Choosing the right venue and vehicle to initiate your kids into the black art of big game fishing is a ticklish business. Kids, at least my kids, need to be kept busy constantly; they need action; they want it to happen now. Big game fishing just isn’t like that – at least not often enough to be predictable. Sure when you get a hook-up there’s often too much action to handle. But we all know that it’s the gaps in between - the hours of fruitless trolling that go into the occasional picture of glory hanging on your wall – that would be tough to take for a kid.

There are places in the world, of course, where the bite is pretty predictable but they tend to be a) difficult to get to b) not particularly child friendly c) require jabs and medicines and last but not least d) the food is not what my kids would eat for a whole week.

Solution. Florida.

Easy peasy; a week in Orlando to get them wired up on roller coaster adrenalin and then a week on the beach to cast in the surf, rent a runabout boat to fish the flats and then hit out into the Gulf of Mexico for a six hour expeditionary voyage on a bona fide game fishing boat to see if they could really hack it. If it didn’t work, no harm done and the Nintendo Gameboys in my backpack would keep them from wearying too much.

Picking the right boat isn’t too much of a lottery in these Internet-driven days either, provided you stick to a few tenets; ask several, successively more complex, questions and make sure they respond quickly by email, look for and check references, examine photos carefully to make sure they are as recent as possible. The usual common sense stuff. I had a surf around and found Midnight Son, a 35ft California sport boat operated by Captain Brian Martel out of Sarasota. From the web site, I knew exactly what to expect: an old boat – well loved, thoroughly fished, hard worked, routinely maintained – and that’s what she is. The clincher was the fact that Brian had been involved in catching sharks for the movie Jaws. Things with dangerous teeth and nasty attitudes attract kids like bees to honey. Midnite Son seemed like a good call.

The day we were originally supposed to go out, Tropical Storm Erika howled over us on her way to shred parts of Brownsville Texas on the western Gulf, so that killed that one. But luckily Brian had a spare day two days later and we rescheduled for then.

We met the boat at the dock at 8am and Brian and Doe, the mate, introduced themselves to the kids first just as it should be. I liked them both right away. They were older gents – not elderly, just comfortable in their skins – and they ragged each other with that gentle, yet near the knuckle, humour that only truly old friends can get away with. Jamie, listening to them, immediately got the fact that they were teasing and grinned ear to ear at the banter. This was going to work out just fine.

With the boat fuelled and the bait in the well, we set off and as soon as they were allowed, both Jamie and Scott scampered up the ladder onto the flying bridge like old pros. It’s scary how kids can do that; I still take my time and get the jitters going up and down those ladders but those two just had no sense of fear at all and went up and down at will. I was feeling lucky and had my special tee-shirt on; the “Fishing is life...” one. We also found a cricket on the boat which serenaded us by chirping all day from behind the stairwell. Both kids reckoned that was a good luck sign too – why else would a cricket be on board? So we were all set and the gods were with us.

Our first stop was by a wreck near to shore where we put out a spanish mackerel bait rigged for barracuda. No takers.

We headed on towards a second wreck where we had a near instant strike on the mackerel but the ‘cuda simply halved the bait in two without hooking up and refused to come back for more.

Brian decided to anchor up and bottom fish over the wreck. I bit my tongue: if there is one thing I can’t stand it’s bottom fishing. But I know enough about skippers to know that he’s the boss and it’s best to fish the way he thinks you should fish rather than try to order him about on his own by-god boat. We flipped some light lines with shrimp bait over the side for the boys and the skipper caught a blue runner before he could even give the rod to the boys. I took a big heavy bottom rig (yawn), baited with a sardine, and dropped the sinker to the sea floor where I let it lie until the bait was stolen, undetected, by a fish. And then I let it lie there some more in an unbeknown baitless, and therefore pointless, state. Told you…bottom fishing is the pits.

The skipper though, he was up to something altogether more strange. He and Doe baited what looked like a substantial meat hook on a wire hawser attached to a thick rope. When I say “baited”, I mean the huge head of a tuna went onto the hook.

He then gave me a pair of gloves and said “Put these on. Now I’m gonna lower this down and when he picks it up, I’ll set the hook. You give your rod to Doe and then get on over here and lift the fish hand over hand to the surface. Don’t wrap the line around your hand or you’ll either bust your hand or get pulled clean out the boat. Clear?”

What the hell was down there? Giant sea bass as it turns out – running anything up to 300lbs and more. “Why can’t we use a rod?” I asked – almost adding ‘like normal people’ but thought better of it. “Cos there’s no way of stopping them with a rod. This is the only way to do it” replied Brian firmly.

I had a mixed feelings about this one. I don’t really like this kind of fishing but I had a hankering to see one of these leviathans and if it wanted a fight, well…

But nothing picked the bait up and Brian eventually decided, after checking on the radio with several other charter captains he knew, that today wasn’t a good wreck fishing day. Besides, the kids were getting bored and we were all losing our baits without feeling a bite. “Let’s do sumthin’ else” said Brian, casting the deciding, indeed the only, vote on the Midnite Son.

So we set of at a slow, purposeful troll of about 6 knots, pulling two planer lines with silver spoons and one long flat line with the same. The planers pulled the heavy rods over into a healthy curve but they are set so that when a fish strikes they release the tension and the rod comes up in a strike. After only a few minutes, Brian called from the flying bridge “Fish on!” as one of the planer rods came up purposefully. I grabbed the rod and wound in my first spanish mackerel of the day. It wasn’t really a fight as the planer gear we were using was way too heavy for the mack to resist. It was more or less a winch-it-in affair. But the fish was in the boat and the prospect of getting skunked had melted. The tee-shirt karma was working – or maybe it was the cricket…

A few minutes later “Fish on!” brought up mack number two and so it went on. The kids were fitted with belly belts too and, provided me or Doe held the rod, they were allowed to fight the fish to the boat. Pretty soon they were shouting “FISH ON!!!” at the tops of their lungs and diving for the rods like veterans.

Spanish mackerel are very pretty, lean, silver spotted streamlined predators with some very sharp, barracuda like, teeth. The biggest one ever caught aboard Midnite Son was 27 inches long and I would have made a fish that big to be about maybe 7 or maybe 8 lbs. The rigs we were using were 50lb test on the planers (or maybe heavier) and 30lb on the flat line so the fish were no real match for the gear in a sporting sense. But the real reason we needed the extra weight was that swimming with the macks were tuna. Little tunny in this case and it wasn’t long before we hit them. This was what I wanted – some real action. The first two hit simultaneously and Doe helped Scott fight one while I fought the other. We got them both to the boat at the same time and I had to hold both rods whilst Doe first got mine aboard and then we helped Scott crank his fish the last few yards to the boat. His wee face was a study in determination. The tuna, like all of its kin, was putting up a bruising battle whilst we shouted “Scotty, Scotty, Scotty. Scotty!” to keep him motivated. Not that he needed it really – this fish wasn’t going anywhere but in the boat.

Of course the problem with two kids is that when one has done something, the other has to do it too, and preferably go one better. Next tuna was passed to Jamie and this was a serious fish, at least in little tunny terms. Because of the strength of the fish, Jamie couldn’t hold the rod in his belly belt and crank the reel at the same time so I held the rod steady whilst he used two hands on the reel. The fish eventually came aboard and Jamie was overjoyed to see a fish of about 27lb in the cooler. Both boys had by now joined the Big Game Club; tuna, marlin, sailfish, wahoo, swordfish, shark…any of them gets you the ticket. “Can we come back again Dad? This is fantastic!” they were both asking and we were only two hours into a six hour day.

From then on, the war cry “Fish on!” was heard with almost every pass of the area Brian had marked. He later explained to me that he had run across a huge school of bait fish that were being pinned to the sea floor by the numerous predators above so our lures, fishing shallower, looked like bait trying to escape the “carpet” below. We took fish after fish after fish until the huge ice-box cooler was full. Doe had asked at the beginning of the trip whether we wanted to take any fish home as he always gave unwanted fish to local families in Sarasota who needed them. As he emptied the fish out of the ice box to clear some space, I began to feel that we’d need to register as a charity there were so many of them.

By the end of the day there were 37 macks to about 25 inches; good sized fish but to Jamie’s frustration we didn’t break Midnite Son’s record. There were also 2 blue runners (released alive as they are poor food quality) and 6 tuna in the boat. Add to that the couple of macks that came off at the boat and the couple of tuna that broke hooks or line and you will get the idea of just how high the bar had been set on the kids’ first big game trip. A tough act to follow.
But even on perfect days there are certain signs that tell you that they have to end. Like when Jamie says “This one hardly fights at all Dad, I can just wind it straight in” or when Scott says “When can we use the shrimp baits again Dad?” you know that they are slipping into “been there, done that” mode.

And isn’t that the way of kids? You want to tell them that they don’t know how lucky they are, that days like this are to be cherished, that you need to have respect for the fish, that when the fish are biting you don’t stop for lunch…and a whole bunch of other stuff that your dad probably told you and you didn’t pay any attention to either. What can you do – people, not just kids it has to be said, tend to evaluate their world and their reality in terms of their immediate circumstance, not by some ephemeral memory from someone else’s past.

The boys had sampled Big Game Fishing. This was it. This was how it worked. It was fun while it lasted. Come back another day. Fish on.