One Fish, Two Fish, Old Fish, New Fish

Or, how to recapture childlike joy in the outdoors

My very first time catching this species of fish. Read on to learn what it is.

Tap. Tap-tap… bzzzzzz!

Line started whizzing off my reel as the fish took off. Satisfying bend in the rod. Whatever it was felt different from the snapper and grouper I’d been catching all day. Wasn’t the sullen drag of a hooked shark, either. This was zippy, like a methed-out sprinter running slalom.

Jack. Had to be a jack. I tightened the drag on my reel and started to put the wood to this fish. Jacks are strong and love to run, but I wasn’t having any of it. If this was an amberjack, I wanted it in the boat, unhooked and back in the water stat; amberjacks were out of season.

I soon realized it wasn’t an amber, or if it was it was a small one, because I gained line too easily.

After a minute or two of this game of tug-of-war, I saw a flash of silver under the crystalline, royal blue waters of the Gulf: Definitely a jack. A smallish one. I reeled up to the swivel and hoisted the fish aboard.

Huh. Who are you?

“Banded rudderfish,” my friend Joe said. “Good eating.”

That’s all I needed to hear. I sliced the fish’s gills to bleed it out, plunked it into a sea ice slurry, then Joe performed ike jime on it by spiking it in the brain, then slicing the tail to reveal the main nerve above the fish’s spine, where he jammed a wire to short-circuit the fish’s nervous system. This killing method keeps the fish firmer, whiter and less fishy than anything else known to man.

Mr. Banded Rudderfish was destined for sashimi, and I was stoked.

I’ve been fishing for many decades, but I still feel a child’s joy whenever I find a new fish at the end of my line. I’ve caught and eaten close to 400 species of fish and seafood in my life, and it still thrills me: It’s the wonder of the new, fascination with the myriad shapes and colors and habits of the fish that live among us, the riveting possibilities of new flavors and textures at the table.

Bottom fishing is the best way to check all these boxes, because it’s basically playing fish bingo: You never know what is going to bite your hook. That day on the Gulf, I caught beeliners (a/k/a vermillion snapper), triggerfish, red grouper, gag grouper, a dusky shark, a reef shark, red snapper, a porgy, a king mackerel, and two banded rudderfish. Joe added mangrove snapper to that list, and his son Mac added an almaco jack to our fishy menagerie.

A few, like the red snapper and the gag grouper, we had to return to the sea because they were out of season. The gag groupers were heartbreaking to me, because they are some of the best eating fish in the world. Alas, for that reason their season is short. Others, like the sharks, we never even brought in the boat because they’re either protected or we just didn’t feel like killing them.

But the experience of catching these fish never gets old. Triggerfish are tricksters, able to nip your bait away before you know it, leaving you unaware you’re “fishing on credit” with baitless hooks. Beeliners are perfect kid-friendly fish, plentiful and easy to catch, and pretty, too.

Grouper are all bite and no fight: Ferocious strikes that require very quick reflexes and muscle to crank that reel the instant they strike so you can yank them out of the rocks they live in. Do that, and a few reels later you got him. Fail, and, well, you lost. He “reefs” you, rubbing the line against the limestone or whatever he’s hiding in until it snaps.

Snapper are bulldogs, striking hot and shaking their heads the whole way up. Jacks, like that rudderfish, are runners, peeling off line in any direction – including directly at you. King mackerel can leap clean out of the sea, twisting and shaking like a tarpon or marlin.

And the sharks. Oh God, the sharks. So, so many in the Gulf. If you hook a shark clean, it’s a hammer blow of a strike, a few powerful head shakes, then a deliberate, willful run. But sharks can be bullied. Beat him and he gives up. The trick is being able to beat him in those first few minutes. Not easy when it’s a 150-pound bronze whaler.

More often, though, you catch something you want, like a grouper, get him out of the rocks (yay!) and start reeling him up, when whomp! Your line loads up triple in weight and all of a sudden you can barely reel it. Yeah, that’s Mr. Shark. He just ate your grouper and is waiting patiently for your line to break, which it almost always does. (Sad trombone.)

That’s called getting “sharked,” and it’s becoming increasingly common in the Gulf. Joe said our trip wasn’t even that bad. “Sometimes they eat every fish. You just have to leave at that point.”

If you’ve never fought groupers and large red snappers and sharks all day, you have no idea how physically demanding it is. These are all strong fish heavier than 10 pounds each – sometimes a lot heavier – that live down deep and pull hard. No matter who you are, you’ll feel it in your lower back, your wrists, your forearms, and after a day of this, under the armpit you tuck your rod into. It’s my left one that’s bruised as I write this.

Catching pelagic fish on the troll, like the king mackerel I caught, is straight up exhausting. Even if the fish isn’t huge – mine was nice, not anything special – you are 1) hauling in at least 2 pounds of lead that’s attached to the lure; 2) a fish usually with it’s mouth open, which is like pulling in a backwards umbrella through the ocean; and, most importantly, 3) all this against the boat, which is kept in gear and moving to keep tension on the fish, because the strike on a lure traveling at 10 knots will often tear a gap in a fish’s mouth, which means it can spit the hook if you lose tension on it for a second.

I wear a runner’s watch, and after that fight with the king mack I checked it, because I was huffing. I’d topped out at 154 beats per minute during that fight, which is basically where my heart is when I am running a race. It was up at a baseline of 110 beats a minute the whole time we were into the grouper and sharks. Fish cardio!

That mackerel capped my day. I used to catch them off Long Island and New Jersey, where they’re called “smoker kings” because they are excellent smoked. I remember them being strong-tasting and a bit soft, like bluefish. Our bleeding, bonking, icing and then ike jime transformed the usually dark flesh into something far firmer and whiter. Joe, who has seen hundreds of king mackerel, said he’s never seen anything like it. I can’t wait to eat this fish.

My first king mackerel in almost 30 years!

What’s more? The last king mack I caught was probably in about 1996, which is why I am so happy in the picture. It was like a reunion with an old friend.

The sheer number of different delicacies from one day of fishing has me feeling like a kid on Christmas Eve. Grouper throats (collars), rudderfish sashimi and aguachile. Seared beeliner and mangrove snapper with the skin on. Simple fried beeliner with salsa. Grouper with hearts of palm salad. Ceviche, fish tacos, and oh that mackerel! Smoked, seared, grilled and definitely in a Baja-style smoked fish taco. Nothing like it. My fingers are dancing typing this and my mind is whirling with ideas.

It all boils down to surprise, diversity, a healthy dose of physical strain, enjoying a skill I’ve developed over decades (bottom fishing), and a whole lotta straight-up, full-throated joy in serving the fruits of this labor to my friends.

I needed this day. I bet you need one like it, too. But maybe it’s not fishing. So what’s your jam? What does this for you?