I first came to the Florida Keys in Winter of 2002, so I'm relatively new to the whole Keys scene. My boyfriend and I both hate winters in upstate New York, so we started visiting here every chance we got. One winter season we came down three times, once we'd discovered sportfishing. I have to say that flying down to the Keys and going out fishing with a good charter fishing guide is one of the best vacations you could ever have. We went out with a variety of captains, both backcountry and offshore, and the first one we happened to find turned out to be one of the best. We found his business card in a tackle shop and next day bundled up and went out on his flats boat. It was freezing, but we had the time of our life on that gray day. Our guide later became one of our web design clients, and his family hosted us for a lobster dinner once when we came down on vacation. Really a nice time.
My boyfriend likes to get big fish, and of course when you're from the north, who can imagine anything more exciting than catching a shark. Our guide had a flats boat, so really the biggest fish he could promise us was a shark. The first step was to catch some bait: barracuda, which in itself sounded pretty dangerous and exciting. We did this by trolling some whistling lures- I dont' know what you call them- they are bright orange and pink skinny rubber tubes with hooks out one end. Supposedly they whistle in the water and attract the barracuda. We dragged the pretty lures through the water until the poles bent way down and something was on the hook. My BF grabbed the pole and hung on-wow! Then the other pole did the same thing and it was my turn. Man, it was tough and I thought maybe we'd caught a shark by trolling (I didn't know anything about how sharks hunt at at point, so I didn't know this was pretty much impossible). It felt so heavy and it was all I could do to hold onto the pole. How would I ever reel it in? We fought and it took me a while, but after a few minutes we both reeled in gigantic barracuda (or so the guide told us after he saw the fish...I had no idea what they looked like then, those early days of my fishing career).
I was pretty impressed with the barracuda fishing, and I remember thinking that was pretty exciting all by itself. Shark fishing must be amazing if this was just the bait. I was thrilled. Now, five years later and many many fishing trips later, I have learned that most fishermen (oops-anglers, I mean) regard the barracuda as something undesirable, not even really a fish worth catching, almost an embarrassment that it should happen to get hooked. Nobody eats them, although some guides tell me Cubans eat them. There's that ciguatera disease, which you can get from eating the larger cudas. Well, I don't need to eat them but I still love the barracuda. See how happy I was after catching my first big fish? You always remember your first with fondness, and that was my first (see picture). Plus, when you go snorkeling, they hang near you so you can study them up close, and they eye you and creep you out a little, if they're big. That's exciting, too. Sometimes we hate the cudas when they snatch our yellowtail as we reel them in, hoping for a snapper dinner. But we always laugh at their resourcefulness and the nerve they have, stealing our dinner, and really down deep, we respect the cuda. Cuda OK.
