Puttin'em Back

On Friday night, one of the outlaw gang that put out the cobia FADs last weekend, as described in my previous posting, was captured. That sucker was tortured for hours, forced to drink rum and diet coke and eat smoked tuna dip until he cracked and gave up the coordinates of the FADs. With this information in hand, the plan was to do a FAD check on Saturday aboard the Mitchells' (Drew and Bart) 45 Cabo Express, Blue Heaven. But first, there was choring to be done, which was just as well as there was a dense fog Saturday morning that would last most of the day. The chore du jour was dropping the new Lee triple spreader outriggers on the Mitchells' (Pete and Melanie) 54 Hatteras, Anonymous, and waxing them and stringing them with outrigger lines, a task accomplished in relatively short order by a few actual workers seconded by many hangers on and critics.

After lunch, Blue Heaven slipped out through the lingering fog crewed by Captain Drew, assisted by Pete, who was like a cat on a screen door in the role of Radar Watcher and Collision Preventer, with the Freemanator, Eric Songer (the Freemanator's father), and Papa working in the cockpit under the lash of Bart, mate extraordinaire.

Both Fads were where they were supposed to be and, as seen deep in the water from the tower, floating pretty much as intended. But, after only a week, there was as yet no bait to speak of on either FAD and, consequently, no cobia. Disappointed, but determined not to waste the remainder of the day day or the fuel, we decided to engage in a little catch and release red snapper fishing at a spot the location of which could only be pried out of me with copious amounts of rum and diet coke and smoked tuna dip.

Of course, red snapper is closed, and everything we caught was released to live to fight (or breed) another day, save one legal scamp that made the ride home and an unfortunate red snapper gobbled up by a porpoise after release. The snapper were big, and they were testy, so a good time was had by all hands. If a picture is indeed worth a thousand words, then here are seven thousand words.

That's Just Wrong!

Fish attracting devices (FADs) that are anchored to the bottom and float beneath the surface of the water are illegal, probably because they are made of nondegradable materials and pose a hazard to navigation if they break loose and drift about. For the unitiated among you, a typical FAD is a 5x8 plastic tarpaulin zip tied to a PVC frame. One end of the frame has a polypropelene bridle tied to the corners. A polypropelene anchor line is tied to the center of the bridle and to a makeshift anchor weighing around 75 pounds. Crab trap buoys are attached to the corners where the bridle is tied to prevent the whole contraption from sinking to the bottom, and a couple of small sections of a flotation noodle are zip tied to the other end of the frame to make it float as well. The anchor line is only long enough to allow the FAD to float about 15 feet below the surface. The intended effect of this Rube Goldberg engineering is a plastic door floating horizontally beneath the surface, on which grows flora and fauna, which attracts small bait, which attracts larger bait, which attracts weary, migrating cobia, who take up residence in the shade of the FAD and leisurely avail themselves of the amazing and unexpected bait buffet, waiting in ignorance for the FAD outlaws to come and harvest them. As I said, FADs are illegal, so I and my kith and kin would never stoop to engage in such nefarious activity. Well, maybe not nefarious. After all, FADs are not malum in se like murder or incest; they are malum prohibitum like jaywalking or shooting dove at a water hole at dusk. Which I suppose was the exculpatory rationale of the outlaw gang I heard about on Saturday. I was told that a scurvy lot of scofflaws departed from Destin Harbor Saturday morning to deploy two FADs to the west in 60 feet of water about five nautical miles apart. They were led by two ruffians who shall go unnamed, and who, like Rooster Cogburn, are known on the docks and in the dives of the northeastern Gulf coast to be ruthless men, double tough; fear don't enter into their thinking. Actually, it is also widely known that these two don't do much thinking at all, as illustrated by the fact that I was told they forgot the crab trap buoys, an inexplicable omission that bid fair to bring their entire criminal enterprise to naught. But a child's life jacket and a flotation cushion were pressed into service, and these improvisations worked well enough, as both FADs deployed as intended. Later, the smug members of the gang were seen lolling about East Pass marina in the sun or cavorting in a nearby swimming pool like porpoises as, over the horizon, small crustaceans began to affix themselves to the underside of the FADs, beginning the circle of life that will result, the malefactors hope, in the death of a number of delicious cobia. Bad doings all around.