Down to the last piling

About 10 a.m. last Monday, some excitement broke out among a handful of fishermen on the pier. Joyce Luell, 65, had hooked a real fighter about halfway down to the end.

Joyce Luell EVAN WILLIAMS / FLORIDA WEEKLY "It's like a freight train," she said later about the fish, a snook. "They come through and they're hooked or they're not hooked — and they really pull."

She angled it towards Fort Myers Beach, on an old rod that a friend had given to her. He had been the one to teach her how to fish for snook, when she started coming to the beach every April for 10 years with her husband. Ms. Luell said she was always grateful for that.

"It takes a while for the natives to accept you," she said, "And I think he finally got tired of me not catching fish and not knowing what I was doing."

Ms. Luell started fishing when she was 5 years old. Her father, who is deceased, used to take her out on the Chippewa River near where she grew up in Cornell, Wis. "My dad would get me up at four o'clock in the morning and say, 'Are you coming, Joyce?'"

But her father never fished for snook.

"When the weather is real clear, the (snook) can see you," she said. "Today it's choppy. When the shadow gets close to the pier, that's when they may hit."

Ms. Luell stayed with the fish as it fought her under the shadow of the pier.

Her friend who taught her how to catch them moved away from the beach this year. She'll miss him. The first four years she came to the beach, he'd tell her what she was doing wrong, why she couldn't catch one. He'd tell her not to set the hook and what baitfish to use. He wasn't the only native on the beach. There's still "Diamond Jim" because he finds things in the sand. And there's also "Moon," whose nickname was less clear.

Ms. Luell comes to the pier shortly after sunrise every day to fish, and the early birds bust her chops a bit.

"There are a lot of people that will come early," she said. "We usually come when the sun comes up. They usually say, 'You should have been here an hour ago. The fish were really biting.'"

One fisherman that day, Gene Melville, also from Wisconsin, came by and said, "If you believe every word she tells you, I've got a bridge (in Alaska) I'll sell you."

He was full of mirth. "Her eyes are turning brown," he said later, when Ms. Luell talked about how big the snook was. "She's full of b.s." And then, as he took off down to the end of the pier: "I wish I was related to Herman Melville. I'd be getting royalties from Moby Dick."

Ms. Luell had already caught six snook on this trip: four were too small to keep (the size limit is between 28 and 33 inches), one was too big, and one — the morning before — was a keeper.

Since she retired two years ago, Ms. Luell and her husband drive down from Tomahawk, Wis. every year instead of fly, and spend all of April instead of just two weeks. They travel with their cat, Sisu — it means "determination" in Finnish — who they found on the side of the road three years ago.

For 17 years, she drove a "cube van," a big, white 14-ft truck, straight through the Wisconsin winters, selling novelties like lighters and sunglasses to truck stops and gas stations. The Luells raised a son and daughter, now both in their 30s and living in Minnesota.

It seemed probable that they would soon hear the story, from their mother, about the one that got away.

"This one probably would have been too big (to keep) or really close," Ms. Luell said.

She had brought it up to the last piling by the beach before it slipped back into the Gulf.

A few seconds later, a reporter walked up to see what happened. Ms. Luell said she was feeling "very discouraged at the moment. I thought for sure I had 'em."

The excitement was over, she said, but her heart was pounding. The beach was filling up with colorful umbrellas, families, sunbathers. It was quiet, breezy, a typically pretty day.

"Some days you're out here and there's nothing going on," Ms. Luell said, hooking a new baitfish onto her line, which her husband had brought her. "That's why they call it fishing."

Another fisherman called Ed asked Ms. Luell what she said when the snook got away.

"'Doggonit anyway!'" she told him. "I didn't swear."