There are few fishing grounds that can turn an angler or guide from hero to zero in 24 hours. But the oyster-bar and mangrove-fringed shallows of the Chokoloskee region of the Ten Thousand Islands is one of them.
The Gulf Coast-side river mouths, island shorelines and sand bars as well as the secluded back-country creeks and sloughs hold a huge variety of gamefish species at various times of the year: tarpon, snook, sea trout, redfish, bluefish, black drum, cobia, tripletail, permit, shark, pompano, flounder, sheepshead, mackerel, snapper and grouper.
But an angler needs more than a tide chart and GPS to figure out where and when to chase these fish. Moon phase, season, tide, wind direction and speed, and barometric pressure combine to guide the movements of baitfish on which gamefish feed. And even if a tide chart says high water will occur in a certain bay at a certain time, a fisherman could find it nearly dry if high winds have blown all the water out. Storms shift sandbars around, creating an island where there wasn’t one the week before. And it’s easy to miss a tarpon-laden slough in murky water if you explore it for the first time at high tide. There is so much fish habitat in this watery maze that almost any species could be anywhere at any time. Or not.
Captain Bert Barkus, 61, has been conducting anglers on light-tackle fishing charters in the Chokoloskee area for more than 30 years. He believes it offers the greatest variety fishing possible. But it even humbles him once in a while.
“I have fished every bay from here to Harney (River) hundreds and hundreds of times. That’s what it takes to locate fish in numbers,” Barkus said. “I’ve been keeping logbooks for years, and the minute I think I figured it out, it does not work.”
Barkus explored the area long before the advent of GPS. No one showed him any spots. He said it took him a year to figure out how to navigate the back country from Chokoloskee south to Lostmans River. These days, he rarely gets skunked, but says he has to stay on his toes at all times.
“If you do not give at least 110 percent here, you will not catch fish,” he said.
On a recent fishing trip on a rare calm day between cold fronts, Barkus decided to stick to the outside islands, creeks and sloughs rather than the back country because of unfavorably cool water temperatures in the interior region.
Fishing in an eight-foot-deep slough on a high incoming tide, his customer caught and released countless ladyfish and at least a dozen sea trout using a root beer-colored plastic jig.
The fish were biting enthusiastically, making trout-catching seem easy.
When they grew weary of unhooking messy ladyfish, Barkus relocated to a sandy shoreline where the customer caught and released a redfish using the same jig. A short distance away, a cast of a pearl-white Baitbuster (resembling a wounded mullet) to another shoreline yielded a small snook.
The tide had begun to fall, but not much. To try to improve from an inshore slam to a super slam, guide and angler motored to a secluded, muddy bay with almost no tidal movement in search of tarpon.
They saw one tarpon roll in the middle of the bay and spooked several others that they didn’t see when the boat drifted on top of them.
Barkus said that particular fishery would improve as the weather cools and the fish float higher in the water column where they can be easily spotted — an ideal “laid-up” situation for fly fishing.
But, he cautioned, not every seemingly anaerobic bay will hold tarpon.
Just like the springtime pre-spawn fishery along the oceanside flats of the Keys, tarpon have established travel corridors through certain rivers and sloughs in the Ten Thousand Islands.
“If you don’t know the highway, you won’t know which wall they lay up in,” he said. “If any place can skunk you, this place can do it.”
But thoroughly un-skunked, guide and angler headed back to Chokoloskee in late afternoon.
