Oleta State Park, Florida

Thursday, June 28, 2007, Oleta River State Park (Miami)

Fresh off the plane and into the rental car I soon see the Oleta River State Park sign on the highway over to Miami Beach and can’t resist. Sunny, breezy, scattered clouds, 80s, and water everywhere. When you are compelled to fish and you see a possibility of publicly accessible water it’s hard to resist.

A $5 fee at the gate opens to a green-embraced entrance road. “You’re continually fighting back the jungle,” said a friend of mine years ago after his move to Florida. Today this jungle has pale yellow butterflies – solo fliers as big as pocket watches – bouncing among the bushes and trees.

The parking lots have room for hundreds of cars but nobody’s here on this mid-day workday. (I count 10 cars.) I park at the last lot, the one with the sign for the fishing pier, and grab my rod and walk a manicured trail past a pavilion with restrooms, past picnic tables, and to the pier (350 yards from the car).

There are 9 persons on the pier and none of them looks like me. None of them speaks like me. It‘s all Spanish except for one couple – dark as a charbroiled coconut – whose tongue is more exotic, more delicious. “Dominique fishy fishy!” she exclaims with a grin as she looks into the water. I have an idea what that means.

The pier is short – less than 100 feet – and juts out into a huge bay that I assume is the Oleta River. The water is clear to the bottom. I immediately see two small barracuda – each alone in the shallows and camouflaged against the pebbled bottom.

The anglers on the pier are all bait chunkers – huge rods, huge hooks, huge sinkers, and huge full-arm casts that go a mile. I gaze down among the pilings beneath the pier and see schools of small baitfish and occasionally a larger fish – maybe a couple of pounds – darting among them. These are foreign waters to me; I’m not familiar with most of the fish.

The bottom line is that I try several of my bass lures – I am certain, but wrong, that a small finesse worm will catch something – and go fishless. Even the barracuda, with which I do have some past experience, don’t bite. I throw a Rat-L-Trap in the far distance without a bite, and a topwater chugger across the shoreline shallows without a bite. But it’s absolutely fun knowing that there are fish here and knowing that I MAY crack the code. Hope always!

A huge splash – just like a feeding largemouth - happens 100 feet up the shoreline. An equally huge black man says to me, “That was a big one.”

“Barracuda?” I ask.

”Yep, and he’s still there.” He moves his hands into a three-foot-wide demonstration.

I throw a finesse worm and then a chugger, but nothing.

With live shrimp I could catch fish here. But live bait – and even cut bait - is a pain to deal with. So I usually don’t fool with it.

On the walk back to the car (my time is limited to less than an hour) I notice that the air is abuzz with sounds of locusts. I also notice that there are no bugs bothering me – no mosquitoes, no noseeums, no black flies, no nothing. A real treat for Florida.

A brown chameleon perches on a log beside the path and stays alert until I am within inches of him. Then he jumps away.