As sailfish anglers who catch their own bait know, goggle-eyes don’t come easily this time of year. Hurricane Andrew hasn’t helped matters. Catching a goggle-eye is almost as rewarding as catching a sailfish.
“A real good morning you’ll catch 10 to 15 dozen goggle-eyes. A decent morning for fishing here is four to five dozen,” said David Doll. “That hasn’t happened since the hurricane.”
Doll knows: He catches and sells live bait for a living. A North Lauderdale resident, Doll operates out of Lighthouse Point Marina, where he has an assortment of baitwells that can accommodate up to 100 dozen baitfish.
“Most every spot I’ve heard of for catching goggle-eyes I’ve fished at one time or another,” said Doll, who fishes for bait by hook and line from Jupiter to Fowey Light.
Usually Doll can catch all the goggle-eyes his customers need off Hillsboro Inlet. Since the storm, the only place he’s been able to catch goggle-eyes consistently is south of Miami. So almost every day he’s been making the 80- mile round trip by boat just to catch goggle-eyes.
Why the problems? Apparently Andrew moved the buoys off Hillsboro Inlet, a popular bait-catching site, and altered shallow reefs. Doll said his fish finder has not been marking bait on the reefs like it used to. That could be because the hurricane piled sand on the reefs or cleaned up the reefs; in either case, the reefs would not attract goggle-eyes as before.
With pilchards plentiful and mullet schools making their way down the coast, what’s the big deal about catching goggle-eyes? Doll, who skippered the winning boat in the 1991 Pompano Beach Fishing Rodeo, was fourth in the Rodeo this year in his boat Live Bait and fifth in the spring Fort Lauderdale Billfish Tournament, wouldn’t fish for sailfish with anything else.
“It’s a premium bait for sailfish,” he said. “You catch more fish than with any other bait.”
— Mullet is a popular bait, but if the Florida Marine Fisheries Commission has its way, anglers will have to do without live black mullet for two weeks each month for the next three months.
The MFC recently passed a 90-day emergency proposal that would prohibit recreational and commercial anglers from catching or possessing live black mullet during the first and third weeks of November, December and January.
If approved by the governor and Cabinet Oct. 20, the proposal would take effect Nov. 1. Live silver and finger mullet could still be used, along with cut or gutted black mullet caught before the closure.
The reason for the proposal is to start rebuilding a fishery that has been hammered by commercial netters. Mullet are inexpensive food fish, and mullet roe is prized in the Far East.
Commercial netters in Florida harvest some 24.5 million pounds of mullet annually. Nearly half is caught from October to January, when mullet move offshore to spawn.
The MFC has sought limitations since 1989, when commercial harvest was prohibited from sunrise Saturday to sunset Sunday during the spawning season. In 1990, that ban was extended to noon Friday to sunset Sunday.
For two years, the MFC has proposed rules that would prohibit the harvesting of mullet for more days per month during the spawning season so the fish have a chance to get offshore. Commercial fishing interests have sued to prevent those proposals from being enacted, so for the past two years, mullet stocks continued to be ravaged.
If approved, the emergency proposal cannot be disabled by a lawsuit. Closing the harvest for a week at a time would enable more mullet to spawn but still allow fish markets to sell fresh mullet except for a few days a month.
