My family has a reunion every 5 years at a resort overlooking the inter-coastal waterway at Indian Rocks Beach Florida. Today is a bustling place with nightlife, an operating marina and boat traffic passing by all day long. The rest of the area is surrounded by hotels, condos, and nearly everyone is from somewhere else. LINK To The Magazine
Fifty years ago it was a different world. It was nothing but mangroves. The traffic had to stop when the occasional sailboat boat passed so the bridge could rise. A cardboard box grabbed from Publix Super Market made a great sled to glide down the grassy banks of the bridge. The mangroves were full of fish and at low tide a sandbar was formed that you could wade out to cast for, snook, redfish, and trout. For two brothers aged 6 and 8, this was paradise. I was the sixth born out of seven children and my brother Kevin, the baby of the family. Our older siblings were already of the age to be interested in things like boys, girls, and teenage things. So Kevin and I spent a lot of time together and we loved to fish.
The tide had dropped enough to wade to the sandbar and horseshoe crabs were moving around everywhere. Blue crabs were easily taken by tying a chicken neck to a string and when the line went tight we slowly pulled it back and scooped them up with a dip net. On this day though there was something different. All the potholes on the flats were filled with sting rays. With practice we learned if you did it just right, you could pick up a sting ray with your bare hands by pinching your thumb and fore finger in their eye sockets. I also learned that if you did it wrong, they would drive their spike in the soft web of skin between the same thumb and fore finger and it hurt like hell. Kevin almost fell over laughing.
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