There was a great Time-Life book (anyone remember those?) from the olden days called Dangerous Sea Creatures, which I read/pored over endlessly in elementary school. There was a great white shark on the cover that looks like it has a cocked eyebrow. But something unusual that lingered with me through the years was that amid the pages of this bestiary, populated by the usual marine suspects (sharks, sea snakes, stingrays, etc.), was an entry on groupers. And yes, that’s the same clade of fish used in the well-known sandwich.
“But only the most paranoid bather feared a grouper.”
Large groupers, this book implied ominously, were known to attack divers. In a predatory way, not just out of provocation or annoyance. As I got older, for the most part I understood that assertions like this were hyperbole and melodrama, and that it was rare that any marine animal attacked a human. And then, as an adult, I read Jeff Klinkenberg’s “Revenge of the Sandwich,” included in his 2008 compendium Pilgrim in the Land of Alligators. The essay contains a few intriguing accounts about unwary humans suffering injuries from being careless around large groupers, and nods to the popularity of the greatest fish sandwich ever produced. Klinkenberg’s essay also contains this line: “But only the most paranoid bather feared a grouper.”
It then goes on to tell the story of a spear-fisher off the coast of Sarasota who nearly lost a foot to a mammoth grouper, near a popular offshore spring known as the Green Banana. The imagery of the attack is less Jaws and more comical, overall; you won’t find the evocations of lurking menace presented in Dangerous Sea Creatures, although the experience does seem pretty harrowing. After having to turn his spear gun on the grouper in order to escape to the surface, the diver “bled all over the boat,” his leg “scraped from ankle to knee.” But to judge from his conversation with the author, he seemed to treat the attack as grist for lively conversation, rather than as a life-altering trauma.
Considering the human depredations on the grouper population, coupled with no confirmed human fatalities as a result of grouper attack, you might think about this incident the next time you’re at Dockside Dave’s in Madeira Beach (mentioned as a grouper sandwich hotspot in the essay, and which has great chowder, too). Or if you’re at The Hurricane, Frenchy’s, Crabby Bill’s, Big Ray’s Fish Camp, Mad Beach Fish House, or literally hundreds of other establishments in the Tampa Bay region. Klinkenberg gives a shout out to one such place, so I figured I’d add some of my own favorites.
Judging from the essay, spearfishing requires a kind of fearlessness regarding not just groupers, but sharks, rays, barracuda, and other potentially-menacing denizens of the seas (not to mention a fearlessness of drowning or the bends). “Things happen out there,” the spearfisher said cryptically, while telling Klinkenberg of his run-ins with sea life and boat propellers. And while this piece spoke to me because I love grouper sandwiches, the rest of Pilgrim in the Land of Alligators is a fun trove of writings not just on other perhaps less-benign animals (“Bull Sharks” is the title of the essay immediately following “Revenge of the Sandwich”), but Floridana in general.
