The Scuttlefish

Screenshot ©GoFundMe/Fox 31 Denver’s video (below).

Before she ever set foot in the surf at Cocoa Beach, Florida, 28-year-old Colorado woman Jill Kruse, who was about to wade into the ocean for the very first time of her life, felt that something was going to go wrong.

Many of us have this sneaking premonition around the sea, but after a moment or two, the reality of the situation seems almost silly to acknowledge: you have a one-in-11.5-million chance of being bitten by a shark, according to the University of Florida’s “International Shark Attack File”. What are those chances on your very first time in the ocean?

Read more»

Screenshot from CatersTV’s video below.

“One day, I was partially unemployed and I was stealing golfballs out of a golf course lake where I lived and, um, then I realized that wasn’t the way to make money–stealing. This business just blew up.” – Glenn Berger.

It’s hard to fathom how Glenn Berger developed this business plan but there’s no way of arguing that it’s anything short of brilliant.

Over a decade ago, Mr. Berger calculated that by collecting lost golfballs, he could earn at least $1, sometimes $2, by retrieving, cleaning, and reselling them to courses around Florida.

Read more»

“I really didn’t think the trip was that hard,” she told ABC’s WFTS, a Tampa, Florida news outlet. Photo: Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Portland Press Herald (video below).

Late last September, 18-year-old Sally Gardiner-Smith set sail aboard Athena, a modest 29-foot Ericson (a sailboat designed for relatively light air), leaving Portland, Maine for St. Petersburg, Florida, where she would be attending Eckerd College–the following year.

Read more»

Butler travels between Florida and Nantucket catching and tagging sharks. She only learned to fish in 2014, she says, but she’s already caught 30 sharks this year. Photo: Caters News Agency.

21-year-old Marisa Butler, a former Miss Maine, USA contestant has given up the glitz and glam of beauty queen life (whatever that may constitute in Maine), and is now working with NOAA in hopes of contributing to the tagging of 100 sharks by the end of the year. How? By hooking them in the surf and bringing them up the beach with her hands, of course, the only way a woman from Maine would. Mon dieu.

Read more»

Above: A school of mullet plies the waters off Florida. Photo: Paul Dabill.

For once, we have news out of Florida that doesn’t involve fantastically inexplicable things like shark-hunting cats or manatee-fearing spring breakers, but a monumental change in fisheries management that will (hopefully) “fill the sea with food” by protecting forage fish, relatively small fish species that help make up the lower end of the food chain, like the oft-diminished mullet.

Read more»

Poor, clueless fool. Screenshot from a video (below) posted by Florida Fishing Is the Best.

Having spent the better part of my life along coastlines, I’ve seen gulls pull just about every trick in the book short of grand theft auto, and I can’t even begin to count the number of times I’ve seen them take food out of unwitting hand (mine, even, while working on a charter boat holding bait).

We’ve all had our run-ins with the gulls, and some of us fortunate few have have had the great pleasure of being defecated upon–twice, in my experience–but never have I ever seen a gull act so brazenly as to pluck a fried fish directly from a beachgoer’s gaping gob. Clearly, this exercise was calculated, and deserving of a long, slow round of applause.

Read more»

I’m guessing she’s not a water person. Screenshot from Boji‘s video on Facebook.

Surely, this woman has never seen a more docile, mild-tempered mammal in her life, but by the looks of her face, and the sounds of her shrill screaming, you’d think she’d just run into Jack the Ripper.

Near the end of the video clip, this poor girl faints, momentarily, as her courteous companions sit back cackling, high and dry in the cockpit. Friends like these, eh?

A rare sight: An Atlantic Goliath Grouper (Epinephelus itajara), on a beach. Screenshot from WFMyNews2’s video

Search “goliath grouper” or their slightly outdated, racier name “jewfish” on Youtube and you’ll come across hundreds of videos of fishermen pulling these 3- 4- 500-pound behemoths in beside a bridge piling, dock or some other large underwater structure. What you won’t find (at least, what I can’t find) is someone hauling a goliath grouper in from the surf. What this particular fish was doing anywhere near the beach, unless there’s a wreck or flourishing reef within a hundred yards of that sandy shoreline, is a complete mystery.

Read more»