[A] February, 1922, quotations.
Tourists who plan to bring back a wee nip of Scotch with them from Florida should be very careful to carry the bottles in their hand luggage. Many trunks are opened on the way up, evidently by members of the train crews, and all alcoholic stimulants carefully abstracted. Nothing else is touched. A friend of mine took three metal hot-water bottles to Florida with him so that he could bring Scotch back in them. These bottles were encased in pretty pink flannel wrappers. He filled them with Scotch as planned; but when he reached Washington again, he found that his trunk had been opened and the bottles removed. The pink flannel wrappers were left behind, and nothing else had been touched.
There seems to be an idea in the North that rum-running from Bimini and Cuba to the Florida coast can be easily stopped by Prohibition agents. This is a mistaken idea; for the rum-runner has several hundred miles of uninhabited coastline and keys on which to land his cargo. It was among these keys that the most notorious pirates of the early days concealed their vessels and their treasure, and eluded pursuit for years. It would be as easy to catch a rum-runner among the Florida keys as to locate a red ant in the Hippodrome.
Any Prohibition enforcement agent that didn’t have lead in his shoes and a daub of mud in both eyes, however, could easily get the goods on twenty or thirty Miami bootleggers in a day.
One good result of comparatively cheap whisky in Miami is the apparently total disappearance of beer-making and other home-brewing activities. There seems to be no market for hops, malt, prunes, raisins or wash-boilers—which would seem to make Miami an unusually healthy city in which to live.
CHAPTER XIII
OF FLORIDA FISHING—OF THE TIGERISH BARRACUDA AND THE SURPRISED-LOOKING DOLPHIN—OF THE UNCONVENTIONAL HABITS OF THE WHIP-RAY AND THE VARYING ESTIMATES OF CAP’N CHARLEY THOMPSON—AND OF THE CONSERVATIVE RAVING OF THE MIAMI PROSPECTUSES
The Florida keys drip down from the end of the peninsula on which Miami beach is built, and would doubtless be compared by Senator Lodge or the late Robert Browning to a necklace of jade and gold, or to mango on mango that o’erlace the sea, or something similarly poetic. Among, between and around these keys is found the greatest fishing in the world. Florida fishing is about as much like the ordinary conception of fishing as prize-fighting is like fox-trotting. Instead of sitting contemplatively over a rod and reel with a pipe in his mouth and a dreamy look in his eyes, and occasionally snaking a small fish out of the water in a leisurely manner, the Florida fisherman crouches over his rod with taut muscles and enters knock-down and drag-out fights with bundles of concentrated energy that leave him as sore and limp and blistered as though he had been wrestling with the Twentieth Century Limited.
Speedy motor-boats slip away from Miami landing-stages and reach the fishing grounds in an hour. Over the reefs, on whose rocky peaks lie the skeletons of many an ancient wreck, wait the barracuda, sometimes known as the tigers of the sea. They are long, slim, silvery fish, rather like enormous pickerel, and their jaws are set with heavy dog-teeth. They average between four and five feet in length; and as the fisherman sits in the stern of a motor-boat with his bait spinning along thirty yards astern, he can see the barracuda following, following along behind the bait like a thin gray shadow. The barracuda is always there and always hungry; so when all other game fish fail, the fishermen turn to him. When he finally decides to take the bait, he takes it with such vigor that the fisherman feels that a steamer trunk has fallen on the tip of his rod. The rods are stiff as iron and the big reels have drags on them that would stop a race-horse in a hundred yards; so the average barracuda seldom fights more than ten minutes. All game fish, of course, are caught by trolling from the back of a motor-boat traveling from six to ten miles an hour.
Out a little farther toward the gulf stream are the golden dolphins, thin and surprised-looking fish, much smaller than the barracuda, but better fighters. There, too, is the husky amberjack, that fights for twenty minutes and more in spite of the heavy drag on the reel. The prettiest welter-weight fighter of the Florida waters is the sailfish, a blue and silver torpedo, five and six and seven feet in length, with a spear for a nose and a lateen sail for a dorsal fin. He is a finicky striker; and when he is at the bait one feels only a slight jar. The lightness of the touch usually means sailfish; and when it comes, the fisherman releases his drag and lets his line run out fifteen or twenty or even thirty feet. Then he snaps the drag back into place and hoists his rod with a mighty heave without further inquiry. Frequently the sailfish is at the end of the line, in which case the fun begins—the sensation being about the same as holding a bucking bronco at the end of a fifty-yard rope. If an amateur is holding the rod, the end of the thirty or forty-five minute fight finds him calling in a weak and trembling voice for a large drink of varnish or some similar restorative, and he spends the remainder of the trip pricking and caressing the blisters on his hands.