Snippet of Life - Goin' Fishin'

I think I was 14 when Pat, Marty, and I decided to rent a boat and do some fishing on the Intra Coastal Waterway. None of us were good fishermen nor were we expert boaters. However, we did manage to get up the cash needed and the boat rental people didn't care much about anything beyond that.

So, one fine Saturday morning, Marty's mom dropped us and our fishing gear off at the boat rental and fishing shop, told us to be careful and left the three of us on our own after signing for our rental. We purchased some shrimp for bait, got familiar with the boat and motor, and began our journey.

The rental dock was along the Sunny Isles Causeway (AKA Sunny Isles Blvd, AKA N.E. 163rd St, AKA S-826). You can actually look at this spot (though I am not sure it is a boat rental place anymore) on Google Maps. So I did. I will, in the next few pics, our route out to the Intra Coastal. It's only an approximation of the route because the topography changes with the growth and death of the mangrove trees. The channels through the swamp widen and narrow over time, even disappear and new one emerge.



Once out on the Intra-Coastal, we traveled south toward Haulover Cut, keeping to the western shore along the mangroves. The mangroves are bushy, low growing, trees which grow in salty or brackish water. The low lying coastal areas of Florida are heavy with mangrove swamps. The green in those pictures were all mangrove trees. Within that green were little passages that led deeper into the swamp. There is good fishing among the mangroves, we'd always been told and Pat, who was the one who claimed to know about such things, assured us we'd catch some snapper if we went down one of these passages.

We went in but we caught nothing but the only bites we got were from mosquitoes. And, after nearly getting stuck on the roots of these trees, we went back out onto the Intra Coastal. We wasted away most of the day riding up and down the Waterway, trying to avoid being swamped by the pleasure boats roaring by and getting sunburned. Sunscreen did not exist in 1960, tans were seen as healthy and good. Sunburns were painful but not considered life threatening.

Around 5 PM or so, we headed back to the boat rental dock. I should say, we began our journey back because we never got there... at least, not by boat. About two thirds of the way back we took a turn that we shouldn't have. We followed the channel deeper into the `groves until we were pretty much lost because, as we went in, we passed other channels of similar size which would lure us in as we tried to find our way back to the main channel. If you've ever played that old computer game "Adventure", you will recognize the phrase "a twisty maze of passages all looking alike."

We were lost! As it got darker, we got more lost. Eventually, we decided the only thing we could do was try to reach the road we glimpsed from time to time as we wandered through the trees swatting mosquitoes and pretending we were not overly worried. After an hour more of searching for a big enough break in the tangled trees, we found a spot we could drag the boat through and over some roots to the roadway.

The trek west to the boat rental dock was full of bravado and apprehension. We figured we were in big trouble. It turned out the guy at the dock wasn't angry with us and accepted that we had left the boat several hundred yards east quite calmly. He did relate, however, that my father had been by a couple of times and was "really P.O'd!" My father had been expecting a call for a couple of hours and had made two trips in the last hour, looking for us. I called him from the store's phone.

That was our last boating adventure. Not counting the kayak Pat and I built which sank in one of the rockpits we used to swim in the first, and last, time we launched it.