Boating & Fishing Insiders

Fall means time for Spanish mackerel. Credit: Terry Tomalin

It starts with the faint smell of smoke. You walk outside in the darkness to get your morning paper and catch a whiff of a wood fire somewhere in the neighborhood. It's cool, not cold, but still chilly enough to start the fireplace.

Here in Florida, we call it a two T-shirt day. You start off with a long sleeve over your short sleeve knowing that you'll peel one off as soon as that sun peeks over the horizon.

By then, hopefully, you'll have found the school of scaled sardines on the grass flats, and with one toss of the cast net, you'll have a livewell full of whitebait. If your luck holds, you'll motor out to that spot a mile off the beach that everybody knows about and find seabirds diving for scraps in a chum slick that stretches farther than the eye can see. That's a sure sign the mackerel are feeding.

You anchor off that little patch of hard bottom and toss out a couple of "chummers" just to see if anybody is home. The bait isn't in the water five seconds before there's a flash, then a splash, as the predator takes its prize. So you toss two more baitfish in the water, this time on hooks attached to wire leaders. One is swimming free; the other is dangling beneath an orange float. Within seconds both lines pull taut: double hookup.
 
If the action keeps up, you'll be back at the dock by 9 a.m. with a half dozen Spanish mackerel on ice ready for filleting. Fry them up with onions and peppers, serve them with scrambled eggs and a little hot sauce, and you've got the breakfast of champions. Kick back with a cup of steaming hot black coffee and repeat after me, "Man, I love the fall."

Spanish mackerel, closely related to the much-heralded king mackerel, is also a voracious feeder. It is not uncommon to clean a mackerel destined for the table and find a dozen or more baitfish in its gullet. As a schooling species, where you find one Spanish mackerel, you will find others. That's one reason why these fish are a good choice for heart-pounding, nonstop angling action.

On light tackle and monofilament line, the average angler will lose as many Spanish mackerel as he lands. But add a light wire leader, and even a 6-year-old can bring in one of these fighters.

Ah. Fall in Florida.