When I was much younger, one of my friends was from a whole family of commercial fishermen. Originally from North Carolina, his dad ran a charter boat out of Miami in the winter months and out of Hatteras in the summer months. My friend’s older brother was a bait fisherman – specifically a ballyhoo bait fisherman.
Alfred, the older brother, ran a net boat out of the Miami River and caught ballyhoo on the reefs along the Southeast Florida coast. Occasionally, if we bugged him enough, he took a couple of us along with him fro the ride. He expected us to work, but we ended up having fun fishing while he caught bait.
The ballyhoo fishing at that time consisted of first finding a school of fish, and then corralling them into a tight ball. Alfred would run the boat in ever decreasing circles around the school of bait. As they balled up together, he would drop his seine net and continue to run around the school, releasing the net.
The net had weights on the bottom edge and floats on the top. As he ran around the school of bait, he built a circular curtain that trapped the fish inside. Once he completed his circle and reached the beginning of the net, the real work began.
With all the ballyhoo now encircled, he began pulling the net back into the boat making the circle smaller and smaller. Depending on the size of the school, he would stop hauling the net at some point and begin dipping bait.
With a scoop net on the end of a long pole, he would dip up the ballyhoo and deposit them into his brine tank. The brine tank was an icy, saltwater slush; the cold from the ice kept the bait fresh while the saltwater kept them very firm – an ideal way top preserve a fresh catch. This is where we were expected to help. He would not let us work the net, but he fully expected us to dip the bait.
Once we had dipped bait for a while, Alfred would grudgingly allow us to fish. And, fish we did.
The ballyhoo, balled up in the small circle of the seine, would loose lots of shiny, silver scales during the catch process. Behind the net, a silvery streak of scales made an ideal chum line for an hundred yards behind the boat. This chum line drew more fish than any chumming I had done before and have done since.
We grabbed some of the fresh ballyhoo, hooked them up and freelined them back in the chum line. Mutton snapper, grouper, cero mackerel, almost any predator fish drawn to the chum would be eager to eat our fresh ballyhoo.
Alfred was not much for sport fishing. He made his living on the water, and while we considered it an honor and a treat to get to go with him, he considered it work. When he finished one net drop, he was on to another, regardless of how well the fish were biting for us.
Once he filled both of his brine tanks, it was off to the bait wholesaler on the Miami River, where we offloaded several hundred pounds of ballyhoo. The faster we could get all this done, the faster he get the boat cleaned and secured and could head home, so we were once again out to work.
Over the years as I married and fished, I would call Alfred to tell him I was heading offshore the next day. He would always bring home a bucket of fresh ballyhoo, still soaking in cold brine. I would swing by his house and pick up my bait for the next day. He never took any money for them, even though I offered on every occasion.
Alfred passed away a number of years ago. After retiring from fishing, he moved to a 200 acre farm with several head of cattle and a big garden. It was quite a change from being on the water every day. He joked about not “knowing where the gills were on those cows”. It was there that he left us.
I still fish with ballyhoo, but I have neither the time nor the patience to catch my own any more. But every time I pick up a ballyhoo, I always think about Alfred and our ballyhoo catching trips.
