Messing About in South Florida: LESSON LEARNED

Home in Port Charlotte
High of 77*

I fished all day Saturday with two guests aboard. Below are the locations where we fished, as recorded by my SPOT locator. (Satellite POsitioning Transmitter, also known as personal locator beacon).

By using my boat trailer and Charlotte County boat ramps, we fished all of these locations by running just 26 miles on the water.

I used Google Earth to trace out the same path departing from my backyard canal and going south in Charlotte Harbor, around the Cape Haze peninsula, up the intercoastal waterway from Boca Grande, to get to the same starting point at Placida Harbor. Of course, if I launched the boat from my home port I have to follow the same path back. Adding the bonus location we fished in the Myakka River at the El Jobean bridge, and having to back track home from there, the approximate nautical mileage of all water travel would have been over 81 miles!

The bottom line is: not only did the trailer enable me to cover more fishing grounds in less than one third the miles traveled; not only did it save me about 25 gallons of marine fuel (priced today at $4.15), but the time I would have wasted in driving the boat was better spent fishing for those 3 extra hours.

The bottom line here is...I've learned a valuable lesson. Just because you own a home with a boat lift on a Gulf access canal doesn't mean you don't want to purchase a trailer with your fishing boat.

In looking at the attached photograph, of my SPOT alerts, to the right of point #5 I have indicated a line pointing to the approximate location of my home port on the Auburn Waterway. Point #4 is close to the Placida boat ramp. This was where the day began at approximately 930AM. We then fished between spots 1-4 and pulled the boat out back at spot #4 at 4PM. We had the boat back in the water 20 minutes later at spot #5 and were catching fish again at 4:30PM at the El Jobean bridge on the Myakka River until 6PM.

I've attached is a wide shot so those unfamiliar with our waters can see the peninsula's separating all of the fishing grounds I covered in one day. It's amazing, don't you agree?

So why buy on a canal? #1 - Gulf access, waterfront homes will always have better resale value than their land locked comparable counterparts. #2 - when I want to fish the upper harbor or make those long cruises with out of town guest, it's still nice to launch from your backyard.

Oh, the fishing report? We caught keeper sheepshead and keeper sugar trout. We caught and released big ladyfish and small mangrove snapper, plus some white grunts and squirrel fish. I lost track of how many fish total but we brought home 10. I took some pictures of Subaru Jim running his boat out there along mine. I hope he got some of me too. If he did, I will post later.

Click pictures for full screen image