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Extreme fishing

Enterprising FGCU students hunting big fish from a kayak, crazy as that may sound
By Chad Gillis (Contact)
Thursday, August 17, 2006
Shane Edgar, 19, marketing major, FGCU. Drives blue Nissan extended cab. Known for catching tarpon and sharks offshore that weigh more than he and his boat combined.
David McCleaf, 22, human performance major, FGCU. Drives his mother’s beige Toyota Camry on trips to the keys. Big-game fisherman in diminutive kayak. Captures Edgar’s exploits on film, shares with world through Internet.
First cast, nothing. Second cast, the same. The third draws interest, and a thundering splash engulfs the lure. Edgar jerks the rod to set the hook but misses.
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Edgar launches a glittery gold plastic lure toward a school of juvenile tarpon, arguably the world’s most prized inshore gamefish. He twitches the rod a couple times, causing the fake bait to dance across the surface like a skipping rock.
“Dude, that was exciting,” Edgar says with a deep breath, looking back at his fishing cohort for the day, Aaron Anderson. “It’s a rush.”
Every fifth cast or so a tarpon strikes with ferocity, slapping the lure several feet into the air. Ten minutes pass and Edgar’s quest has become monotonous: throw the lure, twitch it, jerk the rod when the tarpon hits and mumble expletives when it swims away.
Edgar’s disgust, however, is short-lived. He grew up fishing the Estero Bay area. He’s fought plenty of tarpon, and landed two of the three adults he hooked from his kayak this year. These are fish that weighed 150 pounds or more.
Over the last four years Edgar, McCleaf and a group of friends have vaulted kayak fishing from casual recreation to newfangled extreme sport. They have big dreams, catch big fish and they’re image as fanatical fishermen is growing fast.
Search them on the Internet and you’ll find dozens of sites boasting photos of the dauntless duo.
As sport goes, fishing doesn’t get much fairer than this. A tarpon, shark or snook weighing even 15 pounds can tow a kayak dozens of yards during a 10-minute fight.
Stretch those critters out to 50, 100, or 200 pounds and it’s easy to see why Edgars and McCleaf are at a disadvantage. They paddle their kayaks from the beach to the fishing grounds, hook and land trophy gamefish that would make an offshore captain proud, photo and release those fish and then paddle back to the launch.
It’s one thing to land a 5-foot bullshark on heavy tackle in a big motorboat two miles offshore with the help of a mate and a strong gaff. It’s another to land that same shark on lighter tackles in a kayak that weighs 50 pounds.
Big, hungry sharks are the last thing most kayakers, swimmers and surfers want to see up close, let alone touch. Edgars and McCleaf, though, seek out these great predators from the cockpits of minuscule boats.
“It’s ‘Do as I say, don’t do as I do,’” Edgar explains. “It’s real dangerous. We’ve got all these 16-year-olds out there trying it and saying, ‘If these guys can catch a shark, I can.’ But this is not for your average Joe.”
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Edgar and McCleaf are both college students, years away from the daily rat race grind. Edgar graduated high school two years ago and he’s already running a business as he enters his junior year in college. McCleaf was just accepted to FGCU’s human performance program and plans to get a master’s degree at the local university upon completing his undergrad work.
On the side, they push the limits of an adrenaline-packed sport.
Stan Laughlin owns Captain Dick Enterprises, a kayak fishing outfitting company in Atlanta that ships most of its equipment to Florida for sale. His business is built around the growing popularity of kayak fishing, and he looks to Edgar and McCleaf to stir interest in would-be buyers.
“They’re at the leading edge of all of this,” Laughlin says. “If anything new is going on, they’re the ones doing it.”
Laughlin is one of Southeast’s top kayak fishing gear distributors, and he’s seen all the photos and e-mail stories about big fish landed in kayaks from around the country.
Edgar and McCleaf are tops in the field, he says.
“They really push the envelope,” Laughlin says. “There’s nobody else that does it as good as they do in the state of Florida. I know of other guys in other areas that do this type of fishing, but they don’t promote because they know it’s not safe.”
It’s not safe.
Fighting a large shark from a kayak has obvious dangers. Add the elements of darkness and being miles offshore and it seems like a death wish.
“The safety issues are really critical when you get offshore,” Laughlin says. “It can just as easily be a 7-foot bull shark as it can be a tarpon, and you certainly don’t want to get dumped in the pond with a shark like that out there.”
A typical night goes like this: paddle a few miles offshore, rig up a live ladyfish as bait, chuck the bait at a group of tarpon and hold on. Once the hook is set, it can take several miles and up to two hours to bring the fish boatside.
That’s when the real excitement starts.
Larger sharks, likes bulls and hammerheads, feast regularly on tarpon. The bigger the tarpon, the bigger the shark following it.
Edgar’s doesn’t portray himself as some type of Animal Planet daredevil or a testosterone-pumped college kid looking for the ultimate thrill. He’s actually very grounded, a member of the local church and, unlike many kids his age, someone who’s not all that interested in hanging out on campus and getting drunk.
Beer and parties are low on his list of priorities. Instead of driving home inebriated in the middle of the night — risking DUIs, wrecks and injuries or death — Edgar’s just happy to get back to the beach safe. He has enough danger in his life, no need to take other risks.
“We get pretty worried about the sharks. We talk about it all the time,” Edgar says. “But when where on the water, we’re not actually that worried. If we were, we wouldn’t go.”
Maybe Edgar doesn’t worry when he’s on the water, but his family and friends do. He and McCleaf have heard all the warnings before, but they somehow transcend fear that would cripple most people and paddle out into the darkness, sometimes with an adult shark off their stern.
When targeting sharks, they fish from beaches at Marco Island and in Bonita Springs.
For bait, they cut up heads and body parts from smaller fish like jacks and catfish. They stake the rods and reels into the sand and run a giant hook through the head of a jack, paddle offshore about two miles and drop the bait into the dark waters.
Then they paddle back to the beach and wait. Sometimes sharks follow them all the way out and back to the beach.
McCleaf says sharks are smarter than most people think.
“They don’t want to eat a plastic kayak or a paddle or me. They know there’s fish on the boat, and that’s what they want,” he says. “They do that all the time.”
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Edgar and McCleaf started a charter business earlier this year aimed at giving everyday anglers a chance to battle a giant fish from the seat of a 14-foot kayak.
The business plan is to chase big game fish all over Southwest Florida and post the results on the net. They hope that will spur a charter business that will flourish over the next few years, while Edgar and McCleaf concentrate on their education before going on to more normal jobs.
So far they’ve had two paid charters, but the business is only a few weeks old.
Their Internet site — www.hightailincharters.com — is covered with photos of massive gamefish caught mostly in Lee County waters.
There’s the 7-foot tarpon Edgar landed this summer at night two miles off Sanibel, an increasingly famous shot of Edgar holding a severed snook head in his lap and another of McCleaf holding a 5-foot bull shark in his hands while balancing on the kayak.
A film on the site shows McCleaf stalking a shark in local waters, quietly following the fish as though he were hunting it on a charter. The film is meant to give potential customers an idea of what it’s like to turn fearsome predator into prey.
Some people have accused them of altering photos, faking the impressive catches. But their friends and family know it’s for real.
“People tell us all the time, ‘I don’t want to read about you in the newspapers (the obituaries).’ But we always take precautions. And we do worry about sharks,” Edgar says. “What if we flipped out of the boat with a shark on the line or one attacking a tarpon, I don’t know what we’d do. You have to realized that you can’t predict nature.”
Edgar’s exploits have earned him notoriety of sorts in recent months. He and McCleaf were fishing along south Lee County beaches one night when Edgar hooked a huge adult snook.
“It was maybe 48 inches, and it ran. I got it close to the boat and it just stopped fighting,” Edgar said. “I thought he’d gotten off the hook. But then I reel in this bloody head that’s 16 inches long itself. A shark got him, one probably bigger than my kayak.”
McCleaf snapped a photo of Edgar holding the severed snook head and posted the shot on several fishing forums. People noticed.
“I run into people all the time who say, ‘Oh, you’re that snook head guy.’ And I’m like yeah, I’m the snook head guy,” Edgar says.
If Edgar’s the business poster boy snook head guy, McCleaf’s the camera man.
He takes most of the photos for the Internet site and his personal collection. In fact, McCleaf’s love of photography has nearly eclipsed his will to hunt fish.
“Lately I find myself snapping photos and just putting down the rod,” he says. “I almost enjoy just watching someone else and not even touching the fish.”
Fishing, photography, school. He’s equally excited about all three facets of his young life.
McCleaf, Edgar and some friends are in the keys fishing this week, camping for a few days before the fall semester starts. McCleaf took summer school this year in hope of being accepted to FGCU’s human performance major.
While his friends, Edgar and Aaron Anderson, fished the grass flats for redfish and tarpon, McCleaf was stuck in a classroom, scribbling answers on a biology test sheet.
A call late Monday night reveals the results.
“Hey David, how’s it going?”
“Great, man.”
“How did the test go on Friday?”
“I aced it big time. A 98.”
“That’s great. What are you doing right now, fishing?”
“Driving back to Estero. I’ve got an orientation for the human performance program tomorrow at 1 (p.m.). Can’t miss that.”
“So you got accepted. Nice.”
“I hope so. But I’ll be back in the keys on Wednesday, you can be sure of that.”
McCleaf drove his mom’s beige Toyota Camry most of the night Monday to make sure he’d be home in time for orientation. Like the big tarpon and sharks he and Edgar land, McCleaf’s been waiting for this orientation like a 4-year-old waiting for the ice cream truck on a hot summer day.
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This summer has been good to Edgar and McCleaf. They started a business and got a couple of paying charters, landed giant tarpon and sharks offshore, made headway in college and realized that their dream of extreme fishing may be coming true.
“I really didn’t think much about it four or five years ago,” Edgar explains. “Then David and I went out and saw this boat hooked up with a tarpon and we thought we’d never be able to do that in a kayak. If you’d have told me that we’d be doing what we’re doing now even two years ago, I’d have thought you were crazy.”
People think Edgar and McCleaf are the crazy ones.
“We understand that we promote something that’s dangerous,” Edgar says. “We try to educate people and tell them that it’s not safe and that they need to take serious precautions.”
Edgar’s mother, Tammy Edgar, says confidence in her son’s ability to make good decisions on the water helps her sleep at night when he’s offshore battling tarpon.
“The tarpon and redfish, I don’t mind,” she says. “But the sharks are another thing. I don’t like it when they hold up the shark heads and their snouts. I’ll tell you, I’m not going swimming out there anymore. I never thought about sharks like that being off local beaches.”
Tammy Edgar says she’s proud of both her son and David for creating their business and following through with aspirations at such a young age. She and her husband, James Edgar, and her daughter, Michelle, 18, fished Estero Bay waters for years.
Mom says Edgar and McCleaf should be glad the women haven’t followed them offshore. “They don’t like me telling this to people but Michelle and I are probably better fishermen, or fisherwomen that they are. We outfish Shane and his dad all the time.”
She knows the goals are lofty and that danger is ever-present. As a mother, she’d like to keep her son away from the sharks, but she also realizes he has dreams and needs to chase those goals if he’s going to be happy.
Edgar puts it simply.
“We have aspirations for that 10-foot tiger shark or that 12-foot hammerhead,” Edgar continues. “I couldn’t care less about catching another 6-foot shark. But if I can catch that big shark that I’m dreaming of, I’ll die happy.”
Kayak fishing
The pluses:
-- Kayaks cost much less than power boats and are easier to launch and recover, maintain, store and transport
-- Great exercise, relaxing pace
-- No gasoline needed
-- Stealth and extremely shallow draft
-- Closer to water, more intimate experience
The minuses:
-- High winds and seas can easily capsize kayaks
-- Heat and sun exhaustion possible due to high physical output
-- Not as versatile as a power boat
-- Doesn’t protect anglers as well from fish, some of which can be large and dangerous
http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2006/aug/17/extreme_fishing/?neapolitan