirits and sweat emanated out of the car as I opened the front door to sit down in the front seat. The dark blue vinyl seat — usually scorching hot from the sun —  was cool on my legs as I sat down. 

My dad entered the old wagon and cranked her up and the big V-8 rumbled as he put the car in reverse, and we backed out of the driveway. He turned on the radio which was tuned to 1040 WHBO — his favorite oldies channel.

Gene Chandler was singing the Duke of Earle as we cruised west down Cortez Road toward the Island. I didn’t know where we were going fishing, and I didn’t care, as it sure beat being in school.

At the end of Cortez Road, we turned south on Gulf Drive and finally arrived at the 3 piers in Bradenton Beach. The dirt parking lot was covered in coffee cream colored puddles as we splashed in and parked under the Australian pines. 

Since it was cloudy with chances of rain coming in and out the beach was empty and so was the pier we had chosen to fish. Today we would fish the southern-most pier. It was always best when we had the pier to ourselves and so far, it looked like we would.

We grabbed our gear and walked out over the white sugar sand and finally reached the base of the pier. I took the rods and the landing net while my dad carried the cast net and the other bucket with all our terminal tackle.

The bait was thick around the pier as the large schools swirled up and down the sides in the clear Gulf water.

We set down our gear and my dad prepared to catch bait. The five-gallon bucket with the cast net in it would act as our baitwell. We had a piece of rope attached to the handle that was long enough to drop the bucket over the side of the pier, fill it with water and haul it back up. 

After placing the battery powered aerator on the lip of the bucket I turned it on and heard the gentle hum as the bubbles began to form in the water. While doing this, my dad loaded the cast net and tossed it in the water over a large school of bait. It landed in the water in a perfect circle, “a pancake” and it quickly sank to the bottom engulfing the baitfish. He quickly pulled the line tight to close the net and then hauled it up on the pier to empty the bait where I stood waiting to gather it and put it in the bucket. 

The snowy egrets, white egrets and a big blue heron gathered around as the small baits flipped and struggled on the cement slab of the pier. As the birds darted in and out snatching their breakfast I started putting baits in the bucket. 

“Not too many,” my father warned. “They’ll all die if we overload the bucket.”

So out of the 40-50 baits we caught I managed to put about 2 dozen in the bucket. The rest we pushed back over the side of the pier into the water and the birds quickly cleaned up any that we missed. 

Then it was time to fish.

It was a struggle to carry that 5-gallon bucket of water and bait out to the end of the pier but through a lot of huffing and puffing I managed to make it.

“What are we fishing for today?” I asked still breathing heavy from carrying the bucket.

“Well,” my father replied, “Let’s see if there’s any mackerel around.” 

He was excited to target mackerel as he had been working on a new rig to catch the toothy fish. Using a regular monofilament leader always left you at the mercy of getting cut off and trying to use a metal leader resulted in not getting a bite as it was just too visible which deterred the mackerel away from it. 

The dilemma was finding a leader that was wire but not as visible as the leaders you could purchase at the local tackle shops. 

And my dad figured it out. He found some very thin copper wire at the hardware store and made some short 3-inch leaders with a small black  swivel on one end and a small hook on the other. 

We tied a couple of these experimental leaders on our line and cast out some baits. Within a minute or so my dad was hooked up. The drag screamed off of his old Mitchell 302 saltwater spinning reel and the rod bent over double as he held it high in the air to battle the fish.

As the fish neared the pier we could see through our polarized sunglasses that it was a hefty-sized Spanish mackerel. 

I quickly reeled on my Mitchell 300 to retrieve my bait so I could grab the landing net to hoist the fish up on the pier. The net — a four foot landing net with a 10-foot wooden dowel attached as the handle to make it long enough to reach the water — was awkward in my hands but on the second try I managed to net the fish.

The rig worked.

The copper wire held up to the mack’s teeth and we successfully landed the fish.

Upon removing the hook, my dad slit the throat of the mackerel to bleed it and laid it on the pier. 

Over the next hour or so we commenced to catching one mackerel after the other, feeling triumphant that not only were we catching fish but that my dad’s invention of the leader worked perfectly. 

Having a half dozen mackerel for dinner and releasing 3 times that many as to not waste them, we decided to head home in time to be there before my mother got home from work.

We packed the mackerel on ice in a cooler and loaded our gear back in the wagon just as it was starting to rain.

Once back home I watched my father clean the fish on a board placed over the laundry tub in the garage. His wooden handled filet knife easily sliced the macks cutting them in to steaks to be cooked later for dinner. 

We stood there talking about how good the fish were biting and how good our mackerel rigs had worked. It was a feeling of satisfaction, of having achieved something especially on a day when we weren’t even supposed to be out fishing.

It was a feeling of spending time with my father that I would never forget. 

In fact, I still use these rigs to this day, and they still work. And more importantly, I have the memories of spending days on the water fishing my with dad — learning how to become a man and a good fisherman — memories that I can cherish forever. Happy Father’s Day dad. Thanks for rainy days and for taking me fishing.

And all of you grown up kids out there, don’t forget to call dad on this Father’s Day and thank him for simply being dad. And hopefully you can create memories with your own kids that will last a lifetime.