74 JANUARY 2018“Who would have thought I’d catch the
biggest snook of my life while fishing in
my own backyard?” Regina Gallant, an
avid snook angler, posed that rhetorical
question the day after she managed
that feat.
The evening before, as the sun
dipped behind Fort Lauderdale’s
soaring high-rise skyline, both Gallant
and I had hooked good snook. While
she kept hers clear of the nearby pilings,
the monster I had on wove my braided
line strategically through the structure
and broke off. But we released Gallant’s
49-inch trophy. As we watched that
giant fish sweep water with its tail and
fade into the amber light of the urban
nightscape, Gallant referenced our
own twilight zone, explaining, “Well,
here we are, all alone with world-
class snook, fishing in the middle of a
bustling metropolis!”
CURRENT AFFAIRS
After 25 years of chasing trophy snook
in the far corners of the Caribbean, South
America and even Central America, I
can say most anglers would expect such
beasts to be caught along exotic shore-
lines, but not here, in the middle of a
jungle of submerged concrete, right in
downtown Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
I’ve learned better, from many
evenings spent after work fishing
the maze of waterways and canals
that surround the concrete jungle of
Broward County, where I live. While
the scenery does not compare with the
Everglades or Costa Rica, the canals
of Broward County provide more
than a thruway for boat traffic. These
these same color principles when
fishing tight quarters of urban rivers
and canals on my flats boat.BIG LIPS, LITTLE LIPS
Procuring live bait with only a few
hours to spare after work can be a tough
endeavor, or — if you must buy it — a
costly one. Most of us are not captains
who fish day in and day out and consis-
tently know where the fish are. We just
don’t have the time. Trolling plugs is
my solution.
In the spiderweb of rivers and canals
running through Fort Lauderdale and
Miami, mullet are the most common
forage fish for predators like snook.
For that reason, I use plugs that match
the profile of a mullet, ranging from 5
to 9 inches in size. If there are larger
mullet around, I will fish plugs greater
than 10 inches.man-made waters are also home to
giant snook.
Linesiders are structure-oriented,
and you can find them scattered through
many tropical urban river systems, often
prowling close to bridges, docks, jetties
and spillways. Trolling diving plugs
works extremely well to locate these
snook — especially trophies.
While trolling as a snook strategy
hasn’t gained great popularity, the
second-largest snook recorded
by the International Game Fish
Association was actually caught on
a trolled plug. George Beck, of Fort
Lauderdale, caught his 56-inch
57-pound, 12-ounce snook while trolling
a red-and-white Rapala Magnum CD18
at the mouth of Rio Naranjo in Quepos,
Costa Rica. That was enough proof for
me to start keeping a couple of rods and
an assortment of diving plugs in the
boat whenever I went out in search of
massive linesiders.
Miami-based Capt. Bouncer Smith
showed me how to pull plugs in urban
waterways during the 1990s. I can
still recall the early August morning
we were going to head offshore when,
motoring through Government Cut,
Smith said the tide was just right for
snook. He tied on two Rapala Magnum
CD18s, one red-and-white and the
other orange. Our first pass out of
the cut along the north jetty produced
an 11-pound fish. On the second pass,
we landed a 15-pounder, both on the
orange Rapala. After seeing that, I was
hooked like a snook on a diving plug.
“When I troll into the current, I may
not even be moving,” Smith told me,
and his words would prove true several
times in my own fishing exploits.
Smith keeps his center console almost
stationary in the current, just barely
sliding forward as he moves parallel
to the jetty with a feathered touch of
the throttles. “If I give it more juice, the
lures will rise in the water column and
get pulled away from where the fish
are,” he says.
He also taught me to keep color
selections simple. His arsenal consists
of four main color choices: light (red
and white), dark ( black or purple), radi-
cally different (orange or bright pink),
and a few that match the hatch (natural,
silver colors that mimic a mullet). I use