IRL Capt John Kumiski 4/2/2016

Broken Trailer Orlando Fishing Report

My aluminum trailer crapped out on me this week, thus the Broken Trailer Orlando Fishing Report.

News of the Week

My friend Rodney Smith attended the Brevard County Commission meeting this past week. My understanding of our telephone conversation is that almost four hours of citizen comments and discussion were spent as Brevard County citizens requested the Commission declare a state of emergency due to the condition of the Banana River Lagoon. One of the Commissioners made a motion to make such a declaration. That motion did not receive a second. The matter did not come up for a vote.

One of the Commissioners was heard to say, “They’re still catching fish at Sebastian Inlet and in the Mosquito Lagoon.” Apparently all life in the lagoon system will have to die before the weasels will take action. No, they probably will not take action even then.

These were Mitchell Roffer’s comments to the Brevard County Commision:

I am Mitchell Roffer, President of Roffer’s Ocean Fishing Forecasting Service, Inc. of West Melbourne and I live on Melbourne Beach 6025 Hwy. A1A. I have my Ph.D from Univ. Miami ‘s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences in Biological Oceanography. Property owner [in Brevard County] for more than twenty years.

We have a three billion dollar ($3.7B) ecosystem economic machine called the Indian River Lagoon. We have not done enough to maintain its upkeep and health. Its like your valuable car that you don’t do enough servicing on until a hose breaks and then you realize that the engine and transmission are blown too. It hurts to pay the bill, but you have to.

Yes we have not been paying to maintain and protect the IRL. This is not a new problem. This has been going on for at least 15 years.

So now prepare yourself to pay. Yes be prepared to pay on the order of 500 million dollars.

The press releases I’ve read from certain government offices are a sad joke that insults my intelligence. If water quality was such a top priority in the state of Florida, then we would not be in this situation. The IRL has been under managed and understudied. Protection has been negligently weak.

Yes the problem is obvious: Too much nitrogen and phosphorus.

We must act. We must declare a state of emergency so that we can:

1.     Get rid of the muck within five years.

2.     End residential fertilizer use.

3.     End septic tanks.

4.     Remediate water entering the IRL.

5.     Mandate the reduction of nutrients coming from agriculture including farms, citrus and cattle.

6.     Improve water treatment infrastructure to modern tertiary and quartinary treatment, as well as, stopping sewage spillage.

7.     Restore the ecosystem through sea grass planting, oyster and other bivalve culture and fish restocking.

8.     Improve the monitoring and science.

Yes we need state, federal and regional money. I think we need a large bond issue. Interest rates are low.

Asking you to act. The Tampa Bay leaders acted and succeeded to repair and restore the Tampa Bay estuary.  Be the leaders you were elected to be.

They’re weasels, Mitchell. It takes fortitude to act for the greater good, and those weasels don’t have it.

Fishing!

Oi, what a week.

Monday was cleanup day from the Everglades trip. I checked the Econ gauge online. Wednesday night before the trip to south Florida it read two feet. Monday morning it read eight feet. What?!!! It must be broken.

I hopped in the car and went down the street to check. The gauge is working properly. Weekend rains blew out the river, just when it was hitting the right level, too.

Tuesday son Alex and his Lady Allison joined me for a day on the mighty Atlantic. As I was backing the trailer down the boat ramp I heard a disturbing grinding noise. The trailer had broken and was dragging on the ramp. We got the Mitzi into the water and went fishing. We got several bluefish and Spanish mackerel, most on jigs but a few on fly too.

After several telephone conversations (during our fishing) I determined my course of action. I would tie the boat to the dock at Blue Points Marina ($2/foot/night), effect such repairs on the old trailer that I could get it home, go buy a new trailer, and come back and get the boat the next day. That way I maybe could get my Wednesday charter in as well.

I would like to thank Allen McMillan at Central Florida Marine for making the purchase of that new trailer (a Continental) as painless and expedient as possible. Great work, sir!

How fortunate am I that after taking a 500+ mile trip with that trailer it breaks on the boat ramp at Port Canaveral, THE most convenient place it could ever have broken??

I am in the process of rebuilding the old trailer, an EZ Loader, and will be selling it. If you’re looking for a trailer please consider it. I will have an “official” for sale notice when I finish the job.

Wednesday Mark and Janet Soley met me at Blue Points for our rendezvous. The wind was out of the east at 15. We got to the jetty and turned around. That was that. I put the Mitzi on her new wheels and drove her home.

Thursday I may have been dreaming, or maybe I entered another form of alternate reality. In that reality I went paddling with Tim McFall. We found some clean water in the Indian River Lagoon system. In that clean water we actually found a few redfish we could see, and I actually convinced one to take a fly I had tied from rooster feathers, a Homer Rhodes Shrimp Fly.

It was a fantastic experience. Sadly, I don’t expect it to ever happen again, at least in my lifetime. I so hope I’m light years off base with that prediction.

Friday I returned to normal reality. I took the Bang-O-Craft scouting out of River Breeze. The water looks awful. In spite of that I actually saw in the murky stuff that now passes for water four redfish, alive and swimming, a group of three and a single. I cast a DOA CAL jig at the group and one of them slammed it with zero hesitation. The single spooked off the same lure.

Three dink trout were taken by using the DOA Deadly Combo. That was the total catch in about five hours of hunting.

And that is this week’s broken trailer Orlando fishing report from the Spotted Tail.

Life is great and I love my work!

Life is short- Go Fishing!

John Kumiski

www.spottedtail.com