Monthly Archives: December 2015

Snake Week!

The third week of September started out as snake week for me. On Sunday I came home from a tournament at West Point and backed my boat into the garage. After taking some things in the house I unhooked the boat and something just didn’t look right under the boat. When I looked closer there was a four foot long black snake slowly crawling across the floor.

Monday I was cutting the field at my farm and on one pass I noticed something white where I had cut on the last pass. It was a three foot long black snake that had gotten too close to the bush hog blade. Laying on its back, its white belly really stood out.

I hated to kill the one at the farm and did not bother the one in my garage. Snakes won’t bother you if you leave them alone and they eat mice and other vermin. I have always been interested in snakes and they don’t worry me much.

The two in September were both what we called “black runners” when I was growing up on the farm. We liked having them around the chicken houses since they ate the rats that ate the chicken feed, but they could be a problem since they would eat eggs, too.

My mom was terrified of snakes and dad would sometimes walk into the house with a king snake wrapped around his arm. We knew king snakes were good snakes since they ate rats and would kill poisonous snakes. He taught me how to identify dangerous snakes and how to catch the non-poisonous ones.

The church I attended had an old pond behind it. The concrete dam had a square overflow spillway and the water in it was about 15 feet down since the pond had been drained. We used to go out there and play after church.

One day when I was about 12 years old we went back there a water snake was trapped in the spillway. I went home and made a snake catcher, a long pole with a cord running down its side through staples and had a loop at the end. I rode my bicycle back to the church the next day, taking my snake catcher and an old metal minnow bucket, the kind with a top that had a clip to keep it closed, with me.

The snake was still there and I managed to catch it with the loop. It was not happy but I got it in the bucket and took it home. Mom was not happy with my new pet!

I tried to keep that water snake in a wooden box but the next day it was gone. I am pretty sure it got out on its own and my mom didn’t make dad release it. Snakes can get through a tiny hole, much smaller than you would think.

I don’t even kill poisonous snakes unless they are a problem. A couple of years ago I was fishing at my pond and noticed a snake head at my fish basket. I picked up a stick and shooed it away but it came right back. The second time I ran it off I saw it had a triangular head, the sign of a viper. It was a young cotton mouth.

The third time it came back I got my pistol out of the truck and shot it in the head, since I did not want to be worried about a poisonous snake at my feet while I fished. Since I like to eat anything I kill I skinned it, much easier than I expected after cutting off its head, gutted it and cut it into four inch long pieces.

It tasted pretty good after flouring it and frying the pieces, but since it was only about three feet long there was not much meat on it.

One snake almost gave me a heart attack. I came home from work one sunny early spring day back in the 1980s and decided to walk through the garden. As I took a step I realized I was about to put my foot on a huge black snake lying in the sun and did a one leg hop about three feet back.

That snake lived around my house for years and I saw it fairly often. One day my dog kept barking at something under the deck and when I looked it was coiled on one of the supports in the corner of the deck. And I would see it sunning on some days in the garden. I watched carefully where I stepped after the thrill of almost stepping on it.

One day I was working on my well pump, kneeled on the floor of my well house. I had been in and out several times getting tools but one time when I stood up, on a shelf at eye level, there was a snake skin on it. It had not been there when I had kneeled by the pump a few minutes earlier.

That big black snake had shed its skin right over my head. The skin was perfect, you could see the bumps on the head end where its eyes had been. That six foot, two inch skin was pinned on my wall for several years.

Snakes are good in many ways so don’t fear them, just respect them and what they do. Find out about them and realize they are just part of the natural world.

What Are Giant Grouper?

Times Changing for Giant Grouper

By Rodney Smith, www.rodneysmithmedia.com.

Landing a giant grouper

Landing a giant grouper

Handling Giant Grouper Carefully is a Mighty Task

It might as well have been the Loch Ness monster I stood over, except there was nothing either anecdotal or mystical about this giant sea monster; it was real! The rotting carcass of what was then called a jewfish, estimated to weigh over six-hundred pounds, lay before me in the wet Gulf of Mexico sands near the base of the Pier Kahiki, which was part of a Hawaiian-themed complex at Indian Rocks Beach. The high tide had dumped the decaying beast there after fishermen had caught it using a hand gaff-sized steel hook baited with a football-sized black drum. The hook was attached to a short 3/8″ steel chain, which was tied to a sturdy hemp rope they had secured to the pier’s railing.

Once I was up and on the pier’s deck, I overheard the crusty dock manager, Joe, chuckling and talking through the cigar permanently clenched in his broad, crooked mouth to a couple of tourists. “It took six of them men to pull it to shore” he was telling them. Later, when I asked Joe why they wasted such a giant fish, he followed his normal method of operation, spitting his words in my direction. “Boy, them big fish ain’t any good; anyway, they took the cheek meat with’em.”

It was the late Sixties, a time of ignorant bliss, well before most fishermen understood our oceans’ bounties were not finite. Less than a decade later, I believe it was the summer of 1975, during one of my first surfing trips to Sebastian Inlet State Park, I saw three Volkswagen Bug- sized grouper swimming along the bottom of the inlet’s main channel. Their size was amazing and unbelievable. This was the last time I saw any truly giant jewfish.

Looking back at how drastically fisheries management has changed, it might as well have been a hundred years ago. Today jewfish have been officially renamed goliath grouper. Since 1990, these remarkable fish have been fully protected in the U.S.A as a “no take” fish, and their numbers continue to grow. In fact, goliath grouper have rebounded to the point that segments of the angler population find them to be quite the nuisance.

Acting like protected California seals, goliath grouper hang out at places where they know they can steal angler’s catches. Their thieving habits alone have partially fueled a push to remove a couple of layers of Federal and State regulations protecting these endangered fish. Less restrictive rules could give fisheries managers several keen opportunities to raise research money and fisheries datum, or find ways to better protect habitat and build artificial reefs.

States like Florida could sell goliath grouper kill-tags, much like special hunting permits. They could open up a couple of goliath grouper short seasons and help the recreational sports fishing industry raise revenue. This strategy could pump major bucks into coastal fishing communities around the Sunshine State and help researchers and scientist collect valuable data. It could be a “win/win” for everybody!

However, there are serious obstacles standing in the way of this idea. Fisheries biologists understand the complexities of protecting the sustainability of these potentially huge, but slow- growing fish better than most of us. They will tell you we must protect the biggest goliath groupers or they will never return to their historical size and range.

There are two things I’ve learned about fisheries management as a member of the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council’s Snapper/Grouper Advisory Panel. Management of our fisheries and other marine resources is most often driven by money and greed, and secondly, I now understand why the following statement is true. Fisheries management isn’t rocket science, it’s worse!

To read more like this, visit www.rodneysmithmedia.com.

Four Pound Spotted Bass At Lanier

Last Sunday at Lanier 12 members of the Spalding County Sportsman Club fished our November tournament. In 8.5 hours we landed 14 keeper bass weighing about 34 pounds. All were spots, not a single largemouth was weighed in. There were no limits and four people didn’t have a keeper.

I managed to win with four weighing 11.84 pounds and my 4.30 pound spot was big fish. Niles Murray came in second with three weighing 6.49 pounds, Raymond English placed third with two at 4.71 pounds and Billy Roberts was fourth with one at 3.26 pounds.

I was looking forward to this tournament since I had won the Flint River tournament at Lanier two weeks earlier. In that tournament I landed three keepers the first two hours on three points not far from where we launched. So in this tournament I headed to those points as soon as we blasted off.

After three hours of casting with nothing to show for it I was real frustrated. In the Flint River tournament wind was blowing in on the three points where I caught fish but in the Sportsman Club tournament the wind was not hitting them.

A little after ten I ran to Mud Creek and stopped on a rocky point where I had caught my biggest spot ever, a 4.27 pounder, in a club tournament about ten years ago. The wind was blowing in on this point, so hard I had trouble fishing it, even with a spinnerbait.

As I rounded the point I saw some brush on my depthfinder but the wind was too strong to stop on it. After I got around to the lee side of the point I put down my spinnerbait and picked up a rod with a four inch soft swim bait on a quarter ounce jig head tied on it. I had never caught a bass on a swim bait but I knew it should be good.

After a few casts on the point I felt my line tick as the bait sank in about 15 feet of water. I managed to set the hook and finally land a spot that weighed 4.03 pounds. That really cheered me up!

I made a few more casts with the swim bait then picked up a jig and pig since I was in a good position to fish the brush I had seen. As the jig came through the brush a fish hit it and I landed the 4.30 pound spot, my biggest ever! That gave me two four pound spotted bass at Lanier in one day! Enough to win the tournament, but at the time I didn’t know that.

I got those fish recorded on my GoPro camera and it is a real comedy watching me try to get the fish to the boat, pick up the net and get them in the boat since I was by myself. What you can’t see is the fact I could see the fish in the clear water the whole time I was fighting them and was scared I would lose them.

I fished that point another hour without a bite then tried a couple more similar rocky points with wind blowing in on them but didn’t catch anything. At about 1:00 I went to a point back in Mud Creek and found a brush pile on it. After throwing out my marker I cast a jig head worm to it and landed a spot that was just barely 14 inches long.

When I got on top of the brush I used a drop shot and immediately got a bite. After a long fight on the light rod and eight pound test line I landed the two pound spot. That was it for the day although I fished hard until the end at 3:30. It was weird, I caught two fish two times within ten minutes of each other but nothing else in the 8.5 hours! That’s tournament fishing.