The Jetty Conchs: Joel Daves

This interview with conducted by Chessy Ricca on May 28, 2019 in West Palm Beach, Florida. Joel Daves was born July 14, 1928.

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Chessy: So my first question would be what is your family background?

Joel: I was born in Atlanta, my people we all came from Georgia. We came down here in 1938 when I was 10 years old. So I grew up in West Palm Beach and went to public school to Palm Beach High School and then went to Sewanee which is a liberal arts college in Tennessee to the University of Florida for law school then I went in the Marine Corp for 2 and a half years then I came back and I’ve been here ever since. And so I came back here in 1955. I’d been gone almost 10 years and all the time that I was, (laughs) you’re going to get more than what you bargained for, all the time that I was gone I was either in Gainesville, Florida or Sewanee, Tennessee or Camp Lejune, North Carolina or Newport, Rhode Island and I decided that if I ever got back to Florida, I’d get a boat and start fishing. I mean, I didn’t fish when I was a kid around here. I was a boy scout and spent a lot of time in the woods, but I didn’t fish. I had friends were fishing but I didn’t know Jerry Branch or any of those guys. And, so when I came back, I knew a guy named Earl Roebuck, he and I bought a boat together and then I met some other friends who fished and started going to the Bahamas and fishing and then I kinda, my brother in law, that was “B Paty”, Bob’s father, B Paty, B F Paty jr., and he kinda introduced me to the “Jetty Conchs”, told me what type of gear to get, and kinda helped me get started. I started going up onto the jetty and fishing. Actually the guys that, its interesting because it was a very difficult kinda of fishing to do. You had to get a mullet out of the school, the schools that come by usually were moving, they wouldn’t just sit still, you could snag and snag until you got one, they were moving. You had to run up and down the jetty and follow the schools. That’s where the fish were anyway. Under the school. So it took me a couple years to figure out how to, you know, kinda learn how to do it and what to do and what not to do. Even those rocks, your fishing those rocks, you got a bare hook and you’ve got a mullet in those rocks, if you’re not careful you’re gonna get a big rock. (Laughs) Then you gotta break it off and you gotta find a new rig and tie it all over again, meantime mullet have moved on down the jetty and the snuke (snook), its very exciting, its very exciting fishing. It was the kinda fishing that if you did a few times and you kinda mastered some of the fundamentals where you kinda catch a mullet and snag a mullet, once you kinda got into it, you couldn’t imagine anything more exciting. (3:29 minutes)

Chessy: Is that why they called you “No Snaggum”?

Joel: That was one of, Jimmy Branch gave all the, he gave all of the nicknames. I never did like that one. He didn’t ask me if I liked it.

Chessy: So no one nicknamed themselves?

Joel: No. Jimmy Branch, he won’t admit to it but he named every body.

Chessy: (Laughs)

Joel: So I came back here in 55. It was a couple years before I kinda organized and started going out on the jetty. And you didn’t just become a Jetty Conch. They had to kinda let you in. And that happened at the annual bash that was called “the Conch Out.” And “conch” is always spelled C-O-N-C-H, and I’m sure you know that. And we would have those things on the inlet dock, or later on, always over on Peanut Island where everybody would kinda get drunk and fall down.

Chessy: That’s where the conch outs were?

Joel: Yea.

Chessy: On Peanut Island?

Joel: Yea well it was undeveloped. There was nothing over there.

Chessy: Yea.

Joel: Well in the beginning like I say, the first couple years we had conch outs they were either on the dock or I think there was once it was down at Jimmy Branch’s house. He had a house on Indian road, nice big 2-story house on a big lot. But it, he didn’t want to do that every year, and so we started going over to Peanut Island. And then, I mean they had to take, the guys that were going to do the cooking had to take cooking gear and everything with them. Then everybody, kind of, would get drunk, and tell lies, and that’s when they admit… so somebody says to make a motion to admit, or whatever the terminology they used, mark Beaty to be a Jetty Conch, and there would be a vote and everybody kinda knew who was fishing and who wasn’t fishing, so if he’d been fishing and had caught a few fish, the vote would always be “yay”. But, they wouldn’t let people in who didn’t go up there and fish and catch fish so you kinda had to be, kinda know what you were doing on the jetty. So that’s how I got started. And that was about when I got kinda really settled in and by that time it was about 1960.

Chessy: How old were you roughly?

Joel: I was, well I was (long pause) 32?

Chessy: So, you said that Earl Roebuck got you involved?

Joel: Did you ever know Earl?

Chessy: No. I don’t, that’s why I was asking.

Joel: They lived, they had a house on El Pueblo Way, and he had grown up around here. He was not a Jetty fisherman. He just happened to be the first guy that I fished with. He had an old boat that we used and then he and I bought a boat together, but he never came out on the jetty. He just fished. I had made up my mind that when I came back I was gonna get a boat and start fishing. I had never heard of the Jetty Conchs until I came back. So Earl was never a jetty conch. So I started fishing with Earl, I started going out on the boat and fishing with Earl. Then a friend of mine named Sell Davis (spelling?), he got me involved and going to the Bahamas. So he and I went to the Bahamas a lot.

Chessy: Oh yea, “Bird Legs”.

Joel: (Laughs) See I never did fish the jetty alone. He was going to the Bahamas, great guy. So during those years I spent, I looked forward to the conch out every year.

Chessy: It was only once a year?

Joel: Yes. But it lasted about a month.

Chessy: (laughs) Was it at the beginning of season or at the end of the season?

Joel: The conch out, the jetty fisherman depended on the mullet runs and the mullet started showing up about the 10^th of September, Labor Day, and they would continue to come for 4 weeks or 5 weeks, and as soon as they showed up at the end of the year… now originally before world war II, there were some really huge schools, but by the time I started fishing they were still, I mean I remember going up there on a Saturday morning to the jetty and there were no houses up there, you could drive up it was full of mud all the way across the other side. And Saturday morning boats, and fish, you could see like big 4-foot barracudas just sitting there waiting for a mouth full, and snuke would be striking the fish coming up from the bottom. I’m sorry you never got to see that, I’m sorry that anybody who loves boating and fishing never got to see that just because it was just a spectacle. It was something you could see and hear and visualize and then your touching the fish, you know your snagging that mullet, hes squirming and you get him up on the top of the jetty yand hes squirming and you couldn’t keep every mullet because if you hooked him through the head he’d die, you wanted one that was going to live for a little bit. But you didn’t want him too lively because he’d get away from the fish.

Chessy: Ok so you want the mullet to kinda be below the school.

Joel: Yes.

Chessy: Cause like with all those mullet, out of all those millions of mullet, how do you get the snook to eat your mullet?

Joel: Well that’s a good question and the answer is you try to fish with one that’s alive but not real lively. See if he’s real lively, he’s gonna swim to the top and slap around with all the mullet at the top. So you want one that alive, and he’s got a little lead on his head, you ever seen the rigs that were used?

Chessy: No, that was one of my questions.

Joel: Well, I should’ve brought one down, I’ve got some of those up there. But the rigs were, we fished with about a 6 foot, 7oz or 8 oz wire leader and at the end wrapped like a number 8 hook, it’s a big hook, fish got a big mouth, then we made up these little quarter ounce leads out of mono, tie them with mono and a little loop and then you could kinda bend that loop back and slip it over the hook. Gave it a little, I mean I’ve been up there with the guys that grew up on that jetty and they cast fine without any kind of weight. I never could do it. There a picture? Yea that’s it! That’s it, right there. But that would be a, you know what an 8-0, it’s a big hook and it’s about a quarter, small-ish kinda lead and just enough to if your hook, trying to snag, you wat to throw that thing out just on the other side of the school and it begins to sink but you gotta wait 10, 20, 30 seconds for it to sink down a little bit, then you snag and hope you get a fish.

Chessy: And it’s always the outgoing tide, never the incoming?

Joel: Well, that’s not true. That was, I mean, the mullet they don’t know what time it is. They most of the time mullet come in on the incoming tide and go out and sometimes they’d go in, when we had big mullet runs in the early days, the mullet would go in and come down the lake to the golf course and sometimes they’d come all the way down to the north bridge, good size schools. They’d go up north by Palm Beach Shores, but then when the tide changed, they’d drift back down so depending on how far they got, often though if the mullet would come in one day they wouldn’t go out, they kinda hang around and go out the next morning or the next time there was an outgoing tide they were near the inlet and they would kinda go out. So the best fishing was generally considered to be on the outgoing tide, but not the early, not the middle of the tide, the tide’s going out for six hours so. (Recording cuts out, 13:50 minutes)

I don't know why this recording cut out. Fore more information on the Jetty Conchs, below is a short article from a 1968 edition of Sports Illustrated called "A Palm Beach Coming Out Party".

Joel Daves passed away at 93 years old July 20, 2021.