Headwind and Justin Casey came back from the Ten Thousand Islands (as those two usually do) with a fishing/boating report that made some of us wish we had gone with them and some of us glad we had not.
Us and we are members of the Fish or Cut Bait Society, a motley lot of fishing-doers, like a dresser drawer full of unmatched socks. An outsider would suppose no two of us could tolerate one another, much less fish together, but we can and do.
These two, Headwind and Justin Casey, are a particularly peculiar pair. Headwind is the type who grabs a tackle bag with his left hand and all the rods and reels he can carry with his right, drops the stuff into his pickup and takes off. Sure, he’s tried keeping checklists, only they keep getting lost.
Planning and preparation are not his style. Spontaneity is. Just before he gets to I-95, Headwind pulls off at a 7-11 store and studies the tackle he’s brought, as though he hadn’t seen it before. Depending on what it is, he drives north, south or west, to saltwater or freshwater.
“I know it looks helter-skelter,” he says, “but I like to wing it and do things the hard way. That’s why there’s no kind of trouble I can’t get out of. They don’t call me Headwind for nothing.”
That is one reason we call him Headwind. Another is that we’ve all forgotten his real name.
Justin Casey is the opposite type, ready for anything and overlooking nothing. Just in case of something, he carries at least two of everything. I do mean everything. You carry one spare tire, right? Right, you and everyone else, but that Justin Casey, he has two spare tires just in case he gets two flats.
In his mind, it’s Headwind who’s the nut.
“Oh, that Headwind!” Justin exclaims, “I swear he purposely creates a crisis, just to prove he can squirm out of it. Maybe I’m a little crazy too, but there’s method in my madness. Headwind’s got madness in his method.”
They went over to the Gulf Coast to fish for two days on Headwind’s little boat, 15 feet, four inches long, 39 inches wide with a 9.8 hp outboard, a cross between a skiff and a canoe, ideal for the mostly shallow inshore territory of Everglades City and Chokoloskee. The Ten Thousand Islands, between Marco and Everglades National Park, are infested with oyster bars, mangrove deadfall and surprise mudflats.
You don’t need much water under you with that boat. She draws scarcely more than a canoe, a good thing over there.
Almost all the Ten Thousand Islands are where the marine chart says they are, and so is all the water, and sometimes the depth is what the charts say it’s supposed to be. Sometimes, maybe most times, it seems to me that it isn’t. I’m pretty sure last year’s Hurricane Irma altered the bottom a lot, not that it was charted accurately before.
Going by what was left of Everglades City a year ago, Headwind and Justin were surprised the storm surge didn’t carry off the whole bottom of Chokoloskee Bay. Tangled in mangroves there and well upstream on Turner River, they saw pieces of houses that are likely to remain there until they disintegrate.
In some places (but not enough) on the chart it says “local knowledge required,” and that’s correct, but nothing tells you what the local knowledge is. You learn it by hitting bottom, bumpity bump, gouging your outboard’s skeg, nicking your propeller blades and dinging your hull.
Headwind keeps a patching kit in his little boat’s little storage compartment. Justin Casey bought him a second kit, just in case.
Because Headwind hates planning and preparation, he let Justin do all that. It was part kindness on Headwind’s part, and part cruelty.
“Justin was glad to do it, but doing it drove him up the walls,” Headwind told us. “Other than rods and reels in the racks, if you put two of anything on my boat then you can’t put one of something else on it. Justin fretted constantly about all the spare stuff we didn’t have room for, except when fish were biting.”
When he paused for breath, Tiller, who’s chairman of the steering committee, leapt into the breach.
“Tell us about the fishing,” Tiller commanded, and Justin told.
“On day one the weather forecast was kind of windy for the boat, so we went up the Turner and got a few hard strikes that missed our lures,” he said. “The water was dirty and we couldn’t see the fish. They probably were sea trout or small snook. We boated one snook, about 18 or 20 inches.”
What do you mean, we? Headwind said. “I caught that snook.”
Anyway, Justin continued, that was to say were no longer than 12 inches and Justin Casey wanted to say were shorter than 12. The minimum keeper size is 18 inches, so all those also had to be turned loose.
“Does my ladyfish that jumped and dropped the hook count?” Headwind asked.
“No, but my little Goliath grouper does ‘cuz I boated it,” Justin said.
“Only because I netted it for you,” Headwind said, a bit sharply.
Tiller blew his referee whistle and wagged an admonishing finger: No bickering allowed.
Justin Casey said he caught most of the trout, which Headwind agreed was true, but felt obliged to mention that Justin was sticking stinkbaits on his jig hook.
Headwind dislikes stinkbaits. He didn’t want to say they’re unsportsman-like, even though we know that’s what he thinks.
The highlight of that day was an eye-bulging fish that came about halfway out the water to smack a soft plastic white lizard that Justin had on his hook. “It looked like either a tarpon or a big snook,” he said.
“Probably a tarpon,” Headwind said.
“I think it was a snook,” Justin Casey said.
“It was a tarpon because I want it to be a tarpon,” Headwind said.
I appreciated their story enough to print it, so I went to the cooler and pulled beers for the three of us, on my tab.
“Next time we’re over there we must thank that guy who told us where to go,” Justin said, and Headwind said, “No. Let’s just tell him where to go.”
Feedback: witzfish@att.net.
Source: http://www.waterfronttimes.com/fishing-buddies-blend-together-mismatched-socks
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