Swordfish catch leads to accident

[Jacksonville News]

Swordfish catch leads to accident

While handling fish, angler falls and breaks his back and neck


By JIM SUTTON, The Times-Union

It is said that the two best days in a man's life are the day he buys a new boat and the day he sells it.

But for a crew of local anglers, fate spun the old adage 180 degrees. For four men, that first day on the boat nearly turned out to be the worst of their lives. And, for one of them, nearly his last.
They had a plan
Brett Gordon bought a new boat, a 25-foot Bluewater with twin Suzuki 175 four-strokes, but it was down in Stuart. He needed a good pulling machine. That's where Casey Smith came in - he had the truck.
"Originally, it wasn't going to be a fishing trip," Smith said. But they reasoned that they were that far south anyway, and the Gulf Stream was right there. So Adrian Heilman and Clint Bennett were drawn into the plan.
The guys loaded up early on the morning of Sept. 22. They picked up the boat around 1 p.m. After loading it with gas, ice and Coronas, they launched at about 2 p.m. They decided to play with the boat awhile, run out and do a little trolling and bottom fishing until 5 or 6. Then at dark, they would deep-drop for swordfish.
Neither the trolling nor the bottom fishing proved productive, so at around 7 p.m., they found themselves setting up adrift in 1,250 feet of water. They were 20 miles offshore and 20 miles south of Stuart. The Gulf Stream flows north along Florida's coast, and it was the group's intent to use that drift to bring them back north to Stuart.
Around dark, they set out HydroGlow lights, designed to burn just under the surface. The crew was using whole squid for bait. The baits were staggered off the transom at depths of 400, 200 and 50 feet. Each bait had a small chemical light attached to it. The crew members say it was a perfect night with light southeast winds.
400 feet of pain
Around 8 p.m., there was a light hit on one rod. Smith picked it up, set the hook and had a fish on. In 20 minutes, a swordfish came to the top. Apparently, that was about the time the fish figured out what was happening. It charged the boat, removing two chunks of gelcoat with its bill, then sounded.
For the next hour, the fish fought. The crew members dragged it to the surface four times where they could see the leader but not get it. Then he sounded again. At that point, the angler was getting the worst end of the fight.
"Casey was soaking wet from sweat and getting exhausted," Bennett said.
They already had broken a fighting belt. The fishing line was marked with small rubber bands to indicate the set depths. Four times, Smith fought the fish to the surface. Four times, it bull-dogged back down, and four times, Smith saw the 400-foot marker back up at the rod tip.
Finally, the fish did come up. With Smith prostrate on the bow, it took all three guys left standing, one hand gaff and a flying gaff to get the fish in the boat. It measured 68.5 inches in length and had a 45-inch girth. The fish was never weighed, crew members estimated it to be 180 pounds. The GPS unit indicated they had traveled 6.5 miles from the initial hookup.
For the next hour, they put a dent in the supply of energy drinks, cleaned the boat and iced that part of the fish they could cram into the fish box.
Then they ran south to the same drop point and put bait down again. Within 45 minutes, they had another bite. This time, they saw the 200-foot light racing across the water. Line was melting off the reel. They figured it to be a shark. But in about 20 minutes, a 90-pound swordfish was up to the side of the boat and gaffed. The crew admits it was still a "little green," and Bennett carries two long welts on his body - struck by the fish's bill - to prove it.
Heading home
The crew members headed in, tired but happy, with a first-day fish story they believed might never be beat. They were wrong.
They had a little trouble finding the boat ramp under dark skies. The handheld spotlight was on the fritz. In telling the story later, Smith smiled, despite a heavy neck brace. He surmised that the problem with the light was that it was one of the only things on the boat that wasn't borrowed.
The crew members took turns driving north to Jacksonville. They stopped several times for ice. It was melting fast because they couldn't shut the fish box lid with a foot or two of swordfish sticking out. They packed 800 pounds of ice in the box from the time they launched in Stuart until they made it home to Jacksonville at about 8 a.m.
They all went home to rest awhile, with a plan to meet around noon to clean the fish and the boat, which were equally bloody.
Big fish, bad karma
They did meet, along with several assorted family members, friends and interested neighbors. As the crowd gathered, the crew unloaded the smaller fish first. Smith, Gordon and Bennett lifted the big fish to the gunnels. Gordon went down to help Heilman on the ground. What happened next took a split second, but each member of the crew recalls the scene almost like slow motion.
Smith's gloved hand was inside the gill plate, and Gordon had the tail. The fish began to slide off. Gordon lost his grip on the tail. As the swordfish made the 8-foot drop to the pavement, it took Smith along for the ride. He hit head-first on the pavement, flipped and landed back-first on the concrete curb.
Bennett remembers Smith's first words, "Oh - -, I broke my neck." But that wasn't all. His back was broken, too.
An ambulance was there in minutes. The paramedics were met with an interesting scene. Gordon described it: "Casey was lying there in the gutter covered in fish blood and slime." A giant fish lay beside him. "The first thing the EMTs wanted to know was, 'Whose blood is it?' "
Smith was strapped, then taped down, to a backboard and rushed to the hospital. Smith said he remembered, while hospital staff worked on him, that he hadn't brushed his teeth that morning or taken a shower since Friday. It was last Sunday.
"And you know how your momma always said, 'Wear clean underwear in case' ... and this time I didn't even have them on," Smith said.
By Monday, the MRIs had shown, Smith said, that he had indeed broken a C2 bone in his neck and a T4 bone in his back.
"The doctor said the C2 kills you or makes you a quadriplegic ... he said it's the same bone Christopher Reeve broke," he said. The back injury might have been nearly as debilitating.
But neither break resulted in spinal damage. His doctor told him that "it's a total miracle you're up walking," Smith said.
And it was, perhaps, more of a miracle that he was sent home late Monday night in a neck and back brace that he'll wear 24 hours a day for at least six weeks.
What now?
The crew has had time to think things over since the trip. Hindsight brings two things to focus. First, the crew questioned what its plan was to get the fish on the ground. The answer they came up with was that they really hadn't had one. Second, the guys talked about how careful they were when they thought it counted.
"We were so safe in the boat," Bennett said. "We had a life raft, EPRIB and glow sticks tied to our pants in case any of us went over"... in water more than a quarter-mile deep, in the dead of night, 20 miles from land.
Then death stalked a driveway.
Smith is ready to fish again and said the doctor believes a year might do it. But he's not anxious to fight another swordfish, "and that has nothing to do with my neck." The guys rib him about how badly the swordfish put it on him, how close he was to giving up.
What could have been the worst day of their lives turned out to be something different, maybe deeper. It was clear as the group sat together at Smith's house this week that their attention was on celebration and second chances. And a little humor, too. The topic of the big fish came up again - how easily it could have torn the hook out or otherwise escaped after being on so long that night.
Bennett laughed and said, "Yeah, if Casey'd lost it, we'd have probably broken his neck."
jim.sutton@jacksonville.com, (904) 359-4215