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January, 1999Florida’s Long-Ranger
by Frank Sargent
The Reality Check is not your standard charter boat. The custom-built, 45-foot rocketship can whisk anglers offshore at speeds up to 60 miles per hour and carries 600 gallons of fuel.
It is hailing fish out of the blackness of the 4:00 a.m. Gulf. “Thump!” go the ones that hit the side of the boat. “Smack!” go the ones that hit the 3/8-inch Plexiglass windshield.
“I had one bust the shield a while back,” calls Tommy Butler from the helm of the Reality Check. “I’m changing to half-inch Plexi when this one breaks. One of them hits you in the face, it’s lights out!”
Hopefully it won’t break tonight. We are 100 miles off St. Petersburg, Florida, running at 50 mph through a barrage of flying fish, and they are splattering against us like giant, scaled moths. Somehow the name of the boat seems very appropriate on this surreal journey.
We are on the way to some of the best reef-fishing areas left on the planet, ajum-ble of peaks, caves, ledges and springs that lie along the 40-fathom curve of the eastern Gulf, just inside the 1,000-foot drop of the continental shelf. Butler, a hook-and-line commercial fisherman long before he became a charter skipper, figured that if he could get clients out there in reasonable time and in reasonable comfort, there were charters to be had. The Reality Check was the solution.
| Tommy Butter with a gag grouper taken from the edge of the continental shelf. On these long-range trips, anglers routinely catch grouper over 30 pounds, plus a host of other bottom fish. |  |
Offshore Rocketship
A 45-foot, custom-built arrow of Wescore, balsa-core and tni-axial fiberglass, the lightweight hull of the Reality Check is nearly bulletproof. Powered by twin 350-hp turbocharged Yanmar diesels buckled up to a pair of Mercruiser’s racing division Speed Drives, this guided missile can run at 63 mph loaded light, or in the mid-50s loaded with ice, food, and four anglers in the “pod”, a wrap-around cabin that protects its occupants from wind-blast, rain, spray - and flying fish. The speed, plus a 1.4-mpg fuel efficiency and 600-gallon fuel capacity, have made it possible for Butler to run single-day trips all the way from Apalachicola to the Dry Tortugas out of his home port of St. Petersburg.
“The fishing out there is like it was inshore 30 years ago,” says Butler. “You’ll catch more big bottom fish in a day than you ever have in your life.”
The first stop, roughly due west of Boca Grande in 224 feet, puts us over a spire of fish as tall as a five-story building. Butler and mate Sean Gatesman give me a play-by-play as we watch the show on the color sounder.
“The big cloud at the top is bait, squid probably, and the long cloud below that is amberjack,” Butler explains. “The red blocks attached to the bottom are gags, and all the stuff around the edges are snapper and scamp and Kitty Mitchells and whatever. The trick is to get through the AJs to get the gags.
| Once Butler's customers have caught their limit of grouper, they can have fun slugging it out with the huge amberjack that stack up over the offshore reefs |  |
Big Gear for Big Fish
To do the job, he breaks out some no-nonsense tackle. Butler’s no fan of light gear for fishing the deep reefs. The seven-foot solid-glass rods are the diameter of broomsticks, and each wears a 9/0 Penn Senator with an over-sized drag. The clear mono is 100-pound test, the fluorocarbon leaders 130-pound. Hooks are needle-sharp 10/0 Mustads, extra-strong, while the egg sinkers weigh six to ten ounces. For those customers who want them, he carries electric drives that make it much easier to reel in the football-field’s length of line that’s let out on each drop.
“This is not the place for 40-pound test,” he says. “The only thing you do with lighter line is break off fish or turn them into ‘cuda or shark bait. You just can’t let them swim around in the open water for a half-hour and not attract predators out here.”
We bait up with five-inch grunts hooked through the lips and send them on the long ride to the bottom. When the sinker hits, I pick up the slack and am immediately brought to my knees as something large and powerful freight-trains it for shelter. After lots of grunting, staggering and cranking, the gray-brown hulk of a 20-pound gag grouper emerges in a cloud of silver bubbles.
“Medium-sized,” says Butler, “but we’ll take it.”
The next drop produces a 15-pound gag, followed by an 18. Then the man-grove snapper move in. We crank up a half-dozen five-pounders, plus a few Kitty Mitchells and scamp in the same size range.
“That’s enough off this spot; we’ll leave the rest,” Butler announces, prompting Gatesman to begin hauling in a knee-deep stack of anchor line.
We run west a mile or so to a 240-foot hole in the bottom. I send down a squirrelfish, bounce bottom twice, and find myself rudely slammed against the gunwale. This fish, another gag, takes a fighting belt to bring to the top, and my arms feel as if I have battled a bluefin by the time the 34-pounder comes over the rail. The hole also produces a 22-pound gag, plus the usual assortment of scamp and mangrove snapper, and a couple of ten-pound red grouper from its edges.
Butler tells me that the reds are usually found on flat rock bottom, particularly in areas with holes in the rock, rather than on the ledges and rock piles preferred by gags. He says that true black grouper (Mycteroperca bonaci) also like the more obvious structure, particularly the edges of coral outcroppings, and it’s common to deck two or three among the gags.
In hauling up big bottom dwellers, the trick is to rapidly pull the fish through the first 100 feet of water.
After that, the change in pressure ends the fight for most species, as their air bladders expand and float them to the top.
100-Percent Keepers
“We don’t catch any gags out here under the 20-inch minimum size,” Butler points out. “There’s no release mortality, since everything we catch is legal-sized. When we get a half-dozen fish off a spot, we quit fishing there, and I won’t go back for three or four months. I don’t have to - there are thousands of spots along the curve."
Butler’s conservation ethic is also practical. “If you clean out a reef, whether it’s in 20 feet or 200 feet, it takes a year for the big grouper to return. If you leave some there, they attract others in a few weeks,” he says. “Rest a spot and the fish are hot to bite when you pull up on it. Hit it twice in one week and you’re hauling water most of the time.”
After we have plenty of eating fish in the icebox, we drop baits short of bottom into the AJs. Forty-pounders immediately have all three rods bent to the water. We bring up four each, as fast as we can reel them in, before our muscles turn to jelly. "If somebody wanted to, they could catch 40 or 50 in a day,” says Butler. “There’s no end to AJs out here!”
Because of the water depth, fishing remains good year-round, and is not greatly affected by heat or cold. Even though our trip occurred during the "slow” period of summer, we had unbelievable action, and Butler says it gets even better in fall and winter. As far as he can tell, prime time for the largest gags is probably December through March.
No question about it - 100 miles of open ocean is a long boat ride, even at 50 mph. But for those who want to tangle with really big grouper - lots of them - there’s hardly any place that can compare.
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