Category: Outdoors

South Florida offshore anglers have their pick of species in May, and many of them put blackfin tuna at the top of their fish wish list. Even though the grouper season opens on May 1, and fried grouper is delicious, those fish can be difficult to catch.

Blackfin tuna, however, are abundant this month. They can be caught with live bait, dead bait, and trolling lures, and they are exceptionally tasty grilled, or pan-seared on the outside and rare on the inside.

Unlike grouper, there is no minimum size limit for blackfins, although most of them range in weight from 10 to 30 pounds. The daily bag limit is two tuna per angler or 10 per boat, whichever is greater. That means two fishermen can keep 10 blackfins and six anglers can keep a total of 12 fish.

The first step in catching blackfins is finding water where they hang out. According to Capt. Skip Dana of Deerfield Beach, purple-blue water is ideal, but tuna can also be caught in green water. More important than the water’s color is the presence of baitfish.

“I tell people to find water that’s alive, where it’s got baits and activity,” Dana said. “If you find that good, alive water, the tuna will find you.”

When he fishes in tournaments, Dana will drift with live baits such as pilchards, sardines, and goggle-eyes on flat lines, which his crew casts out behind the boat, as well as live baits on kite lines, which splash on the surface suspended from a fishing kite.

“When the conditions are right, you want a full spread out,” said Dana, who also has his crew put chunks of sardines in the water to attract the tuna, but not too many chunks.

“I think some guys over-chunk,” said Dana, who uses frozen sardines sold by tackle stores. “Don’t get crazy. You want a slow, steady stream of chunks, but not too much.

“There are so many sharks, you can’t chunk that much, otherwise you’ll have sharks up in the chum, and triggerfish.”

Local anglers lose a lot of blackfins to sharks, often reeling in only the head of a tuna after it’s been chomped. So after hooking a tuna, it’s essential to reel in the hard-fighting fish as quickly as possible.

Capt. Bouncer Smith said anglers can also chunk for tuna using a 25-pound flat of herring or squid. “You can cut it up in advance or cut it as you chunk it,” he said.

Smith noted that even when your chunking attracts tuna behind your boat, the fish won’t always eat a bait drifted back on a hook. When that happens, anglers need to go lighter and smaller with their tackle. So if you usually fish with 30-pound leaders and size 5/0 circle hooks, you might want to downsize to 20-pound leaders with a 2/0 or 1/0 hook.

Dana said that most anglers would do fine using two spinning rods with 3/0 to 5/0 hooks. Using dead or live baits, he’d put one on the surface and the other down with a 1-ounce sinker and drift in 150-220 feet.

Be aware that multiple hookups can occur when the tuna are chummed up and in a feeding frenzy. That can result in crossed lines, so it’s important for anglers to pay attention to where their fish are headed so they can go over or under a fellow angler’s fishing line.

The time of day also can be a factor in tuna fishing success.

As Capt. Mario Coté of Hollywood pointed out, blackfin tuna have big eyes that allow them to take a careful look at a bait. He uses 20-pound conventional outfits with 15-foot leaders of 40-pound fluorocarbon, which is invisible in the water. He also likes to fish for tuna early in the morning, late in the afternoon, and on cloudy days, because that’s when the sunlight is less intense.

“If you were in the water on a sunny day and you had to look up to see something, it wouldn’t be easy,” Coté explained.

Coté fishes with live pilchards on two flat lines and on two weighted lines, one down about 50 feet and the other close to the bottom. He hooks the pilchards through the nose, although other anglers hook the baits toward the tail so the pilchards swim down.

Now is also a great time to catch a tuna from a kayak. Joe Hector of the Extreme Kayak Fishing tournament series uses live bait and jigs for blackfins. His live-bait outfit is straight 30-pound monofilament with a 2/0 to 3/0 hook on a medium-heavy spinning rod. “I know the 2/0 hook is small, but I’ve had way more tuna bites on a 2/0,” said Hector, of Deerfield Beach.

“They’re definitely deep as well, so I would definitely recommend taking a jigging rod and hitting the deeper wrecks and jigging your butt off,” added Hector, who uses a vertical jig, a long, heavy piece of metal with one or two hooks attached to it. “Start at 250 feet if you’re drifting in and 80 if you’re drifting out.”

No matter how you catch a blackfin tuna, and whether you marinate it in soy sauce or teriyaki sauce or sprinkle it with olive oil, salt, and pepper before grilling or searing it, you’ll forget all about fishing for grouper once you taste it.

What a month ahead for stargazers! The month of May offers a little bit of everything for us astronomy enthusiasts. There’s a meteor shower early in the month, a total lunar eclipse mid-month, and a parade of planets in the morning skies near the end of the month. Pretty cool!

This month’s challenge for beginners: It’s a great time of the year to follow an old saying and “arc to Arcturus.” Arcturus is the fourth brightest star in the entire night sky and has a beautiful orangish color (due to its relatively “cool” temperature).

First, find the Big Dipper by looking north. Then, follow the arc of its handle but extend the arc until you curve to Arcturus. If you continue the arc, you can then “speed on to Spica,” which is a brilliant-white star (due to its relatively hot temperature) located in Virgo.

This month’s astrophotography challenge: Take your pick — you can stay up late for the eclipse or wake up early for the planets. Either offers the opportunity for beautiful pictures with or without a telescope. Good luck!

Sky highlights this month:

• May 6. Eta Aquarids Meteor Shower. This is a reliable meteor shower of a medium rate. This year it will be at its best due to moonlight not being a factor (a waxing crescent that evening, which will set early). For best results, view from a very dark location after midnight.
• May 15–16. Total Lunar Eclipse. The full eclipse begins at 11:29 p.m. local time. Look for the Moon’s slight reddish hue as sunlight passing through Earth’s atmosphere gets scattered onto it. The eclipse maximum occurs at 12:11 a.m. The full eclipse ends by 12:54 a.m.
• May 15–16. Full Moon. Of course, it’s also a Full Moon, because you can only have a lunar eclipse during a Full Moon. This one was nicknamed the “Flower Moon” by some ancient Native American tribes for the time of year when, obviously, many flowers are in bloom.
• May 22–29. Conjunction Week! OK, that’s not an official title — just one I made up — but I think it’s apropos. In the morning skies of late May, we will be treated to a parade of all the naked-eye planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn) and a crescent Moon (some nights). It should be magnificent and worth setting the alarm clock for a pre-dawn walk.
• May 30. New Moon. This is the best time of the month to venture out to a dark area and view/photograph deep-sky objects (nebulas, star clusters, galaxies, etc.). Please consider joining the South Florida Amateur Astronomers Association for information on the best places for sky-watching (www.sfaaa.com).

It’s a terrific month for astrophotography. If you post any cool pics, be sure to tag the Parklander® and me on Instagram (@theparklander and @jeterk1971)— We’d love to see your work!

When I first moved to Florida back in 2016, I was a New York transplant — a city girl through and through. My idea of the Everglades was a humid, mosquito-infested swamp, and airboat rides an overpriced tourist trap that posed little interest. Today, I’m an Everglades convert happy to admit that I was dead wrong. The Everglades is a majestic place unique from everything else Florida has to offer.

My conversion happened during my very first airboat ride. Just as Aladdin introduced Jasmine to a whole new world in “Aladdin,” I was fortunate enough to meet a man who did the same for me — he took me on a magic airboat ride through the Everglades at night, introducing me to a whole new world that has become one of my favorite places.

The diverse “River of Grass” is home to hundreds of different species of plants, birds, snakes, turtles, fish, frogs, and the American alligator. Gliding across the top of the clear, shallow water, airboats are the perfect way to pass through this beautiful terrain. No matter what time of day you venture out, you’re sure to see something different.

Reaching speeds upward of 60 miles per hour, airboats are equal parts sightseeing and thrill rides that can easily turn a hot summer day into a cool, enjoyable run. Under the morning/midday sun, you’ll have a crystal-clear view of the scenic sawgrass marshes and floating hydrilla, the greens dynamic against bright blue skies. Stare below the water’s deceptively clear surface and you’ll likely see garfish, bass, bluegill, and a number of other fish.

Cruising across the Everglades at sunset, you’re bound to see ibises, anhingas, egrets, and purple gallinules taking flight, soaring against the deep pink and orange sky. Considered one of the top 10 birding locations in the world, the Everglades is home to more than 360 different bird species. Be wary though — the transition to sundown is when you are likely to encounter the most mosquitoes.

Once the sun goes down, the Everglades begins to come alive, which is why nighttime tours offer the best wildlife viewing. Gliding slowly down shallow passageways between tall grasses, you’ll see plenty of alligators, their eyes glowing red from the airboat lights. Airboats can quickly pull up right alongside gators, giving you the ultimate safe, closer encounter. Once the water moves, these creatures dive beneath the surface, hiding under floating mud — one of the places they store a kill they cannot finish eating in one sitting.

One of the most enchanting parts of a nighttime experience is to shut off the loud engine and take a few moments to immerse yourself in your surroundings. Above you will be a stunning night sky laden with stars. Close your eyes and you’ll hear the low growling of gators and the trilling of frogs, a wild symphony that offers a peaceful escape from the day-to-day grind.

Public Airboat Tours

There are two outlets near Parkland that offer public airboat tours:

• Loxahatchee Everglades Airboat Tours and Rides, 15490 Loxahatchee Road, Parkland. It offers a “Great Blue” 50-minute, guided airboat tour that costs $80 per adult and $45 for children between the ages of 3 and 12. Tours operate Monday to Saturday between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. For more information, visit www.evergladesairboattours.com.
• Everglades Airboat Tours at Everglades Holiday Park, 21940 Griffin Road, Fort Lauderdale. It offers daily one-hour tours starting at 9 a.m., with the last boat leaving at 4 p.m. Tickets cost $35.99 for adults 12 and older and $23 for children between the ages of 3 and 11. Everglades Holiday Park also offers animal encounters and gator shows run by the Gator Boys, stars of the “Animal Planet” reality TV series of the same name.

Private Airboat Tours

While they may be a bit pricier, private airboat tours offer a more intimate experience, along with the ability to see the Everglades at different times of the day, when the sun is no longer bearing down on you.

Everglades Airboat Excursions offers private two-hour sunset tours, which cost $425 for up to four people, and private two-hour night excursions, which cost $500 for up to four people. Groups larger than four can be accommodated for an additional $50 per person. All tours depart from the boat ramp at Francis S. Taylor Wildlife Management Area in Weston on Highway 27. For more information, visit www.evergladesairboatexcursions.com.

What to Bring/Wear

If you’re heading out on a daytime tour, you’ll want to bring water, sunscreen, a hat, sunglasses, and bug repellant. You may also want a cell phone neck holder if you’re planning on taking pictures with your phone. Most airboats do not have sides, meaning that, if dropped, your phone will likely slide off the deck and into the water (unfortunately speaking from experience on that one!).

If you’re embarking on a nighttime trip, make sure to check the weather forecast. The temperature tends to feel about 10 degrees cooler in the Everglades, with the wind from the propeller making it even chillier.

The last day of Florida’s lobster season was March 31, and the seasons for grouper and hogfish don’t open until May 1, so what’s an underwater hunter to do in April?

Spearfishing expert Jim “Chiefy” Mathie sets his sights on a great-tasting exotic fish.

“There’s really not a lot of species to go after because of the lack of opportunity for lobster, hogfish, and grouper,” said Mathie, a retired Deerfield Beach fire chief. “So we target lionfish.”

Native to the South Pacific Ocean, lionfish were first discovered off South Florida in the mid-1980s. The belief is that the lionfish were someone’s pets and when the fish outgrew their aquarium, the owner dumped them in the ocean. From there, the invasive lionfish have spread throughout the Caribbean, into the Gulf of Mexico, down to South America, and up the Atlantic coast to North Carolina.

The fish have no natural predators in those waters, which means bigger reef fish such as grouper don’t realize they can eat them. Lionfish feast on tiny grouper, snapper, shellfish, and other native species. Left unchecked, lionfish can take over a reef. That’s where spear-fishers come in.

Although lionfish are here to stay — researchers in submarines have documented lionfish in 1,000 feet of water off South Florida — divers with pole spears and spearguns do their part by reducing the lionfish population. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission is doing its part to combat the lionfish invasion by having no size or bag limits and no closed season. The agency has an informative web page at myfwc.com/fishing/saltwater/recreational/lionfish.

Mathie, who said he and his dive buddies had “an outstanding lobster season” diving primarily in 35 to 45 feet of water, noted that spear-fishers keep lionfish populations under control on coral reefs in those depths.

“We’ve seen a few lionfish, but in this location we do a very good job of harvesting lionfish in the shallow waters, just because it gets a lot of pressure from the divers. That’s actually a good thing because we’re kind of keeping them in check shallow,” said Mathie, author of the lobstering and spearfishing books “Catching the BUG” and “Catching the Spear-it!” that are available at local dive shops and online.

Deeper reefs that don’t receive that much pressure tend to have more and bigger lionfish, so that’s where Mathie and his Chiefy crew hunt.

“We change our tactics in April to head out into roughly the 80- to 100-foot depth. We call that the third reef or the east side of the third reef,” Mathie said. “It also gives us an opportunity to check out what’s going on out there, because lionfish and lobster like the same terrain. So those are areas that, when the season allows us, we can go back to for lobster. So it’s kind of a mixed bag for us from that standpoint. While you can’t take them, you can certainly explore and find some new locations.”

Lionfish are an ideal species for divers new to spearfishing because, as Mathie noted, they don’t swim around a lot, so they’re easy to shoot, especially compared with grouper and hogfish, which are the ultimate species for the majority of underwater hunters.

Given their small size — the state-record lionfish speared in the Atlantic Ocean was 18.78 inches off of Islamorada, and an 18.7-inch, 3.77-pounder shot last year off of Destin is the Gulf of Mexico state record — lionfish don’t require the use of big spearguns. Mathie and his crew use 3- to 4-foot, hand-held pole spears with three- or five-prong tips, which prevent a fish from spinning after it is speared.

Lionfish have 18 venomous spines, 13 on the top and five on the bottom, so care must be taken when handling them. Getting stung by a spine can cause intense pain. The pectoral fins, which are not venomous, give the fish its name because when they’re fanned out in the water, they look like a lion’s mane.

“Typically, after you spear them, you treat them like a bass. You put your thumb in their mouth and you hold them; that way you’re pretty much away from their spines,” Mathie said. “What we like to do is use a pair of paramedic (or trauma) shears to trim up those venomous spines. But there is an element of danger when you’re trimming them up under the water with shears.”

Mathie said a safer alternative is to use a Zookeeper, “a plastic tube with a one-way funnel. You keep the lionfish on the spear and stick the fish in there without having to touch it at all, pull the spear back out, and the lionfish stays in that tube.”

The hard-sided Zookeeper, which is manufactured in Sunrise, also keeps the spines from accidentally touching your body as you swim. They are sold online and at local dive stores.

This time of year, Mathie and his friends try to fill their Zookeepers, put the fish in a cooler when they get back in the boat, and fillet them at the dock.

“They’re excellent eating,” Mathie said. “They have a pure white fillet, no bloodline, a flaky texture, and almost a sweet taste. You can do anything with them. You can make ceviche or sear them in olive oil with salt and pepper and eat it right out of the pan, it’s that good.”

And that alone is a good enough reason to keep diving this month instead of waiting until May.

The grouper season in South Florida closes for four months on January 1, so time is running short to catch one of the hard-fighting, great-tasting fish.

The good news is that now is the best time of the year to catch grouper according to the legendary Capt. Bouncer Smith, who retired after 54 years of running fishing charters in Miami Beach.

Live-baiting around coral reefs and wrecks is the most popular way to catch grouper. Boaters can either anchor up-current or drift or troll with their baits.

“Probably the most consistently productive bait that is readily available is pinfish,” Smith says, noting they can be caught on hook and line or in a pinfish trap. “With that being said, if you caught live ballyhoo and slow-trolled them in 15 to 50 feet of water, wherever you find a reef edge, they’re very, very effective.”

But, adds Smith, there’s an even better live bait for grouper — a baby bonito of 1-3 pounds.

They can be caught trolling a homemade, Sabiki-like rig consisting of some small spoons and bonefish jigs with a small trolling lead in front of them. Meanwhile, Smith says, your grouper fishing rod is already rigged with a 9/0 triple-strength circle hook and a 120-pound leader about 20 feet long, tied to a three-way swivel with a 1- to 3-pound weight attached to a short piece of monofilament tied to the bottom of the swivel. His preferred mainline is 80- or 100-pound monofilament because the line stretches without breaking when you apply maximum pressure on a grouper to prevent it from heading back into a reef or wreck.

“You’re trolling those little lures around all the wrecks out to 200 feet, and at some point, you’ll catch baby bonitos, which are very prolific in the fall,” Smith says. “As soon as you catch a baby bonito, you hook it through the upper lip and you drop it down on the upstream side of the wreck. And you better have all the drag you can afford.

“That live bonito is the No. 1 black grouper food you can drop down. It’s a great bait anytime, but the little bonitos are very common in the fall and the black groupers get common in the fall.”

Another tried but true, but seldom used tactic that works for grouper is to troll dead baits along coral reefs, which was perfected more than 50 years ago by Capt. Buddy Carey of the famed Pier 5 charter fleet in Miami. Smith says the technique is still effective and not that difficult to master.

“The grouper see something going by that looks like it might be edible and they’re out to get it,” Smith says. “They come charging up off the reef.”

Smith trolls skirted ballyhoo, using a planer to get the bait near the bottom where the grouper hang out. A planer is a small, rectangular, weighted piece of metal that is attached to the mainline of a fishing outfit at one end and to a long leader at the other end.

When it is deployed, the planer, which comes in different sizes that travel at different depths, glides down through the water behind the boat. Depending on the size of the planer and how much fishing line is put out, the bait can be presented at a depth that will attract the attention of any fish in that zone.

Smith rigs the ballyhoo on a 7/0 triple-strength 3417 Mustad J hook at the end of a 100-foot length of 100-pound monofilament leader attached to the planer. He uses dual-speed Penn International reels, size 30 or larger. In low gear, the reel can pull a grouper away from a structure. Then, the high gear setting enables an angler to get the fish quickly to the boat, before a shark can bite it.

“The grouper on occasion will come up and hit the ballyhoo on top of the water, but basically you want the bait about 10 feet off the bottom,” Smith says. “If it’s real close to the bottom, they’ve got the advantage of getting back into the bottom. And if it’s too high, then a lot of them will say, ‘Oh, that one’s too far away.’ But generally speaking, they come charging up to get that morsel going by.”

Smith says that anglers can learn how to precisely troll for groupers by practicing with a planer over a sandy bottom. When the bait starts hitting the sand, mark the fishing line and record the RPMs of the engines. The next time you troll, run at the same speed and let out the same amount of line, and you’ll know how far down your bait is running.

The grouper season closure, which runs through April 30 in Atlantic waters, was implemented in 2010 to allow the populations of black, gag, and red grouper to increase in number and in size, as well as to protect the fish during their spawning seasons.

The minimum size limit for black and gag grouper is 24 inches and reds must be 20 inches. Anglers can keep a total of three grouper per day, but only one can be a black or a gag. The other two, or all three, can be red grouper.

Follow Capt. Bouncer’s advice and you’ll be able to enjoy several delicious meals of fresh grouper for the holiday season. Otherwise, you’ll have to wait until May.