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Outdoor Life: Pompano fishing spans generations - Columnists - The News Herald
By SCOTT LINDSEY
By SCOTT LINDSEY
How much do we really know about pompano? Do we know where they winter, summer or even where they come from when they arrive in spring?
My first recollection of pompano was from my daddy and granddaddy. We would come to the cottage at Sunnyside Beach in March and fish on the beach every morning at daylight, Then we would return home and cook pompano (fried I might add) along with eggs and toast and coffee. No one ever had a better breakfast. My granddaddy would eat the eggs of the pompano, but I would have no part of that.
The night before we would get all our tackle ready, two-hook rigs with treble hooks and 2- to 3-ounce pyramid leads and 40-pound test lines on level-wind reels. Galvanized pipes cut off about 3 feet long were used as sand spikes. The plastic ones had not yet been invented yet. I didn't get a wink of sleep thinking about what we were going to do the next day.
Daddy owned an old World War II jeep that would be loaded up with buckets, chairs, rods and reels and a homemade sand flea rake that I still have. We would leave the house a little after daylight and ride the beach as far as Camp Creek if necessary, looking for holes we thought would hold pompano.
Most of the time we never had to go past the Avondale Pier because there always was a nice hole on the east side of the pier, caused by the pass at the inlet being open. Of course if it was open, we had to stop there anyway.
The pier was for the enjoyment of employees of Avondale Mills in north Alabama and usually was locked. In later years, I was given a key to the lock and could sort of have my own personal pier when the employees were not on the property.
I have stood on that pier and watched hundreds of pompano going in a circle in the hole the inlet caused, spilling out at low tide. It was literally like shooting fish in a barrel , there were so many. Every once in awhile some retired officers from Tyndall would show up and fish, but other than those gentlemen, I pretty much had it all to myself.
In the 1960s, it was unheard of to fish for pompano anywhere except from the beach. It was sand fleas or fresh shrimp or nothing for bait. This business of fishing for them from piers with jigs came much later.
If it was a dry spring and all the lakes such as Camp Creek and Deer Lake were closed, it was possible to drive all the way to Destin and never leave the beach. After you passed Inlet Beach, the only cottage you saw on the beach was the Mays cottage until you reached Seagrove Beach. To reach it, you had to drive in on a sandy road from U.S. 98.
You would have thought there would have been all the pompano the gulf could support back then, but that wasn't the case. The pompano's main enemy at this time wasn't hook-and-line fishermen, it was nets. They were netted pretty hard with catches ranging in the thousands of pounds. It didn't take long to wipe out a school of fish with a large net.
I'm not sure we know any more about pompano today than we did back then. We knew they showed up in the spring and sort of disappeared after that. When May rolled around, pompano fishing gave way to snapper fishing and we never thought about pompano until the next spring.
In discussions with other pompano fishermen, we've tried to sum up what we knew, or what we thought we knew about pompano. We know since the netting has stopped, at least in this area, there are more than there ever have been. But even that statement isn't completely accurate.
Pompano, like most other fish and animals are cyclical. That means in certain years there will be more or less than there were in some other years. In 1970, there were more pompano than I had ever witnessed even though they were being netted.
The last time they were thick like that was in 1996. They came early and stayed late. I caught more pompano that year than any year I can remember.
We still don't have a clue just where they come from or how they travel to get here. It was accepted knowledge they came up the coast hitting around St. Petersburg first and then points west.
If that is true, why do they seem to show up around Navarre Beach four or five weeks before we see them here?
It is a theory and only a theory that they follow a warm current across the gulf that empties onto the beaches of Navarre. Where do they go when they leave here? One bunch ends up at the mouth of the Mississippi River and points west, and they spend the summer there.
No biologist can tell you with a straight face just where they first started spawning on their trek north. It was proved just a few years ago they spawned in the Panhandle in March, even though the locals knew they spawned here because little pompano started showing up in early April.
There's much to be learned about this little fish, but there are some certainties I have learned about them that cannot be disputed. Fried in hot grease with hushpuppies and french fries, there is no other fish in the world that can compare.
On a light spinning rod with 6-pound test line, no other fish is as strong or as quick and able to change directions as a pompano. To see a school in the surf from the bow of a boat as the fish twist and shine in the morning sun can make your heart skip a beat. To cast into that school and watch as several fish fight over your jig and one gets hooked makes getting up before daylight worthwhile.
If you've never done so, you should try it. You will get hooked just like the pompano do.
