Chief Stump Pond Gets His Fishies!

Chief Stump PondFinally Gets Fishy! 

By Capt. Tony Petrella  

Chief Stump Pond, an expatriate from New York’s Mohawk Valley, was feeling “fish-deprived”—or, in his case perhaps “depraved” is a better word—since his annual migration to Venice a few weeks ago. 

“I’ve been out wade-fishing twice!” he wailed piteously in an email obviously written in great anguish, considering the number of typographical errors it contained. “Once I was up at Blackburn Point with The Champeen (a.k.a. Jack Thorpe) and yesterday at Casperson Beach. Caught one small snook and a ladyfish.”  

Detecting more than a little bit of pleading between the lines, I replied with a suggestion that we dump my Hewes Redfisher into the water at Indian Mounds in Englewood and spend some time poking around Lemon Bay.  

“What time?” was his immediate comeback.  

So it was that at 9am yesterday I looped the sea anchor to the starboard stern cleat and pitched the big yellow ice cream cone overboard to slow the boat’s drift.

The tide was getting to full depth, and there weren’t any visible redfish fooling around on the broad oyster bar to the north, so I handed Ron Pisani his nine-weight rigged with a sink-tip line.  

“Have at ‘em, Chief Stumpy,” I said. “There must be something out there that’ll eat that glass minnow pattern.”

Alas, there was not. So, after about ten minutes, I hauled in the drift sock, fired up the four-stroke and headed south.  

There’s a huge flat just south of the Tom Adams Bridge that has fingers of deeper channels cutting through it because of the strong currents flowing in from Stump Pass (“They named it after me, you know,” The Chief insisted)—which is just around the corner from one of the larger mangrove islands that usually harbor snook and redfish.  

Idling out of the Bay’s main shipping channel, I cut power to the 115 Yami, tossed out the sock again, and grinned smugly when The Chief nailed a trout on his third cast.

A 22-inch, three-pound trout, I might add. On a silver anchovy pattern that I had tied the night before.  

More trout followed. Then a bunch of ladyfish.  

“Ain’t no redfish in this Bay!” Stumpy intoned.   

“Not in this spot,” I answered casually. “But, if you’ll hop down from the casting deck and reel in that line we’ll go see about finding some.”  

Ten minutes later, I was standing on the poling platform trying to keep a persistent east wind from burying us in the mangroves, while scanning the water for shadows.  

“See any?” Stumpy asked.  

“Nope. But keep working those potholes and maybe something magical will happen.”   

When it didn’t, I eased down from my perch, dropped the sock into a baitwell, and headed for the pass, which miraculously hasn’t filled in yet after last year’s multi-million-dollar dredging operation.  

We didn’t have to go very far into the Gulf of Mexico to spot terns diving on the oily chum of baitfish body parts.  

“Ah, Si. La Senoritas are being active,” I drawled in a pretty poor accent in honor of the Spanish mackerel that were viciously feeding on pods of pilchards, greenbacks, and anchovies.

Wheeling the Hewes in a tight arc to put the wind at his back, I throttled back and told The Chief to get to work.

Now for the Bad News/Good News part of the story.  

Bad News: The mackerel kept crashing, thrashing, and chasing the fleeing schools of baitfish. Which meant they were keeping just thatfar out of casting range.  

Good News: We caught them. Literally.  

Having whirled around in a 180-degree pursuit of their lunch (by now it was pushing noon), the Macs were heading straight for us. It simply was a matter of laying out the fly, twitching it a couple of times, and hanging on.  

“Broke me off!” The Chief wailed. “A big one, too.”  

Spanish mackerel have a mouth full of very sharp teeth and easily cut through the 20-pound tippet that’s typically used for daily fishing around these parts. So, gunning for Macs usually involves shooting at them with 30-pound fluorocarbon, or even Surflon braided wire.  

Stumpy was in a hurry, though, so I merely pulled another rod from underneath the port gunwale and he was back in business.  

Several hookups later, with fillets of blackened mackerel leaping in his brain, Stumpy agreed that it was time to head for shore.

He’d already had a “career day.”  Even so, as he was securing the anchovy pattern to the hook-keeper, he couldn’t resist taking another verbal shot.

“Ain’t no redfish in this Gulf!” Stumpy intoned.  

“Next time, Chief,” I replied. “Next time!”