Dave Pomerleau, “The Mad Snooker”, has dedicated the past 40 years of his life to the avid night pursuit of snook over 40” long.
Captain Dave Pomerleau has a complexion that would look right on Dracula—his skin is pale as a snook’s belly because he rarely sees the light of day.
For the past 40 years, Pomerleau, AKA “The Mad Snooker”, has been a night stalker, a rabid pursuer of giant snook that seem to magically appear only after dark—perhaps they, like him, spend their days asleep, awaiting sundown to come out and feed.
He is like Ahab without the peg leg, obsessed with the pursuit of the “white whales”.
Pomerleau is one of those guys who is just plain crazy about big snook—though he has never eaten one, or eaten any kind of fish.
“You don’t eat your pets,” he says.
His snooking habit has been both a blessing—earning him fame all along Florida’s west central coast as a fishing guide—and a curse, making it tough to stay attached to a significant other as well as to hold down any sort of day job that might interfere with his fishing.
“I don’t consider a snook “big” until it reaches 40 inches,” Pomerleau notes. “And the big ones usually take some special tricks and a lot of time to catch.”
"Pomerleau sometimes loads massive aerated bait tanks into a trailer and tows it to various bridges, jumping many miles between hot spots in search of giant fish."
He has gone to amazing lengths to pull off the trick at times, including for years guiding “land charters” in which he towed a trailer with a 200-gallon aerated bait “Jacuzzi” from bridge to bridge, sometimes covering 100 miles in a night charter looking for the bite. The tank carried Pomerleau’s baits—mullet of the size most of us would be satisfied to put on the smoker, 12” to 16” long.
For clients who specifically want a giant snook, it’s often a homer-or-strikeout deal. If you’re fishing baits that weigh a couple pounds, you aren’t going to be seeing any 5 pound snook taking the bait. Pomerleau is a swing-for-the-fences kind of guy. (He’s sort of that way with ladies, too, having run through a long procession of interesting women over the years, most of whom eventually found his never-home-at-night lifestyle was not for them.)
The giant fish are not numerous anywhere—it’s a pursuit akin to chasing unicorns. A 40-incher is at least a decade old, and will have had to evade harvest during the legal-size years, 28” to 33” on the west coast and 28” to 32” on the east coast, as well as the forays of bottlenose dolphin (a major snook predator) and bull sharks and, much more insidious, occasional bouts of red tide on the west coast.
They are rare, but unlike unicorns, they definitely exist, and Dave knows where they lurk.
Pomerleau fishes tackle that looks more suitable for landing bluefin tuna, not surprising since it takes some authority just to get the baits into the water. Eight-foot conventional rods with all the whip of a shovel handle, lever drag reels and 100-pound-test lines are the preferred armament.
When a snook takes one of the baits, it’s usually a “thump” followed by a short run and then it’s time for a serious hook set, to drive the 8/0 triple strong Mustad home.
After that it’s mostly mano-e-mano as to whether the fish comes in for a photo op or manages to make it to a barnacle encrusted piling to snip the line. It makes no sense that a 25 to 30 pound fish can be strong enough to outmuscle a 200-pound man, but combined with the leverage of the long rod and the close proximity of the cover where they stay, they sometimes do it.
The fortunate anglers who manage to whip the odds and the fish get a lifetime memory and bragging rights to being one of the few to catch a snook over 40” long.
Pomerleau occasionally makes forays across Florida to the east coast inlets, where he also catches monster fish like this one.
The Mad Snooker more often fishes from a center console these days, but he still homes in on the giant linesiders more than any other target. Sometimes he hauls the boat clear across the state to catch the lunkers of the lower east coast during the late spring and summer bite—this is his vacation—he only charters on the west coast.
If you’d like to take a shot at catching the snook of a lifetime—and remember you might get zip—Pomerleau can be reached at (727) 570-9711 or www.madsnooker.com. (What else would his email be?)
Don’t call during daylight hours—he’ll be sleeping.
— Frank Sargeant
Frankmako1@gmail.com
