Parrotfish, Cowfish, and a Puffer on The Fly

After sleeping in and just being well tired  most of the morning after fishing dock lights with Kirk, Noah and I eventually found the energy and headed out to fish Boca Raton inlet once again. I was ready to settle the score there and finally catch a damn parrotfish on the fly. But first, here's an obnoxious amount of sergeant majors:

Actually that's a pretty normal amount of sergeant majors. This seems to be more or less the rule at an inlet or reef in South Florida. The sergeant majors are ever present and ever annoying, but a little bit fun to catch on small dry flies. After all, how often do you get to say that you've caught a reef fish, a damselfish, on a dry fly? It is pretty cool, honestly. 

Abudefduf saxatilis on a bread crumb dry fly.

After fooling with the sergeant majors and pinfish until I became sick of them once again, I buckled down and started on focusing on acquiring my parrotfish. There are a number of parrotfish species there, including queen parrotfish and stoplight parrotfish, and some were feeding off the rocks, which I figured would make them viable targets. I put flies in front of both cruising parrotfish and ones that were feeding and struggled to get a reaction. I eventually snagged some sargassum and dressed the hook with it and that's how I got my first take, which only lead to a break off. I'd almost considered counting any fish I caught on sargassum tied to a hook but quickly changed my mind about it. Sargassum isn't meat, nor is it a traditional bait, but it wasn't an imitation, it was exactly what once of the fish were eating. So, even though it was tied to the hook no differently than would be a feather, some hair, or and artificial product, it was still bait. I decided to keep trying to get one to eat an undressed fly. This was a serious chore made harder by a variety of variables. Though the water was very clear and I could see the fish, the ripping current and surface disturbance made sight fishing thee parrotfish tricky. I knew I'd pretty much have to set the hook the instant a parrotfish took, as my experiences fishing for these reef species told me they'd nip then react the fly without me feeling anything. It's very difficult to set on sight without being able to see the fly in the water. I'd have to read the fish's body language, and they were behaving in ways I'd not seen other fish behave. I tried sitting the fly still on the rocks near where they were feeding, and I could have, for all I know, had a few takes doing so, but I just didn't notice them. Eventually I got smart though, and as a parrotfish got close to where I thought my fly was, I dropped my rod tip about a foot and let the fly and splitshot roll down the rock. The fish turned completely around and quickly pursued, travelling about a foot then stopping. I set the hook, was on, and prayed that I hadn't just snagged the fish. Miracle of miracles, it had eaten the fly. I didn't know what species it was at the times, but it was a parrotfish so it was new by default. 

Redtail/yellowtail parrotfish. Sparisoma rubripinne. Life list fish #151. Rank: species

That was the initial phase of the species. Parrotfish, like many wrasses, often have two color phases during their life, with variances overall that make it not immediately clear what they actually are. Not long after I caught my lifer, I caught another yellowtail on a piece of sargassum hooked on the fly that looked very different: 

With one really cool lifer down I was a bit more excited than I had been much of the day prior. The presence of a few huge scrawled filefish served to hype me up even more. Though I got one of a pair to chase a fly a bunch of times I couldn't seem to get it to eat. Fear not, another oddball showed up. I was using another version of the orange chenille worm I'd caught the parrotfish on, but one with a small light pink marabou tail when I spotted a scrawled cowfish. I put the fly in front of it and it quickly showed interest. 

Now, filefish, cowfish, boxfish, puffers, and other such odd shaped fish have sort of a... stupid quality. I love them, they're really cool, and they aren't actually stupid, but the way the swim and the way the approach and eat thing just makes them seem like idiots. If you've seen it you know what I'm talking about. They're the dumbest looking things, to the extent that I often can't help but laugh out loud watching them react to a fly especially. This little cowfish was no exception, it wandered on over and started sucking and chewing on the marabou tail of my fly, sort of blowing it in and out of its mouth. It was very goofy. It took me a number of tries to actually get the hook in him but I eventually did. The fly didn't stay in him long, but I had him over land when it popped out... disaster averted! 

Scrawled cowfish. Acanthostracion quadricornis. Life list fish #152. Rank: species

Look at this fish! What a weirdo. 

Now I had to long standing targets out of the way, and I relaxed a little bit. I was still excited but I wasn't nervous. I kept trying to catch new parrotfish and dropping a small white Walt's Worm into crevices hoping for a bluehead wrasse. A couple dusky damselfish found it instead.

Stegastes adustus

Then, from one of the crevices came something I'd not expected, something I'd never even heard of. It was clearly a puffer of some description, but as I held it in my hand I had no clue exactly what it was other than simply one of the coolest fish I'd ever caught. Later, I'd learn that it was a Caribbean sharpnose puffer, a species I'm certain very few have ever been privileged to catch on the fly. For me, this is what it's all about. Look at this freaky, beautiful little fish!

Caribbean sharpnose puffer, Canthigaster rostrata. Life list fish #153. Rank: species.

That's the last fish I caught on the fly in daylight that day, I spent the rest of my time fishing bait. It lead to a couple of frustrating captures. The next story in the Florida saga will about that frustration, and the redemption that followed. Stay tuned.

Until next time,

Fish for the love of fish.

Fish for the love of places fish live.

Fish for you.

And stay safe and healthy.

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, John, Elizabeth, Brandon, Christopher, Shawn, Mike, Sara, Leo, and Franky for supporting this blog on Patreon.

A Lifer Sculpin and No Snakes

Today (Thursday) my mother and I headed to Rhode Island with the objective of looking for a very hard to find snake. Smooth green snakes had a naturally spotty range made even more spotty by urban sprawl. Although they are still abundant in a handful of locales they are lacking in numbers overall. And as if being rare weren't enough, their habitat and behavior make them even harder to find and photograph. They are wicked fast, like hanging out in vegetation the same color they are, and don't sit still when handled. The best way to find them in a good scenario for photography is by lifting board and bark and rocks. Though the area my mom and I searched was great habitat (and we covered a lot of it), we failed to find either a basking snake or anything really ideal to lift that one would like hiding under. I heard a number of things make a break for it in the brush, but what those things were I will never know. One was certainly some kind of snake.

A coyote raided turtle nest.

So, we skunked out. No snakes! But it would be silly not to have a backup plan, and I did. We paid a visit to a favorite breachway of mine after lunch and I targeted micros. At first I was after rock gunnels. It just wasn't happening the tide was too high to fish the places I wanted to, and the bergalls kept getting in the way. 

Then, wading through some sandy areas, I noticed I was spooking a bunch of little flatfish. Some were definitely juvenile summer flounder, the rest were hogchoker. I started targeting them, which was very, very frustrating. These little flat fish may turn out to be extremely hard for me to add to my lifelist. I eventually had to call it quits and head back towards the car. But I did decide to walk along the edge of the breachway instead of the road on the way there. I found some more hogchokers hanging around a few rocks, but in trying to catch them, I ended up catching something very different. I saw come out from under a weed covered rock a pair of very stout fish with big heads and mottled coloration. They were clearly sculpins of some sort. And, true to the ravenous nature of many sculpins, they pounced on my tiny tanago hook fly. I hooked it and immediately lifted it's incredibly minuscule body out of the water. My heartbeat increased rapidly as I carefully waded back to dry land, worrying all the way that the fish would free itself, knowing full well this could only be a new species no matter what sculpin it turned out to be. I quickly got it into the photo-tank, before which time it did indeed throw the hook, and got as many photos as I could. Then I went back out and tried to get the other one, which was bigger. I did, and I got it safely into the photo tank too, where I was lucky enough to get one key photo, though I didn't know that until I got home. These are the results from both fish:

Specimen #1

Specimen #2

Now, for the aforementioned key photo of the larger of the two sculpins: 

Why, you are probably asking, is this the key photo? It is a bit less well focused than the rest and doesn't seem to show some key parts of the fish in any detail. 

Well, it shows one specific part of the fish in enough clarity for me to confidently identify the species. These two fish could only really have been either shorthorned sculpins or little sculpins, also called grubbies. It was much more likely that they were grubbies because they are more common than shorthorned south of Cape Cod Bay, and shorthorned sculpins are rarely in very shallow water in the summer up north. So it would stand to reason that in Southern New England in a spot with water temperatures just above 60 degrees, these would most likely be grubbies. But weirder things have happened in this spot than a shorthorned sculpin showing up in late June... just 25 yards away, I'd caught a barrelfish on the fly... so it could go either way. Except I got a good enough shot of the larger specimens anal fin with rays extended to get a count of 10. 

Grubbies have 10 or 11 anal fin rays, shorthorned sculpins have 13 or 14. 

So, life list fish #133 for me is the little sculpin. It had been far too long since I got a new fish to add to the list. What a relief! Only 17 to go before I reach my year end goal of 150. 

Lifelist fish # 133, little sculpin/grubby, Myoxocephalus aenaeus. Rank: species

If you enjoy what I'm doing here, please share and comment. It is increasingly difficult to maintain this blog under dwindling readership. What best keeps me going so is knowing that I am engaging people and getting them interested in different aspects of fly fishing, the natural world, and art. Follow, like on Facebook, share wherever, comment wherever. Also, consider supporting me on Patreon (link at the top of the bar to the right of your screen, on web version). Every little bit is appreciated! Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, john, and Christopher, for supporting this blog.

Florida: A Plethora of Weird Fish

If you enjoy what I'm doing here, please share and comment. It is increasingly difficult to maintain this blog under dwindling readership. What best keeps me going so is knowing that I am engaging people and getting them interested in different aspects of fly fishing, the natural world, and art. Follow, like on Facebook, share wherever, comment wherever. Also, consider supporting me on Patreon (link at the top of the bar to the right of your screen, on web version). Every little bit is appreciated! 

"What the f*** is that thing" was the common theme for Noah and I on most of our visits to inlets south of where we were staying on the East Coast. We saw some weird stuff down there. Huge scrawled filefish... like, easily world record sized. All manor of species and color phases of parrotfish. Some very strange wrasse. I saw a huge lime green moray eel. Giant angelfish. There were things swimming in that water that I just could not identify.

This was a life-lister's wet dream. How many species down there would be new ones for me? The number could easily have been north of 50. And throughout the year I have no doubt at least 200 species I've never caught spend some time in this same water. Noah and I knew this before we even saw a South FL inlet, and it's why we fished them so much. We were down there to catch new species, and inlets and piers were going to put us very close to a lot of them.

I myself got 13 new species from one inlet that we fished three times. I'm not sure exactly how many Noah got but it was substantial as well. I should add that just because there were hundreds of fish and a lot of new species didn't make it easy to catch them. I had to work for new species. But the sheer biomass of the place meant I was assured to catch at least a few new ones. If you haven't already read it, this post covers the first trip and six species I got at this inlet: flyfishingcts.blogspot.com. Ideally you should read that one before finishing this one.

Our second visit to this particular inlet was great fun for me because it yielded a few species that I really wanted to get. Of course I started out catching the ever present sergeant majors. We need to find a time when those buggers aren't so prevalent. I do wonder if there even is such a time.

Abudefduf saxatilis

Noah saw a yellow thing in the mix. He dropped his shrimp in front of said yellow thing, then hooked said yellow thing. The yellow thing turned out to be a French grunt. Did I say yellow thing enough? Yellow thing. You'd get it if you had been there.

 Haemulon flavolineatum (yellow thing)

Noah then went up the wall, and I was left to catch one of two new wrasse species I would catch at this inlet. Both have very hilarious names. This one probably has the funnier of the two. On a pheasant tail nymph with a soft plastic tail, I caught two slippery dicks. No, I did not make that name up. They are slippery though, and they are dicks about letting you get your fly back from them. So, aptly named I guess. They are gorgeous little fish though, in contrast to the rather dull colored wrasse we see in New England, bergalls and tautog.

Halichoeres bivittatus

Not long after I caught the slippery dicks I got a couple of damselfish. Some of the damselfish in Florida are very tricky to identify, namely longfin, cocoa, and dusky damselfish. Sergeant majors are a damselfish as well but they stand out from the crowd. Cocoa and longfin damselfish havevery distinct color phases, unfortunately when inshore their color varies almost none from eachother and dusky damselfish. I am fairly confident though that both of the ones I caught were dusky damselfish, Stegastes adustus.

The blue on this one's fin threw me off. Thanks to Patrick Kerwin I learned that dusky may have some blue.

As time wore on I caught fewer and fewer fish, even fewer non-sergeant majors, and even fewer fish on the fly. But eventually I managed to get something interesting to take the artificial again. A bandtail puffer! I had seen a lot of puffers on this trip and I couldn't imagine leaving without at least one, but I thought it would have been either a checkered of southern. I will get those, but catching the less common bandtail was a wonderful compromise.

Bandtail puffer, Sphoeroides spengleri

I believe that was the last fish I caught there that day. But we came back the next for more. We thought there's be more potential for new species there at slack tide. That seemed to be validated. Quickly upon getting there I made casts out into deep water, which was not fishable with the fly rod when the tide was moving, and the first fish I caught was the second wrasse with a funny name. The puddingwife wrasse. In my opinion this was the prettiest fish I have ever caught. 

Puddingwife wrasse, Halichoeres radiatus

Then a yellow thing jumped on my little streamer and I had a French grunt of my own. Slack tide was working out well.

These guys' eyes are just mesmerizing. Haemulon flavolineatum

Then, another grunt species came to the fly, my third species of grunt of this trip: a sailor's choice grunt.  

Haemulon parra

And then, a new snapper species. Schoolmaster snapper. I think these are probably the most handsomely dressed of the snappers. I caught a mangrove snapper a while later, for comparison a photo of that fish follows the photo of the schoolmaster. Though many target snapper species as food fish, keeping a schoolmaster would be a poor decision. They often carry cigutera poisoning, something found in some reef-fish and fish that eat reef-fish. They are so frequently associated with cigutera that in some areas locals just label the species itself poisonous. Though that isn't true... don't eat one. Or any other species you have limited knowledge of, for that matter. 

 Lutjanus apodus

 Lutjanus griseus

Noah caught a couple fish that I was kind of jealous of. One of them was a big, gorgeous terminal phase slippery dick. Another was a juvenile gray triggerfish.

Halichoeres bivittatus, terminal phase (Photo courtesy Noah Johnson)

Balistes capriscus

But the fish I was most jealous of was a really bizarre one. We had seen this thing swimming around for about an hour. We both got casts in front of the thing and both had interest from it. In fact, the second photo in this post shows this fish. At the time we didn't know exactly what it was, which is a shame because it was actually an all tackle world record. Eventually Noah got the fish to take a jig. We walked it down the wall, where I hopped down to help him land it (this is where things broke down if we had wanted to get this fish confirmed as a record). I leadered the fish and led it around the rocks. Touching it was questionable. There were a lot of spines to get poked by and we had no clue what kind of strange toxins this fish could be carrying around with it. 

As it turns out, this was a spotfin porcupinefish. The world record was just over 8lbs, caught by a rather legendary angler in the life-listing community,  Steve Wozniak (not the apple one). This one would have gone 12 easy. And we didn't even properly identify it until we were on our way back to camp. Oops. 

Diodon hystrix

Missed world record opportunity aside, we did really well there on our last visit and really well there in general. We caught a total of 18 species between us at this one inlet, most of them new.

Blue runner,
Horseye jack,
Yellow jack,
Leather jack,
Sergeant major,
Dusky damselfish,
Tomtate grunt,
French grunt,
Sailors choice grunt,
Spottail pinfish,
Pinfish,
Puddingwife wrasse,
Slippery dick,
Mangrove snapper,
Schoolmaster snapper,
Bandtail puffer,
Spotfin porcupinefish,
Gray Triggerfish

That's just wild. And I know we didn't even catch half the number of species we saw there. I can't wait to return to that place. It has so much potential. When we finished out there that evening we headed for our last night of the Florida trip. I wouldn't catch any new species before we left. I ended the trip with 29 new species and 1 new hybrid, bringing my life-list total to 130. My goal of reaching 150 by the end of 2019 seems very attainable if not surpassable. Time to put an inhuman amount of effort into catching fish people rarely think to target.

This Florida trip is not entirely complete though. Expect one more post, hopefully just as exciting as the rest have been. Unfortunately it seems you all haven't enjoyed these as much as I did as my readership has fallen even further over the last month, but I plan to do more trips like this in the near future whether or not they result in good numbers here on the blog.

Florida: Hillsboro Inlet

If you enjoy what I'm doing here, please share and comment. It is increasingly difficult to maintain this blog under dwindling readership. What best keeps me going so is knowing that I am engaging people and getting them interested in different aspects of fly fishing, the natural world, and art. Follow, like on Facebook, share wherever, comment wherever. Also, consider supporting me on Patreon (link at the top of the bar to the right of your screen, on web version). Every little bit is appreciated! 

Inlets and piers are probably some of the best places anywhere for a land based angler to target new species. They are by their structural nature just fishy as all get out. There is always something swimming down there. The structure and current they provide is exactly what many species look for at various times and conditions. And, under a wide range of conditions, there may be an entirely different batch of species at any pier or inlet. In the time Noah and I were in Florida there was one inlet that we fished a few times and every time it was different. There were also piers and inlets that we only fished once. This is about one of those that we fished only one time. 

Hillsboro Inlet

Before this trip, I spent hours researching spots, pouring over google maps, and watching fishing videos. Before I even started this research, though, I knew without a doubt I wanted to fish Hillboro Inlet. I had heard great things about the abundance of small species there, and I wanted to see it for myself. When Noah and I got to the water's edge it was clear we were in a good spot. Reef fish abounded, from tiny sergeant majors to bright blue parrotfish. In took me all of five casts to catch the first fish, and it was a new species. I had caught a spottail pinfish already on this trip but had somehow not gotten the very numerous regular pinfish. At least, until then.

Pinfish, Lagodon rhomboides

Believe it or not, the same pinfish. 

Shortly thereafter I started having a tough time getting anything to eat. Then I introduced bread into the equation. I found that if I violently jigged my fly in a cloud of bread that was being frenzied on by dozens of fish, I could catch them. As with the scaled sardines the day before, the fish were taking the fly and dropping it far to fast to react in time to set the hook, but jigging aggressively meant I could basically set the hook without actually trying to strike to the take. I still went through a lot of time without a fish on the end of my line which seems absurd given the number fish, but I had gotten pretty used to it. Getting these species on artificial fly just isn't easy. With persistence and thought, though, I managed to get another new species. A bermuda chub, Kyphosus sectatrix. 

Kyphosus sectatrix and a piece of brain coral

Though there were a lot of other species around, I did not suceed in getting any other than pinfish and bermuda chubs. I did break of a larger mojarra, and missed a parrotfish, but I didn't get any new species. Not even fishing bait (though I wouldn't have counted one to my life list).

Hillsboro inlet is a cool spot that I guarantee I will be back to. Why am I being so forward with this location when I hide virtually every other spot I fish to the best of my ability? Inlets change every day, and ones like this provide far more in the way of small species than they do large staging fish like snook or redfish. It is hard to spot burn an inlet. The fish that were at Hillsborough when Noah and I were there were probably somewhere else the very next tide. And what I want to result from my sharing of my multi-species fishing and life-listing, above all else, is to turn someones's attention to fish species they may never have otherwise. I don't expect you all to go out and try to catch a banded sunfish, or an eastern mosquito fish, or a bandtail puffer. Micro fishing isn't for everyone, I get it. But there is so much beauty and intrigue to be found in the aquatic world, far more than just trout, or just bass, or just... anything. If I can help just one angler open up their mind to the beauty and value of species he or she had previously perceived as a trash fish, I will have succeeded.

So, if it strikes your curiosity, go to Hillsboro Inlet someday. Bring a light fly rod and small flies, a small spinning rod and shrimp, or even just a cane pole and bread, and see if you can catch something you've never seen before. To me, catching a species that I've only read about or seen a few photos of is just as exciting as catching a really big wild trout. And I hope I can pass some of the excitement and fascination I get out of this along to you.