Fishing on Florida's Intercostal Waterway and fishing in a box of chocolates have one thing in common: you never know what you're going to get. As a Michigan boy, I know my bass, my blue gill, my northern pike, my trout, and I have a basic feel for their respective habitats. But when you cast chunks of shrimp off the bank of an estuary, that’s part of the Matanzas River, that’s part of the Intercostal Waterway, that runs parallel to Florida's Atlantic coast, well, ignorant Michigan boys, like me, have no idea what lurks below.
When the beast grabbed hold, I was daydreaming about mass murder. And why wouldn't I? After all, Fort Matanzas stood sentinel across the estuary there. I knew all about the fort. When we visited here some years prior, my wife and I took the short ferry over to this national historical site and stood where cannon four hundred and fifty years ago delivered amazingly accurate blows onto Spain’s enemies.
I wondered how the Spaniards gathered seafood in these waters. But then again, they probably didn't. They had slaves do their dirty work, indigenous people who had known the whereabouts and habits of the fishery there at the Matanzas Inlet for hundreds of years. The Spanish, in the names of Jesus Christ and The Crown, were masters at committing atrocities against others. They forced others to gather oysters in their shells.
So there I was on this February afternoon, standing on that shelly shore, casting shrimp baits twenty yards out, while imagining cannon blasts and Spanish soldiers sweating and swatting at mosquitoes. After an hour, I had fed a school of small fish (species unknown) with about fifteen whole shrimps offered in small, bite-size pieces. Either the little bastards had an uncanny ability to peck the bait from around the hook, or I had no skill at setting the barb. Both, probably. But it made for a lovely if somewhat labor-intensive time, all that re-baiting and donating. After all, here was a warm winter sun with Fort Matanzas across the way, precious surroundings for a refugee from the bitter north. I reloaded and cast again.
The monster hit. My reel seethed as the line peeled out and my rod arched in protest. I yelled, "Whoa!" to no one around, and without any breath, my eyebrows shot up to my scalp. Left to right, right to left, outward to in, and inward to out, the leviathan wandered to and fro. When it swam in, I reeled in the slack, and when it swam out, the line gave way again. I pictured a gigantic and grinning grouper that chuckled at the "challenge" of out-dueling a Michigan rig more accustomed to pestering blue gills on their spawning beds.
This rivaled the short-lived fight my mother had had in Canada. When I was twelve, my family took a vacation to a cottage on the northern shore of Lake Erie in Ontario. One afternoon, we went fishing a ways inland, and in a small rented boat, we rowed through lanes in a deep marsh until we stopped at a clearing populated by hundreds of dragonflies. I affixed a night crawler to my mother’s hook and she let it drop straight down over the side where she sat.
Mom was by no means a great fan of fishing. She was a life master at duplicate bridge, had recently become an aficionado of French cooking, and was a well-schooled classical pianist. But she was willing to get her hands dirty and try new things, if not threading a worm on a hook. Ever the trooper, she faced out from her boat bench, a knee on each side, and watched her bobber a few feet away.
And then, as in a movie of horrors, she shrieked. Her rod tip dove down from a violent strike, and in the next instant, an enormous northern pike rose on the other side of the boat, and soared two feet into the air with the crawler draped on its cheek. And in a great watery explosion, it crashed back down, broke the line, and vanished. My mother never saw it. It had swum under the boat with its violent leap happening behind her. She turned to me uttlery still. I had never before seen that expression on her face, and I never saw it again, that vacant and shocked gape as though she had just seen a ghost.
Mom's "fight" lasted all of five seconds. But there in the shadow of Fort Matanzas, we fought on, my fish and I. Well, at least I alone fought. The fish, it seems, just bided its time, left to right, right to left, outward to in, and inward to out. Truth be told, the beast kind of scared me. If I could bring him in, how would my delicate Michigan fingers manage the head and body of a creature of such apparent mass? Surely it would have teeth like needles and gills and fins with edges as sharp as razors. Maybe it was a shark, intent in its angry surrender to make of me a mini-massacre, to bite a chunk out of my arm in retaliation. No, I would be satisfied just to see it, to name it, and from a safe distance to get a picture of it. There was no one near to witness the event, except for the tourists who perched along the parapets of Fort Matanzas.
A quarter mile away, the Matanzas River meets the Atlantic Ocean at an inlet. It's not really a river, but bulges and recedes with the ebb and flow of the tides. "Matanzas" in Spanish means "massacre" and the Matanzas Inlet gets its name from the massacre that occurred there in 1565. To gain religious freedom, hundreds of French Protestants had tried to settle that country south of St. Augustine, but King Phillip of Spain, the first interloper, would have none of it. A Spanish captain sailed to Florida with orders to uproot and murder the French, those non-Catholic infidels, and when two hundred of them were captured on the inlet beach, their executions were pronounced.
But then, the history goes, the murders were halted by a kindly attendant priest who requested that the Catholics among the French be spared. But only twelve of the two hundred pledged an allegiance to the Pope, while the rest maintained their theological integrity and were summarily slaughtered like sheep.
Were I standing there on the beach, I may have been inclined to exhibit a transformation of heart, to express a new-found love for the Pope, but with a hand behind my back, fingers crossed. On second thought, the conquerors may have relegated me to wading the shallows in bare feet to search for oysters with bare fingers. And those mosquitoes! Maybe those one hundred and eighty eight who refused to convert knew something more, and preferred a quick death to a slow death by gradual blood-letting.
One thing you can say about those souls who inhabited the New World: they were patient. For thousands of years, the natives lived according to the clock of nature. You could not assert your will over the timetable for harvest. The Spanish invaders arrived on boats carried by slow breezes. They waited months for messages. But, it must be said, their bloodthirsty quest for gold surely ratcheted up their ambitions and forced the issue.
As my fish and I labored against each other, I could not, as it were, sense a natural timetable for this harvest. No, my bloodthirsty quest for gold ratcheted my ambition and forced the issue. Therefore, to instill more control and in the tiniest of clockwise adjustments, I tightened the drag on my reel, when... snap! Like my mother's fishing pole before me, my rod was suddenly freed from its cargo and stood straight out with its limp line lying weightless on the surface.
I'll never know what kind of fish had its way that day. To find out, I told my tale to the kid at the bait shop, but he just shrugged and listed off about ten different species that grow large in those inner waters. Here was another pink Yankee who lost a fish. Was he going to buy something or not?
Before gathering my gear and heading back, I crouched down at the water's edge to wash my hands of bait residue. There was no wind and the water was calm. The last tourists of the day had been ferried back to the landing and Fort Matanzas stood alone in fading light. I noticed out a short distance a ripple forming, and saw that it was the snout of a green sea turtle coming up for air. His head and the spine of his shell broke the surface, and he held there staring at me. I acknowledged him with a nod, and just like that, down he went, gone to further reaches of the estuary.
The turtle may encounter my fish in its intercostal travels, and consider, the way turtles might consider, the odd sight of a hook impaled in a lip. But there is nothing new in this: His ancestors have encountered peculiar things over the centuries, of cannon blasts, and severed heads, and foreign legs among oyster beds.
