A short clip of “Silver” a (2-3 part?) series film about chasing tarpon, bonefish, and permit on the flats. This first clip highlights a little Keys tarpon fishing with the boys.

Tunes: Scott H. Biram, “Blood, Sweat, and Murder”

Sunday, December 24, 2000

I scared some fish pretty badly today. None died of heart attacks, so I didn’t catch any.

For the first time in days it was a decent weather. Not good, but decent. It wasn’t blowing a full gale and there were the odd moments of sunlight between the driven clouds. I hadn’t been on that flat since summer and I wanted to see if there would be any real difference in the fishing… apparently not. Just windier. In three hours I saw maybe eight fish. The first were in a group of maybe a half dozen and were past me so fast I had only one shot at them. The other two were singles and I spooked them both.

I still don’t get this bonefishing thing. I mean, other fish make sense: they eat baitfish so you throw a streamer at them, pull it away, and if they like what they see they’ll come over and eat it. It’s simple. The only worry is maybe matching the size of the bait, though if the fish are biting this hardly matters.

Bonefish seem totally different, even though one hears they can be caught using the same logic. The trick, they say (usually in magazines that come out of places like Illinois or New Hampshire), is to figure out what the bonefish are eating, learn how those bait act, and present a fly accordingly. Apparently this works, since in the same publications they have pictures of anglers cradling five-pounders with the flies still stuck in their mouths. Smug bastards.

Every time I try their advice the whole thing goes to pieces (threatening to take my sanity with it). I have tossed all sorts of flies at many bonefish and the results are fairly predictable. About the only thing that varies is how the fish leave. Some hustle around nervously and then cruise off while others bolt outright, pushing what I invariably think of as “bow-wakes” across the flat. Most, however, either ignore my offerings or never see them. To borrow from Tom Stoppard’s Guildenstern, I feel like a blind man looting a bazaar for his own portrait.

Clearly more research is needed, but how? Do I take a year’s hiatus from my job and try to discover some of their secrets on my own, or do I simply hire one of the Bahamian gurus – “Crazy” Charlie Smith, perhaps – to teach me what they know? I suppose I could pray for enlightenment, but I’m reasonably confident catching a bonefish doesn’t rate very highly on The Almighty’s list of goals for my life. At the rate I’m going I might catch one before the year is out, but the odds seem against it. I’m either so hopeless that I should be banned from all bonefish flats for life, or these fish are just impossible. If I ever do nail this thing it’ll undoubtedly turn out that there was some really simple thing I was doing wrong the whole time. I hope so. I’m tired of throwing flies at fish and either scaring them, or (worse) having them not see my fly at all. There has got to be a middle ground somewhere – a zone where the fly lands perfectly, the bonefish sees the fly, likes it, swims over and eats it. I would love to be there just once.

“Flatswalker’s Journal, March 2010. We descend into paradise to look for the Grey Fox, but we also find a wolf…”

Do it yourself (DIY) fly fishing leads to an unusual discovery for this small group of anglers at an undisclosed location in the Caribbean. Barracudas (the Wolf) are on the attack and bonefish (the Grey Fox) scatter everywhere. Nevermind, they leave that flat well alone and continue their search for bonefish on the flats… and they find some.

It’s hot. There’s the smell of stale sweat mingled with the windborne scent of mangroves as the flats to the northward dry out and a zillion myriad invertebrates bake in the sun, and I bake right along with them.  We’re west of Key West and south of most everything dry within sight, though I can just make out a few distant keys standing mirrored in the mirage to the south. I’m not alone; tarpon hunting isn’t typically a solitary sport, but when you’re up there on the bow and it’s been awhile since you’ve seen a fish, you tend to forget that there’s someone back there, poling the boat.

The tarpon comes out of nowhere, cruising right to left and on an easy intersect course with our skiff. I’m on the bow, trying to delay that moment when I would have to admit that, dangit, yes, we’re too shallow now and tarpon fishing is over for the day, and knowing that means reeling in and grabbing the smaller rod with a bonefish/permit fly on it.

But, sometimes life hands you those perfect moments.

“Ok, better grab the bonefish rod; we’re too shallow for tarpon here.”

“You mean like that one right there?”

“Where? …Holy Shit! Cast, man, cast! Wait, let me stop the boat.”

The fish is off the starboard bow and I’m afraid to cast directly over the boat and hook my companions, so I make a cast that’s not only off-target, but too short. I know I’ve only got one more chance so I pick up, shoot one back cast, and bomb it out there at an angle calculated to intercept. I hope. It’s a guessing game at this point. The fish could turn aside and miss the fly all together; the fly could sink too much and hang up on the shallow, weedy bottom; or, the fish could turn toward us and see the fly line. But none of those happen. The fly lands about ten feet ahead of the fish and I just let it sit there, waiting. I can no longer see the tarpon in the water—as it crossed the bow it moved under the glare to our left—so I’m just guessing at where the fish would be if it kept swimming at the same speed.

At what feels like the right moment I twitch the fly. A giant head breaks the surface as the fish rolls, taking the fly on the way back down. It’s headed away from me so the line is instantly tight and the fish is on. After days of fruitless casting, spooked fish, and half-hearted follows from reluctant tarpon, such an obvious, aggressive take leaves us all in disbelief. A microsecond later the fish’s head is out of the water and shaking, and it’s big.

“Holy ––––––––––––– shit!”

All of a sudden everyone’s yelling. The Great White Hoke is trying to start the engine and follow the fish, BarJack is securing the pushpole, and I’m trying not to pass out from shock. The tarpon tries to jump, but the water is so shallow and the fish is so big that it’s more of a belly-flopping lunge. I instantly realize what a foolish thing I’ve done (which is a feeling I’m sure I share with all of the tarpon anglers that have gone before me). The fact that I’m using a little nine-weight—a beast of a flyrod I’ve dubbed “Pancho” —makes my folly a little more dire, and (in retrospect) funnier.

By this time the fish is hell and gone and my backing has vanished in a scary fast-forward of anything I’ve ever experienced. I realize that in a few moments it will be completely gone and I debate jumping in and swimming after the fish. Hoke is doing his best to follow, but we’re so shallow that the motor is just kicking up foam and we’re barely making steerage-way. Way out there the tarpon jumps, this time clearing the surface in a clean leap, straight for the sky. It’s so far away now that it could be a different fish free jumping, and I only know it’s mine because the reel slows and my backing stops in mid-Houdini. (Thank goodness, too, I thought I’d have to go back to Worldwide that evening and feed my brand new ten-weight reel to the guy behind the counter who told me “don’t worry, 200 yards is plenty for any fish.”)

The next twenty minutes or so—I’m merely guessing here, since the whole experience was so surreal that time ceased to register: for all I know I could have been chasing that fish for days, or just a few minutes—the tarpon leads us on a wild chase, first out to the deep water, then back into shallow flat (where, again, we have to tilt the engine so high that we’re barely moving), under a broken anchor line (still attached to the anchor), around a shark, and back out to deep water where the real fight begins. I vaguely remember all this: BarJack leaping past me barefoot off the bow to clear my line from the anchor rope, a momentary scare when the shark showed up, and the endless struggle to retrieve line while keeping it tight. Good ol’ Hoke jockeys the skiff like a pro, speeding up to help me retrieve line, slowing down when the line gets too slack, and even turning away from the fish when it runs back at us. At this point it’s mostly a skiff versus fish game, and I’m just the guy holding the rod and reeling like mad. But that is all about to change.

The fight that follows is mostly quiet, punctuated by curses and the reluctant zzzzzzz—zzz of the drag as the fish takes line. Occasionally Hoke gasses the motor and turns the skiff to give me a better angle. Sweat stings my eyes and various joints begin to cramp, starting with my right hand as I struggle to retrieve line. My left leg keeps shaking. An indeterminate length of time later the fish is rolling next to the boat and I see that I can turn her at will now. BarJack is lying flat on the deck reaching for that giant mouth. He’s got blue gloves on and I can clearly see my little fly stuck in the top lip, slightly right of center. The moment of the grab is hidden from me behind BarJack’s head, but suddenly he screaming, and it’s a good scream so I put down my rod and head forward to see “my” fish. My first touch is delicate. I find the silver mechanism of her open jaw a marvel of streamlined leverage and translucent membrane. The barbless fly is an incongruity that is easily removed. I’m retrospectively worried to see that the hook has opened under the strain of our fight. We ease her head back under water and Hoke puts the skiff in gear. A moment later she shoots from our grasp, drenching us with a farewell tail-slap and vanishing into the green world that surrounds us.

I sit down, shaky and sore. We high-five and slap backs, but there’s no celebratory champagne to pop, nor even cheap beer. In keeping with our minimalist ethos we crack lukewarm bottles of water. As we turn the boat toward Key West and the long run home, I know I’ll be riding this high for days—not so much the fight (where even though I “won” I feel like I’ve just had my ass handed to me), nor even the high of landing my first real big Florida Keys tarpon, or even the clean release and watching the fish swim strongly away, but instead I keep replaying the sight of a 90 pound fish rolling on a fly in two feet of water. I might fish for another 50 years and never witness such a take, much less be a part of it.

I keep hearing the immortal words of Jim Harrison: “Who said that we go through life with a diminishing portfolio of enthusiasm? …So you try to seek out in life moments that give you this immense jolt of electricity. So you try to have something that gives you this electricity, and freshens up your feeling about being alive.”

I’m immediately depressed that I might have peaked with my first experience.

“Massively miraculous, a very powerful force, extraordinary;
so extraordinary as to create immediate unreality
in the process upon contact with the fish.”
~ Richard Brautigan, 1973.

The Keys Chronicles
June, 2009.

This season we’re staying at Nate “Dubya’s” Mullet Camp, like always. But this year the flavor is distinctly different, in a bare-bones, fish-camp kind of way. We won’t be sipping our Cuban coffees around his kitchen counter while we whip up new flies, nor lounging on his couch with cocktails after a home cooked dinner of lemon-pepper mahi-mahi. We won’t because (in a fit of hubris and with the best intentions) he gutted the place. This was a few months ago, when business was still booming and before the economy went into low gear and rich people’s portfolios dried up, taking his business with them. His place was a simple structure to begin with—basically a cube with a pitched roof—but when it was full of the accoutrements and paraphernalia of daily life—appliances, stove, counters, tables, and chairs, not to mention lights, walls, and a ceiling—it seemed a normal sort of place. Homely, even. But, with the interior stripped down to the studs and planking, and the ceiling nothing more than a tangle of wires among the rafters—in fact, the underbelly of the roof—well, you feel like you’re seeing a whole different space, like a flat laid bare by low tide.

Thankfully the exterior of the Mullet Camp is much the same, with its wrap-around balcony populated by the odd chair or side table, the warped, moldy floorboards, and the antique tarpon mount hanging at the head of the stairs. It’s cool up there, damp. In the morning—sipping my Cuban coffee and browsing though fly boxes wondering what the fish might like today—I hear doves cooing in the distance and smell the ocean, barely a hundred yards to the south. Even the foliage reminds me of home. There’s Caribbean birch, poinsiana, croton, and coconut palms. However, there are also oak trees and other species I can’t name but which belong firmly to the north American continent.

It feels early, but the rest of the tarpon-fishing world has already put in a good four hours by now. That’s the thing about tarpon fishing, you’re either up before the birds—you can still see stars as you hitch the trailer to the pickup, and you’re on the water when dawn is just a promise on the eastern horizon—or you’re on the veranda nursing your second cup of coffee and checking your leaders while you wait for the sun to rise high enough so you can actually see the fish through the water.

When you do the nocturnal thing you’re looking for rolling fish as dawn breaks, but that’s a hit or miss affair. If the wind is up the fish won’t roll, or you can’t see them if they do. Also, the rolling hour is over quickly and then you’re just sitting there, in a boat, waiting for daylight. If you happen to nail one early you’re glad you made the effort, but if don’t you begin to pine for bed (or wherever you happen to have slept) and wonder if tarpon are really worth all this. By eight o’clock you realize you’ve been blind casting for an hour just to stay awake… and also because the fish are out there, right, one might just grab it.

There’s something magical about that pre-dawn time when tarpon are rolling in channels, canals, and the lee of keys or islands. And if I ever had a perfectly calm morning down here I might be convinced to make the effort and grab a little of that early morning magic for myself, but when’s the last time it was even remotely calm in the Keys in June? Maybe it’s just me—most of my itinerant fishing experience has been in something approaching a young hurricane—but it could simply be the season. I mean, early summer isn’t exactly the calmest period, meteorologically speaking, but that is when the tarpon are here. If I refused to fly fish in the wind I’d never get a cast off. (Never mind that all the trips I’ve taken in the summer, fall, winter or otherwise have been plagued by the same seasonable/unseasonable windy conditions, so maybe it is me after all.) I wonder what would happen if I did encounter a windless day on the flats…

*

The 'Old' New Skiff... before the overhaul

And We Don’t Have A Freakin’ Skiff!

Yup, tarpon season is just around the corner and our brains are heating up along with the weather. Just got this little piece of mental clusterflop from good old Nate “Dubya” down in Tavernier Key. I can’t figure whether to call the Bureau of Mental Health, just feel sorry for him, or start stressing out myself that this tarpon season may find us skiff-less. Read and enjoy.

So I have figured out some things down here.  I don’t think the carbon guy has his shit together to spend that sort of loot on his product.  “Some” is the operative word here [as in, let’s do “some” of what we should to have a nice skiff].  Damn it!  Is skiff construction a winter Olympic sport?

If I knew some of the right answers here I would find the motivation to work on it more at night.  Instead I dream I am sanding fiberglass in the nude.  I know it’s not smart but I keep on grinding.  I do however have a respirator on.  Horrific stress dream, man. I just don’t want to waste my energies or miss a tarpon season.  I think I have misplaced some of my energies lately, and I know I left it near my sanity somewhere? What do you think, Mr. WindKnot?

Dolphin marine has some goodies to be bought for cash:

• Old school poling platform: single pipe from the transom with a “Y” or split with two steps.  We will build an insert like the last boat, as opposed to a mount on top cap.  (Hope to score this for no more than $200.00.)  It also allows us to choose our desired platform height and gives the room to steer a tiller.  Not as stable as I would like it to be, but neither is my life at this point… so why not?
• Slam hatch for the transom replacing the circular access to the bilge.  Like the one on the old skiff. $20.00???
• 27-gallon fuel tank?  I can’t find one that works with her dimensions or my dementia.  It would take the whole space forward.  They are [freakin’] seven inches tall.  They put carpet on top of them.  They have a baffle but not a great one.  I am skeptical about this and wonder if they were not pulled for this reason.  Plus, that’s a lot of fuel. They have temp ones, but I would rather put a perm one in and glass in the step up to support the span of the cap above.
• Spray rails @ $44.00 apiece. (A steal.) They’re pre drilled and counter sunk and the Keys people quote $190.00 for the job.
• Rubrail, end cap and insert for $130.00… a fair deal and we know it is the right one.
• The tiller?  I have been looking on ebay, but no one can seem to tell me exactly what I need.  It cost around $600 new from Dolphin.

[And, after all that there’s still] the trailer.  It has no title. And is a royal pain in the scrotum to register it as “homemade”. [It’s gotta be] weighed, certified, serial numbered, and $200 bucks for taxable worth.  Is it worth it to refit it with new tires, hubs, and bearings? This shit is stressing me out. [I mean,] do I glass the rigging holes or put pie covers?

Tell me if this scheme is nuckin flagrently fucin crazy or smart and nifty/resourceful?

[Wait,] do I put the battery up front?… did you know all the fish froze to death?… L.E.D. lights on the trailer?… paint a tarpon on the entry?… shit, flush mount push pole holders?… composite electric trim tabs or bennett sports?

[Help.]

About the Author:

Nate "Dubya" Landing a Keys "Poon"

Mr. Nate “Dubya” runs a successful/struggling/booming/busting business building sweet-ass shit for rich people in the Florida Keys. In his spare time — which he has none of — he a fish-a-holic… recently inducted into the close-knit (yet suspicious) brotherhood of fly fishing tarpon fanatics. A self taught scholar of the flats, tropical architecture, and interior design, he hopes to one day finish rebuilding his own tropical home and have a functional skiff to wet a line on the fabled flats in his (freakin’) backyard (for goodness’ sake). (He has also promised to one day visit the author of this blog and cast flies at little bonefish in my backyard, but I’m not holding my breath.)

Eleuthera, Bahamas May 2004

POSTSCRIPT

Our final day: we bid farewell to Aaron (who had an early flight to catch) and went fishing. In keeping with the cosmic laws that govern such things, this day dawned with perfect weather — just as the angler who needed it most was flying out. Winds were light and variable and the sky was crystal clear. In celebration of the perfect visibility we headed north to explore the area call Lower Bogue on the northwestern coast. Again the beaches were stunning, as was the panorama from the fabled Glass Window Bridge. However, we saw no bones, just sharks and cudas. That’s the problem with only visiting a place once: I still can’t figure if we were there on the wrong tide or those bare sand flats just don’t hold fish [7]. I would love to talk with anyone who has actually fished that area successfully. I mean, we had be best conditions for spotting fish ever; they simply weren’t there.

So, we headed back southward to good old Boxfish Bay to catch the falling tide. It was awesome, exactly what you hope for after paying your dues with a week of schlepping it out on blown out flats where you can actually see the shadows of the wind-blown foam lines on the bottom. During the last hour of our last tide we saw fish everywhere. The water was oil-calm and you could spot tails a hundred yards away. All you had to do was wade into range, make an accurate cast, strip once and the fish was on. Dad and I both caught several fish and I had the pleasure of watching a particularly big bone wallow over a shallow bank with its back out of the water to chase my shrimp fly. That’s a sight I won’t forget in a hurry, and a perfect way to end our trip.

Aaron, my friend, you should have been there.

____________________
7 Which logically makes no sense, right? I mean, all those predators — the cuda and sharks — must be there for something. I still like to think that we just hit it wrong and if we’d had better luck in our timing we’d have found bonefish (which would have made those beaches more than just pretty stretches of sand and turquoise water, it would have made them perfect). [back]