"27" Cedar Key's Redfish

Would that every day could be spent exploring every mile of the Florida Coastline and the pearly necklace of islands that surrounds it. As a highschool student in the early 60's in Sarasota, afterschool was spent on the water. Snook, Trout, and Redfish filled our refrigerator, Snook the only one with a size and number limit in place at that time, and it was four per person per day, twentyfour inch minimum.
Fresh from Ohio, a fourteen year old boy talked his way into owning a fourteen foot runabout within six months. Dad had died the year before we moved. Everything learned about the Gulf of Mexico came through a curiosity that has yet to be satisfied. The first Snook mom freezered weighed eighteen pounds. It was the first of that days limit that totaled forty-five pounds. We never had it so good, and never would again. Decades later nothing from that scene remains. The little slips, bayous, and cuts, the clear emerald water that made the spooking of fish a certainty, even the pass they called "Midnight," were all disappearing even as we dreamed of the next days tight lines in 1962. C.E.L.

Yankeetown Blacktip

Birthing the perfect beast. Liking the taste of shark led to cleaning this one while still well offshore. Blacktip, are very delicious, but should be headed and gutted soon after subduing, then iced. This one was noticeably fatter, and when opened, allowed the peaceful extraction of seven thrashing miniatures from its gullet, each of which after being dropped head first back into the outgoing tide, returned to the surface jaws snapping and swimming back along the slick of blood and entrails.......... eating “Mom.”