My father, Marlin Eller, used to tell me about when he was a boy in the 1930s growing up in Deerfield, the water in the Intracoastal Waterway and Hillsboro River/Canal was clear most of the time. According to him, you could see all the way to the bottom and use treble snag hooks and cast nets to catch fish from the bridges or docks.

When I was a boy growing up some 20 years later in the 1950s, we only had clear water in the Intracoastal in Deerfield a few days a year, and it was never really clear in the Hillsboro Canal. However, the water was always clear in the Intracoastal on the back end of an incoming tide near the Hillsboro or Boca Raton Inlets. In December each year, the shrimp would start running, that is, they would float and swim in from the ocean by the thousands on an incoming tide. The run would continue through April. However, January and February seemed to be the best. And the very best was three days before and after the full moon. You could only see them at night with a light, because in the daytime they kept near the bottom. We would anchor our boat at the beginning of an incoming tide just off the channel so as not to interfere with boat traffic. Then, we would put our bright lanterns out on extender poles. Extending our dip nets out over the water just behind a lantern, we were ready to catch some shrimp. At night, the shrimp tend to swim near the surface, and you can see them coming because their eyes shine bright pink. Sometimes, they would be in groups of two or three and you could get them all with one swoop. But mostly it was one at a time.

Once you had a few in the net, you would dump them into the 5-gallon bucket in the middle of the boat. We would generally “shrimp” for two to three hours and then quit because it was pretty tiring and, sometimes, it would be biting cold. Back home, Mother would take the ones she wanted for frying or boiling and we’d put the others in the bait freezer.

Fishing was also good that time of year. We sometimes used a homemade lure, which we thought looked like a shrimp when trolled. We made it by cutting Mother’s orange and yellow embroidery threads into 5-inch-long pieces and tying them onto the links of a dog chain about 4 inches long. A ball sinker in the front and regular fish hook in the back finished off the lure. We’d troll between Boca Raton and Hillsboro Inlets in about 15 feet of water next to the first reef and catch lots of blue fish and some Spanish mackerel. If they weren’t biting there, we’d go into the deeper water of the second reef in about 50 feet of water and try to catch some kingfish or cobia. If that didn’t work, we’d anchor and chum up grouper, red snapper, yellow tail and the always dependable grey snapper or grunts. We could always catch fish. We had lots of fun and never worried about having something to eat.

David Eller