Jeff Glassgold and Jennie Simmons admire a keeper-sized yellowtail.

It is my belief that ‘shy’ should not be used to describe members of the snapper clan. Least of all yellowtail snapper, reputed by some to be especially wary. No indeed. In various waters I have observed foot-long yellowtail assault 8-inch ballyhoo skipping behind a trolling boat. I have also witnessed them body slam MirrOlures in 30 feet of water, just out of sight of the Miami skyline. That’s pretty bold, as far as fish go. After all, when’s the last time you caught a kingfish on a 4-foot plug?

But, like many schooling fish, yellowtail seem to operate on some kind of collective brain (ever wonder why a pod of mangrove snapper suddenly quits biting, or how the dadgum jacks all decide to bite at once?). Moreover, yellowtail seem to be able to learn. At least that’s what a veteran Islamorada charter captain explained when I asked about all the buckets of oats and chum piled up in his 23-foot open fisherman.

“It’s a consensus among the top yellowtail fishermen in this area that you can make your own yellowtail spot, simply by going out there and chumming an area that’s never been chummed before,” said Capt. Ron Green. “It’s a known fact that when David Jensen was running the Caloosa partyboat out of Whale Harbor, when they pulled up on a spot, the fish were conditioned enough that before the first chumbag was in the water, they would hear the motors and come up to investigate.”

Listening to the skipper’s monologue of marine mojo, I couldn’t help picturing aquarium fish rising to attention at the flip of a lid.

“See, if you set up a feeding station, and drop your anchor there every day, when those fish hear the motor, they know one thing: It’s feeding time. It’s a food fight!”

So we were about to be treated to an education in Pavlovian snapper fishing. Green guaranteed that with enough chumming, on just the right section of reef, he would be able to paint the surface of the water yellow behind his boat, the Daytripper III. I’d done a bit of yellowtail fishing myself, but most of the ’tails I’d caught were hanging far back in the chumline, where they flashed here and there and grabbed bits of shrimp or ballyhoo drifting freely on light line and light hooks.

The kind of fishing Green promised was in-your-face action, a sort of snapper sight casting that intrigued me, almost as much as the whole training fish to feed out of your hand thing.

With the skipper’s quiver of moderately stiff, 12- and 20-pound rods and an industrial quantity of chum (30 blocks!) and horse feed, we were off to the reef.

For our part, we’d brought a secret weapon: A lady angler, namely Jennie Simmons, Florida Sportsman advertising assistant. I think it’s still P.C. to say that the fair sex has better luck with the kind of finesse involved in light-tackle snapper fishing.

Jennie paid close attention to Capt. Green’s instructions to strip line off the rod in 6-foot increments (bail open, of course) by pointing the rodtip low to the water and pulling back sharply. The idea was to give a piece of peeled shrimp a drag-free drift in the current, allowing it to sink like the bits of chum streaming behind us.

“I try to tell people not to strip line by pulling it off the reel—it gets bunched up before it gets through the guides,” said Green. “There’s always one or two guys who figure that out, and they catch all the fish.”

Make that one gal. It was actually quite some time before Jennie got to show off her angling prowess. After anchoring on a steep dropoff outside Alligator Reef, Green insisted we first wait for the fish to show. He put out a frozen chumblock in a large-mesh bag tied off at the stern, then set to mixing the oats and the chum.

The oats are purchased in 50-pound bags at the local feed store. The night before a trip, Green fills a couple of 5-gallon buckets three-quarters of the way with oats, then tops them off with water. By the next day, it’s a mushy mess, as are the several blocks of chum set out to thaw (some, obviously, are reserved in frozen state for thawing in the mesh bag offshore).

On the water, Green stirs a half-and-half mix of the two ingredients in a separate bucket with the bent handle of an old gaff. He uses an ice scoop to toss the rich, semi-buoyant attractant into the chumslick every now and then. The fish go crazy, and yes, on good days they do bunch up in a seething mass of yellow right behind the boat.

With a moderately slow current, it took awhile for the fish to tune in to the chum. But they soon arrived, flipping bright yellow fins at the surface like a school of thermonuclear bonefish. Green says on days with no current at all, the ’tails simply hang deep beneath the boat, waiting for their breakfast of cereal and fish goop to sink to their level. When that’s the case, the skipper grabs a heaping handful of the chum, packs it into a ball around the bait (shrimp, ballyhoo sliver, glass minnow, etc.), wraps the fishing line around it a dozen times, and sends it shooting comet-like for the depths. The chumball dissolves in the water, attracting yellowtail to the candy center. Some yellowtailers add masonry sand to the chumball mix, making the ever-popular sandball.