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Chicago's 'Fish Magnet' Uses a Fire Extinguisher, Baby Stroller To Fish

By Mark Schipper | April 17, 2015 5:47am
Powerlining at Montrose Beach
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DNAinfo/Mark Schipper

MONTROSE BEACH — If you're up early enough to see the fleet of powerline fishermen set up their rigs on Montrose Beach, you'd be hard-pressed to miss Argelio Matos, a Cuban political refugee who hits the shoreline almost every morning to chase the spring run of coho salmon.

Matos, 71, cuts a distinctive figure on the shoreline with his custom-made, double-reeled rig that he built from a standard baby stroller. Everything he needs to fish, along with a few luxury extras like cupholders and slotted storage, is contained within his handiwork.

For the uninitiated, "powerline" fishing is done by firing a weight with a line and rubberband attached 200 to 300 yards into the water using the blast from the compressed CO2 in a 15-pound fire extinguisher. It gives fishermen the distance they need to set up a line with multiple hooks.

 


Argelio Matos [DNAinfo/Mark Schipper]

Matos' method — and dedication — pays off. A retired handyman from Irving Park who has been fishing since he was a child growing up in Cuba, Matos hooks up to 40-50 coho every season — a total some casual fishermen say they can only dream about.

“He’s like a fish magnet,” said a fisherman at Montrose Harbor who immediately knew who Matos was because of his stroller — and his fishing prowess.

As a boy, Matos helped his father make a living in a fishing village near Punta de Maisi, Cuba, where they fished from a 12-foot wooden boat and caught snapper, grouper, permit, barracuda, shark and sea turtles, he said.

First, they sold their catch at the local markets, but after Fidel Castro took control in 1962, he collectivized the fishing industry as part of the turnover to a Communist economy, Matos said.

After a while, Matos said he and his father couldn’t make a living as fishermen anymore.

Matos, who speaks with a heavy Cuban accent, said they had to sell to government factories instead of small markets. Castro didn't let them continue "fishing for us," he said.

"We have to do it for him. [But] you have to do it because you gotta survive, the other way you cannot.”

He left Cuba in 1968, and traveled with his sister, his niece and her husband and one of his friends to Guantanamo Bay in a small wooden boat. He said he rowed the boat right up to a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier at anchor in the big bay.

He spent a week at the military base at Guantanamo before he was taken to Florida as a political refugee. Then, a week after that, on April 4, 1968, the U.S. government flew him to Chicago and set him up with a job, Matos said.

At first, he said he thought Lake Michigan was an ocean.


[DNAinfo/Mark Schipper]

“I get here, and it look so good and big, I think oh my goodness, I got it!” said Matos. He he made friends with a Puerto Rican man who spoke Spanish and showed him how to catch freshwater fish, including how to use the powerline technique.

He's been fishing that way every since.

After launching the line far into the lake with the burst from the fire extinguisher, the attached rubberband is reeled back in using a standard fishing reel. Once the rubberband is cranked back to shore, it is clipped to the powerline, which is stored on an oversized plastic reel. 

As they let out line from the reel, strung with baited hooks every 4 or 5 feet, the stretched rubber contracts and slowly pulls the string of hooks out. Once the line is out, the fishermen wait for schools of salmon to swim past their baited hooks — and hopefully bite.

It's peak season for coho, who come close to the shore every spring to feed in the shallows — the only time they leave the deeper areas of Lake Michigan in schools to work the near-shore terrain.

At Montrose, Matos' preferred spot, most of the fishermen rise long before dawn to start their pursuit of cohos.


DNAinfo/Mark Schipper

Their first stop is often Stacey Greene’s Park Bait Shop to pick up minnows and night crawlers. There, Greene passes on reports from earlier customers on what fish are — and aren't — biting.

On the slabs of revetment at the shoreline, some fishermen cast lures or baited hooks in the traditional way — but most rig up up the equipment for a day of powerlining, like Matos. They attach their lines to little bells that ring when a fish attacks the hooked bait.

While many fishermen arrive before 3 a.m., or by dawn at the latest, Matos prefers to show up later in the morning.

“I come a little later, about 10 [a.m.]. Then everybody’s set up [and] I can see” where everybody else is, said Matos, pointing to the colored buoys attached to the lines of other fishermen. “I don’t want no aggravations.”

By midmorning during the powerline season, the lakefront looks like a fish market, with salmon and trout flying back from the water and slapping down on concrete to be hooked onto strings or tossed into baskets and brought home to cook.

The noise from the extinguishers firing echoes, as do the spinning lines whizzing off the wheels. Matos recalled that they used to attach the line to railroad spikes and hurl them into the water before they started using extinguishers.

“Before we had the fire extinguisher, we had to shoot it [the weight] with the railroad spikes,” said Matos, who swung his arm overhead like a cowboy with a lariat to demonstrate the movement.

“Hey, get on the floor, watch out!” said Matos, laughing and ducking to avoid the imaginary spike. “Sometimes a good throw, sometimes no.”

As he was talking, a bell attached to his line began to ring, signaling a fish had taken the bait, and he started to pull in the long line by hand.

After netting the coho, his first fish of the day, Matos gave it away to another fisherman who’d come over to complain that he hadn't caught any fish. The fisherman thanked Matos and said he was going to smoke the salmon.

Matos said he took pity on the man, who he thought simply had bad luck. But his bad luck was nothing compared to another fisherman Matos sees around Montrose.

“Every time one guy come, you won’t believe me,” said Matos. “And he touch my line — he cursed. I say, ‘Oh God, here he come. I’m getting away from you!’ "

But everyone has bad days, he said.

“Some days they kill, left and right, kill all the fish," he said, referring to days when the fishing is good and salmon take the bait. But you can still strike out: "You right in the middle, same depth, same equipment, and they don’t touch you.”

But Matos usually has good days. He either cooks or smokes his catch and gives a lot away to friends.

After decades of fishing on Lake Michigan, Matos considers this adopted body of water his own.

“I told my people, when I die I want my ash [spread] over here," he said.

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