Aboard the Fanta-Sea

At 6:00 A. M., all of us were in the Marina Diner, but unknown to one another. I hunkered down at the counter over my blueberry pancakes and sausages, wondering which of the other diners would turn up at the boat, the Fanta-Sea.

We converged at the boat at 6:45 and introduced ourselves. Bill was a retiree from Michigan who’d driven down to Florida with his wife in their camper. Roy was a cattle rancher from South Dakota who was accompanying his wife, an engineer, on a business trip. Jason was a young father from Chicago, out for a day on his own while his wife took the kids to Busch Gardens. Bill and Jason were avid freshwater fishermen who had brought their own rods and reels, expensive rigs that were useless for the type of reef-fishing that we would be doing.

Most charter boats have a captain and a mate, but the Fanta-Sea was run by two guys who alternated in those roles. Bob was taciturn and would turn out to be a master at luring a grouper onto a five-ought hook; Tom was garrulous and thought himself witty, a misconception of which I would gradually disabuse him during the course of the day.

“We’re both captains,” Tom said, “so we can both tell y’all what to do.”

“Glad to hear that,” I answered. “Now we won’t have to worry about tipping the mate.” Roy thought that was about the funniest thing he’d ever heard. But then, Roy was from South Dakota.

Our two captains took us out 27 miles to the reefs before we began to fish. The day was foggy, and I did not see the spectacular sunrise I has seen on previous trips. During the ride out, details of our lives began to emerge. Bill had been a tunnel rat in Viet Nam. Back in the States, his weight had gradually ballooned to 360 pounds, a condition he blamed on PTS. He’d recently had his stomach stapled, and his weight was down to 230. Roy raised Black Angus cattle and lived 20 miles from his nearest neighbor. Jason was so quiet that we thought he might be getting seasick until he opened his cooler and downed the first of what would turn out to be seven or eight Coronas. He had even brought lime wedges.

We tried a number of spots along the reefs. Bait was cut sardines and chunks of squid. Jason was the first to hook up with a big fish, but he was slightly built and unable to get the fish “on the elevator” before it found some underwater structure and got off. We missed fish by instinctively setting the hook; grouper have soft mouths, and the hook tears out. Captain Tom jeered each of these misses with some version of “Ha! You got burned!”

Captain Bob demonstrated by hooking a fish and cranking furiously on the reel. He brought a 25” black grouper on board, three inches above minimum size for a keeper. I caught a series of red grouper, all a couple of inches short of the 20 inch minimum for reds. We all caught a number of gray snapper, or grunts, but by mid-afternoon I still didn’t have my keeper, and I had promised a grouper dinner to a lady friend who had flown down to spend a few days.

We’d had sandwiches and beer while moving to a new spot, and when the bell went off, I went to the bottom quickly. Within a few seconds I felt a chomp, waited a beat, and began to reel like--well, like Bob. He knew I had a good fish on, and told me to keep ’im comin’. We were in eighty feet of water, but soon the form of a large black grouper appeared just below the surface. Bob hoisted it aboard, and I had my keeper.

Back at the marina, a small crowd of tourists gathered as Bob laid out our catch. Our total of six legal grouper was the second best at the marina for the day. As Bob filleted the catch, he got a lot of unwanted attention from egrets and pelicans that landed on the cutting box and nearby pilings and attempted to snatch offal and skins. It’s illegal to feed these birds but in their search for easy meals they have become as aggressive as robber gulls. As Bob walked over to the dumpster with the fish guts, a great blue heron stood on the cover, watching the proceeding like a dour undertaker in a blue serge suit.

Bill’s wife had come down to meet the boat. It was her birthday, and Bill had promised her a fish. I had my filets in a plastic bag, and I told her how Crabby Bill’s Restaurant nearby would cook them up with sides for a small price.

“Oh, Bill," she gushed, "can we go?”

“We don’t need no restaurant,” he replied, shooting me a dirty look. “I got the Weber Smoky Joe right in the back of the truck.”

“Please, Bill? It’s my birthday.”

I tipped the captains and left the marina without hearing the denouement of that little drama. Back at the Palm Pavilion, I left the filets in the refrigerator and joined my guest on the beach.

Two hours later, we were at Crabby Bill's, feasting on blackened, fresh-caught grouper, salad, and baked potato, washed down with rum-runners. We had sushi, prime rib, and lobster tails for our other vacation dinners, but we agreed that the grouper somehow topped them all.