KEY WEST, Fla. — It was definitely a fly rod, an 11-to-12 weight that many anglers use for big saltwater species like permit and tarpon, mated to a single action fly reel about the size that Michigan anglers use for salmon.

After that, it started to get weird.

The fish bending the rod was a 10-pound grouper, an oceanic bottom dweller with a mouth like a paint bucket.

The lure in its jaw was a lead jig that weighed about as much as, oh, 10,000 trout flies.

“The fly rod really works, doesn’t it?” Capt. Frank Piku said as an angler brought the grouper to the port side of Piku’s 35-foot Jaguar catamaran, “Golden Streaker,” then reached down with a lip-gripper and hoisted the fish aboard.

On the starboard side, John Noffsinger of Annandale, Va., also held a bent fly rod, fighting a big yellowtail snapper whose metallic-blue sides, yellow spots and yellow racing stripe, and tail earn it the apt nickname of “flag.”

We were in the Gulf of Mexico, 55 miles west of America’s southernmost city near the uninhabited Marquesas Keys, where fish see far fewer anglers than those on reefs near the Florida Keys.

Reaching this spot would take 261/27-3 hours on a conventional sport-fishing boat, too far for one day. But with twin 250-horsepower Evinrude engines, Piku’s cat can touch 70 m.p.h. and cruise at 50-55.

He can make the run in an hour, fish all day and be home in time to cook the catch for dinner.

Piku is a 73-year-old retired businessman, Detroit native and Sylvan Lake resident who ships his boat between its summer home on Lake St. Clair, where he charters for walleyes, bass and muskellunge, and its winter harbor at Key West, where he catches everything from amberjack to wahoo.

“I have the best of both worlds,” he said. “I’ll stay here until the end of May, then ship the boat north. I miss the best of the shallow-water walleye fishing, but there are still plenty when I get back.”

Many people, especially women and kids, find it hard to jig heavy lures on conventional tackle and even harder to crank in a grouper, which looks like a watermelon with fins.

A grouper’s only tactic is to dive like a smart bomb for the nearest hole, and once a grouper gets into a hole and spreads its fins, the only way to force it out would be to fillet it in the water.

Piku said, “If they get in a hole, give some slack and count 20. Sometimes they head back for their home hole, and you can tighten up and catch them in-between. But you need to get them off the bottom as soon as they’re hooked.”

He came up with the idea of using saltwater fly tackle with 30-pound monofilament line, letting the long, bendy rod do much of the work done by the arms and shoulders of anglers using conventional stand-up rods, which look like pool cues with line guides.

He uses 9-foot Shakespeare Ugly Sticks, which sell for $60, and Pfleuger and Shakespeare reels that sell for about $130, a modest price for saltwater fly tackle.

The lures are 1-3 ounce jigs tipped with cut squid, fish or a plastic tail.

“Let the jig drop until it hits bottom. Use the fly rod to lift the jig up five, six feet and let it drop back down,” Piku told John Noffsinger’s brother, Carl, who lives in Woodbridge, Va. “When a fish hits, lift hard and start fighting it.”

Noffsinger put Piku’s advice into practice, and seconds later emitted a loud “Damn!” as the rod was bent double by a fat, powerful grouper.

The fishfinder showed we were over a small hump on a flat sea floor. John Noffsinger asked, “What does the bottom look like?” and Piku gave the best short description of the tropical ocean floor I’ve ever heard:

“It looks like a garden. It’s all covered with plants and bushes and twigs and grass and things. And just about everything you see down there is alive.”

Also aboard was Piku’s fishing buddy, David Hawtof, a plastic surgeon from Waterford, Mich., who in 1993 “retired and went a-sailing. It took eight months to sail through the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River and down the Atlantic Coast to Key West. I’ve been here ever since.”

Hawtof is a volunteer with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He does a lot of scuba diving for a project monitoring and trying to recover populations of lobsters and conch, a large marine snail whose flesh makes wonderful fritters, chowder and salad, and whose head-sized, pink-lined shells are sold in tourist traps (the shells now imported, because conch collecting is banned in Florida waters.)

“Now, they let me operate on fish, implanting sonic tags,” Hawtof said. “I’ve really enjoyed the fisheries work. I’ve written several papers (in scientific journals) and have another one coming out this summer.”

A 10-inch ballyhoo, a member of the needlefish family with a projecting underlip beak half as long as its body, drifted aft of the “Golden Streaker” under a balloon float, and the drag began to whine as something grabbed the bait and headed for Cuba 90 miles to the south.

We were hoping for a big king mackerel, and John Noffsinger played the fish for several minutes before we saw it was a lemon shark about 5 feet long and 50-60 pounds, which Piku cut off.

“We see a lot of sharks out here,” Piku said. “Once, a big tiger shark swam in a circle right around the boat, lifted its head out of the water and looked at us like it was trying to decide which one to eat.”

In five hours of fishing, four anglers landed more than 30 red grouper. Five were over the 20-inch limit, but we could keep only one each.

We also caught five black and gag grouper a couple of inches shy of legal limit of 24 inches in these waters (size and bag limits for many Florida fish vary in different parts of the state.)

We topped the fish box off with a dozen snappers that included yellowtails, one of the tastiest fish in any ocean.
Commercial fishermen can take yellowtails only with rods, not nets. Consequently, they’re rarely seen outside of Florida.
As “Golden Streaker” sped back toward Key West, Piku said he’s become intrigued by the swordfish that live in the deep waters 20 miles off the Atlantic side and is learning the techniques to catch them.

“They’re as deep as 3,000 feet in the daytime and come up to 600-1,000 feet at night. You use lighted baits, and most people use electric reels because that’s a long way to crank up a fish that might go 100-300 pounds,” he said.
Have a question for ERIC SHARP? Contact him at 313-222-2511 or esharp@freepress.com.
Capt. Frank can be reached via his Web . Tel: 305.509.1547