It’s just past 4 a.m. and very dark along the murky Indian River on Florida’s mid-Atlantic coast. The thick, humid air is cool and pleasant. Matt Bagley, our fishing guide, eases his 18-foot skiff toward a well-lighted dock. The only sound is the low murmur of his two electric trolling motors.
This is our third dock of the night. It’s behind the home of a local doctor. Matt calls this place “Valhalla” because it’s his favorite hot spot for snook, one of Florida’s best game fish.
Standing barefoot on the bow of the skiff, I cast about 50 feet to a group of dark spots under the dock lights just inches below the water’s surface. The spots are snook. My fly, which imitates a small minnow, bounces off the dock, and drops under a child’s water slide.
“Strip! Strip!” Matt whispers urgently. I make small, sharp jerks on my line. My aim is to drag the fly near the edge of the light but not directly in it. I don’t want the snook to get too good of a look at the fly, but rather strike it instinctively.
Bingo! There’s a strong tug on my line. A snook thrashes in the water. “Fish on,” Matt says calmly. He maneuvers the skiff to prevent the snook from wrapping my line around a dock piling and breaking it – one of the challenges, I’ve learned, of nighttime snook fishing or snookin’.
Nighttime snook anglers are a fishing subculture. Getting up in the middle of the night in Florida – like ice fishing up North – to fish for snook is not for everyone.
Nighttime snookin’ exists because of an unofficial partnership between anglers and waterfront
homeowners who install dock lights that shine on the water, attracting small bait fish and shrimp, which, in turn, attract snook.
Matt, who guides for the Southern Anglers shop in Stuart, says snook, like tarpon, their better-known Florida neighbors, are nocturnal hunters. Snook are structure-oriented. They like docks, bridges and mangrove thickets.
Snook are also one of the tastiest fish around. Most snook caught by anglers weigh 6 to 8 pounds. The Florida record is 44 pounds.
My old friend, Barry Hall, who lives in Hobe Sound, Fla., introduced me to nighttime flyfishing for snook on the Indian River, which is a fascinating place night or day.
The Indian River stretches for 156 miles through six counties on Florida’s Atlantic coast, roughly from Daytona Beach to Stuart. The river’s width ranges from a half-mile to 5 miles, and it has an average depth of only 3 feet. And it’s not really a river but an estuary, where fresh water and saltwater mix.
Estuaries are one of nature’s most productive ecosystems. The Indian River is home to 4,300 species of fish, animals and plants, more than any other estuary in the U.S.
More than one-third of the entire U.S. population of manatees lives in the Indian River. The river’s mangroves and sea grass create an important protective nursery for juvenile fish. The mangroves are also home to many kinds of birds including, egrets, herons, ospreys, eagles and spoonbills, as well as sea turtles and dolphins.
In 1903 President Theodore Roosevelt named the river’s Pelican Island near Vero Beach the nation’s first wildlife refuge. Today the Indian River Lagoon National Estuary Program, a Melbourne-based program of the state of Florida and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, manages far-reaching efforts to protect the river’s ecosystem.
The Indian River estuary was formed hundreds of thousands of years ago when long sand bars began to separate the river’s waters from the Atlantic Ocean. Some experts believe the river’s mangroves originally floated over from Africa. Today six inlets connect the river to the ocean. The sand bars are heavily populated barrier islands with tourism and recreation destinations, including the Kennedy Space Center.
We left the doctor’s dock as the predawn sky turned from black to pink. Matt ran us out the St. Lucie inlet into the calm, turquoise Atlantic to hunt crevelle jack, a popular ocean-going game fish. Jacks travel in pods and feed on schools of bait fish. This churns up the water, and you find jacks by looking for agitated or “nervous” water, as Matt calls it.
A quarter-mile offshore we found a pod and followed it up and down Hutchinson Island until we got close enough to cast. Barry hooked a jack but lost it. Then a shark arrived on the scene. This quickly changed the jacks’ priority from eating to not being eaten.
Out-fished by the shark, we headed back into the river. It was light now, and Matt poled his boat along a line of mangroves. We threw long, double haul casts to snook Matt spotted from up on his poling platform on the stern.
The morning sun was getting higher, and we headed for home, passing other anglers on their way out. The night shift was over, and day shift was about to begin.
Robert Wurmstedt is a freelance writer who lives in Denver.
If you go
We released the snook we caught. Snook are protected by Florida fishing regulations. Snook cannot be kept from June through August and from Dec. 15 to Jan. 31. These are ideal times for catch-and-release anglers because there is less competition from anglers who keep the snook.
Our guide, Matt Bagley, works out of Southern Angler, a fly fishing shop in Stuart, 772-223-1300, www.southernangler.com. His half-day fee is $250 for up to two anglers. Matt has a special guide license that includes licenses for his clients. We started fishing at 4 a.m.
A good online source of information on Florida snook fishing is www.snookangler.com. For information on the Indian River and its environment, contact the Indian River Lagoon National Estuary Program in Melbourne, 321-984-4950, www.sjrwmd.com and http://sjr.state.fl.us/programs/outreach/irlnep/irlnep.html.
Also, the Environmental Learning Center in Vero Beach, 772-589-5050, http://indian-river.fl.us/elc/restore/lagoon.html. The Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission, 850-488-4676, has a fishing website at www.fishingcapital.com.
