Retired fishing legend Bouncer Smith returns to South Florida for some saltwater fishing

Having retired to landlocked Marietta, Georgia, several months ago after 54 years as a charter captain in Miami Beach, Bouncer Smith was in serious need of some solid saltwater fly-fishing.

The 72-year-old legend got more than he was hoping for on an epic trip for Spanish mackerel in the Gulf of Mexico with Capt. Mike Venezia, who anchored his vintage 23-foot SeaCraft on a spot and never had to move until we finally called it quits.

The three of us caught more than 60 mackerel — we kept some for dinner, then lost count — with the majority of the tasty, hard-hitting fish coming on the fly rod.

It was just what Smith, who had driven to South Florida for eight days of fishing with captain friends and former customers the week before, needed. During his only fishing trip since moving to Georgia, he caught striped bass and spotted bass on a frigid day at Lake Lanier, where the temperature was 38 degrees when he and the guide left the dock and 38 degrees when they returned.

Smith, who misses saltwater fishing “an awful lot,” said he was looking for “a fast-action day on the fly rod,” and Spanish mackerel were the perfect species. “I’ve always been a fan of mackerel fishing. It was just all good fun.”

Venezia (www.bonefishingislamorada.com or 954-608-4466), who primarily fishes what’s known as the backcountry out of Bud N’ Mary’s Marina, was the perfect guide.

Born in Hollywood, Venezia grew up freshwater fishing in Plantation and moved to the Keys to live with his firefighter father when he was 15. That got him hooked on inshore fishing and he worked a couple of years as a mate on an offshore boat at Bud N’ Mary’s For the last eight years he’s focused on fishing Florida Bay and the Gulf in his SeaCraft and his pink 18-foot ActionCraft flats boat for permit, bonefish, tarpon, snook, redfish, trout, snapper and sharks.

“You get bored with one thing, just go do something else,” said Venezia of the region’s species diversity. Although we were targeting mackerel, we also caught a keeper pompano, two keeper mangrove snapper along with plenty of smaller ones, lane snapper, mutton snapper, blue runners, grunts and remoras.

Fishing for Spanish mackerel gets really good when the weather cools, with schools of the fish moving along the boundary between Florida Bay and the Gulf. Venezia likes to set up around white sand holes and areas of hard bottom, which are where the mackerel ambush crustaceans and baitfish.

“It’s so flat out there, there’s nothing for miles. All you need is a little bit of depression in the bottom, where it goes from grass to sand or grass to rock,” Venezia said, adding that the hot bite should continue throughout February and into early March.

He added the quality of the mackerel fishing varies with the approach and passing of cold fronts. “Those days when it’s really good, you hook one and there’s another one eating the knot, eating the swivel, eating the line, everything.”

We had only a handful of cut-offs from the sharp-toothed mackerel. Smith brought two of his 7-weight fly rods, one with a floating fly line and a 20-pound titanium leader and the other with an intermediate line and a No. 3 stainless steel wire leader. The fish hit a variety of white, yellow and pink Deceiver and Clouser minnow flies on No. 2 and No. 4 hooks until only a few strands of hair was left on them, but their favorite was the Clouser.

“They liked the Clouser minnows the best because when you just twitch them and don’t retrieve them, they dive toward the bottom,” Smith said. “A Clouser minnow is a bucktail jig for a fly rod. It’s got lead eyes and it jumps up and drops down as you jig it.”

The mackerel were slashing after Smith’s flies almost immediately after Venezia anchored in 12 feet of water and put out a block of coarse-ground menhaden chum. The fish also liked Venezia’s array of pink, green, yellow, white and red bucktail jigs that we fished on 6-6 and 7-foot medium-fast Penn Spinfisher V spinning outfits spooled with 10-pound braided line and 10 to 12 inches of No. 3 wire. He also brought 10 dozen live shrimp in case the Spanish were finicky.

We started out tipping the hooks of the jigs with a quarter-inch piece of shrimp, which produced lots of bites, but by the end of the day the fish were slamming bare jigs, many of them with the bucktail scraped away.

That mackerel blitz was as good as any that Smith had experienced as a boy growing up in Miami, and it sent him back home on the long drive to Georgia with plenty of warm memories.

This story was originally published January 29, 2021 at 8:36 PM.