St. George Island fishing guides will get you hooked

ST. GEORGE ISLAND

See the new lighthouse in the middle of town? Dave Armentrout just painted it, lowering himself down from the top one section at a time. Armentrout is also a real estate agent on the island, but things have slowed in the past few years. And he's a member of the volunteer fire department.

This morning, at the ungodly weekend hour of 7:45 a.m., this jack-of-all-trades is our fishing captain. We meet him dockside next to his 23-foot center-console Sea Craft. Nothing fancy, but it squires us nimbly out to the middle of the Bob Sikes Cut, which separates St. George Island from Little St. George Island. Armentrout, a 1994 graduate of Clearwater High School, moved out to St. George Island in 1996 for some peace and quiet.

He leads about 200 fishing trips annually, filling the off season with hunting and sailing trips. This time of year the target species are redfish, speckled trout, tripletail and tarpon. Our hooks laden with small pink shrimp, we start casting.

The end of my rod dips, not violently, but I've got something. It's just a little croaker, singing its indignant song at me as we lower it back into the water, but the bite gets the morning started. Conversation eddies, Armentrout telling us about the bear that was seen on St. George Island this morning (Did it swim or hitch a ride across the 4-mile bridge?) and about his marine biologist girlfriend who recently starred in the Panhandle Players' production of The Star-Spangled Girl at Apalach's Dixie Theater.

He's trying to distract us from what he says is shaping up to be a C-minus fishing day — after all, he's caught a 165-pound tarpon out here, and just the other day a trip like ours yielded 25 speckled trout, four redfish, six flounder and five Spanish mackerel.

Redfish elude us, but we do fine with spotted sea trout and good-sized bull whiting, enough to feed our whole beach house tonight. I'm thinking ceviche, I'm thinking crab-stuffed flounder while I watch Armentrout fillet the goods at trip's end. He's fast, the gulls above keeping tabs on the heads and tails. What's his hurry? This afternoon he and his girlfriend are going fishing.