Thursday, November 1, 2001

Rare sawfish once could be found in Texas waters

Port Aransas fishing guide Clark Miles recalls the awesome spectacle of a sawfish lashed to the top of a truck or car when he was a teen.
   He was on a family campout on the beach when the curious scene unfolded. A crowd gathered around the vehicle, which was draped from bumper to bumper with one of the gulf's oddest oddities.
   Miles places this memory sometime during the early 1960s, give or take a year or two. This fits the time frame of other sawfish stories in the Coastal Bend.
   In March of 1957, then-Port Aransas resident Chris Page and his fishing buddies caught 14 sawfish off Bob Hall Pier.
   And in a 1994 letter to my predecessor, outdoors writer Buddy Gough, Flour Bluff resident Karl Boardman wrote about his involvement in landing what he referred to as one of the largest fish ever taken on rod and reel from Texas waters.
   He wrote of a 17-foot, 5-inch sawfish caught at Big Shell by Boardman's surf-fishing partner, Roy "Nick" Nichols on June 24, 1961. Page, a longtime Port Aransas angler who now lives in San Antonio, said this could have been the same fish Miles recalls seeing on the beach.
   Other than these accounts, limited research reveals little tangible evidence of sawfish here since the 1960s, unless you count local biologist David McKee telling me he remembers hearing about one or two sawfish landed some 20-25 years ago.
   The last official sighting in Texas waters occurred in 1984 in Aransas Bay, according to National Marine Fisheries Service records. That's all I know about that. Since 1971, only three published Texas sightings have been recorded, one each in 1978, 1979 and 1984.
   Even Texas Game and Fish Commission biological surveys from the late 1950s list none captured north of Port Isabel.
   Perhaps the most visible legacy and lore of sawfish that once swam Coastal Bend waters is a mural on a Rockport barbershop. On the southern exterior wall of this small Austin Street building is a simple painting of a sawfish caught in a trawl by two Palacios fishermen in Matagorda Bay, probably in the summer of 1927 or 1928.
   Apparently, sawfish were not particularly rare back then, but few caught around here measured 17 feet long, 61/2 feet wide and weighed 2,000 pounds, as the sign says. The mural was a ploy by a local resort, called Cool Coast Camp, to attract tourist.
   Local memory suggests that the huge ray-like fish had been preserved for a time in a pool with frequent dousings of formaldehyde. I'm not sure how popular this was as a tourist draw.
   Today, sawfish are caught, catalogued, released and carefully tracked electronically by scientists in Florida, where the River of Grass meets the Gulf of Mexico to form murky coves where sawfish glide near the bottom like stingrays.
   They look more like sharks on the prowl, but are really quite docile. The sawfish's snout is used to slash and kill or stun baitfish in schools or to root for crustaceans.
   Thanks, in part, to the research performed by biologists at Mote Marine Lab near Lostmans River, Fla., the plight of this strange and magnificent fish has gained the attention of folks who compile the Endangered Species list.
   This probably is long overdue. No definitive census counts on sawfish are available, according to Jennifer Lee with NMFS.
   Sawfish usually are found in shallow water, very close to shore or near river mouths, with muddy or sandy bottoms. This preferred habitat makes the species vulnerable.
   NMFS blames commercial fishing and coastal development for the sawfish's decline. Because of its jagged snout, the sawfish is easily entangled in nets and once was fairly common as bycatch.
   There are no federal and few state regulations nationwide on sawfish, which grow to lengths of 25 feet and live up to 30 or 40 years. Once targeted as a food fish by commercial fishermen, then later by people wanting to mount their toothy bill, called a rostrum, on their walls, sawfish are no longer of any real commercial value.
   Sawfish once spanned the entire Gulf Coast and along the Atlantic Coast as far north as New York. And also have been found in tropical seas and estuaries scattered throughout the world.
   It is the first fish that lives its entire life in saltwater to be considered for the endangered species list. White marlin could be next. It's likely that the smalltooth sawfish will be added to the endangered list in April. There is little evidence of a United States population of largetooth sawfish, though Page said Nichols fish was a largetooth.
   The World Conservation Union, a group that monitors endangered species worldwide, has already listed the sawfish as critically endangered.
   I've never seen one, not even in an aquarium. But I'd like to.
  
  

Talk about fishing in the Coastal Bend