Save The Keys, Please

It can jump 10 feet straight up or whip a man to death with two slaps of its armored tail. The tarpon—a.k.a. cuffum, silver king, sabalo real and Megalops atlantica—is a game fish to reckon with. But you wouldn't want to eat one.

The tarpon's flesh is soft and tasteless by all accounts, and most anglers release their fish after the fight, honoring the quarry by returning it alive to the sea. So I was surprised during a recent evening of tarpon fishing out of Marathon in the Florida Keys to hear a voice on the VHF radio offering 40 cents a pound for tarpon. "I'll buy all you can catch," the voice added in a distinctly American accent. If I was only mildly amused by the offer, my guide was outraged.

"That's my livelihood he's messing with," said captain Randy Rode of the Rode Runner. "What the hell's going on here?" Rode, 38, is a third-generation Keys captain. His father, Dick, was one of the pioneer charter-boat skippers on Marathon Key, and his grandfather, a transplanted New Englander, fished commercially in the days before the Keys sportfishing industry developed. (A brother, Gary, was killed by lightning while putting out crawfish traps.) In addition to having a stake in the Keys fishery, Rode is a graduate marine biologist ( University of South Florida, 1971) with a deep concern for the future of the Florida ecosystem. His reaction to the message we had just heard on the radio was understandably fierce.

"This is another example of how these waters are being ripped off and ruined," he said. "In the first place, it's against Florida law to buy or sell game fish—not just tarpon, but snook, sailfish, striped bass, permit or bonefish, too. If this guy is getting away with it, what comes next?"

"Let's find out," I said.

We did, and in the course of our investigation we saw an appalling number of practices now becoming established in the rich waters of the mid-Keys that could, in the long run, do irreparable harm to that splendid marine habitat.

?Sport netting. Early each morning during the tarpon run, charter skippers like Rode and his friend Brad Picariello go out to net mullet and save themselves the $30 a dozen they would otherwise have to pay for this most toothsome of tarpon baits. But it's getting harder and harder to come by the baitfish. On this particular morning, Rode, Picariello and I scoured canal after canal along the Atlantic side of Marathon Key. Picariello, poised in the bow with the cast net, guided us slowly, quietly into one canal lined with $250,000 condos. "They were here by the hundreds day before yesterday," he whispered. "Now I don't see a ripple."

"It's the damned sport netters," Rode snarled. "They were in here yesterday."

Sport netting? The concept was as incongruous to me as, say, competitive leaf raking.

"Hell, they don't need the money," Rode explained. "They do it for the fun. Come in here with their fancy boats, run a long gill net around a whole school of mullet, then pull 'em. They wholesale their catch for barely enough to buy a couple of cases of beer. But they've done the macho thing, you see, and wrecked the day for us."