Florida Sportsman March 2025

Energy earned for energy spent. More and more these days, that calculus contributes to my overall satisfaction as an angler. I burn fuel to catch fish, I feel good when I come home with fuel for my body. Nothing beats Spanish mackerel for this equation. When they’re running—which is right now for much of Florida—it’s usually a simple affair to get the boat out along the beach and catch a few with jigs or spoons. You might have a pier or favorite surf fishing beach where you can intercept them. Surely you’ve heard that Spanish are best when eaten fresh. Today, tomorrow: Great! Day three, pushing it. Frozen? No thanks. Me? I can take a day’s catch of Spanish and fuel myself for almost a week. By way of example,…

Twenty years ago, it took direct hits from Hurricanes Frances and Jeanne to get water over my Stuart, FL seawall. This past fall, all it took was a big moon and a high tide. Similar “blue sky flooding” is happening even more frequently to our south, in Miami Beach. Flooding, storm surge damage and stressors to our coastal habitat seem to be here to stay. What to do about it? In my neighborhood, two of my neighbors, in the last year, built higher seawalls, at about $600 a foot. In the City of Miami Beach, they’re not only raising seawalls, they’re building roads and sidewalks on top of roads and sidewalks. But is building higher walls or pancaking roads on top of roads sustainable? Probably not, and thankfully there are…

On a recent visit to Jacksonville Beach, Shane Canny said he was pleasantly surprised to find a fishing pier within walking distance of his hotel. He and his son James rented two fishing poles and purchased fresh frozen shrimp at the pier’s bait shop. “Instead of walking the beach, we spent the afternoon catching a bucket full of whiting,” Shane said. “We also had a better look at the Atlantic from the pier: sea birds, porpoises and fish, too.” The Canny family would have a nearby restaurant prepare their catch later that evening. On any given day, the pier is visited by guests enjoying the ¼-mile walk to the end while watching fishermen bring in their catches. During the cooler months of fall, winter and spring, fishing baits on the…

The power-to-weight ratio of Mercury’s 5.7L V10 Verado outboards stands out right away: These are 350- and 400-horsepower engines weighing as little as 695 pounds. I’ll spare you the math but encourage you to look around and reflect on that. They’ve a small footprint, too, mounting down to 26-inch centers, if called for. Performance? Oh yes. High displacement, quad-cam design; torque-optimized spark timing; performance-tuned intakes and a Revolution X propeller engineered for the package promise gratifying low-end power and high-end performance. This unique combination suggests installation options for a variety of fishing boats, from singles on large hybrid bay boats to multi-power options for the biggest center consoles. We put three 400-hp V10 Verado outboards through unique fishing applications during filming of our Florida Sportsman Sea Trials episode. Two 25-inch…

FUJINON STABLE BINOCULARS OFFERING TWO LEVELS of magnification in two new models, FUJIFILM North America announced the introduction of its FUJINON TECHNO-STABI TS-L1640 and TS-L2040 binoculars. The powerful 16x and 20x (respectively) magnifications are primarily designed for birdwatchers, but also are ideal for anglers, hunters, boaters, aviators, sports fans, concertgoers and travelers. “FUJINON TECHNO-STABI TS-L binoculars challenge conventional thinking about high-magnification optics, especially for birdwatchers,” said Mike C. Northrup, Senior Manager of Strategic Business Development at FUJIFILM North America Corporation. “We’ve engineered a way to give birders and other outdoor enthusiasts unprecedented, stabilized magnification while maintaining the compact form and image quality they demand.” The magnification is powerful in both sets of binoculars. For example, objects that are 160 feet or 200 feet away, respectively, appear 10 feet away. The…

The chicken rig is a classic Florida bottom fishing rig that can be configured for whatever size leader, hooks, or target fish you’re after. It’s perfect for triggerfish, covered in this month’s feature, and also excel-lent for snapper, sheepshead, grunts, seabass and just about any other schooling panfish that lives on or near bottom. Not really ideal for groupers and amberjacks, but in heavier tests and with hardware (three-way swivels instead of knots), it can be modified for the heavies. Basically, the chicken rig is a terminal leader with a sinker at the bottom and one or more hooks positioned above it in series—generally two. Central to its construction is the dropper loop knot, a handy little knot every fisherman should learn. The dropper loop gives you a stiff mini-loop…