When I picture flyfishing for tarpon, the first thing that comes to mind is the setting. I see turquoise flats stretching to the horizon and then melting into deep blue, all of it rimmed with thick green mangroves. That’s not where I ended up.
A sharp sun is pinned overhead, drilling into the back of my neck like a hot desk lamp. I’m alone in a rowboat on a lake, a shallow depression with the sort of soft marl bottom that squelches unpleasantly between the toes. Its shape is the result of glacial waves that once buried northern Michigan in six thousand feet of hard, gray ice. In late June, with a ring of leafy oaks surrounding the lake and the air hanging wet and heavy, the fact that there was even snow here three months ago seems unlikely, and a mile of ice, impossible. When it’s hot here it seems like it’s always been hot, and always will be.
Rogelio Velasco has owned Yucatan-based Pesca Maya fishing resort for 19 years, so he knows the challenge of producing off-the-grid electricity, especially for power-hungry air conditioners. Pesca Maya, like all Ascension Bay resorts, sits inside the Sian Ka’an biosphere reserve, where power lines don’t exist and aren’t forthcoming. So instead, most lodges rely on diesel…