Fishing in Florida

English 102

Feb 20, 2013

A Good Night of Fishing

I have always loved the water since I was very young, so growing up in Florida just seemed natural. When we first moved there, the ocean seemed kind of intimidating, wondering about the sharks and other creatures of the deep that your imagination sometimes makes larger than life. I have always liked to fish, so when the offer to work on a crab and mullet boat came up, I accepted it immediately. It was hard work for little pay and the hours were quite grueling, but after awhile, I started to notice all kinds of things in the wildlife that I hadn't known or seen before.

We always fished off the coastline or in the back bays depending on the season. The first winter of cold fronts drove schools of mullet close to the shoreline. Mullet are a vegetarian fish and quite tasty when smoked of fried – a southern favorite! The people that I worked for had a smoker and all the tourists year after year would come there to purchase and eat the fresh smoked mullet and enjoy the succulent taste of fresh crabs.

When we would go out on the water fishing, we could see the water churning with schools of mullet sometimes as large as a thousand fish. They would swim in a perfect circle from the surface and down to about thirty feet deep, perfectly synchronized except for the occasional jumper trying to remove annoying pests that would sometimes hitch a ride. We would drop nets and turn the boat in a circle and and bring in 50-100 fish at a time. It was very taxing on the body to bring in the nets and get the fish out of the nets, but it was fun and quite an experience that you only get from being out there and doing it.

One night the mullet were more active than usual and there was also a different species of fish that I had never seen before in the area. Every once in awhile I would catch a glimpse of the fish but I couldn't figure out what they were. As the night went on, the thumps on the side of the boat were...