Florida: Strange New Species

As Noah and I drove across peninsular Florida once again, I felt partly fulfilled and partly frustrated. In our time on the Gulf Coast, I had not gotten a single new species. I failed to get my redfish. But I had caught a lot of snook, a few good snook, and one quite big one. The end was in sight now. We had caught a lot of new species in Florida this time. I had already reached my goal of adding at least 15 to my life list. It was time to buckle down and really get a lot done in the time we had left. 

As we traveled, we passed lots of oranges. Some growing, some in transit. The growers seem not to mind loosing some product: The trucks are filled as much as they can be, providing an explanation for the piles of roadside oranges we saw in Arcadia. Noah and I joked that if we tailgated the a truck long enough with a catcher's mitt on one hand out the window, we could probably get a free snack.

We spent a night at my Grandparent's again before going back to our base camp. It gave us a good chance to just relax a little. We needed it badly. But in the morning, we were ready to go. On our way south towards Jupiter we decided to hit some familiar places and some new places, starting in Melbourne.

Our first spot was quite productive. I had found some funky species here in November and wanted to get some of them, and this time I did. We both got ourselves frillfin gobies, which were easy to find and fool but not as easy to bring to hand. Dropping my tiny flies into different cracks and holes produced many takes and I eventually did bring some to hand, but I found that, much like darters, the little turds liked to attack my split shot instead of the fly. That is an annoying trait of some of the more aggressive micros I target. These little gobies did have a big attitude. It makes them pretty adorable.

frillfin goby, Bathygobius soporator

Mangrove snapper were pretty abundant there this time, though they were genuinely difficult to get on artificials and bait. I got a fair number of takes and just two to hand. Also abundant were scaled sardines (pilchards) and some other kind of tiny baitfish, which were periodically getting trashed by either jacks or spanish mackerel. We didn't catch any of the blitzing fish, so we'll probably never know which.

mangrove snapper, Lutjanus griseus

Eventually Noah wandered elsewhere while I continued trying to get new species in the rocks. He found some hardhead catfish and was sight fishing them. He called me up and I made my way over. Sure enough there were some cats meandering around a weedy area. He had already caught more than one. I took a few shots before I hooked one. These were a pretty unique fish. Just seeing a catfish swimming around in salt water was weird enough, but these things jumped sometimes when hooked and had a funky metallic sheen to them. Though widely considered a trash fish throughout their range and being very difficult to handle, I found them pretty interesting. 

hardhead catfish, Ariopsis felis

As tricky and somewhat dangerous as hardhead catfish are to handle, not long after I managed to get something to eat my fly that was much, much more dangerous. I had seen a lot of stingrays already on this trip. I'd made casts to a couple. Spooked all of them. This time? That thing just swam over and planted right on top of the fly, taking it much the same way as the skates I've sight fished have. I set the hook, battled the fish for a little while, and found myself in a predicament. I was not going to get a good grip and grin with this thing... I let it sit in the shallows for a moment and called Noah to see if he could grab a towel. Eventually I got antsy and just snapped what mediocre photos I could get, broke the fish off, and ushered it out of the tide pool. This was my third cartilaginous fish species on the fly. 

common stingray, Dasyatis pastinaca

So, I had added 3 new species to my list at this spot today. Could I get one of the scaled sardines we were seeing? We certainly had small enough tackle. Noah and I both sat on a concrete culvert trying to hook a pilchard for a long time. He had the added advantage of being able to use bait. Though I could use bait, it would disqualify the catch from being added to my list. But what we found was that these fish wouldn't grab onto anything for long, bait or artificial. That is usually what makes getting a smaller fish hard on the fly: they just don't hold on long enough to set the hook. Well, in this case they were behaving the same way with the shrimp and the fly. We would occasionally have one on for a few seconds before it would flip off the hook and back into the water. Eventually, Noah got one. I found that when he quit regretting them the going got tougher for me: having bits of shrimp in the water was getting the fish into a frenzy. So I started just tossing pieces in and jigging my fly violently right under the surface. Noah was pretty much packed and ready to leave when I finally managed to hook one of those little buggers and get it to hand. This is a species I certainly hadn't expected to get on this trip, or ever honestly. 

scaled sardine, Harengula jaguana

From there we continued south, and found another very charismatic new fish species. But that will have to wait for another day.