The Flyfish Journal - The Flyfish Journal 15.3
WILL IT HOLD? Jillian Tisdale’s Knot Code
Words: Joe Dahut 2024-04-16 10:03:14
“Jillian Tisdale casts a Sage R8 rod prototype on a cloudy day in the Florida Keys. We waited out low tide, and the tarpon, by casting each blank and taking photos.” Photo: Dylan Schmitz
I once worked at a bakery and noticed how often the bakers would throw out perfectly good treats or send them home in a box with me at the end of my shift. I certainly didn’t complain, but it always confused me. These were items loyal customers would undoubtedly pay good money for. One day, I asked the owner and head baker why she kept tossing them.
“They aren’t right,” she would admit, dumbfounded at her own stubbornness. After further prying, she said, somewhat embarrassed, it was her loyalty to “the code.” I accepted her answer and later came to understand that most humans are not inherently born with a code. Codes are learned and developed over the span of a lifetime—through heartbreak, loss, panic, joy, connection and moments of deep shame and embarrassment. “The code” is a list of rules that cannot be broken, no matter how extraneous the circumstance.
Those bakers were artists and, like any good artisan, maker or craftsperson, their list of failures often superseded their list of accolades and accomplishments. When I first moved to the Florida Keys, I worked in a fly shop that was opening in Marathon and had the great pleasure of working with one such artisan: Jillian Tisdale. What fascinated me about Jillian immediately was her fascination with tying, testing and talking about knots, specifically for big tarpon.
A petite blond woman with a penchant for the puzzle that is knot tying, she was only a kid when she first worked the muscles that tie her knots today. As a child, Jillian and her father would take an annual birthday trip to Red Lobster, where he would ask her to crack open his crab legs for him. With delight, Jillian made precise, delicate cuts and cracks to earn the crab meat for her father, working the ligaments with enough force for each to break clean, but not so much that the shell tarnished the meat. Every once in a while, her father would reward her with a bite for her hard work. He asked her for help because she liked to do it, but more interestingly, because she was damn good at it. Jillian’s been working that muscle ever since, even after her father passed on. Those moments in the corner booth at Gainesville’s Red Lobster eventually fueled the essence of her passion to live and breathe Florida Keys flyfishing. Jillian lives in the deep chasm of tarpon fishing, where she chases what oftentimes can never be caught.
In the shop one day, I swept up her rejected attempts and joked that some of the fallen soldiers could have worked, could have held against the might of a fish. She shot me a look that said, “Don’t fuck with me, Dahut.” This area of the fly shop was a minefield of what I call “knot stumps”—clipped knots that were crooked, incorrect or just not “right” in some ineffable way. The remnants of knots that undoubtedly would have held, but for some reason were rejected, curdled with dust beneath a large Husky storage container. Spools of tippet dotted the surface of the table, and Jillian stood in perplexed frustration, a sign that something was brewing. Sliding the knot between her teeth and her lips, I heard a pop of saliva that adhered the filament together, melding the indifference of thin diameter to thick, the forcibly blended puzzle piece that somehow, some way, works when connected to a big, angry fish.
Knotting dissimilar diameters together is like wrangling a toddler into a car seat—all buckles, stuffiness, zippers and sometimes tears. Anyone who has tried tying tarpon leaders knows it presents phenomenal opportunities to practice patience and breathing exercises. Jillian’s practice is similar to parenting, I’d imagine, in the testing and search for the correct pressures and points of tension. Like any good parent, Jillian picks her battles. That day’s happened to be a 16-pound class section of hard mono connected to 80-pound fluorocarbon tippet for a man fishing tarpon in Africa, a trip Jillian had lusted after for some time. I gawked at her wizardry, laughing—“16 pound to what? 80?”
Like the rings of Saturn, red impact lines flared across the bridges of her knuckles and spanned their orbit to the side of her palms. Wrapping across her appendages, the lines painted her skin white hot upon contact and settled to a red hue after their impression. They looked like they were on the verge of scarring, which so often separates those who tie knots because they have to, and those who do it because they need perfection.
“Think this’ll hold?” she questioned, holding the Cobranagle, a knot developed by Nathaniel Linville of Key West, up to the light for closer inspection. Although I was certain it did not need light to judge its validity, I was happy to comply out of admiration for her work.
A knot that binds the class and the shock in a tarpon leader is the connective tissue in the transaction between a tarpon and an angler, arguably the most important part. Like God, the person tying the knot takes two entities and performs an act to make them one, to make them whole, complete, a taper of barreled coils that, when done poorly, spring out in an unavoidable kind of bad-hair-day misery. There is no mistaking when a knot is tied poorly. The practice of tying saltwater flyfishing knots is an amalgamation of days, time, effort and frustration.
Thankfully for her customers, Jillian is no stranger to paying her dues, and it shows in her work. As a former employee of Sandy Moret’s famous Florida Keys Outfitters in Islamorada and current manager of Seven Mile Fly Shop in Marathon, she has learned under the tutelage of some of the most famous faces of saltwater flyfishing’s Mount Rushmore. Among them are professional knot enthusiasts and true innovators of the sport and the binds that connect it. Steve, Chad and Dustin Huff, Nathaniel Linville, Kat Vallilee, Sandy Moret and countless other angling titans have considered Jillian an easy study. She has learned from the people that pioneered the sport, the masterminds that walked so the new generation of anglers, guides and enthusiasts could run.
In an obvious analogue to her love of knots, Jillian is deeply dedicated to the history of the sport. Like any art form, understanding the formal constraints that precede you well enough to break them is key to success. Jillian’s hands are positioned like a master puppeteer, the knot barreling and quivering like her marionette. It takes precision and confidence to conjoin monofilament and fluorocarbon, as if convincing two warring siblings that they do, in fact, want to get along. Like anything worth pursuing, perfection is always a little out of reach. Knowing what has been done, and by who, is pivotal to moving the needle past the status quo, past just fulfilling the order of what each day requires. Tying knots is the difference between active and passive involvement in the sport of tarpon fishing. It is what connects her, and so many others, beneath the surface.
Just as reading good poetry makes a writer burst at the seams with ideas for a new poem, watching someone dedicated to the tradition of tarpon knots makes an angler want to search deeper—for the meaning, lineage and reasons why. Flyfishing in saltwater requires a cataloging of mistakes to never make again, a spirit free enough to avoid the oftentimes too-critical nature of humanity, and the never-give-up-attitude that takes anglers to wild places, with wilder people, in inopportune conditions.
After leaving the shop and beginning teaching, I frequently stopped to bother Jillian and her employees, like a freshman in college attending high school parties on their first trip home. I’d come in to drink coffee and crack jokes about old customers, distracting them from inventory management splayed out on the long wooden table. During one of my visits, Jillian received a photograph from Antonio, the man who’d gone to Africa. The leaders had been tied long before his trip, and they were ordered when I still worked at the shop. Jillian had nearly forgotten about the work she’d done. Around the table in the fly shop, the glow of her phone showed an image of Antonio, donning a huge grin, traffic-cone-orange gloved hands holding the mouth of a tarpon. The knot, perfectly balanced in the middle of the frame, gleamed in what appeared to be the afternoon sun. She showed me the photograph, cocked her head to the side in hesitation, and laughed.
“It still doesn’t look right,” she said.
©Funny Feelings LLC. View All Articles.