Captian Doug Lillard: Florida flats fishing guide to the Florida Keys, Flamingo,
and Miami. Fishing for Tarpon, Bonefish, Permit, Snook, Redfish and Sharks.
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South Florida Fishing Guide
Dancing with Tarpon
by John CostelloFly fishing is to fishing as the art of high seduction is to rape!
I needed an interesting statement to hang this article on and the above came to mind, and now having used it, cannot, for the life of me, remember where I read it, what the book was called, who wrote it, or if it even dealt with fly- fishing. Phone calls to some of the more erudite members of the fly-fishing fraternity have not helped either, as only one person amongst them had heard it, and then could not remember where, (but most liked it).
This being the case, I suppose I should hasten and lay claim to it, but I know if I did that, I'd have some of my friends accuse me of some form Freudian misdemeanor, and in the next issue of this magazine, a well read reader with a good memory would castigate me, quoting chapter and verse of the book I just plagiarized, so I'll just let it stand as is.
Now hat has all this to do with tarpon and fishing for them, you might well ask?... and rightly so. Bear with me a little while, and I will tell you about tarpon fishing and what it has to do with the above quote. It's about meeting a beautiful lady, getting interestingly involved, and when the tie is right, implementing that lovely art of high seduction. It's about silks and lace and heady perfumes, of lowered lashes, and sighs and looks full of promise, and fleeting touches and them wham, she mugs you.
That's tarpon fishing.
The problem is though, that this is singularly the most exciting, terrifying, and highly addictive form of fly fishing that there can possibly be, and like the aftermath of being mugged, once you have fly fished for tarpon, you will never be the same again.
If you're a bit like me and have been around a while now, having caught your fair share of big fish, or hunted some exciting game, or , in general, just begun to get that slight edge of cockiness when you start to believe that you know hat you are doing, what it's about, and even worse, think that you are getting good at it, then boy'o, what you need is a good spell on the flats of Blackador Key or Islamorada, and have "sabalo grande" give you a lesson in humility and teach you how to bow to them.
Firstly, start by forgetting everything that you have ever read or seen in the glossy books and magazines written about tarpon fishing. Those flat calm days without a breath of wind, and large silvery fish, leaping gently in a delicate cascade of spray, with the angler standing calmly frozen into the edge of the picture are, to put it mildly, and so not offend my more gentle readers, a load of hogwash.
Those are the special days that seem reserved for other more fortunate anglers, and very seldom you, but at least the knowledge is there that once you have paid your dues and served your tarpon fishing apprenticeship, you might get your share of them.
In the beginning there is the wind, and the wind blows and blows, and everybody back at the lodge mutters about having fished these flats at this time of the year, man and boy, every year for the past how many hundred of years, and they surely never experienced wind like this. But it does not matter, this wind, because its you own special wind which follows you to all your dream fishing spots, so you are used to it by now, and to hell with it, you're going to get yourself a tarpon. So there you are, all wind swept and sunburnt, standing on the casing platform of a flats boat, waiting and watching and not quite knowing what you are looking for, because reality is never quite what you expect.
"There, there, can you see it, cast mon cast, oh hell to lat, why didn't you cast mon", and you stand, helpless and riddled with buck fever as the first tarpon of the rest of your life swims by some twenty get away. There's this voice inside of you saying at little prayer "Oh Lord, I want to catch one of those, please lord......" (You know that one "i promise to never......steal sweets......covet my neighbors wife......I'll be a good boy......that sort of thing......if you only let me catch one of those beautiful fish").
You realize that Tomas Paz, your guide, with years of poling these flats, 5 day a week, every week for at least six months of each year is as excited as you, and this despite the constant day to day exposure to tarpon. Most guides are the same. They guide for years, and yet never seem to lose the excitement, this comes through in the way they handle their clients, or in the way the classical "Fish at 11 o'clock, fifty feet, Cast" type of command gets forgotten and replaced with the "There, there" excitement.
But that's tarpon fishing and I'm jumping the gun somewhat in the telling of it.
It was in the days that I was finalizing the publication of one of my articles, and was in the full flush of "Sailfish On A Fly" euphoria when PJ Jacobs stuck it to me. "Sailfish! yes well, don't doubt that they're grand, but now tarpon, they're something else, they are awesome, so let's go catch some".
Do you remember those classic lines from "Zorba the Greek", when Anthony Quinn says "When a woman calls you to her bed..." well, when you are invited to go tarpon fishing, go. Stop whatever you are doing, pack your bags, cash in on part or even all of the inheritance, and just "Go".
Go build memories to see you through those dull office days, or time stuck in traffic jams, or whatever it is that robs ones soul in the dreary times that the demands of modern living impose. Go grab a whole pile of memories to give you an edge of sanity in the midst of all the dull gray humdrum times. Start them by standing on the casting platform of a flats boat, with just the quiet splash of being polled along, and feel in you the certainty that there are fish on these flats, and that you are going to catch them, or at least try your damndest. They are beautiful these flats, and it does not matter where they are. The water is crystal clear, with the shadows of the depths changing the hues of the various shades of jades and greens and aquamarines, with beds of turtle grass patterning darkly in between. Blackador Key, Deer Key, Ambegris Key, Little Pine Island, Islamorada, Boca Grande, all soft names for island studding these waters. The Savannah, mile upon mile of jade green water, with no way to separate the sea and the sky were it not for the upside down reflections of the clouds. And through it all swim the tarpon, those wonderful fish with their roots buried in the mists of time, and at the moment, just moving to their own rhythm and time.
PJ was right, they are awesome these fish, awesome in each and every single way. Stand on the casting platform and have a school of tarpon roll alongside, gulping air, and you will swear, from the sheer size and sound, that it was a school of dolphin breaching, not fish. Manage at last, despite the almost terminal case of buck fever that separates your limbs from the commands of your mind, to get a fly to one, presenting by some miracle beyond the ability of shaking hands, gently within that magic 'one foot' strike zone, near to its head. The tail gives an extra beat or two, something alters subtly in the demeanor of the fish, and suddenly your fly disappears in a cavernous maw that gives you an instant understanding of the term "bucket mouth". A little voice within your head keeps repeating what your new Yank buddy told you back at the pub, "strip, strip, strip, strip" he said, "it does not matter what's happening, when she goes for your fly, just keep on stripping" and fumble fingered you do it, and the next strip meets with resistance, and without thinking you set the hook with your line hand, and automatically reinforce this using the rod in a low sideways strike. It's like hammering in a nail, first a quick light tap followed by a series of harder thuds driving it home, but all done automatically. The next few heartbeats are what makes sight fishing for tarpon so very, very special.
Tarpon are different, stick a hook into them and they don't waste time figuring out what happened, and then reacting. With them, it's like a grenade with no fuse, a case of instant detonation, and the immediacy and sheer violence of it leaving you frozen and incredulous. When a fish of that size and power reacts in the shallow water where it is sought, it does so either by coming straight up out of the water in a long leap of as much as fifteen feet, presenting a superlative image of size and fury, or else it blasts across the flats on a blistering run that has your line and backing rooster tailing. Think bout it a bit, this is not long distance happening like Polaris missiles or junk like that. When that fish takes our fly ins going to do so about twenty feet away. So what you have is a ringside view of a fish, which can sometimes grow to weigh over two hundred pounds, erupting from the water in a leap that can tower far above your head. It boggles my mind th think about it, that something that size, with no warm up, no run up, nothing, can just unleash itself, and in a display of sheer brutal power launch itself out of the shallows and that high into the air. Awesome, you bet because if that is now awesome, then I surely don't know what is.
When a tarpon jumps, it leaves an indelible series of fragmented images in your memor, that will, unbidden sometimes, replay themselves, over and over again. You will find them straying, vividly, into your mind, maybe at a boardroom meeting when voices become a drone, or in the midst of a dream tossed night, it does not matter when, because believe me, you will never forget. You will again see its head, slowly and dreamlike, breaking the surface, and again feel yourself fixed within the vision of that golden eye with its dark dead pupil that looks down into the depths of you, chilling you with the intensity of its stare, and then the stare disolves into a head shaking, gill rattling length of silver erupting, mindless in its fury, and not in the least concerned as to where it is going, or what might be in its way. Guides recount, in awe, of tarpon knocking them off their poling platforms with the first great leap, and with the next leap, clearing the anglers from out of the boat.
I had a fish of some 80 pounds come 6 feet out of its way and grab my fly with a mouth that gaped above the water. The take is one that I still see in the reflection of sunlight on a window, or maybe glancing off the odd bit of water. I did it all by the book, raisisng my rod hand and tilting the reel away to prevent the flyline fouling it. I pointed the rod along the direction of the line and not the fish, and dropped my line hand with my fingers forming a circle to guide the flyline that leapt off the deck, and the 20 lb tippet popped as effortlessly as rotten cotton when loop of line swept off the deck and around the rod butt. I know that line breaks easily when shocked, but in this case I never even gelt it go.
On yet another occasion, a fish of about the same size took 150 meters of leader, flyline and backing in one long swift run after my striking the hook into it. I am able to say with certainty the run was of that distance as flyline apart, 120 meters was the length of additional backing that had been spliced onto that which was already on my reel. Twenty five minutes into the fight, with the fish well and truly hooked, and neither of us giving any quarter, there was a sickening lurch, of a kind which I'd never felt in all my years of fishing, and with it the knowledge that my fish was gone. Winding in the slack was also different, with a feeling of lightness leaving no doubts that the flyline had so been lost. My initial thought was that the backing had been cut on a piece of coral, but this was not the case. The weight and strength of the fish, and the sheer effort that the two of us had pitted against each other, had caused a meter long sewn splice to part.
That's
tarpon fishing.
Stand on the casting platform of a Hewes custom
boat on the lime green waters of Islamorada, and have schools of tarpon in
the 100 pound class swim out of the shadows of the turtle grass. Happy
fish, the guides call them, as the broach on the surface with their backs
a handspan wide, and that great golden eye looking past and through you.
Cas to them with the rumble of traffic just across the way, and only one
or two other boats out on the waters with you. The largest fish I took
under these conditions was between 90 and 100 [pimds/ An enormous fish
that never jumped one, not even towards the end when it was tiring, and
would surface in order to gulp air, and then revitalized, continue the
fight. It was hooked and fought in the midst of a squall that overtook us,
with waterspouts passing eerily less than 400 meters away, with rain and
sunshine alternating in a wild contradition of weather, brought about in
the aftermath of a revolving tropical storm. An enormously strong gish
that after 45 minutes of hard, no holds barred fight, wa able, when Doug Lillard, my guide, lay flat on the fore deck and grabbec its
lower jaw, in the gaffing method used by the more concerned guides, to
prevent dislocated jaws, to shake him and fling him away like some terrier
with a rat. I eventually brought it back to the bat, on three occasions
binging the leader knot right back into the eyes of the rod, thus
confirming, Florida style, having landed the fish, and then snapped it off
with fight still left in her. She sank, looking at me, and with a flick of
the tail was gone.
That was a while ago now, and I can still see
that fish, and the words of Robert Penn Warden run through my mind: "I
have met hem, eye to eye, the lower jaw horn, outthrust, arched down at
the corners, merciless as Genghis, motionless and mogul, and the eye of
the tarpon is round, bulging, ringed like a target ingold, vision is
armor, he sees and does not. Forgive. The tarpon has looked me in the eye,
and forgiven Nothing".
That's tarpon fishing.
