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The map of the world used to be coloured red. Quite right too: we conquered, captured, colonized, and civilized much of the world. We taught the natives to speak English, queue in an orderly fashion, hold their knives and forks properly, and to maintain a stiff upper lip when being whipped for insolence to their betters. Erhem! Things seem to have changed somewhat.
The Colonials are now often better off than us, and instead of buying our goods to make us rich, they are now exporting vast quantities of very clever stuff to us, and insisting on offering us wonderful touristy sun-baked bargains to make our English winters survivable. I am sure no good will come of it. The first of the colonists to think they could go it alone, were those American chappies. It was, of course, a ridiculous notion to believe that they could manage their own affairs without the input of a bevy of Whitehall mandarins to guide their colonial path, but for some strange reason, they appear to have muddled through passably well; so much so, that they even have this place in Florida that sends folks to walk on the moon, and ruddy great spaceships to place satellites to allow us to talk to each other by bouncing signals off things floating around the earth. A likely story, I say; but all that hacking through the Florida jungle has had some positive effects for we anglers.
Now I'm perfectly aware that European carpers have turned the game into a three hundred and sixty five days a year business. Given the wonders of modern tentage, and a pair of fur-lined bivvy slippers, the new-age carper can awake to a foot of snow with every expectation of a twenty-pounder. Isn't that wonderful. And say I, more power to all those with the indomitablility of spirit to make it so. Can I just mention here though, there are prettier paths through the cooler months.
Come January this year I looked in the mirror. It's not something I do for pleasure, it's something I do when shaving. A pale and haggard face looked back at me and mouthed the words, 'For God's sake, get some sunshine on your back.' I nodded in submissive agreement, and logged into the British Airways website without completing my shave.
I just can't do the beach only thing any longer. I have already served my time on the sand. I'm OK for an hour or two, and goodness knows, I've done my fair share of life-saving when my children have belly-flopped into deep water, but winter sun these days just has to be filled with fishing.
For reliable sunshine with fishing you have to go way south of Europe. I've been all over the globe in my time, but price does come into it for me now. The smart move is to look at destinations that attract the mass tourist market. Those are the places that have loads of flights, and where you can often get a real bargain. With the dollar in free-fall against Sterling, Florida is an obvious choice, and I reckon it's really affordable. Booking well ahead I was able to get into Orlando for under three hundred quid. I'd booked a cheap hire-car via the UK office of Hertz, and with their slick system at the airport I was on the Beeline motorway from Orlando to the Atlantic Space Coast within an hour of landing. So far, excellent, and easy. I'd also struck a totally brilliant deal with the Marriot Hotel in Cocoa Beech, which is pretty up-market, so I didn't feel too much like an itinerant waif and stray. The next thing was to call my guide.
If you want to just fish, and soak up the sun, you can simply take your English carping tackle down to pretty well any bit of coast, thread on a slice of cut fish for bait, then snooze the days away. You will catch fish of one sort or another, and on occasions you will be connected to something so strong it'll make your eyes water. Plan B is to get some sensible advice from one of the multitudes of bait sellers, or tackle shops. On this occasion I took it even more seriously, because I wanted to catch a giant redfish.
The redfish, sometimes called a red drum, is a glorious and fantastically powerful creature. It's found all along the lower Atlantic coast of the United States, and round into the Gulf. Aesthetic anglers, and hoity-toity folks who have had their education paid for, fish for it with fly tackle. They find that the Redfish takes the sort of shrimp and crab patterns used for bonefish. A six or ten pound redfish on a #8 flyrod is fantastic fun. The biggest blighters though; fish or twenty pounds and above, are better tackled with slightly stouter rods, and either live prawn bait, or one of those disgusting-looking soft plastic imitations, so beloved of our American cousins.
Leaving the lingering velvety kiss of Lady Luck aside, the key to big fish is the right local guide. I'd spent several hours surfing the net before leaving the UK and the same name kept appearing at the top of the local experts, Troy Perez. British anglers, used to doing their own thing, might consider a local guide to be a bit of a luxury, but there is no shorter cut to reliable results in a vast unknown area. The best guides are booked years in advance. They supply the boat, the tackle, the bait, the lures, minute by minute advice, and they know where to go. They are the bargain of the century. Troy agreed by email to spend a half day with me, and said that he would take me to a place near Titusville called Mosquito Lagoon. The name filled me with foreboding, but not wanting to seem to be wimpy bug-fearing Englishman, I pretended to be delighted. In fact, I need not have worried, I didn't even see a mosquito while I was in Florida.
Troy's boat rig was a totally fantazmagorical machine. Flat as a pancake, with a huge engine on the stern to drive it at high speed, in 8 of water. As we surged away from the boat ramp, we seemed to be skidding on a shallow puddle over a grass lawn, which was decidedly un-nerving. Anyway, my companion for the day, local angler Tom Bartosek was completely unconcerned about the fact that we appeared to be doing 60 mph with no wheels.
The HUGE Mosquito Lagoon lies immediately north of the Space Centre at Cape Canaveral. You could loose a squadron of pocket battleships in it. Finding fish in this great sheet of water is the secret: the sort of thing to test Troy's thirty years of experience.
We turned this way and that, around and over sand bars and sunken debris, until we were quite close to the launch pads of the Space Centre. Troy equipped us with medium spinning rods, small salt-water fixed spool reels loaded with 15 lb test line, and a simple 2/0 hook tied direct. Bait was a big live prawn, which gave just enough casting weight to throw about thirty yards.
Standing up on his poling platform on the stern, Troy pushed us quietly across a shallow bed of saltwater grass. Then the softly-spoken but insistent order came, 'John, cast sixty feet at ten o'clock. I did. The line twitched just once, then fifty yards of line was torn off the heavily-dragged spool in the time it takes to say 'Bloody Hell!' Then the hook-hold gave way. Not a word was said; Troy simply flicked another prawn across for me to re-bait, and jumped back up to his high vantage point.
The silence was almost complete. This is a stealthy game of creeping up upon fish that have their heads down. ast seventy feet at twelve o'clock' This time, when the tip of the rod dipped, I made a point of pulling hard into the fish. In the very shallow water the fish almost cart-wheeled out of the water. 'Huston, we have lift-off,' shouted Troy, as the fish proceeded to head at warp speed for Miami. The rod strained against the surreal backdrop of the space shuttle launch pads. So powerful was this redfish, that the bow of the boat was pulled around. 'Good fish John,' said Troy, 'don't horse him.' Don't horse him, I thought! This fish seems to be playing me!
A big redfish feels and acts very much like a big carp, with hugely muscular runs and an overwhelming impression of inexhaustible power. At one stage the fish must have been well over a hundred yards from the boat, but about thirty minutes later it was doing circles around the boat, with me following it on deck. 'She'll dive under the boat when she's close,' said Troy. 'When she does, I want you to bury the rod in the water, and follow her round.' And by God, she did. With a flash of a vast tail, the fish surged under the boat, with me all dry-mouthed in dread of loosing her. Ten slogging, sweating, anxious minutes later, she was in the net, looking colossal, and magnificent, and utterly, utterly glorious. My arms were aching, and my legs wobbly. Troy weighed her, of course, and gave a low whistle as the scale registered 36 lbs. 'Big fish,' he said, rather unnecessarily. Amidst a good deal of hand shaking and back slapping, I downed two cans of beer in celebration.
The rest of the trip was something of a dream day. Tom landed a thirty pounder, just to keep the American team in the race. Even though Tom is 6'3 and built like a deep-sea trawler, the fish still looks huge in the pictures. Later I tried my brilliant Thomas & Thomas #8 double handed fly-rod on some black drum that were heads down on a grass flat, but apart from a five second hook-hold that turned the big rod into a half-circle before coming adrift, I couldn't ace my earlier triumph.
As they say in that neck of the woods, it's sure one heck of a fishin' hole.
I reckon, if you can't get the missus to agree that for the sake of your well-being you need to do this fishing trip, the answer is to drag her and the kids along too. The smart move would be to do two days at Disneyland to keep them quiet, then five days fishing, with the rest of the team preening themselves on the beach. If the missus looks like Pamela Anderson (some bloody hopes) she won't have to sit on her own for long.
For more information about Florida's Space Coast phone 0870-777-0223 or log
on to www.space-coast.com
John Olliff-Cooper
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