It’s official: Snook have rebounded from 2010 freeze

Snook season closed to Aug. 31

Complete recovery of snook from the catastrophic cold kill of January 2010 has been o-fish-ially proclaimed. It’s no surprise to fishing-doers who figured it out themselves before the state began counting snook last year to see if it was so.

And so it was: Florida now has as many or more snook as it had before the kill, documented by a stock assessment conducted in 2015 with the data report recently completed.

If you hear voices saying, “We told you so,” that’s the snook fishers. They’re sharing high fives with the scientists who got the Fish and Wildlife Conservation (FWC) Commission to shut down snook season six years ago and then reduce keeper limits until the fish got over it.

On the Atlantic coast, where the damage was less severe, catch-and-keep was stopped for nine months. On the Gulf side, we weren’t allowed to keep a snook until September 2013.

If you were out fishing on the day that first norther rolled through, you were impressed. It felt threatening. The second one, a week later, felt dangerous, like an attack. Other than snook there were vast kill-offs of bonefish, tarpon, manatees and crocodiles in salt waters and of alligators and peacock and Mayan cichlids in fresh.

You can’t fault FWC for announcing the results of the stock assessment a little bit boastfully: “The quick recovery demonstrates that the FWC’s conservative management strategies resulted in abundant snook populations prior to the cold snap and that this large biomass was useful in population resilience. During the closure, spawning occurred without the threat of fishing mortality. As a result the number of young snook multiplied and adult snook grew larger.”

Beyond its executive summary, the snook assessment is technical and often dense, but a lot of it explains itself if you don’t mind wading through it. Online, start with the summary at myfwc.com/research/saltwater/stock-assessments/finfish/snook-2015.

An August 2010 report on the extent of the great kill-off is available too, at myfwc.com/research/saltwater/fish/snook/cold-kill-report.

Gulf and Atlantic snook are managed separately. Both seasons are closed now until Aug. 31, but you’re free to catch snook as long as you release them carefully.

That means not dangling a snook from a lip-gripper, but cradling it in wet hands, getting your photo quickly and putting the fish back in the water gently.

To avoid unnecessary hook injuries, use circle hooks with natural bait, and replace treble hooks with singles on artificial lures.