A wise man once said, “Love is a hole in the heart”, but for me, love is a hole in the grass flats off Homosassa, Florida.
Sand holes on the vast turtle grass meadows that stretch some 80 miles between
Port Richey and Steinhatchee are big, white fish magnets, impossible to miss,
and they require very little on the part of the angler except the ability to
cast into them from a reasonable distance. Avoiding an excessive amount of
whipsawing before the fly hits the water is also a plus.
Sand holes attract everything from redfish, snook and sea trout to flounder
and sheepshead. In slightly deeper water, they are spring and early summer
lazing spots for the giant tarpon for which this area of Florida’s west coast
is famed.
Taken together, the thick Thalassia turtle grass here and the holes,
which can be found anywhere from a foot deep to 10 feet down, are the Yin and
Yang of coastal flats. The holes would only be barren sand or limerock without
the surrounding grass, while the grass would be less productive without the
potholes sprinkled here and there.
Holes in saltwater flats, surrounded by seagrass, are prime locations to
find reds, trout and snook in the shallows, and tarpon in slightly deeper
areas. Photo by St Croix Rod.
What made the holes is more or less a mystery—the favorite local legend is
that World War II pilots on training runs from Eglin Field in the Panhandle
dropped bombs here, and in fact some of them look as if they could have been
made just that way, particularly the bowl-shaped impressions favored by the
tarpon in 6- to 10-foot depths.
The bottom here declines very gradually, and in some areas you can be 5 miles
offshore looking at water just barely over your head. In other areas, you can
be a mile out and run into a rock the size of a couch situated 3 inches below
the surface. It’s not a place to motor around blind, to say the least, and
even the local guides (one of which I used to be) go by the saying, “Some of
the rocks here apparently move, and some of them grow.”
A shallow draft flats boat is an essential for fishing the rocky, unmarked
shallows of Florida’s west coast between Bayport and Crystal River. Photo by St Croix Rod.
There are many other holes here as well, including some in the stony marsh
creeks that feed water in a hundred fingers out of the coastal lowlands into
the spartina marsh. Some are 3 feet deep, some are 10 feet, and all are part
of the estuary that has been forming here for an unimaginable number of
centuries. Fly over this country on a calm, sunny day and you can see the
continuation of these rivers up to 10 miles offshore, under the water: sea
level rise is not quite such a new phenomenon as some would have us believe.
Why the holes are there doesn’t really matter to anglers. What does matter is
that they are easy-to-find targets that load up with fish, again and again,
and that they are easy to test with a Deceiver or a Merkin.
The likely reason fish gather on these spots (and really, who knows why they
do any of the stuff they do?) is that the holes provide sort of a kill zone,
where those minnows and crabs and shrimp that can hide so deftly in the turtle
grass have no place to evade predators. The fish typically hang in the grass
just on the edge of the hole, and when an edible (or your fly) comes wandering
across, BAM!
The inshore holes are likely to be around island points, in cuts through the
bars that often form on the outside of a flat where it meets deeper water, and
in the flow-way between mangrove islands. Most of the land at the edge of the
Gulf here is limerock, with mangroves somehow finding enough grip to grow on
it. This is backed up by a spartina saltmarsh that’s 5 miles deep and over 100
miles long, one of Florida’s great natural treasures that only now is
beginning to get the attention and the protection it deserves.
This one is just getting started—battles can last several hours, though
quicker is better for both angler and fish. Photo by Captain Bryon Chamberlain.
In summer, reds and trout seek out holes where good current flow brings a
steady supply of food to them. Within the last decade, lots of snook have
joined them from the south—the Centropomus clan clearly believes in
Global Warming.
The big tarpon come to visit from April through about July 4, porpoising and
daisy chaining and generally behaving like teenagers thinking impure thoughts,
though the biologists say they don’t actually spawn here, but about 100 miles
to the west later in summer. Before they leave, they send a few dozen tarpon
anglers into fits. It’s a very specialized fishery best handled by guides
dedicated to the task.
Tarpon here vary in size from juniors, like this one, to massive
200-pounders. Photo by St Croix Rod.
Trying it on your own, though not mission impossible, is a true challenge, and
you’re likely to send a whole lot of fish over the horizon, screwing up the
works for the sometimes-rather-uppity aficionados while you’re learning.
When the tarpon settle into the holes to rest up between bouts of horsing
about, however, it’s a different game, and you may have a pretty good chance
at them.
In winter—what passes for winter in Florida—the holes again become attractions
for gamefish. They’re slightly deeper than the surrounding flats—sometimes
several feet deeper—and when the big winter tides go out, often driven even
lower by sustained winds out of the north, the holes become aquariums where
the fish can hang and soak up some sun.
I’d guess they also like the fact that bottle-nosed dolphin, which hunt flats
fish all winter long, can’t get into the holes because of the barrier of
surrounding water that’s inches deep. The dolphin, warm-blooded, can easily
catch the cold-blooded fish slowed down by chilly water if they find them in
accessible water.
Hooked up! Twelve-weight rods and reels with lots of backing are a must for
chasing the jumbo tarpon of the central west coast of Florida. Photo by Captain Rick Grassett.
Whatever the season, there are a few basics to the game.
First, you can often find holes by studying Google Earth satellite views. Look
not only for white sand circles but also for the greenish channels that may
lead to them. (Even prop cuts, which also show on Google Earth, can be fish
highways on the flats on the lowest low tides around the new and full moons.)
Second, ground-truthing is everything. Some spots that look like fish hotels
on Google are in fact as barren of fish as a patch of Gobi sand, while others
that look highly unlikely are always loaded. And some are loaded only at
particular tide or moon phases, or when the wind blows from the north—or from
the south. Experience rules, as in all angling.
Gearing up is simple. For seatrout, a 9-foot, 8-weight is fine, while if
you’re targeting snook and reds, a 10-weight is better, especially around
mangrove or oyster habitat where you may have to put some heat on them to
prevent cutoffs. St. Croix’s Imperial Salt in 9-weight, among others, is a
nice compromise between the two.
It doesn’t hurt to overline the rod, making for easier short-distance casting.
I like weight-forward floating lines, but DT’s are fine, too. Tapered leaders
are unnecessary—a rod’s length of 15-pound-test mono does the job for trout
and reds. If there are snook around, you’ll want to add 12 inches of
30-pound-test tippet to prevent cutoffs on the jaws and gillplates.
Gearing up for the tarpon is a whole other game, with 12-weight rods, shock
tippets and reels with some serious backing capacity pretty much essential. It
also helps to be able to lay a streamer the size of a hummingbird out there 80
feet or so with minimal back-casting.
Fly choice is not critical—flats fish are not brown trout. But there are
definitely days when they want whites, yellows and silvers, and other days
when they want browns, blacks and purples. If you get a couple of refusals,
that probably means you need to change colors—or maybe it’s a day when they
want shrimp and you’re throwing a minnow imitation.
Snook have also become a target here in the last decade, with numerous fish
migrating in from the south as winters warm. Photo by Frank Sargeant.
The typical saltwater fly choices usually do the job: Lefty’s Deceiver,
Seaducer, Clouser Minnow and various crab and shrimp patterns, all in 1/0 to
3/0 sizes for trout/reds/snook and up to 5/0 for tarpon.
The most critical part of the deal is to get up to the hole without spooking
the fish. Silence is golden, or silver in the case of tarpon—one bump of the
push pole is sometimes all it takes to turn happy fish into paranoid
suspicious bitches. (It’s not paranoia, though, if someone actually IS trying
to stick a 5/0 hook in your mouth, is it?)
Ideally you want to approach from downwind to help your cast. If there’s
current flowing through the hole—always a good thing for the bite—throw your
fly to the uptide end of the hole and strip it back through, 6 inches at a
time with minnow patterns, shorter with crab and shrimp patterns.
Some days, you can’t keep the fish from eating, some days you can’t get them
to commit. If they follow but don’t quite open the mouth and close the deal,
you can often trigger the bite by making a series of very tiny twitches of the
line as the fish closes in, causing the fly to flutter back and forth just a
bit.
There’s usually no problem with getting the hook into flats fish because they
tend to suck it deep. Reds sometimes come in such a rush that you may get
trigger-happy and set too soon. One tactic I’ve learned is to wait until you
see the white inside of the mouth before you set—when they open up, the fly
for sure gets sucked in and you can then stick them.
If you’re a freshwater fly fisher, just remember that snook, reds and tarpon
all have fairly tough mouths and you may not get a solid hookup by raising the
rod. Instead, strip set, pulling hard and fast on the line with the rod
pointed at the fish. Do it several times for tarpon. When you feel resistance
on the line, raise the rod and get on with the fight.
Reds often hang in the grass on the edge of the holes, rushing out to grab
any bait that swims across the open sand or rock. Photo by Frank Sargeant.
The flats set up here so that they are just about unfishable except for those
with powered boats. It’s more than five miles down each of the major
rivers—the Chassahowitzka, the Homossassa and the Crystal (or
Weewahi Iaca, to maintain the First American nomenclature)—to where
the fishing begins. That’s a long way to paddle a Hobie, though those with
electric assist and plenty of battery power occasionally do it.
This is enough to get you started in the hole thing. How deep you go depends
on you.