A couple of things I learned gigging frogs for the first time. I knew this was a night time activity since frogs are more active at night and certainly less skittish as opposed to day light hours. The moon or rather the lack thereof has a lot do with your success. On our night the moon didn’t rise till about 11:00pm so from darkness which was about 9:00 we had two hours to get our best frogging in. Once the moon came up the bigger frogs disappeared and the ones that did stick around were much more skittish and took off before we could get close enough to gig them. Our guide, Capt. Tim Davis, said his best nights are when the moon sets early and from about 2:00 am to 6:00 am till just before first light starts to illuminate the horizon are his best nights with the biggest frogs. We harvested about 70-frogs which if we had been better skilled could easily have been 300 since we missed most of what we tried to gig. Our success was about 1-frog for every five we came across though we got much better at gigging as the night went on. Remember, we were using 14-foot gigging poles moving about 5-to 7-miles per hour trying to hit something the size of a donut hole meaning we had to aim for the body of the frog as opposed to the exposed head. Hitting the frog in his bony head resulted in a miss. If you want to go gigging for frogs in the Everglades just 25-minutes from downtown Fort Lauderdale contact Capt. Tim Davis on his website www.gladesmanoutfitters.com 

Last night I went frog gigging from an air-boat in the Everglades. This filled a bucket list adventure that had been on my list of Things-To-Do-Before-I-Die list for about 20-years. To say I wasn’t disappointed would be a gross understatement.  Though it was harder than I imagined I could see with more practice I’d be able to become much better at it. You have to imagine tooling along in the dark at about 5-miles per hour looking among the the lilly pads, saw grass and emerging lily bulbs for a dollar sized frog head poking up from the rest of the above water vegetation. If that wasn’t hard enough you had to then gig it with a 15′ pole gauging both speed and distance. Miss by an inch and you might as well have missed by by a foot. If I had hit half of the ones I jabbed at I would have had a more frogs than I would have known what to do with. Tomorrow’s post will tell a little more about the technique and the best times to go.  You can do this too with Capt. Tim Davis at www.gladesmanoutfitters.com