If your physician suggested a vacation in Sarasota for health reasons when the climate here was advertised as “salubrious,” there was no better way to while away your time than fishing.

To say the local waters of the Gulf of Mexico and Sarasota Bay, along with various creeks and lakes, were bountiful with all types of finned creatures is a gross understatement.

Waiting to go for your bait were incalculable numbers of drum, flounder, grouper, jack, sea bass, kingfish, ladyfish, amberjack, bluefish, bonito, redfish, red snapper, snook, sheepshead, Spanish mackerel and speckled trout. To this fisherman’s paradise, add large oysters, clams, scallops and crabs.

Sarasota was, in fact, one of the fishing capitals of the world. Sea life was so plentiful that a picture of a huge fish was on the first town seal of 1902, centered between palm trees and water.

City of Sarasota grew under Mayor Everett Bacon 

Chamber helped city rebound from real estate bust

According to Sarasota historian Karl Grismer, William Whitaker, Sarasota’s first settler, began earning money by selling salted, dried mullet and roe to Cuban traders. “During the winter months the bay churned with them. They came in immense schools, more than a mile long and hundreds of yards wide – so dense it seemed as though a person could walk on them.”

This assertion was echoed by Sarasota’s first mayor, A.B. Edwards, who recalled “The bay was crowded with fish.” He recalled a school of mullet that entered the bay in the morning, moved all day, and was still in sight at dusk. “The fish were so thick you would hit them with your oar, and into the boat they’d plop.”

In 1919 it was reported that one man caught 12,570 fish in 22 days. The obvious question – “Why?” – was not addressed.

On June 28, 1913, Rube Allyn’s short-lived The Sarasota Sun, “Published Each Saturday As Best We Know How,” offered a Woman’s Club Edition column by Helen M. Noble on how to catch a tarpon. Her husband, Paul, was one of the area’s pioneer fishing guides, and later part owner of Gardner-Noble Sporting Goods store.

Noble advised readers to always arrive well before sunup for the trip to Big Pass and into the Gulf aboard the Marguerite. She described the scene as, “... the most beautiful sight in the world to watch gray dawn gradually give way to the soft colors of pink and gray and lavender which heralds the rising sun.”

She suggests the use of hooks made of the toughest steel, “the best are either G.W. Blackburn’s Abbie or a Bebries and Von Hoff’s, and a twenty-seven- or thirty-strand line.”

Small fish, she said, made the best bait. Pieces cut from pompano or mullet could be substituted.

She wrote that on a typical trip, when tarpon were sighted, passengers of the Marguerite would transfer to a skiff, given a rod and reel along with the hopeful advice “to hold on the rod no matter what happens.”

She likened a tarpon hitting the bait as “pulling up the bottom of the Gulf.” The good fight. “Your reel is working overtime and your fish is on its way to Mexico.”

A tarpon, she noted, can leap five to eight feet into the air, desperately trying to shake the hook from its mouth.

She described the battle as an addictive ordeal for the angler. “If you aren’t dead by this time you will try for another, otherwise you will return to the big boat ... and go home to dream of fishing and you will return to the sport on the morrow.”

Noble opined that an “overworked businessman” or “a nerve strained society woman” should not miss an “opportunity to come to Sarasota for a week or two of tarpon fishing and many years will be added to [their] lives!”

During this era, the largest tarpon landed was a 213-pounder by Nels Brockman. Noble’s husband, Paul, had the largest catch for the season, landing thirteen tarpon in two successive mornings.

Although not the largest of area fish, the battling tarpon, crowned the Silver King, was the target of choice for anglers – the big game of the fishing world. Writing in The Outdoors Pictorial, Willis B. Powell described Sarasota’s “acres of tarpon,” and went on, “Down here we talk of fish in tons. ‘Twenty-seven tons of tarpon registered for 1925 prizes’ is the heading over the [tournament] finals.”

Sarasota’s Annual Tarpon Tournament, advertised as the oldest continuously running tarpon tournament in America remains a major Sarasota attraction.

Powell Crosley Jr., one of America’s leading industrialists/inventors – known in his hometown as Cincinnati’s Thomas Edison – came to Sarasota in 1929 at the invitation of Robert Ringling (Charles and Edith Ringling’s son) to participate in the International Tarpon Tournament.

He described the experience of hooking a Silver King. He landed a 102-pound tarpon his first time out: “It was like hooking on to an express train and provided plenty of thrills and excitement and strenuous exercise.”

Crosley fell in love with both tarpon fishing and the beauty of Sarasota. He built his winter home, Seagate mansion, still standing on Sarasota Bay across the street from the airport.

For the 1930 tournament, he was appointed president of the Anglers Club. His boat Little WLW was outfitted to be able to live broadcast a portion of the fish-athon, which could be transmitted throughout the nation.

The Herald dubbed him “Sarasota’s patron saint of the air.” Much to the glee of community leaders, photos of the event were sent to hundreds of newspapers. The occasion was said to have been heard by millions.

From Sarasota’s earliest days, photo-op postcards showcasing a catch near the angler’s hotel sign were mailed around the country for bragging rights and attract more tourists.

The first John Ringling Bridge became a favorite go-to for fishermen, and during the slow season, downtown merchants would sometimes close their shops at noon, and finish the day reeling in the evening’s supper.

In 1956, J.C. Tucker who had tended the John Ringling Bridge for over 26 years, recalled the bay teeming with fish. He bemoaned: “Why, in the old days, it was nothing to catch 100 to 125 fish in a day.”

In 1958 the Herald reported Sarasota boasted 29 fish camps, 50 charter boats, plus a hundred or more fishing guides. A pen-and-ink map stretching from Englewood to Cortez illustrated 20 types of fish and where and when they would most likely be hooked.

Joining Gardner-Noble Sporting Goods, Tucker’s Sporting Goods store, whose motto, “Tucker’s Tackle Takes ’Em” became one of the most popular retail establishments in town. When the Boston Red Sox trained here, baseball great a die-hard fisherman could be seen there practicing his casting technique. (Williams was inducted into International Game Fish Association’s Fishing Hall of Fame in 2000.)

Legendary fishing guide/charter boat captain Johnny Walker signed off his television program with thought-provoking, “Take your kid fishing, because someday he’ll take you.”

The last time I took my kid fishing, we were on the Tony Saprito pier, baiting our hooks alongside a gentleman from New Jersey. He compared his hook, which was very small, to ours, which were much larger. He knowingly shook his head and said with a laugh, “Little hooks for little fish.” It was the 1970s, and it was quickly obvious to me that fishing had dropped off remarkably since I went fishing as a kid in the 1950s. Why?

The annual red tide debacle has not helped. Perhaps it is linked to what Florida State Sen. Robert “Bob” Johnson said in 1973. Describing himself as a skin diver and fisherman, he bemoaned the loss of fish in the area.

The Herald reported him saying, “Eight years ago, one could find an abundance of fish within a mile off the coast of Sarasota.” Attributing the loss of fish to pollutants, he went on “Now one must travel 25 miles into the Gulf to find an equivalent amount of fish. The only reason for this is because of the pollution of our waters.”

So, when you take your kid fishing, you should mostly put little hooks in the tackle box. 

Jeff LaHurd was raised in Sarasota and is an award-winning historian.