Mike Joy lives up to his name when a gag grouper's on the gaff.

As we slowly crisscrossed our way back and forth across the number, four eyes stared at the bottom machine and four eyes scanned the surface.

"There's a loggerhead over there," Mike Joy hollered, pointing at a mature turtle sunning on the surface some hundred yards to the west. "You know he's living somewhere near that spring."

Orthner altered our course and headed for the turtle. About halfway to the spot, the bottom slowly dropped from 122 feet to 125 feet. At the apex of the drop, the bottom appeared to fall out and another hard line, about four feet from original line, appeared.

"There it is," said Joy as Orthner hit the save button on his loran. There was a small show of something on the bottom but certainly not the shower of chevrons we expected. Often, unless you run square over the center of it, the only indication of the spring or sink location is a show of fish.

We must have caught it just right because we could actually see where the bottom started to invert. "The jacks must have moved off the spring," said Orthner. Jacks and other pelagics will stay right on top of the bait schools that swarm around the structure edges. "We'll get right on it and see if we can't turn things on with a little chum and some fresh live baits."

We jugged the spot and slowly examined the perimeter. Just as Orthner had predicted, a large show of fish, presumably amberjack and baitfish, showed up a few hundred yards west of the spring. As they often do on springs and wrecks, the fish were moving on and off the structure. We would anchor close to the spring and try to pull the fish to us.

Such is the nature of fishing a spring or sinkhole. The same techniques you employ while wreck fishing apply here. The object is to set up the boat in position to draw the fish away from the structure. This enables you to catch fish that would otherwise dog you straight into the stuff.

Orthner placed the boat just upcurrent of the spring. A predawn netting session had yielded two wells of varied bait that we put to work. We had threadfin herring, whitebait (scaled sardines), pinfish, grunts and a dozen Spanish sardines we jigged up five miles inshore of the spring. We chopped up a few sardines and started a casual chumline. Not enough freebies to create a frenzy, but enough to get the fish chewing.

There were four of us on the boat: Orthner, Joy, myself and Johnny Costello. After hooking the boat right over the spring we all went to work. Joy grabbed a dead sardine and dropped it to the bottom in hopes that a large gag grouper might be home. He was armed with 50-pound line, three feet of 80-pound leader, four ounces of lead and a broomstick of a rod. Orthner and Costello, rigged with similar gear but lighter sinkers, each grabbed live pinfish and lowered them to varying depths off the bottom.