09/29/2026
THEN AND NOW
From The Bouncer Smith Chronicles
When you’ve spent more than sixty years fishing the waters off South Florida, you get to see changes that most people never notice.
Some are encouraging. Some are heartbreaking.
When I was a teenager, snook were everywhere. We fished for them from shore around North Miami Beach, stopping at seawalls and points of land or wading into river mouths. We caught small snook in huge numbers and plenty of big ones too.
Then came heavy harvesting, gill nets and development. The snook population crashed so badly that eventually I wouldn’t even go snook fishing myself, much less take a charter after them.
But here’s the good news: management worked.
The snook came back. I’ve since had charters catch twenty snook in an evening, and just a few years ago we caught the biggest snook we’d ever taken on a charter.
Swordfish tell a similar story.
I went to Islamorada in 1976 to become a flats guide, just as nighttime swordfishing was exploding in South Florida. Within a few years, however, longlining had become so extensive that sometimes we could hardly put out a spread without drifting into commercial gear.
The fishery collapsed.
Eventually protections were put in place, and by the late 1990s swordfishing was great again. In the early 2000s it became almost unbelievable. I’ve been offshore at night with a hundred other boats. Passengers in commercial airliners could look down and see green Hydro Glow lights scattered across the ocean fifteen or twenty miles offshore.
Daytime swordfishing later became popular, and although the nighttime fishery declined again, we still have a viable daytime fishery. Some recent winters have been phenomenal.
So we know fisheries can recover.
But then there are kingfish.
When I was just out of high school, we went out on a drift boat and caught more than 300 kingfish in a four-hour trip. Once, in less than three hours, I personally caught twenty-seven.
Head boats up and down the coast routinely came home with fifty, seventy-five or a hundred kingfish.
Then spotter planes began locating schools and directing gill-net boats to them. Entire spawning masses could be wiped out in a day. Boats were loaded so heavily that fish on the bottom were crushed by the weight of those above them. Much of the catch was worth almost nothing by the time it reached shore.
Kingfish have never really come back.
Today there are weeks when we might catch one or two. Years ago we could have caught twenty or thirty.
Bottom fishing has changed just as dramatically.
I remember pulling into Haulover with mutton snapper weighing ten, fifteen and twenty pounds, along with black, gag and red grouper. People seeing our catch would swear we had been fishing in the Bahamas.
We hadn’t. We were fishing off Miami.
Today I might catch a ten-pound mutton two or three times a year. I can’t remember the last fifteen-pound mutton I caught around Miami.
But there is another success story: red snapper.
For decades I hardly ever saw one in my home waters. Now I’ve caught ten or twelve in a day, some weighing ten to twenty pounds. Whatever else we may argue about concerning regulations, the recovery of red snapper shows what protection can accomplish.
And that brings me to something fishermen sometimes don’t want to hear.
We can blame commercial fishing, longliners and poor management, and sometimes we should. But recreational fishermen have responsibilities too.
That is especially true with billfish.
When I was young, a run of sailfish might extend from Miami all the way to Palm Beach. We would see dozens tailing on the surface.
Today fishermen have become incredibly good at catching the sailfish that remain. But catching and releasing a fish doesn’t necessarily mean we have saved it.
A sailfish should be brought alongside the boat, kept in the water and released as quickly and gently as possible. Cut the leader close to the mouth. Don’t drag the fish aboard just to get a photograph.
The object shouldn’t simply be to catch more fish.
It should be to make sure those fish are still there for somebody else to catch tomorrow.
And there is one more encouraging story.
I’ve fished South Florida full time for more than sixty years, and in the last few years I’ve seen more bluefin tuna than I saw during most of my lifetime.
That didn’t happen by accident.
Quotas and responsible fishery management have helped the bluefin population rebuild. Seeing a magnificent thousand-pound bluefin tuna off South Florida is something I never get tired of.
So when I think about fishing then and now, I see both sides.
I remember waters filled with kingfish, huge mutton snapper around Miami and sailfish stretching up the coast. Much of that is gone.
But I’ve also watched snook recover. I’ve watched swordfish return. I’ve watched red snapper become abundant and bluefin tuna appear in numbers I never expected to see.
That tells me something important.
We caused a lot of these problems, which means we can also help fix them.
We’re the apex predator on this earth. If fishermen, scientists and fishery managers make good decisions and everybody does his part, there is no reason these fish can’t be around for generations to come.
— Capt. Bouncer Smith
Adapted from The Bouncer Smith Chronicles, Bimini Twist Library
