An Appreciation of Cudas
by Guest Writer - John Tulp I ‘ve spent a lot of time over the past thirty years prowling shallow shoreline flats in a poled canoe, casting to practically everything that moves. From time to time, with a little help from my friends, I’ve found myself in the bow of a skiff with a fly rod in my hand and have managed to catch a few nice bonefish, permit, and tarpon that way, once even a sailfish. These are spectacular gamefish who richly deserve their wonderful reputations. But the bright star in my own sky, or perhaps I should just say my best friend among all the lower Keys species, has always been the cuda. He’s got speed, power, beauty, style--and personality by the bucketful. The sight of him motionless on a shallow flat or just out from a mangrove shoreline, poised like a cocked gun, is one of the most exciting sights I know in fishing. He’s no pushover to persuade, and unless I’m mistaken, he’s gotten all the smarter over the thirty plus years I ve known him. But he’s fairly likely to be a player if you approach him well, and when he decides to hit a tube, there’s no fish on the flats that can match the drama of his strikes, whether he explodes on it directly or teases you with a long yes-no follow, finally grabbing it at the side of your boat with a foot of line left on the rod tip. Once hooked, he can match any fish out there for initial speed and power, and he tops all of them for the unpredictability of his moves. It’s true that he will run out of gas and come to the boat before too long, so you could say he has less stamina on the line than some other Keys gamefish, but for me that has always been a plus. I’ve never been a fan of extended battles of attrition, though I know some people love them. The cuda, who throws fireworks all over the water and then comes in played out so you can go find another, is my kind of fish. All of this might be more vivid with illustration, so here are a few snapshots in time” from the fishing journals I’ve kept over years. Ballast Key -- March 22, 1994 I was poling east along the ocean edge of the big flat connecting Ballast Key with Man Key. I was looking for fish of course, but it was a hot day. When I came to a broad sand ellipse about the size of a pair of tennis courts indented back into the flat, the temptation was irresistible to anchor the canoe and just sit in the water for a while. It was delightful to relax there with no one around, cooling off in the water and taking in the incredible tropical beauty of that place. But suddenly, my mellow gaze sweeping over the whole scene was riveted to a single point: that long, thin, pale gray, cocked gun shape had quietly arrived and taken position at the far edge of my sandy pool. I quietly stood up in the knee-deep water, reached into the anchored canoe for the rod with the cuda tube, and sent a 60 foot cast in his direction. No hesitation. He clicked his position around the way they do to home in on a moving object, then streaked over and smashed it. Once hooked he tore off on a long, clockwise arc of a run, while the line kicked up a roostertail of spray in its effort to keep up, making a noise like ripping cardboard. Unbelievably cool. Out at about 12 o’clock on his circle, suddenly changing his mind, he tightened the arc and came tearing down, right at me. Hmm. Two thoughts snapped into my mind together: “Did I really want to be standing knee deep in the water while a big fish crashed down onto me, his mouth full of teeth and a couple of fish hooks?” and, “Was there anything I could do about it in the two or three seconds it was taking him to close the distance?” Answers: “Probably not”, and “No.” He tore up to me, and then scarcely a rod’s length away, he launched into one of those trademark cuda greyhounding jumps. I was low in the water, and the jump was very high, so that I was actually looking up at him, which was appropriate, since there was no doubt at this point which one of us was worshiping the other. I have a mental freeze-frame of the top of that jump, and it’s all about colors: the flashing silver/white of his flank, the rich blue sky behind, the bright yellow tube hanging down from his jaw. That snapshot has been vivid in my mind for twenty years now, and I doubt it will ever leave. For a split second we locked eyes intently. Then he dropped the tube neatly at my feet, re-entered the water as cleanly as an Olympic diver, and sped away. I was left behind, standing in the water, shaking my head with a dazed grin on my face, and giving a solitary round of applause to a vanished performer. Coupon Bight -- Feb. 4, 2006 A bright day, but cold water. I had been working along the northeast shore of the bight, looking especially for a bonefish or a red, but seeing none of them or anything else. I paddled back across to the southeast lagoon area, hoping a change of scene might help. There was nothing moving back in there either, but then I rounded a corner and looked down into a little cove about the size of a living room. At its base was a cuda, and a big one. His tail was up against the mangroves and his body pointing out at 90 degrees like an exclamation mark. This was a tricky position. A tube landing in front of him or to the side would be whisked away out of his sight by the retrieve before he could home in on it. And anyway, if you were me, you’d have messed up everything at the start by overshooting the cast into the mangrove wall right behind him. So I eased the canoe very slowly and as quietly as I could along the righthand edge of the cove, taking some time with it, until I was down in the the corner of the same shoreline where the cuda was still resting motionless, twenty-five feet away and apparently undisturbed. Okay, now I could cast without that mangrove wall obstacle and could bring the tube across his nose instead of instantly pulling it away. Still, this was a dicey situation. The length of retrieve in this spot would be very short, and it would almost surely be a one-shot deal. People say you should just rip a cuda tube through the water as fast as you can, but I’ve sometimes found that slower is better, and for this cast, with its short retrieve, I wanted it to stay on his vision screen as long as possible. So I wrapped the tube tight around a finger to put an extra bend into the wire for what I hoped would be a seductive wobble, made a short cast ten feet past the cuda, and brought the tube across a few feet in front of him at a moderate, ambling pace. He liked it. Matching the tube’s pace, he ambled out himself and engulfed it in an easy, confident motion. In the style of his take he looked like a big trout sipping a mayfly in a slow-rolling rise, but as soon as he felt the hook, he was all cuda. He could easily have ploughed into the mangrove roots hemming us in on all sides, but instead he went screaming around the whole 270 degree perimeter of the cove, always keeping a foot out from the edge. Impressive. The instant that maneuver was done, he zipped into the center of the cove and went airborne in a vertical, writhing jump, then crashed back down, looking more like a 60lb tarpon than a 20lb cuda. The jump was spectacular, but it was the explosive smash of his landing in this tiny, closed-in cove that blew my mind then - still does. As soon as he landed, he thought of a new move and tore out of the mouth of the cove, towing the canoe as quickly as I could ever paddle it. These canoe sleigh rides behind a big fish are always fun, and this time I was doubly happy, for the sooner we got out from all those mangroves, the better. When I had 100 feet of open water in all directions, I dropped the anchor and made my stand there. He still had a lot to say, with two or three hard runs with solid resistance in the time between them. But out there the odds had shifted in my favor, and soon enough he was within reach of a pair of long pliers for a quick, clean release. Four feet, full girth, broad shoulders, great fish! Torch Key-- March 30, 2013 On a bright, windy day my friend Eric and I were easing the canoe along a high tide shoreline, me with the pushpole, Eric with his fly rod. Off to our right was a broad, shallow piece of open water that for my own purposes I’ve always called Mullet Bay. To our left, the water flowed back into an impenetrable jungle of flooded, tangled mangrove roots and shrubs. We were picking our way through the transitional zone: some open water, but also mini islands of mangroves on all sides, like little icebergs. Definitely a hairy spot either for casting or playing a fish, but it was a fun area to poke around in, and at this tide it seemed our best bet for meeting a redfish. Eric is a fly rod purist, and my role today was to be his chauffeur. Still, I had a cuda rod stashed away, strictly for self defense, in case one attacked the canoe. We didn’t spot any reds in there, but there was a cuda, completely embedded, with his rear half backed into a tunnel of roots and his front half looking out at his world. He was a marginal target at best, and a fisherman with more maturity than I ever show in these situations would just have passed him by. But with Eric’s blessing I put down the pushpole, leaving the canoe to the whim of the wind, and started peppering the cuda with little flick casts. I drew the tube close in front of him three or four times, and he reacted with all the vitality of a stone statue, as if he were a glazed-eyed zombie, or a deeply cynical skeptic, or just the most bored cuda anywhere around Torch Key. Finally he became completely disgusted and swam out of his tunnel to leave, passing less than ten feet alongside of us as he went out. It was absurd to cast at this point, but of course I made a silly little flick anyway, dropping the tube a foot in front of his nose .. . and go figure - he exploded all over it! Eric shouted out, and so did I. My own shout was partly from excitement at the cuda, but it was also because a gust of wind had just slammed the canoe into one of those mangrove icebergs I hadn’t seen behind my back, and had knocked me off my feet. Instinctively I got a hand on each gunnel as I went down, and that was a good move. An unbroken fall down into a canoe can easily break a seat, snap a rod, or wrench a back. Reel Deal AdAh, but with both my hands on the gunnels, who was tending the rod? Not Eric. The cuda, I guess. I caught a quick glance of the rod in mid-air, but my last good look at it with a nice Stradic reel attached was as it ploughed a sandy furrow across the shallow, pale bottom of Mullet Bay, headed west at cuda-warp speed. I’ve been having encounters like these with cudas for years, and they don’t get old. The cuda has always been at the top of my list, but even guides committed to tarpon, permit, and bonefish turn to him gratefully when conditions make those three hard to come by, and some of those guides get a particular grin on their faces when somebody reaches for a cuda tube. Put simply, the cuda, especially when caught in shallow water, is a spectacular gamefish resource, and a rich, colorful part of the fishing lore of Florida. I was amazed when I first came down to Key West in 1980 to learn that cudas had no protection as gamefish whatsoever under Florida’s fishing laws, and I have regarded that as a travesty through all the years since. Now cudas are under a new pressure from commercial fishing, and I have been able to detect a thinning of their numbers through recent years in the waters I frequent. What has been a travesty for years is now beginning to take shape as a crisis. It is good news that the Lower Keys Guides Association and some other people are addressing the need to protect the cuda for the important game fish he is. Full support should be given to their efforts on behalf of one of the best fisheries resources to be found in the State of Florida.
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