The boat was left in the water because of that old trailer. Somehow my dad struck a deal with Eddie at Captain Eddies Fish Basket. I want to say it was located on Sugarloaf or Cudjoe Key, but I’m not sure – it’s been a while! But a small dredged canal led from the building out to the channel. It was an old canal because the mangroves covered it like a canopy.
Our boat would be sunk up to the gunnels and tied to one of those mangrove branches.

Each time we fished, we had to manhandle the boat around and bail the water out of her.

In our back yard on Pine Street my dad and one of his friends decided to fiberglass the bottom of the hull. I remember the smell of fiberglass resin for several nights. They glassed the outside, but the lapstrakes were difficult to overcome. Some air gaps formed under the glass, and either from lack of experience or lack of funds, there was not enough resin to fill all the holes in the woven cloth. The effort fixed the majority of the leaks, but we still took on water when we fished.

The motor was a six horse Mercury – air cooled. It was transported in the trunk of the old Ford, along with the rods and reels. Once the boat was floating again, we mounted the motor and loaded her up. A few pulls on the starter rope – sometimes quite a few pulls – and we were headed out of the creek.

As soon as we got out of the creek, we made a hard left and headed toward the bay side of the key. My dad would idle along while he rigged the rods – the engine never shut off the whole time we fished.

If we stopped, the boat would fill with water! That old Mercury had just enough power running wide pen, to allow water to exit the boat out the drain hole in the transom.

And so we trolled. We trolled the edges of the mangroves and over the grass flats. Sometimes we trolled a little deeper, but seldom did we troll in water deeper than about four feet. And – we caught fish – barracuda to be exact. We trolled until the water in the boat became a nuisance, and we reeled in and ran the water out. Then we trolled again.

For a long time, I thought that trolling was the only way people fished. After all – it’s the way we fished, and we caught a lot of fish, albeit all one variety.

Over time we began fishing with a variety of methods. We would actually anchor and bottom fish from time to time. But that was because it was 1954 and it was a new boat, one that didn’t leak. That boat brought us this new way to fish! the boat was a sixteen foot, wooden Mohawk brand boat. It even had a windshield, a steering wheel, a canvas top, and the best thing yet, a brand new 12 horse Wizard motor. Yep, there was even a Western Auto in Key West. There was even talk of being able to get a water skier up with an engine that powerful!

I fished a lot of hours out of that boat. I grew up fishing in a place that every angler in the world wishes he could see. I grew up before there were limits on fish, before there were wasteful people who simply caught and killed fish just to get a picture. In our day, if we caught and kept a fish it was to eat – not to take a picture.

I have so few pictures from that time, because we really did not care about bragging or showing off our catch. Heck, everyone caught lots of fish and everyone ate the fish they caught. I remember watching the few tourists having their picture made with the fish they caught. I wondered why they wanted to take pictures of fish!

But that was in another time and place – a time and place I wish we could all go back to…