The Flyfish Journal • The Flyfish Journal 15.3 • HARD TO TELL

I will start by telling you how I came to catch a tarpon on a piece of freshly fried chicken skin, which had tightened around the flesh, gotten curled out around its edges like an oyster and turned golden brown from a reaction with hot oil.

The original piece of chicken was placed into the oil by a woman, who appeared to be from the islands. Dominican Republic, the Bahamas or Barbados. She had these glasses that were smudged so deeply by the task of frying chicken that her eyes were as murky as the oil. I imagined that, over the years, she had made dinner for a lot of anglers who stank of gasoline, fish guts and tobacco smoke. To me, it seemed all the men and women who had been in the Keys too long had turned to leather. By the time I arrived, long gone was the Key West that Thomas McGuane had stumbled upon, and ancient was Hemingway’s playground. But there was still something, a residue from generations of chasing a dream that either did or didn’t exist. It was hard to tell.

I had finished a season of guided flyfishing tours in Missoula, MT, and had a too-good-to-be-true offer from a friend—50 bucks for an extra room in a stilted canal-front home and access to all the permit flats he’d discovered. My friend was a free-range alcoholic who seemed surprised when I showed up, with a woman and two dogs, driving a pickup truck full of stuff. Our very first night in the new digs, which belonged to a soon-to-be-former fishing client of my friend, ended with an altercation (and a pretty bad scrap at that) between our respective girlfriends. Mine was lightning in a little bottle, and I knew that about her. His had been pleasant enough when I first met her in a dim bar, but does anyone ever really know what they are getting into? I remember sitting on the back porch looking out over the canal, moonlight swimming, where baby tarpon roamed. I was smoking a cigarette, a thing I did back then, and thinking, holy shit. But we were, after all, going fishing in the morning.

And by “fishing” I mean mostly running aground, casting at shadows, chasing sunburns and disappearing beers. There was the time we were jigging for snapper and a 9-foot bull shark ate one and got hooked somehow under his pectoral fin and didn’t melt the Shakespeare reel for over an hour. And the time I got close enough to see that a permit’s tail is black. And the time I put a little popper I’d made from a wine cork and some paint next to a school of jacks and they all turned and ate it but none of them got stung. And the time we actually did something right and hooked big baby tarpon on gurglers in the dark of night under a bridge in a moving tide—and those sounds I still remember.

Finally, there was the time we stopped at a convenience store for what seemed like just dinner, an eight-piece combo, then drove down a long road and parked near a mangrove-choked lagoon. A family of iguanas, some of them as big as first graders, lived in the branches. Occasionally they would cross the lagoon like serpentine ships, and you almost couldn’t believe the distance from nose to tail. And the painted markings and the bright greens and blues and the deep orange like winter sun. A population of tarpon was swimming in the waters, and every once in a while, one would roll. There’s a reason it’s called that. It is equal parts violent and demure. But best of all, it is a passive way to confirm the presence of fish.

I’m smoking a cigarette and I’m living out a fantasy that is already eroding around me like sand, but it’s still what will come to be known as the good old days. We thread the chicken skin onto a circle hook and I cast out to the far side, leading a fish that just surfaced. Things get tight and when I put pressure on the fish it pulls fiercely and behaves in a way that is scary to a trout fisherman. A series of haunted, charged moments and then there it is—my first tarpon and the biggest fish I’ve ever caught, laying at my feet. Still today one mighty scale, like a flower petal dipped in silver paint, lays flattened in the middle of my copy of 92 in the Shade.

The Flyfish Journal - The Flyfish Journal 15.3

HARD TO TELL

Issue List

The Flyfish Journal 13.4