Mangrove snapper are the only fish in the Florida Keys with a legal education. A yellowtail will forgive you a heavy leader. A grouper will forgive you almost anything. A mangrove snapper in twelve feet of water on a flat calm evening will swim up to your bait, look at the knot, look at the leader, look at you, and go tell the others. They are not spooky exactly. They are unimpressed, which is worse.
The patch reefs off Marathon are where this drama gets staged every August, because the full moon has the snapper stacked up and spawning and hungry and paranoid all at once, and the whole affair is conducted in water so clear that you can watch every mistake you make in real time. The method is simple to describe and maddening to execute. You anchor up-current of a coral head, hang a block of frozen chum off the transom, and wait for the slick to do its work. Within twenty minutes you have a hundred fish behind the boat. Within twenty-five you have a hundred fish behind the boat that have all seen your hook.
So it becomes an equipment argument you have with yourself. You drop to twenty pound leader and they still will not eat, so you go to fifteen, then twelve, then you tie on a hook so small it looks like a punctuation mark and bury it inside a chunk of ballyhoo until nothing metal shows anywhere. Then you free-line it back into the slick with no weight at all and let it drift exactly like the free chum is drifting, which is the whole trick, and which sounds easy until the current does something unhelpful and your bait rises three feet above every other piece of food in the ocean.
We fished two nights out of Marathon with a captain who has run the same twenty-two footer over these reefs for going on thirty years and who talks about snapper the way other men talk about a difficult uncle. He does not chum heavily. He does not anchor twice. He turns the lights off, which is the part nobody expects, and says the fish get honest in the dark. He is right, and it is a little insulting how right he is. Nothing at all happened for the first hour and a half of daylight. Fifteen minutes after the sun quit, a rod bent over so hard the reel handle hit somebody in the wrist.
They fight like a fish twice their size and they fight in exactly one direction, which is straight down into the coral, and if you give them two seconds of slack you will be reeling up a leader with a frayed end and a lesson on it. We lost four in the rocks and boated eleven, the best of them a hair over five pounds, and the cooler went back to the dock heavy enough to require a second opinion about who was carrying it.
The captain filleted them under a dock light with a crowd of pelicans supervising and said the bite had been a little tough. It is possible that man has never once had a good night.
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