News & Events
OAK HILL, Fla. -- Captain Joe Porcelli of Edgewater is so dialed in to the nuances of the Indian River and Mosquito lagoons that he can tell you what size redfish you are going to catch before you arrive at the fishing spot. But don’t let him demonstrate his fishing techniques for too long ... he’ll end up getting the big bites.
On a recent trip to Mosquito Lagoon aboard his shallow-running, 19-foot bay boat, Porcelli and I arrived at the edge of a foot-deep, horseshoe-shaped flat south of Oak Hill, where he predicted slot-sized fish of 18 to 27 inches. Deploying the boat’s Power Pole to remain stationary, he produced a light spinning rod baited with a Berkley Gulp green pumpkin sinking minnow that looks a lot like an American eel. The stinky bait was attached to a No. 1 Kahle hook.
Porcelli cast it toward some ripples in the shallows and demonstrated how to retrieve.
“Like ‘walking the dog’ underwater,” he said, reeling and flicking the line. “It does that darting action and makes the fish eat.”
No kidding. Before he could hand me the rod, it bent sharply and then line began to peel off the reel. To my total un-surprise, I reeled in a 24-inch redfish.
“So where are the bigger ones?” I asked, half-joking.
Raising the Power Pole and cranking the outboard, he replied, without a trace of irony, “We’ve got about a 10-minute run to get to them.”
We headed south to a slightly deeper trough between two flats opposite the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge. I couldn’t see any fish — large or small — but Porcelli insisted they were there, pointing to sharp ripples on the surface. These, he said, were the head wakes of large reds.
The guide put down the Power Pole and broke out slightly stouter spinning rods with Kahle hooks baited with live pinfish.
“Now put it out there and make sure you have a little slack line so when he picks it up and runs with it, he doesn’t feel the pressure of the line and spit it,” Porcelli told me.
I cast where he directed, reeled up a bit of the slack, and waited for something to happen. Porcelli cast his bait a short distance away. After a minute or two, I felt the pinfish wiggle nervously, as if something were about to devour it. Then a felt a light tap, and tension on the line. I waited a couple of beats, then closed the bail and began to reel. But the line was slack and my bait was still alive, albeit dented, when I brought it in.
“He dropped it,” Porcelli said. Then he handed me his rod.
“Reel, reel, reel, reel,” he directed urgently.
At first, I felt nothing but slack — until I looked down and saw a large redfish charging directly for the boat. With no more slack in the line, I raised the rod tip and braided line began zinging off the reel as the fish made a 90-degree turn and dashed off about 25 yards.
I probably fought it for 10 minutes before Porcelli was able to grab the line and net it for photos.
Again, un-surprisingly, it measured 30 inches.
“A healthy, fat fish,” Porcelli said, admiring it before letting it go. “He fought better than a 52-incher on the same tackle.”
With our redfish goals accomplished, Porcelli said it was time to look for sea trout. We motored to a shoal with clear water and sandy potholes dotting the sea grass bed.
There I saw something I’d never seen before up-close: a sizeable trout snoozing in a sand hole. It failed to wake up even after the skiff floated right over it.
“Let’s see if we can wake him up,” Porcelli suggested.
We drifted past and began casting live shrimp into the edge of the depression, at one point bonking the trout on the head. It kept snoring.
After about the 10th landing of the shrimp in the trout’s boudoir, it finally woke up — but swam away without eating the bait.
Confident there were plenty more trout in the vicinity, Porcelli stopped the boat and baited our hooks with shrimp.
“You cast way past the white hole and reel it along the surface so you can see the bait and drop it into the hole without getting any grass on it,” he said, demonstrating.
For the third time that day, I was not shocked when he hooked up, then handed me the rod. It was a three-pound trout.
With two-thirds of an inshore slam accomplished, I suggested we try for snook. The Mosquito Lagoon is pretty much the northernmost extent of the species’ east-coast range. But with water temperatures in the mid-70s, hooking a line-sider was a distinct possibility.
It was the only task we didn’t accomplish that day, despite casting shrimp, jerkbaits and pinfish beneath some tumbledown docks near the River Breeze Park boat ramp. All we caught were small mangrove snapper.
Porcelli was unruffled.
“This is the time when snook are sitting on the couch relaxing after breakfast and lunch,” he said.
Yep, and after custom-tailored redfish and napping trout, I could just about visualize it.
