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It's a rare thing when commercial fishing gear works in favor of anglers, but that's the case in Florida Bay, where thousands of crab-pot buoys create the perfect environment for pursuing one of the world's most unusual species. One look at a tripletail and you'll know how the fish got its name. Its large dorsal and anal fins are positioned far to the rear of its body, giving it the appearance of having three tails. The creature actually looks more like a fresh water sunfish or oscar than any kind of marine species! However, that's not the only thing odd about this unique fish, as I discovered firsthand on a trip last February with Captain Richard Stanczyk.
The owner of Bud n' Mary's Sportfishing Marina on Islamorada in the Florida Keys, Stanczyk is an expert when it comes to tracking down tripletail amid the crab-pot fields of Florida Bay. In order to make the long run across the shallow bay, we hooked up with Jim Bernardin of Pines and Palms Cottages on Islamorada, whose 18-foot Hewes flats skiff skims over inches of water at 40 mph.
High-Speed Spotting
I expected Stanczyk to slow to a crawl as we approached the pots, but he kept going at 20 mph, checking out the buoys along the way. Suddenly he cut the throttle and swung the skiff around. I hadn't seen anything unusual, but Stanczyk idled over to one of the buoys and pointed out a dark shape below it that he assured me was a tripletail. Though the fish was relatively small, it provided a good opportunity to practice the casting drill.
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Stanczyk set me up with a light spinning outfit and explained that I had to cast just beyond the buoy, so the shrimp could be retrieved slowly past it without snagging the trap line. The shrimp itself was rigged with a 2/0 hook threaded from tail to head. A tiny split-shot was pinched onto the line ahead of the bait for casting weight.
My first cast wasn't particularly accurate, and I managed to snag the trap line just as the tripletail took the bait. Fortunately, Stanczyk was able to maneuver around the buoy so that I could clear the line and land the scrappy 15-incher.
After that I got the hang of retrieving my shrimp close enough to the buoys to attract the fish without snagging the line. The trick is to reel the bait past the float to lure the tripletail out from hiding, then stop the retrieve and let the shrimp sink so the fish can nail it. The hook should be set by reeling quickly, then the boat should be thrown in reverse to keep the fish from getting back to the trap line.
It took a while for me to spot the triples as we cruised among the pot buoys, but eventually I got the hang of it. In most cases they looked like nothing more than a leaf or piece of weed attached to the trap line. Curiously, the fish didn't spook easily. It was hard to believe that they wouldn't take off after we roared past only yards from their home, then spun around to get within casting range. The tripletail not only stayed put, they inevitably darted right out for the shrimp when it drifted past. Since I can only catch ignorant fish, this suited my skills to perfection! If my cast wasn't on the money, it was simply a matter of making another that would provide the proper presentation.
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Super-Cooperative Fish
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The tripletail we encountered that day were full of surprises. Later in the morning I lost a big fish when my hook pulled during the fight. Since I still had a piece of shrimp on the hook, I flicked it back to the tripletail, which jumped right on it! To prove that this behavior isn't unusual, one of Bernardin's fish did the same thing later in the day. Talk about cooperative fish!
We covered a lot of ground and hundreds of buoys in order to get shots at relatively few fish. Sometimes we'd find two or three triples in a string of pots, and once we found two at a single buoy, but other strings held none at all. Stanczyk seemed to sense when it was time to change areas, and by spotting at such high speed we never waited long for a shot. After starting out with a few barely legal-sized triples, we began spotting larger fish and passed up the smaller ones.
Shallow-water tripletail typically weigh two to five pounds, although many of the fish we caught were in the five- to eight-pound class. The largest fish were spotted as we left the main concentration of crab pots and headed toward Marathon. There were fewer buoys and we were moving even faster, but those big triples were easy to see. Whereas young tripletail are darkish and have beautiful markings, the larger specimens have a blander coloration and actually appear whitish in the somewhat cloudy Florida Bay water.
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Great Jumping Tripletail!
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At one point I hooked a particularly large triple that displayed another unusual characteristic of this seemingly ungainly species - a leap that took it some three feet out of the water! That fish weighed 10 1/2 pounds, which is unusually large for the area, although tripletail can reach 30 pounds or more. (The IGFA world-record tripletail weighed 42 pounds, five ounces, and was caught in 1989 in Zululand, Republic of South Africa. The IGFA doesn't have line-class records for the species, but Vic Dunaway in his Sport Fish of Florida lists a record in the Sunshine State of 32 pounds.)
Bernardin caught another tripletail of about eight pounds that also made an impressive leap. Stanczyk noted that this behavior is rather common, even though the fish doesn't appear capable of such acrobatics. Indeed, tripletail may be the most underrated game and food fish in all of Florida. Best of all, they're usually ignorant enough to make up for casting errors by visiting anglers such as me who have to polish their casting skills every time they make a trip to the Keys!
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