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.
