Gerald Lee Metz oral history interview by Terry Howard, May 25, 2010

Transcription

1 University of South Florida Scholar Commons Digital Collection - Florida Studies Center Oral Histories Digital Collection - Florida Studies Center Gerald Lee Metz oral history interview by Terry Howard, May 25, 2010 Gerald Lee Metz (Interviewee) Terry Lee Howard (Interviewer) Follow this and additional works at: Part of the American Studies Commons, and the Community-based Research Commons Scholar Commons Citation Metz, Gerald Lee (Interviewee) and Howard, Terry Lee (Interviewer), "Gerald Lee Metz oral history interview by Terry Howard, May 25, 2010" (2010). Digital Collection - Florida Studies Center Oral Histories. Paper This Oral History is brought to you for free and open access by the Digital Collection - Florida Studies Center at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Digital Collection - Florida Studies Center Oral Histories by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact scholarcommons@usf.edu.

2 COPYRIGHT NOTICE This Oral History is copyrighted by the University of South Florida Libraries Oral History Program on behalf of the Board of Trustees of the University of South Florida. Copyright, 2011, University of South Florida. All rights, reserved. This oral history may be used for research, instruction, and private study under the provisions of the Fair Use. Fair Use is a provision of the United States Copyright Law (United States Code, Title 17, section 107), which allows limited use of copyrighted materials under certain conditions. Fair Use limits the amount of material that may be used. For all other permissions and requests, contact the UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH FLORIDA LIBRARIES ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM at the University of South Florida, 4202 E. Fowler Avenue, LIB 122, Tampa, FL

3 Oculina Bank Oral History Project Oral History Program Florida Studies Center University of South Florida, Tampa Library Digital Object Identifier: O Interviewee: Gerald Jerry Lee Metz (GM) Interviewer: Terry Lee Howard (TH) Interview date: May 25, 2010 Interview location: Fort Pierce Branch Library, Fort Pierce, Florida Transcribed by: James E. Scholz Transcription date: June 16, 2010 to June 25, 2010 Audit Edit by: Christine Toth Audit Edit date: July 6, 2010 to July 12, 2010 Final Edit by: Mary Beth Isaacson, MLS Final Edit date: September 14, 2010 Terry Howard: Good morning. This is Terry Howard. Today is May 25, I m at the Fort Pierce City Library in downtown Fort Pierce, Florida, conducting an oral history with Jerry Metz for the Gulf and South Atlantic Fisheries Foundation s project with Fort Pierce fishermen on the Oculina Bank HAPC [Habitat Area of Particular Concern]. Welcome, Jerry. Please state your name, spell your name, your place of birth, and your date of birth. Gerald Metz: Gerald Lee Metz. G-e-r-a-l-d L-e-e M-e-t-z. I was born in West Palm Beach, Florida in TH: Okay. Now, that was Gerald Lee Metz? GM: Gerald Lee Metz. 1

4 TH: Okay. Born where, again? GM: In West Palm Beach, Florida. TH: In GM: That s correct. TH: When did you move to Fort Pierce? GM: Nineteen seventy-six [1976]. TH: Okay. What brought you to Fort Pierce? GM: That s a good question. I left Pennsylvania, I didn t like West Palm Beach; too busy. It grew up too much for me, so I settled in Fort Pierce and have stayed here ever since. I liked it. The fishing was great. Everything was fine, plenty of fish around to catch. The people were real nice. [I] stayed here. TH: Now, are you married? GM: No. TH: How old okay. You re not married. Have you ever been married? GM: Yes, twice. TH: Okay. How old were you when you first got married? GM: (laughs) 2

5 TH: Do you remember? GM: About twenty-two. TH: Okay. Do you have children? GM: Yes. TH: How many? GM: Two. TH: Two sons? GM: I have two boys, one forty-two and one forty-three. TH: Forty-two and forty-three. Oh, my gosh. How much schooling do you have? GM: Well, I went through the eighth grade, but I got a military GED a high school diploma when I was in the military. TH: Okay. GM: So, I do have a basic high school diploma. TH: Okay. What branch of the military were you in? GM: The Army. TH: Okay. Did you go to Vietnam? 3

6 GM: I was in Cambodia, the very eastern er, western edge of Cambodia. Actually, I was in Thailand, where Cambodia and Thailand meet at the Gulf of Siam. I didn t get to the actual Vietnam, but I was within hundreds of miles. TH: Okay. Do you have another job besides charter fishing? GM: No. TH: Okay. What other jobs have you had, though, in the past? GM: Too numerous to mention. TH: (laughs) Okay. Do you want to mention maybe a couple of the things that GM: I ve been a truck driver, a commercial fisherman for several years, a truck driver. I ve been a mason, a brick layer, a carpenter, a sheet metal worker, a diesel mechanic for twelve to fourteen years. I drove a tractor trailer. I ve operated heavy machinery. Just about everything. TH: All right. GM: I am a professor of many, but I am an expert at fishing. TH: (laughs) Okay. You like to fish, most of all. GM: Yes. TH: Okay. Do you currently own a boat? GM: Yes. TH: What kind? Can you describe it? The length? 4

7 GM: I got a twenty-one foot Blue Wave, Bay boat. It s kind of an open fisherman type boat. It holds up to I take up to three people with my business. TH: Okay. What size motor? GM: A 175 [horsepower] Intruder, an [Evinrude] rig. TH: Okay. Do you have live wells? GM: Yeah, live wells. I got the whole package of live wells. I can fish at night, fish live bait, everything that you need. TH: Okay. Now, I d like to ask you some questions about the Oculina Bank. How familiar are you with the Oculina Bank? GM: I remember fishing the Oculina Bank maybe in 1978, seventy-seven [1977]. Actually, when you weren t supposed to fish it, I fished it twice. We never anchored, we just drifted over it. We caught a lot of fish on it, a lot of porgies, red porgies on it. We caught a few other fish, but we never anchored. A lot of fish there, but we knew we weren t supposed to be there, so, we didn t stay long. But we did catch a lot of fish. It s just one of those places where people knew they weren t supposed to go, but the fishing was good. TH: I believe in the seventies [1970s], it was legal to fish there. GM: This was probably in seventy-eight [1978], seventy-nine [1979], eighty [1980]. Maybe somewhere in there, I m not real sure of the dates. TH: Okay. I ll get to that in a minute. I GM: But it was during my commercial fishing days, which was before I started my guide business in TH: Okay. What kind of commercial fishing did you do? 5

8 GM: I did commercial longlining. I ve done commercial net fishing. I did commercial hand line for kingfish. There isn t any kind of fishing I haven t done, absolutely none. I ve done every bit of it. TH: Why was the Oculina Bank designated as an area to protect? GM: I don t know that. I think because of the pacific [sic] coral that grows there. There s some kind of a coral that grows in that pacific area that s native, I guess, or pacific to that area, that doesn t grow in very other many places. TH: Okay. That s specific, not pacific. Specific. GM: Specific, yeah. It s specially specialized to that area for some reason. TH: Okay. Do you know why the Oculina Bank was designated as an area to protect? GM: No, I don t. I would imagine because of the coral. TH: Okay. Is there anything else you can tell me about the Oculina Bank? What do you know about it? You talked about the coral. Do you know who used to fish it or what GM: There s some TH: what brought people s attention to it? GM: I think the fish brought people s attention to it, plus the fact that the shrimpers and the draggers were tearing it up, mostly. The draggers would go over it and absolutely wipe it out. I ve seen pictures, photographs from a submarine where it just looks like a desert, where the draggers have been over it. Anchors don t do that. Draggers do that. A person s anchor is only gonna tear up a little bit of the bottom, but when you go through there with a shrimp boat, you got these nets, and they keep this area for the shrimp that are there in the coral. Then they re gonna tear it up. But I think it s because of the coral and everything. There is some shrimp s different. I ve never been on the bottom, so I don t know, but I think there s no specialized fish that lives there. It s just a special kind of area where this coral grows, and it may have its own little community of fish that aren t [in] a lot of other places. 6

9 When I did fish it, mostly what I caught was red porgies. I don t know if they like that bottom or not, but I did catch a lot of red porgies there. Never caught very many groupers there, because the bottom s flat. It s relatively flat, and the reason it is flat is because the draggers can drag it. If it was full of rocks and boulders and big cliffs, you couldn t fish it, because the draggers would get hung up on it. TH: Have you ever heard that the draggers there were GM: Steeples [Reef]? TH: Yeah. There that the draggers (inaudible) GM: Oh, no doubt, the steeples to it. One time, I would imagine that coral was several feet high, like the staghorn corals and the other corals that grow out. I would imagine that coral was very high, and the draggers just tore it down, like you drag it through a forest and rip all the trees out. And behind that, it s like plowing your field when you have your corn standing and you look behind you, all you see is plowed dirt. You don t see any corn stubble standing up. So that s basically I think the coral used to be very high and very numerous there. TH: Okay. What do you think about the closure of the Oculina Bank to anchoring and bottom fishing? GM: I think the closure is unjustified. I think maybe the anchoring is justified. I don t see I really don t see why there s any harm in drifting over the area. When you anchor, yes, if you re not properly schooled in the technique of anchoring three times the scope of the depth, you ll drag your anchor through it. A lot of people don t know this. The commercial fishermen do that because they know how to work. They know how to anchor and they know how to put out scope, and where the anchor goes to the scope, it stays there. It doesn t drag through it. I think the closure is not warranted. I think the closure should be warranted to draggers, shrimp boats and draggers and people that anchor there. You shouldn t anchor. I don t believe it should be closed just because you want to go there and fish. You re not gonna fish that area out with a rod and reel. It s not gonna happen. You can t fish the world out with a rod and reel. But you can with nets, and commercial lines. Commercial fishin, I think if you were to commercial fish that area, put lines out over that area, you would promptly fish it out very quickly. So, I think that there shouldn t be any commercial fishin there at all, just recreational fishin. That doesn t say that I don t like commercial fishermen; it s just a fact that commercial fishin is very 7

10 effective. And once you have several people commercial fishin that area, you will eventually cut down on the population of the fish that s in the area. TH: Has the closure of Oculina Bank affected your fishing? GM: Not indirectly. It hasn t, no. TH: You mean GM: My basic business for thirty-some years has been inshore. It hasn t directly affected my fishing any, but I have talked to people that it has affected. Now, some people will argue to that and they ll say, Well, if that s the only place that I can go to catch fish to make a living, then they need to go somewhere else and get another job. They need to find something else to do. If that s the only place that a commercial fisherman can go to make a living, he needs to find something else to do, because that s not the only place that you can go catch fish. That s my way of looking at that. They told us years ago, when they told us the different places and different things we couldn t do; they told us we couldn t go there, and we couldn t go there. And some fisherman will go, Well gee, what am I gonna do? I can t make a living. Well, that s not true. There s other places you can go to catch fish just besides that one area there. I don t know how much area that bank encompasses. I don t know the length and the width of it and how many miles north and south it goes, or east and west. So, it may be a very small area, or it may be a very vast area. I don t know. I never really did any research on it that much. TH: If anchoring and bottom fishing in the Oculina Bank were not prohibited in other words, if you could fish there, would you fish there? GM: Yes, I would fish there. TH: Okay. Why, for how, and for what? GM: Well, I would mostly bottom fish, and I would probably fish for porgies. I ve never caught very many groupers there, but I m sure they re there. But I would fish mostly for porgies and bottom fish. There has also been some fish caught over top of it, on the surface there. A few fish hang around the bank. But I would mostly fish for bottom fish. TH: Okay. Overall, how has fishing changed since you began fishing in the Fort Pierce area? 8

11 GM: Boy, a bunch. (laughs) A lot. The fishing has really changed. What s changed the most is when I a good example of this when I first started net fishing back in the late seventies [1970s], you could take 600 yards of net and you could go in the river 1 and you could catch all the fish you could possibly haul back to the dock at 600 yards of net. Trout, pompano, redfish, bluefish, everything; you d just fill a boat up with fish. That s with 600 yards of net. A few years went by, then you had to have a thousand yards of net. A few more years went by, then you had to have 2,000 yards of net. When Eskel Anderson and I TH: When who? GM: Eskel Anderson. TH: How do you spell it? GM: Gee, I don t know you spell Eskel. But Anderson Chucky Anderson s his brother, Eskel. I don t know how you spell that. TH: Eschol? GM: Yeah, Eschol Anderson. He I don t know you spell that. (laughs) TH: E-s-c GM: Maybe E-s-c-h-o-l, or something? Eskel Anderson? Yeah, Anderson. TH: It s important that we get the spelling of these names. How do you say it? GM: I don t know his first name correctly. Anderson, Eskel. TH: E-s-k-e-l? GM: Maybe. (laughs) 1 The river mentioned repeatedly in this interview is to the Indian River. 9

12 TH: Okay. GM: But we TH: That s gonna be your homework. GM: Yeah. (laughs) We fished together a lot, him and I. When we first started fishing together, 600 to 800 yards of net; you d catch all the fish you wanted. When we finally quit, when I finally quit, 3,000 yards of net wasn t enough. And another thing TH: Was that in the river or the ocean? GM: That was in the river and the ocean; mostly in the river and a little bit in the ocean. It seemed like you had to take and put more and more and more net out to catch the same amount of fish you were catching thirty years before that. The river speaking of the river, the river s a very narrow spot. Most of the fish in the river were caught along the banks or on the shores. Not many fish in the middle of the river. Most of the fish were caught on the banks. And in any given night on one night shortly before I quit, I counted the fishermen, and I kind of went through and also just asked em how much net they were fishing, because I was kinda curious. Each one of em had about 2,000 yards of net on the boat. Well, there was about twenty-five fishermen at that time that was working the river. With twenty times 2,000, that s a lot of net. Let s see, that s twenty times two, is 40,000 yards of net. When you put 40,000 yards of net out in a river that isn t two miles wide, every night, 40,000 yards of net, you re gonna wipe something out. So it really made an impact on the river by having to fish more and more and more net. It was harder to make a living. People were putting more and more gear in the water to catch the same amount of fish they were catching thirty years earlier. TH: With much less net. GM: Right. There was no control. You could keep any size fish you wanted. There was no when I first started, there wasn t a limit on no kind of fish; the size limit. You could catch little mackerel, big mackerel. You could catch little tiny pompano, big pompano, it didn t make any difference. A fish weighed a pound, it was worth a dollar, so, you put it in the box. You put everything in the box. But at that time, we couldn t sell a lot of fish. Ladyfish and jacks and 10

13 sand perch and all of those kind of fish, they were considered bottom fish and they were six cents a pound. Now, they re over a dollar. So, it made a big difference. But since the net ban, the river came back considerably. As far as the big trout goes, the pompano there s more pompano been in the river than ever has been in the river. The ocean the ocean is a big spot, but it can be fished out, too, because the fish that travel the ocean travel up and down the shores, most of em; except when you get offshore to the pelagic fish, and then nobody nets out there, with the exception of they used to net the kingfish and stuff and that. And the by-catch on that was tremendous, too. They would catch a lot of things they didn t want. They couldn t sell em, so they just cut em out of the net and let em sink to the bottom. Now, almost everything they catch, they keep it. But there again, the drifting of the drift nets is no longer there. It s made an impact. I think the fishin which really deteriorated quite a bit over the years. And, now, that the net fishin has stopped I never abandon anything. I never signed any kind of paper banning a commercial fisherman from his livelihood. It wasn t like that. People still like me today because I ve never pulled a lever for nothing. I wasn t gonna put my friends out of business. But there again, I can tell you a very good example of that. One time, I thought about this: Let s say that you took all the net fishermen around the state of Florida, which is several hundred, probably. And let s say that those several hundred fishermen caught six trout a day, so you ve caught 700 or 800 to 900 trout a day, all around Florida. Five commercial fishermen could catch that in two days. So, who caught the most fish? The hook and liners, not the commercial fishermen. The hook and liners caught more trout than the net fishermen caught. TH: You re talking about the recreational fishermen? GM: Right, recreational fishermen. Yes, they caught more fish than the commercial fishermen caught, if you look at it that way. But you can never tell a commercial fisherman that, like me, because we always thought that we caught the most. But no, I think the rod and reel fishermen caught more of some of the species than the net fishermen did. TH: Because there s far more of them. GM: There s far more of those, correct. TH: Okay. Next question: Have you had any experiences with law enforcement within or regarding the Oculina Bank? 11

14 GM: No. TH: Okay. Now I want to talk about your fishing history, specifically. What s your earliest memory of fishing and how old were you? GM: Four. TH: Tell us about that. What do you remember about that? GM: I caught a half-pound bluegill, and I got a trophy for it. TH: Half-pound blue, that s a big bluegill. GM: (laughs) Got a trophy for it. TH: Where was this? GM: In Clear Lake, in West Palm Beach. TH: Okay. GM: They had a fishing tournament, and every one I got in, I won. I started fishing probably when I was four years old. And my dad and my mother was proponents of my fishing. They knew where I was all the time, because I d either be at the river or at home. And when they d find me, I d be at the river. My dad died over twenty-five years ago now, and my mother died two years ago. At one time, we were sitting around just for the heck of it, to figure out how many hours and days I ve spent fishing in my lifetime just for the heck of it, because I have spent a lot of time. I have a vast knowledge of fish, not just a fish. I know hundreds of species of fish, everything. I really take fishing as a science. We figured out the days and then we calculated it. I had about 200,000 hours fishing. (TH laughs) I don t believe it takes 200,000 hours for someone to take your brains out on a table and put em back in. 12

15 Fishing is my life. I ve studied fish. I know their habits. I don t just go catch fish. I know how they live, what they eat, how they migrate. Not just for a few fish, but for a lot of fish, hundreds of fish. I ve studied that. When I started when I was little, what got me into that is I would go fishing and I wouldn t catch anything. I d go home wondering, Why didn t I catch nothing? Wonder why didn t I get any? Was they not biting, or was the water too cold, or maybe I didn t have the right bait or something? Why didn t I catch any fish? I d go to the same spot the next day and fill a bucket full. And then I d be wondering, Now, how did that happen? Why did I go here? Today, I didn t catch anything; I go tomorrow, I catch a lot of fish. Next day, I don t get any fish. Well, all that, I found out after forty years, fifty years of doing this, that the moon has an awful lot to do with it. The tides have an awful lot to do with it, and the water color and the temperature of the water and everything. So, I started fishing pretty early. (laughs) TH: Who taught you? GM: Self-taught. TH: Did your father GM: My dad taught me. Plus, I would walk up on the bridge and there d be twenty-five, thirty people on the bridge fishing. And I d walk down, look in the buckets, and I wouldn t stop if nobody had anything in their bucket. I d keep walking. When I found someone that had a half bucket of fish and nobody else had any, I d stop and watch him, see what he was doing, because, obviously, he was doing something that them other people weren t doing. Because they were all using all the same bait, the same fishin in the same area, but he was piling em in. So that s how I learned. I watched the people, the way they did things. That s how I grew up fishing. Commercial fishermen, I would watch other fishermen while I was learning. They would show me how to do the wiring, tie the knot and put the hooks on. That s how I learned: mostly selftaught and learned from other people. TH: Okay. How did you decide to become a charter boat captain? GM: That was pretty easy. Some people wanted to be a fireman when they grew up, I wanted to be a fisherman. That s about as simple as that. TH: Okay. When did you start fishing the Fort Pierce area, age and year? 13

16 GM: Nineteen seventy-six [1976]. Hmm. TH: So, forty-five, fifty GM: Well, I was about thirty-eight. I dunno. (laughs) TH: Forty-five, fifty-five, fifty-five, sixty-five, sixty-five, seventy-five; so, about thirty-one. About thirty-one years old. GM: Yeah, somewhere in there. Yeah, because I had my fortieth birthday on the river. TH: Now, you said early on, you said you lived in Pennsylvania and then came back home? GM: I got out of military when I got out of Thailand, Southeast Asia, I went to Pennsylvania to live with my mother. I got married in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. I lived in I was a diesel mechanic then, and I lived in Pennsylvania for maybe four or five years. Then I moved to Fort Pierce, and I ve been in Fort Pierce ever since. TH: Okay. That was we figured 1976 was when you moved here, and that s when you were about thirty years old. Were you fishing commercially when you first came here? Commercially, recreationally, or working on charter boats? GM: I was fishing commercially and working on charter boats. I started commercial fishing. I got a net, got a boat. I started fishing out of a flattie, mostly mullet fishing, pompano and stuff like that. Then, in between those times, I would fish for Captain Sam Crutchfield 2 on the Lucky Too, cause I had done that all my life. When I was a young boy, I worked on a charter boat fishing for tunas and marlins and sailfish and dolphins and everything like that. I worked the charter boats, and it was only natural for me to work for Captain Sam, cause I knew the ocean. I knew what I was doing. Nobody s ever had to teach me anything. Basically, I picked up the fishing trade as I went along. TH: This next question, it s gonna be kind of you know, it s a wide-open question, cause you ve kind of answered it. What did you fish for, and how did you fish for that type of fish? 2 Sam Crutchfield was also interviewed for the Oculina Bank Oral History Project. The DOI for his interview is O

17 GM: When I was TH: Gear and bait. GM: When I was fishing for what, like fun fishing or commercial fishing? When I was younger, or now? TH: When you were younger. What d you first start fishing for? You said bluegill. But then when you re thirty and back in Fort Pierce, what did you start fishing for first? GM: Commercial fishing, net fishing. That s the first fishing I did when I came to this town. I figured it was a lot of fish here. Mostly commercial fishermen here, not very many sport fishermen was here. So, I mostly commercial fished. And then I d seen the amount of fish that was here, the tremendous amount of trout that was in the river I mean, a ten-pound trout, twelve-pound trout was common back when I first started fishing. You could catch em all day long, ten to twelve pounds. So I said, You know what? I m gonna be a guide. I m gonna be a guide. So I checked into it, and two or three people I talked to said, Oh, you ll starve to death. Don t nobody need a guide around here. Look at all these fish to catch. Nobody needs someone to take em and show em where they re at. You ll starve to death. You won t make no money. Nobody ll hire you. Well, in 1983 and 1984, I fished a total of 634 days. In 1983, I fished 127 days straight customers, with customers. I was booked June, July, and August. I was booked TH: Fishing for mostly trout? GM: April and May. Yes, sir. No, that was snook. TH: Snook? GM: Snook season, I was booked. And in April and May, I was booked June, July and August and September, solid. I didn t have an open day. TH: Mostly snook? 15

18 GM: Yep, that s for snook and other species, too, but mostly was for snook. But I found out that after a while, when I started doing it, I was the only guide within forty miles of where I m standing now. There was no other guides. I was the first guide in St. Lucie County. There wasn t any other guides before me, licensed captains. I was the very first guide in this county. TH: I didn t realize that. Who did you with at first? Or did you fish with anybody? GM: I mostly started fishing with, again, Eskel Anderson. Eskel, and also Raymond Brown. Raymond Brown showed me how to commercial trout splatter pole trout fishing. He showed me the river. He showed me how to catch the pigfish. And he showed me how to fish other fish. And I learned a little bit from this fisherman and that fisherman. TH: Well, let s go back. He taught you how to what? GM: Catch pigfish and to commercial trout fish with a splatter pole. TH: Splatter pole was used for used for catching the bait? GM: No, that was used to catch the trout, in little pigfish traps made out of wire. TH: Okay. Can you explain that? GM: Yeah. They got a what it is, it s a little small trap, maybe about twelve by twelve, maybe twelve inches wide, six inches high and has little funnels in it. And you take a live crab, which works best, because it s fresh, and you smash the crab up and you put it in this trap. Well, these little pigfish, they re babies, actually; they re baby pigfish. When they get big they go in the ocean. They re very small, they re maybe two inches at the maximum, and they just fill these traps up. They get in these funnels and then they can t get back out. You take them and you check those every day and you put em in your bait well. You have to put em back in the river overnight, because you can t use em the same day that you catch em. And the reason you can t use em the same day you catch em [is] because they re full of crap and they won t grunt. And the trick with those is to make em grunt. TH: And they have to be hungry? 16

19 GM: They make that pigfish [sound], that (makes sound effect) sound. They won t make that when they re full. If you put him on the hook and put him down there, he won t make any noise. So you put em in the river and starve em for a day, and they get all this waste out of em. Then they re ready to eat again. So the next day, then you use em. But you can t use em the same day you catch em. TH: You say put him in the river; he can be in a live well, or GM: In a trap, you put em in a big wire trap. TH: Okay. And you store em? GM: Yeah, you store em, and you have to put in real nice water or they ll die. So you have to have a nice clean place for em to be. But that s what I was told that the fishermen in this town done a hundred years ago, eighty, seventy, eighty years ago, that that was their main livelihood in this river, was splatter pole. And there was probably, at one time, twenty-five to thirty people in this town that did splatter pole trout fishing. TH: Well, then, tell me about the splatter pole. GM: The splatter pole is nothing but a cane pole. TH: That s s-p-l-a-t-t-e-r? GM: Yeah, like splatter things on a wall. TH: Okay, splatter pole. GM: Yeah. TH: It s like a cane pole. GM: Yes. I don t know where they got the name splatter pole, but they would take the slap it on the water. They d take it and slam it on the water, like that, and make a crackin noise with it, 17

20 and that would draw the fish up to the boat. For some reason, you d think it would scare em, but it would draw the fish up to the boat. And then it was nothing but a cane pole with a piece of line on it, monofilament or a piece of wire, whatever you had on it; it was about fourteen, sixteen feet long, no rod and reels. And you just hooked the bait on, throw it out right in back of the boat. And you d use these little skiffs that probably weren t two feet high, eighteen to twenty inches high, very low profile boats. TH: Low freeboard. GM: All wood, no metal in the boat whatsoever. The anchor was on a roller. You didn t want to make any noise. You had to be very, very quiet. And you could catch fish six feet in the boat. TH: Catch six what? GM: You could catch these trout six feet back in the boat. TH: Okay. You trolled with these? GM: No. You anchored most of the time. You would drift across a spot and you d put a bait in and use him once or twice, lift him to the surface, lay him back down, lift him to the surface, let him back down. If you didn t get any bites, you took him off (makes gesture), throw him away. When you got a fish, a trout, pull him in the boat, put him between your legs, knock him in the head with a club, and lay him in the boat. You didn t want him to be (inaudible) or in a fish box or in a cooler. You knocked him out and laid him in the bottom of the boat. Well, if you caught two or three in a row, you would ease your anchor overboard, real easy, and you would fish that spot and the fish would come to you then. It d be like you was calling em or something. TH: Now, you fished out of the stern of the boat? GM: Yes. TH: How many poles did you fish at one time? GM: One. 18

21 TH: Just one pole? GM: Yeah. You couldn t fish two. They bite too fast. (laughs) TH: Cool. GM: Just one. (laughs) TH: Interesting. GM: And it was a way that everybody did it, Terry. It was a thing that net fishing and commercial splatter pole fishing for trout is what the two main it s what everybody did. Nobody did anything else. And they tell me, the old timers, eighty, seventy, eighty years ago back during war, or even before the war, they would take these launches, these maybe thirty-five, forty foot skiffs, and there d be four or five fisherman would live on em and they d tow there small flatties behind em. They would tow some of these, maybe five or six of these splatter pole skiffs behind the rig or launch boat and they would stay out for a couple, three days at a time and ice these fish down. Then they would take em to the fish house. But they would stay on the river for two or three days. When they went baiting for these little pigfish, they would get several thousand of em. They would keep em penned up and they would use em during the day. But that was one of the things they did. Besides that, with net fishing, was the only two [types] of fishing I knew of in this town when I come. TH: Now, where did you go in the river to catch trout, mostly: north of the bridges, south of the bridges? GM: All over. TH: All over. GM: All over. I ve been all the way to Stuart and all the way to Vero Beach. Trout are pretty abundant. Actually, what we live on, we live the southern range of the spotted sea trout. We re on the southern end of the range of the spotted southern sea trout; they go all the way into the Virginias. TH: Spotted sea trout. 19

22 GM: And an interesting thing about the spotted sea trout in Florida: in the state of Florida, sea trout does not migrate to the ocean. It s the only state that the sea trout does not migrate to the ocean. Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia and Maryland and some of those states, sea trout migrate into the ocean because of the cold weather. In Florida, right around Jacksonville somewhere, there s a meridian line that goes across there. It s a meridian or a Capricorn thing or one of those lines that go across there. Well, we are on the southern edge of the sea trout. The sea trout for us goes way north. Now, the opposite side of that, we re on the northern end of the snook range. Jacksonville, they don t know what a snook is in Jacksonville. But here s the funny part about that: they don t know what a snook is in Jacksonville, but if you go to Brownsville, Texas, you can catch snook in Brownsville, Texas. You go to Louisiana, Mississippi, you ask em what a snook is, they ll look at you like you re stupid. Well, what is that? Now, why is that? TH: I don t know. GM: I ll tell you why that is. TH: Okay. (laughs) GM: Because if you look, if you follow that meridian line, or that line I m not sure what it is. Don t quote me on this. TH: It would be a longitude line. GM: There s a line that goes across there. Okay, well, that line intersects Brownsville, Texas. Okay? Louisiana, Mississippi, is too cold. Snook die there. Brownsville, Texas is right down on the meridian line there, or on that line. It s the only place, from Jacksonville or Tallahassee west, that they catch snook. Brownsville, Texas. TH: Interesting. It s a longitudinal [sic] line that you re talking about, it goes east and west. GM: Yes, sir. You talk, like, Costa Rica. Costa Rica is the main center for snook. That s their hub. That s what you would call the epicenter, I would say. We re on the northern end of that. We re on the southern end of the sea trout. See, that s how these things relate to each other. It s like the Oculina Bank. It may be a specialized thing. Maybe some of these fish are only on that bank. 20

23 TH: During what months of the year did you fish for which fish? GM: Well, the trout was usually always June, July, and August. That s when the little pigfish are around, is in June, July, and August. TH: Okay. GM: Other than that, they get too large and you can t use em for bait. Other than that, I net fished all year, all year round. And when summertime came, I would do the splatter pole fishing in June, July, and August. TH: For trout. How bout snook? What months for snook? GM: Snook, 365 days a year. TH: Okay. GM: The most prevalent time would be in June, July, and August when they spawned; they were the thickest. You could catch em one right after another, as fast as and as many as you wanted to catch, because they were spawning. They would group up in the inlets, mostly in the inlets. Snook go to the inlets to spawn. They have pelagic eggs, which most fish have. Saltwater fish have pelagic eggs. There s not a saltwater fish that I know that makes a bed, like a bass or a bluegill or a shellcracker; they all have pelagic eggs. And the snook would congregate around the inlets and stuff in that time of year, to spawn. And that s when they were easy to catch. When I started to fishing for snook, there was no limit. You could catch em I gigged 500, 600 pounds of em a night, once people found out they were good to eat. I murdered em. I shouldn t say this, but I m probably the one that helped deplete the population. But it wasn t illegal. It wasn t against the law. TH: Were they did you sell em commercially? GM: No. No, they never sold. There s never been a snook sold commercially. The fish that we sold, we sold to restaurants in the back doors, friends, because they didn t want to eat em. They were soap fish. People thought they they called em soap fish. That was a nickname of a snook. 21

24 TH: Soak? GM: Soap. TH: Soap, s-o-a-p? GM: Soap fish, like the soap you wash with; soap fish. TH: Okay. GM: And people would cook em with the skin on. They d scale em, cook em with the skin on. And the skin tastes like soap, so they didn t want em. So they considered em trash fish. And at one time, they were considered a trash fish, because of the taste. Then, when we were kids, we started one day, I guess, I dunno how it happened. We skinned one and ate it, and it was great. And then we started selling em. Well, you know what happened. (laughs) TH: Now they sell em as snook er, I mean, they sell em as grouper, or snapper, or whatever? GM: Well, there s several hundred pounds or em been sold as grouper. (laughs) TH: Over the years. GM: But when I first started, Terry, there was no law on em. The first law that was ever put on a snook was eighteen inches and a possession of four. And when I was a kid, I d never seen a marine patrol. I d never seen a marine patrol till I was twenty-five years old. You know, a law enforcement person. TH: Yeah. Well, you didn t start fishing here till you were thirty. GM: Yeah. 22

25 TH: How long did a fishing trip last? Now, again, this is a wide open question. An average, I guess now, an average charter fishing day. GM: Charter my charters would last from eight [AM] to five [PM], all day, and from usually from eight [AM] till one [PM] in a half a day. Commercial fishing, that was day and night; there was no time limit to that. Your time was your time. There was no such thing as an hourly thing there. If the fish were biting and they were there, you stayed until they quit biting. Everybody did that. There s no commercial fisherman I ever know that ran away from biting fish. If you do, you were a fool. You didn t make any money. When I was in my guide business, half a day would be four hours, all day would be eight. TH: Okay. How much was an average trip s catch? Now this, again, this is a wide open question. GM: On an average day, in my charter boat, it s a varied thing. I ve never got skunked. I ve never went out and not caught nothing. Back in the earlier days, an average catch was twenty, thirty, forty trout a day. On an artificial lure, on jigs with feathers, and jigs and stuff like that, you catch thirty, forty trout. You catch lots of pompano and bluefish and all that. Net fishing, it was the same. Sometimes, you may go out and get you 2,000 or 3,000 pounds of pompano, a couple thousand pounds of mackerel, or you can go out there and you couldn t get enough fish for a barbeque. Fish have tails. They can swim. They re here today, gone tomorrow. So, you never was the life of a fisherman was feast or famine. You were either a rich man or a poor man, and I ain t never seen a rich fisherman. (laughs) If he was a rich fisherman, he was hauling something besides fish. TH: (laughs) Okay. For how many years did you fish for, let s say, trout? You re still fishing for trout. GM: I m still fishing for trout. I ve fished for them for oh, man, I started fishing for trout when I was probably seven, eight years old. In West Palm Beach, when I grew up in West Palm Beach funny thing about trout: in the river down there they call it the lake; it s called Lake Worth. It used to be a lake, it didn t have an inlet. It used to be more of a brackish, freshwater lake, sort of not a lagoon, but it did have a little bit of some. When I started fishing there for them, I mean, the average day for me would be daylight to dark. I mean, I would go TH: That s before the Army. GM: Yeah, yeah, that s when I was a young kid. I mean, I would fish daylight to dark. It wasn t nothing for me to fish twenty, thirty, forty hours straight. I fished the piers and the beaches for 23

26 pompano. At one time, I used to fish fifteen rods at one time for pompano. Three of us would fish fifteen surf rods. TH: On the surf? GM: In the surf, yeah. We d fish five apiece. TH: In Palm Beach? GM: We sometimes fished twenty rods. TH: Wow. GM: We would throw out, see the rod, bend over, reel the fish in, put it in a hole in the sand behind you, throw it out again, go to the next one. And we d do that sometimes for three or four hours while the bite was on. And then, when the bite quit, we would cooler our fish, put em on ice, and wait till the next bite. TH: That was pompano. GM: Pompano. TH: Now, how many years did you fish for you re still fishing for trout. You did the pompano before you moved to Fort Pierce, mostly. GM: Yeah, I still do that with my business. This year was not a very good year for pompano. We didn t catch very many pompano in the river. Last year was a great year. This year, the trout s been fairly well low. TH: Now, how do you fish pompano in the river as a charter captain? GM: I mostly jig fish. You can fish with sand fleas on the bottom. Most of the commercial fishermen, they fish with sand fleas on the bottom. I use jigs. I fish nothing but jigs for the pompano. 24

27 TH: That s lures? GM: Like, little rubber lures. I fish for pompano with those. I used to use shrimp, believe it or not: when I first started my business, I would use live shrimp. And then I met the man that I I use the lures now I met the man that made those. But in my business, believe it or not, in one day, I would use anywhere from ten to eighteen dozen shrimp in one day. Now, when you take eighteen to twenty dozen shrimp a day, you go through an awful lot of bait. TH: It s expensive. Do you catch your own bait? GM: Well, they were only a dollar and a quarter a dozen. TH: Oh, okay. GM: So, they were only about a dollar a dozen. But the thing of it is, I would go through that many baits. Now, if you took that many baits, you would eat most of your shrimp, because there s not that many fish to catch and the bait fish eat most of em. But that was the thing. That s what I thought you needed to catch with, and I didn t really realize you could catch em on artificial lures. But then, after a while, I did learn that. I haven t fished with a shrimp since TH: Interesting. So you use artificial baits, mostly, now, [and] casting. GM: And live bait. I use live bait, too, but no live shrimp. I use live pilchards, live threadfin herring, live mullet, live cigar minnows, live pinfish. TH: Now, you catch these in traps? GM: You can trap em. The greenies and threadfin herrings and the pilchards, we jig up with little bait fish rigs in the ocean. TH: Can you describe a bait fish rig? 25

28 GM: It s a hook. It s a long rig with six little tiny hooks on with little small trout-type feathers, little tiny bug-looking feathers that the greenies eat. It s the kind of stuff they eat in the ocean, and you catch em six at a time. They ll even strike at a bare hook as long as it s shiny, because of what they eat. So, we catch em on these little they call em Sabiki rigs. They re made in Japan and they have a little, tiny piece of shiny stuff on em that the fish like, and that s how we catch em. You can also catch em in a cast net, if they re thick. TH: Okay. When did you start working as a charter boat captain in Fort Pierce, age and year? You mentioned, I guess, you started with Sam Crutchfield. Approximate age and year? GM: I would say about 1977, seventy-six [1976]. I think I started my business in 1979, 1980, in the very early eighties [1980s] very early eighties [1980s]. I d say I started fishing with Sam Crutchfield in probably 1976, seventy-five [1975], seventy-seven [1977], somewhere in there. That s when the Temptress was Chip Shafer 3 was tied up at the dock. There was several charter boats there, and I knew all of those fellows. TH: It was over on Fisherman s Wharf by the old Simonsen s Restaurant. GM: Fisherman s Wharf by the old Simonsen s Restaurant, right. GM: There was several charter boats there at one time. TH: Ron Lane. GM: Yep, right on the breakwater. GM: Right on the breakwater, the [Happy] Hooker with I can t think of his name now, had the Hooker. TH: Okay. At that time, what did you fish for and how? When you were GM: Mostly for sailfish and dolphin and kingfish and wahoo, offshore fishing. With Sam Crutchfield I did more bottom fishing with Sam Crutchfield that I did trolling. Sam liked to bottom fish. He was very good at it. We would go to the wrecks and catch groupers and 3 Irving Chip Shafer was also interviewed for the Oculina Bank Oral History Project. The DOI for his interview is O

29 amberjacks and snappers and all that sort of stuff. That s basically what we did with him. And then with Ron Lane at the breakwater, Ron Lane never did much bottom fishing; he mostly did a lot of billfishing. Chip Shafer, I worked for him a couple of days while his regular mate was gone. He was strictly billfishing. He didn t do a whole lot of bottom fishing. And kingfishing, they would fish for kingfish. But Sam was the only one that did a lot of bottom fishing. He s a really good bottom fisherman and he taught me a lot about bottom fishing. TH: When you fished with these fellows, where did you go for the fish? Offshore? GM: We would average when we did the bottom fish, we wouldn t fish any more than about 140 feet of water. Mostly fished the wrecks; there s several of em in 70 feet, 90 feet of water, some in 120 feet. We would fish those, and then we d fish the deep ledges at 140 [feet] for the red snappers and the bigger groupers and stuff. And then we d fish the wrecks for the copper bellies and the black groupers, mostly copper bellies on the wrecks. TH: Copper bellies. Grouper? That s a kind of grouper? GM: Yeah, it s a grouper. Well, I don t know if that s the correct name for that fish, but that s what I know them as. I think they re black groupers, but they call em copper bellies cause of the color of the body. And then we d catch the amberjacks, and whenever we did the other fishing, we would fish inshore. We would fish and troll, mostly troll. TH: Okay, so average, how far offshore? For an average? GM: No more than very seldom did we bottom fish over 140 feet, and very seldom did we fish deeper than 600 feet. TH: Okay, so 600 feet would be how many miles out? GM: That s twenty-five miles, bout around eighteen to twenty-two miles. TH: Okay. That s what I was getting at. Okay. GM: It s on the hundred fathom curve. 27

30 TH: Gotcha. How did you decide where to fish and how do you, today, decide to where to fish? GM: I guess I just wake up in the morning and pitch a coin up in the air and call heads or tails. Basically, if you know what I know about fishing basically, I have a vast memory bank. If I go today and the wind is out of the south, let s say southeast. And I catch a lot of fish. I know a hundred places right now I can go catch fish in the southeast wind. Okay, let s say the wind overnight goes to the north. Now, the next day I have to reevaluate my game plan. Now, I have to know where to go to catch these fish when the wind s out of the north, because conditions will change. It may be rougher, it may be more tide, it may be less tide, it may be dirty water, maybe not as dirty water. All of this changes overnight. It can change overnight. So, I have to preprogram myself and go to my memory banks and say, Well, I m gonna see now: today the wind s north, it s twenty knots, the water temperature is sixty degrees. I caught a lot of trout and groupers here. I caught a lot of sailfish and wahoos there. Or, I caught a lot of pompano and jacks there. So, I reevaluate every day. Every day you very seldom does any fisherman that I know of go to the exact same spot every day, unless even if you re bottom fishing, you don t go to the exact same spot. You may go to that area, but you don t go to the exact same spot. I don t know of many fishermen that do that. TH: Okay. I already asked you this. I m gonna ask you again. During what months do you fish for which fish? GM: All right. TH: Let s break it down. January, what do you fish for? GM: Okay. January is mostly in the river now, it s pompano, trout, and redfish. That s what I fish mostly for. And you ll get a mackerel and you ll get some bluefish during the winter. Summer months, fishing slows down a little bit. We get snook. We get trout. The pompano kind of thin out a little bit. They go back on the beach. They leave the river. The river gets too hot and they go back on the beach. But mostly in summer we catch snook, trout, and redfish, too. But the winter is mostly that. Now in the ocean, most of the good trolling for the sailfish and the dolphin and the wahoo is in the wintertime, mostly for the sailfish. They like that rough wind coming out of the north. They tail those big waves, those big swells out there. They tail those, south. And you kinda troll, cross wave, and you catch em going south. But most of that is in the winter. Now, you can catch dolphins in the summer, but most in the winter offshore was kingfish, wahoo, and sailfish, and an occasional marlin. 28

31 In the river, basically everything in the river, summer and winter, with the exception of the some of the fish are a little more active in the winter. The water s a little cooler. Now, when the water gets down to about fifty-eight degrees like it did this year, we lost hundreds of thousands of snook because the water temperature got below fifty-eight degrees. And as you remember that we re on the northern end of that range. So their tolerant water is anywhere from about sixty about seventy-two degrees to about eighty-six degrees. After that, they don t bite much, and after that, they don t and below seventy degrees, sixty-nine, they don t bite either. They just kind of lay around and don t do much. The prime temperature for that particular fish is anywhere from twenty-six degrees Celsius to twenty-seven and a half degrees Celsius. TH: Which fish was that? GM: Snook. TH: Snook, okay. GM: And that figures out of a lot of fish. That s a pretty optimum water temperature for the river. The ocean I ve really never paid that much attention to the ocean temperature. But I do know that you ll come across temperature changes and the fish will be on one side of temperature change and whey won t be on the other. It s just the way they are. I mean, a few degrees in the ocean is very important. Basically, that s what it was most of the time. TH: Okay. You already mentioned how long a fishing trip lasts. How much is an average trip s catch today? GM: Today TH: If I were to charter you today to take me out in the river. GM: Today, I would say that we re not gonna go out and fill a cooler up. We re gonna go out and have some fun. We re gonna catch some fish. The catch is nowhere near like it used to be. And the reason for that was, the reason for that is now is there was no limits. You know, you could catch a hundred trout if you wanted to. And people would do that: they would fill up coolers, full up to the top, not thinking that, you know, Let s just take enough to eat and be done with it. They re not commercial fishermen. I mean, how much fish can you eat? And they would just keep filling boxes and boxes and boxes with fish. 29