For your viewing pleasure.
I’d be OK with this.
One of the anglers is Mark Richens. I got to meet him and stayed at his place back on my first FL tarpon trip. His home on Upper Matecumbe Key was once owned by Ted Williams. It is on the market and can be yours for only $4.2M.
I’m in the air right now on my way to New Orleans, where I’ll primarily be sweating, as well as doing some work. Fishing is not on the agenda, sadly.
So, a few things I’ve seen bouncing around to share with you good (I’m guessing here) people.
First. The Double Haul. Here’s a video about doing it. If you are at the beginning of your bonefishing journey, you really, really need to pick up this skill. It is key. I’ve seen otherwise great anglers fall apart in a boat with bonefish in front of them, the will to make it happen, but lacking the casting ability to cast into a 15 mph wind. Don’t let that be you.
Here’s a story about tarpon fishing in the Washington Post. I love to see our sport go mainstream.
That’s all for now.
This video kills me… that big, nasty, beautiful, wonderful school of good sized tarpon and the shot goes begging… which is pretty much true to form.
Yeah, I’m thinking about tarpon and about next May when I’m going to make it back to Florida and back down to the Keys for a few days of tarponing, which is to say a few days of dodging storms and failing to see fish and fishing hard and maybe, if I’m lucky, getting a follow.
Tarpon are just cool. No way around it.
I was born in 1974, so I missed the peak of Andy Mills’ skiing career and I tend to think of him as a tarpon angler first.
Monte Burke (a real writer, not a hack like me) wrote up a great piece about Andy in Garden & Gun, which is the weirdest title for a magazine that I actually want to read.
This has me thinking about tarpon, one of the other fish I share some brain space with. Tarpon. Mostly, tarpon have kicked my ass. I’ve landed one adult tarpon and three juveniles. I’ve broken a rod on a lost fish, probably jumped 5, fed 20 and nearly wet myself on several more. My interest in tarpon is in direct contrast to my success in angling for them.
Next May I have a conference in Ft. Lauderdale and I’m going to tack on a few days on the back end to try to add another to the tally. My most haunting failures in angling are pretty much all tarpon related.
I envy Andy Mills his talent and his success. I won’t be Andy Mills. I won’t be Nick Mills. I don’t need a thousand fish to the boat, but I would like to hold one more by the lower jaw and look into that massive saucer-sized eye.
Martin tells me they also come in Men’s sizes.
It is tarpon time in the Keys. The migratory ocean-siders are doing their thing, pausing at the bridges and moving with the tides and the hopeful are waiting and searching for them.
It seems I now do this about every two years. A trend that looks like it will continue in 2017. Last year I got the Keys Beat Down and went 5 fishless days before a small act of redemption in the Glades. Somehow, I’m still up for trying again.
Next year it looks like a conference I’ll be attending will be held in Ft. Lauderdale right about this time. That means I’ll be able to wrap up the conference and slide a couple hours south to complete my biennial tarpon hunting.
I have to say… I’m already a bit excited about it, even after the demoralizing smack downs the Keys have dished out. There is just something about being there and seeing those fish sliding through the water, prehistoric, massive, sleek and powerful.
I’ll be planning this trip from now until I get on the deck of whatever skiff I’ll end up on.
The only pic I have of a fish I broke a rod on in 2013.
Big rod… good rod. The Predator 12 weight.
Things got a little crazy on here after I got back from Florida and some of the stuff I wanted to write I didn’t get to, so I’m going to get back to all of that.
I went to go find the big ladies on their migratory journey. I found a few (very few) and they were uninterested in me (felt like high school). Since I was after the 100 pound plus fish I had a correspondingly heavy rod. In this case, I had a loaner Redington Predator 12 weight.
The Predator 12 is a big rod for big fish. It has the additional cork grip so you can really put the stick to the fish with out snapping the thing in more pieces than intended. I’ve never actually cast a rod with the second grip before and I thought might make things a bit heavy. That proved to not be a concern as I found the rod cast remarkably well. Davin put some casts out with the Predator and he liked it as well.
I can’t tell you how if felt on a fish because I didn’t hook a fish on the 12. I really, really, really wish I could tell you how it felt on a big, mature female tarpon, maybe 110 pounds… ya know, the stuff of dreams. Dreams they remain and not born from them on this trip.
So, what I can tell you about the Predator 12 is that it felt good to cast. It wasn’t too heavy and I’m considering adding that rod to the arsenal. At $249, it is a steal by half.
I like gear that is a value and this clearly is. You can spend anywhere from $150 to $900 on a rod these days and for me, every dollar spent on gear is one fewer dollar for the trip kitty. I like to find value for money and this is clearly that.
They make the Predator all the way up to a 14 (I assume for fishing for submarines).
I’m favorably inclined and I bet, if you were in the market, you might enjoy the Predator 12 too, especially if you don’t want to damage your bank account too much in the process.
Before the Bahamas thing blew up, I was regaling you all with tales of our trip to Florida and how it felt to get absolutely crushed by the fishing. I’ll pick up the story where it left off.
I had gone 5 fishelss days. My best day was three follows. We were in Marathon (and Tav and Islamorada and Big Pine) looking for, and failing to find for the most part, the big ocean-side tarpon. Fishing with Bill Horn the day before I heard that it was possible the run was really over… that they run for about 60 days and we were in 60+ territory.
Beyond the fish not being there, there was the weather. June in the Keys can be beautiful. It isn’t as hot or humid as it will get later and there are certain days that are just clear and calm and wonderful. There are also horrible, horrible days full of grey skies and squalls and roiling seas. Day 5 was pretty rough and that was exactly what day 6 was shaping up to be.
My dad had flown out a couple days before and the plan was to get him on a tarpon, any tarpon. We had lined up Derek Rust and we were looking forward to the trip. Derek told us he would be happy to take us out, but thought it would not go well, that the weather was going to be horrible, the winds very high and it was not going to be the day we were hoping for. It was not the call I wanted to get, but I appreciated Derek telling it like it was and letting us come up with a plan B.
I made several calls and found a plan B at about 9:00 PM. The plan was to head North to meet Martin Carranza and to head into the Everglades to Flamingo.
It was such a good call.
I fished with Martin a couple years ago in Biscayne Bay and enjoyed his company. Martin busted his ass for us, poling us into the wind for hours. He was easy going and quick with a joke. An easy guy to share a skiff with.
It was a different kind of fishing, but I really enjoyed it. Casting under the mangroves and tight to cover was a lot of fun. I threw the fly rod and my dad threw a spinning rod so we could both be fishing. My dad hadn’t done any spin fishing since he picked up a fly rod about 18 years ago, and so it was a bit rough to start off with, but he found his groove by the end of the day and was hitting the banks pretty well.
Martin and my Dad, in the Glades.
The first fish of the day was a tarpon, a baby, but a tarpon, and acrobatic and handsome and exactly what I needed. It was a tiny bit of redemption. I had come to Florida and I had caught a tarpon, even if in my mind the tarpon was about 10x the size. Later in the day I was casting a gurgler along the mangroves, over the trench found between the mangroves and the grass and a large, adult tarpon came up on the fly. It turned it’s head sideways so it could look at the fly, and then turned off it. I didn’t have a chance to do much, just standing there slack jawed before shouting some expletive. Probably the closest I came to getting an eat from an adult tarpon the whole trip.
Martin tells me they also come in Men’s sizes.
I also caught a few small snook, my first, and a jack, a snapper and a cuda. My dad got a small snook himself and had a few bumps from other fish. We saw some bigger snook, but those guys were thick in their cover and didn’t want to play.
Martin on the platform.
It was a good day. I got to fish with my dad (who has decided he still prefers trout to tarpon and said the next time I book a Florida trip he’ll book a trip for trout somewhere else). I got to see a friend and some of the water he knows. We saw a manatee and on the way out of the park I also saw an alligator.
Ya know… it may not be one of the greatest victories in Florida fly fishing, but it was a victory for me.
Thanks Martin.
Day four saw Davin and I deciding to camp out in Tav and just wait it out. If you are trying to move around to find a fish that moves around, you stand some chance of missing the fish every time. If you wait, so the thinking went, the fish will have to come to you.
It was a good theory.
The weather was grey, the water was hard to see anything in, the wind was up. In short, not ideal.
This proved to be the closest I would get to my oceanside tarpon. Davin, it turns out, sold his soul (at least a part of his soul at any rate) to gypsies in return for super-human vision. He was calling out fish for me on a day when I couldn’t see a damn thing. He must have seen 100 fish that day, I saw about 8. I was making casts to fish I couldn’t see, but Davin and I were working like a team and we were working well.
Three follows. That was the grand tally for the day.
“Tarpon fishing is a game of incremental victories,” said Davin, and that is certainly true. The fish you see. The fish you cast at. The fish that follow. The fish you get to eat. The fish you jump. The fish you land and release. On a bad day you count it all. On a good day? I’ll let you know when I have one.
At one point we got chased off the water by a wall of watery darkness, managing to run under the protection of Nate’s awning just as the squall hit. We went back out, but the tides had changed the fish stopped moving (or moved further out where not even Davin’s gypsy purchased vision could find them).
Davin got to cast for about 5 minutes and had one shot in that time. He let me stand up there for hours, willing me to connect, but the fishing gods had other plans. Either that or this was the fishing gods’ plan and they are a bunch of jerks.
Davin, taking a shot.
Another day, another smack down, but a good day on the water. I felt like at least I was in the game and that was more than I had felt the previous few days. Funny how I could feel mostly content on a day when I didn’t touch a single fish, but I did feel content. I took the small victories and was happy with them.
I know tarpon on the fly can be hard. I know there are easier ways to catch tarpon. Float a live crab under one of the bridges and you stand a pretty good shot. That’s not what I wanted to do. That wasn’t what I was there for. It wasn’t what any of us were there for.
We came from near and far to try to get our own piece of the migrating ocean-side tarpon. I came from California, Matt Smythe from New York, Davin and his dad from the Cayman Islands and we had Ty Lloyd Jr. from the Naples area and Eric Estrada, as close to a local as we had in the group, from Miami. Davin was up in Tavernier with his friend Nate, the rest of us were down in Marathon.
Heading out on Day 1, High Hopes, Good Weather
The day I got in I got my rental car and headed South. Matt and Ty were already out and not having someone to head out with right away, I did the only thing I could think of and went fishing. I waded, looking for something roughly bonefish shaped and instead found three somethings tarpon shaped. A wolf pack of three big tarpon came skirting the inside of grass. Sure, I cast at them, just because, but they wanted nothing. It seemed like a good omen.
It wasn’t.
When I got out with Eric later that day, we didn’t see much. The next day with Eric we didn’t see much more. The next day with Ty, we didn’t see much more. We covered water. We staked out. We moved. We made calls. We peered into the water for hours and hours and hours and had nothing to show for it. No one was catching fish, not up in Tav, not in Islamorada, not in Marathon.
See, I had been saying these fish have been making this migration for tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of years and they were unlikely to stop any time soon… but they seemed to have kind of stopped. They were running off the script. They were making an idiot out of me/us.
Ty, Matt and I, out looking for fish.
The big meat balls weren’t there. Those rampaging swarms of tarpon, all eyeballs and tails and pushing water visible from a quarter mile… they just weren’t there. We saw a few fish, very few, usually too close to do much about, or, in one case, slightly out of reach.
You head all this way and it’s in the window, but there isn’t anything there. Kind of kicks you in the gut. It’s one thing to get shots and miss them, but it is another to just not get the shots. We were counting fish seen, not fish cast at, not fish fed or jumped and certainly not fish released.
We went through this a couple years ago, although we saw more fish and there was about 1,000% more rain. From that experience I knew we had to stay positive and, oddly enough everyone did.
We slugged it out and there wasn’t much to write about because beyond fishing different places and going out in the back a bit to look for laid up fish, we didn’t see much of anything. We looked for bones and reds on a couple of occasions and every bit of nervous water was a lemon shark.
At least there were drinks in the evening and food and friends and good conversations. Stay positive… that’s the trick.
