LEFT TO RIGHT It’s amazing what you can learn while watching dock lights into the early morning hours. This light, at a friend’s rental in the Upper Keys, had a small squadron of resident tarpon that would stop by regularly to blast bait on their way out of the canals. Photo: Ian Wilson-Navarro “Sliding back into the Keys after a long day on the flats. The folks in their lawn chairs sipping beers on the jetty left us wondering why we had gotten in a boat at all.” Photo: Tim Romano MARINA AFTER DARK An old lure with rusty trebles sits on his desk. At one point in time, we would have replaced it and kept it in rotation, but in its retirement, it sits on the desk like a jersey hung from the rafters. We are both looking for something, something unknown and undecidedly special. I can smell the breath of the marina through the closed window, and it tells me everything I need to know about the day ahead—it will be hot, we will see incredible fish and I will find sweat in places that I did not know I had sweat glands. The palms are skeletal against the morning tide, and what is now black will transition into vibrance with the help of the gleam-ing sun, untethered in its vicious glare. Tonight tells me that tomorrow will be even better, or so I think. The lobster boats look clean. The old man without a finger is singing drunk karaoke in the shacks next to the boats. The tarpon are going ballistic, completely unbothered by his off-key singing, by the women next to him, who are on the clock and bored with what he brings to the evening. I know suffering exists, and I am familiar with the taste of a bad night, but tonight the slate is clean. The words I speak are few and their frequency is high with childish delight, watching the small version of the giants we saw this morning swim and glide through the dock lights. They are learning how to eat, and oftentimes they are not very good at doing so. I tie on a rusty fly so they don’t learn the hard way. It will take them several years before they start courting on the ocean side and, luckily for me, they can be my pets until then. They call this “beating the kids,” but I call it nurturing them. Teaching them not to be so gluttonous, so that when the seasonal guide from Montana who brings his clients to the Keys thinks he can waltz in and cut everyone off, karma will be in fa-vor of the poon. Even the best fishermen need respect because at the end of the day, these fish, this world, this planet doesn’t owe you, me or anyone we know shit. I climb the rocks and stash a minnow pattern in be-tween the docks. I am in the middle of it, far, far away from anyone else. The mini tarpon fly through the air and break the silence of the current. The world could not be more beautiful on a night like this. A beaten-up fly box with retired rusty flies, a pair of pliers and a fly rod and reel that sound like they were made for each other. The pleasures of a late night with creatures that don’t know I exist. THE FLYFISH JOURNAL 081
The Flyfish Journal The Flyfish Journal 13.4: Page 81
