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A Naturalist Goes Fishing

Casting in Fragile Waters from the Gulf of Mexico to New Zealand's South Island

St. Martin's Press

CHANDELEUR ISLANDS

Redfish

The bull redfish was probably close to forty pounds, large by Chandeleur Islands standards. The fish had beaten the odds — one of the last survivors of twenty-five million eggs spawned by its mother over a single breeding season. The vast majority of the eggs had not been fertilized or had been carried by currents to shallows warmed by Louisiana's afternoon sun. Some had been tossed by waves onto the shore to dry among the detritus. Those that had developed into larvae were largely consumed by zooplankton and juvenile fish.

The redfish had grown quickly in its first year — reaching a foot in length by gorging itself on the rich beds of polychaete worms buried in their homemade tubes in the soft sand or by chasing down small crustaceans that darted in and out of sea grass blades. By three years of age, the fish probably weighed an impressive eight pounds and had shifted its diet to big blue crabs — its favorite — along with penaeid shrimp, small croakers, mullet, menhaden, and lizardfish.

As the seasons piled up, the big male attained "bull" status, defined in measure as thirty-five inches or longer from nose to tail. Its foraging range and feeding habits became routine, so much so that the white, pink-tailed plastic jig attracted the fish's attention. After the slightest hesitation, the tantalizing herky-jerky movement of the lure triggered an irreversible burst of neuromuscular activity. The bull redfish struck.

"Fish on!" I yelled in the general direction of my fishing buddy and younger brother Pete, who was seated behind me in our twelve-foot skiff. Pete smiled despite the lightly falling rain and a southwest wind that stirred the water in the shallow cut between the islands. A deep tug followed by strong head wags ruled out a speckled seatrout or ladyfish. "I think it might be a big red!" I shouted. Pete reeled in his line and stowed his pole using the clips on the aft side of the skiff. We both knew the fish would dictate the terms of the fight. If one didn't take immediate action, a fish this size hooked on medium tackle strips a good bit of line from the reel and invariably escapes, either from the line-breaking tension caused by setting the drag in a desperate attempt to turn the fish or, just as often, from running smack out of line.

Pete reached back, grasped the engine's throttle in his left hand for balance, and used his right hand to pull-start the twenty-five-horsepower outboard. The engine, still warm from a recent run, sputtered to life after a few quick tugs. Knowing that from his position Pete couldn't see in which direction to head the skiff, I stood at the bow, fishing pole in hand, and pointed in the general direction the fish had surged. Clicking the engine into gear, Pete gently gunned the throttle and nudged the skiff forward as I reeled line. After what had seemed an interminable stretch of anticipation, we were underway, the big fish holding tight to the bottom, still hooked, still unseen.

Les Îles de Chandeleur lie thirty miles off the coast of Louisiana, delineating the southeasternmost corner of this decidedly Cajun territory. A portion of the Breton National Wildlife Refuge, the fifty-mile chain of uninhabited islands is a naturalist's dream. The landscape consists of low-lying, densely vegetated barrier islands built of sediments washed down the Mississippi long before the Army Corps of Engineers began to dam up the river. In stark contrast to the lack of relief of the islands, the sky and the horizon are as immeasurable as any I have seen in Florida, Montana, or Wyoming. The grandeur sets the stage for jaw-dropping sunrises and sunsets, and during the summer, afternoon thunderheads open up. Thousands of once-endangered brown pelicans and magnificent frigate birds nest among black mangroves, the frigates often soaring in huge spirals, effortlessly riding the thermals until they are but specks in the sky.

I have visited these islands with eleven friends to fish for speckled seatrout and redfish just about every summer or fall for the past fifteen years. Some in our group have been coming more than twice as long, a testament to the addictive nature of this annual pilgrimage. Each year, we drive from Birmingham, Alabama to Biloxi, Mississippi, squeezed into sedans and vans brimming with fishing gear. Arriving at Point Cadet Marina, nestled under the belly of the Golden Nugget Biloxi Casino (formerly the Isle of Capri Casino, which was heavily damaged in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina), we board the VI, an oddly named, 127-foot live-aboard ship owned by Southern Sports Fishing Inc. and captained by Robbie Thornton. Between the twelve of us, more than sixty rigged fishing poles are secured between paired holes cut in wooden boards lining the underside of the open ceiling on the outside back deck. Tackle boxes are slid below benches. Beer is iced down in large coolers. Duffle bags stuffed with toiletries and clean clothes are tossed on bunks below deck (so as to best lay claim to sleeping quarters farthest from noisy engines or those who snore). By late evening, alarm clocks set, we settle into our bunks. Around midnight, Robbie fires up the ship's engines, and the first mate unmoors the ship. Four hours later, the ear-jarring racket of anchor chain disrupts our sleep. Alarms ring. Half asleep, we climb from our bunks to dress, pulling on long-sleeved fishing shirts. Sipping dishwater coffee, we shovel down breakfast while the captain and first mate lower our skiffs by crane from the ship's upper deck, plopping each into the still-dark waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The small skiffs, each provisioned with gas, net, cooler, and life jackets, form a bobbing line against the early dawn sky, an umbilicus connecting our ship to the sea.

"He's running again!" I warned Pete over the whine of reel drag and rumble of engine idle. We had followed the fish for close to forty minutes. Hard rain, stiff winds, and a falling tide had conspired and left us wet and chilled. The only good news was that I had caught a glimpse of the fish. It was definitely a big red, its upper body carpeted in a mosaic of coppery red scales. The fish had to be at least three feet long, with a broad muscular girth that spoke to its bulldog strength. The fish slowed. Maybe it was tiring. I lifted my rod tip and pulled back slowly and steadily and reeled in line as my rod descended. Again and again, lift, pull, reel. With mounting excitement, Pete and I watched the fish's tail fin break the surface near the skiff. Then, as if punctuating the end of a sentence with a deft tail kick, the bull red broke free and vanished.

Ken Marion, a professor of freshwater and marine ecology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, has been visiting the Chandeleur Islands to cast his line into its fish-laden waters for almost four decades. Long before I joined in on these fishing trips, Ken and some of the others in our current fishing group first chartered a ship to the Chandeleurs to fish for speckled seatrout and redfish and to get away from the routines of office and home. They also wanted to take advantage of great birding and revel in the raw, untamed scenery. The fishing trips became so popular that for a while the group chartered the ship in both the summer and spring of a given year. When I asked Ken to estimate, all told, the number of times he had visited the islands to fish, he told me he had to be closing in on his fiftieth trip. Ken had probably accumulated enough speckled seatrout stories to fill a good portion of this chapter. But when I asked him, he told me that one story back in the mid-1990s stood out.

Ken and his longtime skiff-mate, Bruce Cusic, a dentist and nature photographer, were easing toward the end of a long summer day of Chandeleur fishing that had begun well before dawn. A scorching mid-July heat draped the islands in a thick blanket of impossibly muggy air. It was so unbearably hot that Ken and Bruce had had to periodically fire up the skiff's engine and throttle their boat full tilt over the grass flats to cool themselves. Early evening found the two fishers adrift in a slack tide forty yards off of a narrow cut in North Island. Hundreds of laughing gulls nesting on the island filled the sky, some circling directly overhead, others returning low across the water with small fish and crustaceans to feed to their nesting chicks. The beehive of gulls generated a cacophony of chatter that did little to distract the two fishers from the stomach-churning odor of guano baking in the warm, moist marsh mud. Despite the slow fishing that the Chandeleurs are known for during late afternoons and early summer evenings, Ken and Bruce continued to cast their medium-weight rods with spinning reels spooled with translucent green, eight-pound test line toward the shore. Ken was fishing one of the lures most favored by Chandeleur fishers, a white, three-inch plastic grub with a flattened red tail weighted with only the smallest of split shots. Because of its flattened tail this plastic bait is sometimes referred to as a stingray grub. The plastic bait is generally fished by casting it close to shore and using one's wrist action to generate a repetitive up-and-down motion of the pole while reeling to "hop" the grub through the water and back to the skiff.

Ken cast his line in a long high arc toward the mouth of the cut in North Island. The grub landed in the water and sank as the line continued a trajectory seemingly destined for the water's surface. A laughing gull, gliding low on its return to the island, never saw what was coming. Midair, Ken's descending fishing line settled over and wrapped around one of the gull's wings, abruptly dropping the bird to the water. Now, sitting on the water with its wing entangled in line, the gull was clearly unhappy. Ken recalls his immediate thought was Oh, shit! Now I have to untangle a pissed-off gull! Bruce started the engine and ever so slowly edged the skiff toward the ensnarled gull to avoid further startling the shocked bird. Suddenly, the gull jerked down into the water. Ken and Bruce watched in astonishment as the gull's head and wing jerked down below the water's surface and then, immediately upon return to the surface, jerked down again. Ken puzzled over whether the gull was injured or panicked. What could be causing the bird to display such odd spasms? As the skiff neared the gull, the answer was revealed in a flash of silver in the clear blue-green water below the bird. A speckled seatrout had taken Ken's grub. The gull had become a bobber — a feathered fishing bobber.

Bruce eased the skiff the final few feet toward the gull-turned-bobber and the now-hooked speckled trout. Ken grabbed the handle of the three-foot-long fishing net and lifted it from the floor of the skiff. Placing the mouth of the net down into the water, he slipped it under the gull and lifted the entangled bird up and into the skiff. After placing the bird on the skiff's floorboards, Ken firmly grasped the gull's torso and wings, avoiding the reach of its sharp beak. The gull calmed and allowed itself to be untangled from the still-intact fishing line. Ken gently lifted the freed bird over the side of the skiff and placed it into the water. Acting a little embarrassed by the incident (anthropomorphism aside), the gull slowly swam off, twisting its head and neck to periodically peek back toward the skiff. Now, Ken could return his attention to the speckled seatrout that with any luck was still hooked to the end of his line. Retrieving his fishing rod, he reeled in slack line recovered from the entangled bird and fought the fish. The speckled seatrout was the largest he had hooked in the twenty years he had fished the Chandeleur Islands up to that very moment, and all twenty years since. Probably measuring twenty-eight or more inches and weighing a good seven or eight pounds, the fish was truly massive by Chandeleur standards.

As fishing etiquette dictates in a two-person skiff, while Ken fought his fish, Bruce prepared to net Ken's record trout. Ken knew that despite the fish holding in the water above a thick grass-bed of Ruppia, there was an outside chance the fish could dodge into the weeds and break free. Suddenly, it all came to a head. With one final desperate lunge, the massive speckled seatrout forced itself deep into the weeds. Despite the vanishing act, the sustained tension on his line convinced Ken that he still had the fish hooked. Alas, when Bruce forced the fishing net down into the Ruppia, it came back up with Ken's stingray grub attached to nothing more than a pile of weeds.

The silver-colored speckled seatrout (Cynoscion nebulosus) — called truite gris in Louisiana French or, in English, speckled trout, spotted seatrout, or just "speck" for short — is largely named for the generous sprinkling of black dots that cover the dorsum, upper sides, and the dorsal fin and tail. The fish bears no direct kinship with the familiar trout caught by fly and spinner fishers in mountain streams and lakes around the world. Indeed, speckled seatrout are members of the drum family, the same taxonomic group that claims the redfish. Members of the drum family generally produce grunting noises using specialized sonic muscles; speckled trout, like redfish, are no exception. Scientists suspect that these noises are used in fish-to-fish communication. Because the grunts are made by sexually mature male seatrout, they are likely to play a role in reproductive behaviors such as attracting and courting egg-bearing females. I have heard specks grunt as I dropped keepers into my skiff's live-well in the Chandeleurs and in Alabama's Fish River. Similar to that of redfish, the grunting is faint out of the water, but like most sounds produced by marine animals, the sounds carry much greater distances under water.

Most speckled seatrout spend at least some portion of their lives in an estuary. Marine ecologists refer to such fishes as "estuarine-dependent" species. Accordingly, the health of coastal estuaries is critical to the fish's survival, much as healthy productive estuaries are central to sustaining rich populations of blue crabs and oysters. Speckled seatrout occur along the Atlantic coast of the United States from Florida to Massachusetts (they are called spotted weakfish along the northern Atlantic coast) and also throughout the Gulf of Mexico, including, of course, the Chandeleur Islands. Despite the fish's broad geographic distribution, fisheries scientists have learned from tagging studies that speckled seatrout don't wander much. They are homebodies. Some individuals spend their entire lives within just a few miles of the estuary where their parents released egg and sperm. Animal species that don't migrate and have resident populations often exhibit a high degree of genetic relatedness. Speckled seatrout are no exception. By examining the DNA sequences of seatrout sampled from different geographic regions, fishery geneticists have found that populations in the Atlantic are genetically distinct from those in the Gulf of Mexico and that even within a given ocean some populations exhibit genetic differences. The degree of genetic differentiation seen so far is insufficient to divide speckled seatrout into distinct subspecies or new species, yet these genomic changes indicate that as subpopulations of speckled seatrout continue to evolve further, taxonomic differentiation is likely to occur. There can be advantages to variation in genomes between populations of a given species. For instance, if a pathogenic virus or bacteria were to infect one population of speckled seatrout, those fish that compose genetically unique populations elsewhere may prove more resilient and ultimately provide stock to replenish disease-impacted populations.

Young speckled seatrout grow up quickly. Female fish reach a sexually mature twelve to fourteen inches in a single year and are an impressive sixteen to eighteen inches long by the time they turn two years of age. Combine a rapid growth with the ability to produce up to 350,000 eggs per spawn over five months of annual spawning (and thus millions of eggs per fish per year), and you have a species of game fish that when properly managed can replenish its populations with gusto. In a sort of evolutionary trade-off with rapid growth and early reproduction, speckled seatrout have a relatively short life span that rarely exceeds twelve years. Speckled seatrout are resilient in the sense that, unlike other species of fish that gather to spawn in a specific location, seatrout spawn wherever they occur: weed beds, sand and shell bottoms, and around oil and gas platforms. This spawning flexibility pays dividends because, should a given habitat type become inhospitable, the fish can spawn elsewhere.

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Excerpted from A Naturalist Goes Fishing by James McClintock, Annabelle DeCamillis. Copyright © 2015 James McClintock. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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