From the Publisher
On the cover is Jackson Hilton of South Dakota who caught that Spinner Shark while fishing Pine Island Sound with his dad and uncle. Photo by Ron Smits.
The Snook image was found while browsing old photos on my PC. This beast was caught in 1996 under the bridge on Cape Coral Parkway between Skyline & Chiquita. Onlookers laughed at my Red/White Bomber claiming the bigger Snook couldn't be caught there, and “Who uses artificial lures?” This was the first cast, and damn I was skinny!
In the 70’s my dad was one of the few police officers in Cape Coral. When he worked the 3-11 shift we’d head out at midnight and hit the bridges for big snook. My job was to change the batteries on the aerator every couple hours till he came home so the shrimp stayed alive.
Our best catches were under the bridge on CC Pkwy @ Santa Barbara. The whole NE corner was an empty field with a seawall so we had great access. Ray’s Bait & Tackle was in the Big John’s Shopping Center where we got giant live shrimp. I learned how to “free-line” a live bait at the age of about 7. We’d cast a jumbo shrimp along the far seawall with no weight and let the current take it under the bridge. It was rare for a shrimp to survive the drift, and we sure lost a lot of huge snook.
The Cape Coral Bridge was loaded with monster snook and lots of Tarpon at night. The Cape Coral Pier was a hot-spot too, the “Bait Shack” at the foot of the pier was open all night long. My mom would drop me off with $3 for bait but only if we saw cars we recognized in the parking lot, then she’d come back to get me at sunrise.
I’d fish all night long! People caught big snook, sawfish and even cobia. In 1970 Cape Coral’s population was just over 10k. Lee County’s population was around 150k, today it’s almost a million. Back then a neighbor complaining about a barking dog was what kept the police occupied. In my opinion, runoff and pollution from population growth has changed all of that.
Last month my wife & I spent a couple weeks in Georgia. We stayed in a nice cabin just outside of Dahlonega, which is harder to pronounce than a tourist trying to say “Matlacha.” I looked up a couple of Smokey & the Bandit movie locations around Helen, GA, along with a quick photo of the “Sac-O-Suds” store from the movie My Cousin Vinny. It’s still there, with the same name, but it wasn’t open or I would have stolen a can of tuna…. See page 16.
I bought my first new car last month. I never could justify passing up a 1-year old vehicle that still smells new and you save 20%. But I’ve become a fan of the VW Taos and they’re selling new ones cheaper than anything used in it’s class in an attempt to stimulate the VW brand name here in the states.
They wouldn’t agree to what I wanted the bottom line to be, so I agreed to finance at 8% as opposed to paying cash for it. A week later I walked into a local Truist Bank where the loan was, and paid it off. I’m just playing the game they created...
It has a voice command system and you can name it, so when I say “Jarvis” it answers me. But like Siri, if you ask for the weather, it tells you the time. I’m not sure we’re close to any risk of computers taking over just yet.
A buddy of mine bought himself a Key West boat and has gotten the fishing bug. I’ve convinced him to rig LED lighting and plan to do some night snapper fishing this summer. Yellowtail and Mangrove snapper in this part of the state are huge but you’ve gotta fish at night. It’s common to come back with a limit where the smallest fish is well over 5#. The bigger the snapper, the harder it is to get them past the recent shark population boom.
I fish about 25 miles out in 80-feet at the same spot I’ve fished for almost 30 years. It’s LOADED! No, you can’t have the number. You don’t need it, big snappers are on any wreck or rock patch past about 60-feet at night.
West Marine’s possible bankruptcy is the biggest news in the coastal community. They attempted re-branding a few years ago with less focus on marine supplies and more focus on selling high-end clothes and sunglasses, but it’s not working out. Most complaints are about their escalated prices for things you can buy anywhere. They have fifty-eight years of retail experience in a niche industry and it’s looking like a classic Kodak story where they just didn’t plan well, and it’s likely too late to do anything about the $800 MILLION debt!
It’s looking to be a hot summer for us, don’t ignore plenty of hydration!
Jim Griffiths
Publisher, Nautical Mile
