From Small Florida Species to New Jersey Channel Bass

Tight Lines Al Ristori Going to try and comment on the link posts for now on, because I learned that a website gets penalized for the bad search engine optimization practice of "thin content." That of not saying much! I know you like my newsy links, because I see the numbers of people opening the posts from their phones. How many of you click on them from laptops, I don't know. So going forward, if you just want the article I link to, click the link and ignore the rest, but then again, maybe my words will add to the time out of time, so to speak, a little reading provides.

Ristori was out fishing with Crazy Alberto Knie in the Florida Everglades recently, catching a number of small inshore species, including one they could not identify. Ristori got a photo and figured he'd find the answer among his many books that have information about species from that area. No. 

When my son and I first fished the reef some six miles out to sea from Big Pine Key, I caught a very strange yellow fish. Bright yellow. That was 2007 when neither myself nor my son did digital photography, but I'm making a note to myself, because I have a print from 35mm film, and of course, I can scan that. Maybe I'll post it someday. Who knows, some of you might even know what!

I scrolled down a few posts to read about Ristori's skepticism about climate change. He opens with a compelling quote from Thomas Jefferson, but for me, the most interesting part of his post is about channel bass, exactly what I called redfish, red drum, or simply reds when I was a boy. Ristori makes the point that this southern species was abundant in New Jersey--and called channel bass--a hundred years ago. 

So I looked online. Sure enough, I found corroborating evidence in the Bass Barn, from 2014. The comment thread includes information about abundant oysters and clams inshore having sustained the reds.

Found the photo! Had forgotten the purple on the fish.