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.
I was caught between two worlds: human and piscine. I had been welcomed into the school. I moved with them, as they moved. I observed their feeding habits, their societal structures. I was like a salt-crusted, Ichthyological Jane Goodall, except that my silverbacks weren’t gorillas. They were bonefish. Scores of them. Possibly hundreds. All around me, glimmering tails flapped like the banners of their clan—a clan of which I was now an adopted son.
Survive, is what an angler does the first few minutes after hooking a striped marlin. My friend Nick and I shout with joy, accompanied by excited words in Spanish from our new friends. We watch a reel getting emptied and watch the fish leap, flip, and dive. Thirty minutes later and it’s the post-release chatter,…
I WAS A LITTLE SURPRISED when Enrico Puglisi told me that his favorite permit fly was not his EP Crab. Nor was it his lifelike Descendent Crab, or his Palometa Crab, or even the fly he named after the fish itself, the Permit Crab. It’s a shrimp pattern. More precisely, his Spawning Shrimp, #4, in…
Cape Cod is a gnarly pine tree sandbar that sticks sixty miles out from Massachusetts into the north Atlantic. A fishing mecca from time immemorial—Vikings crossed the Atlantic in open boats called knarrs to fish the teeming offshore banks, and the native Wampanoag perfected clambakes there—up to today with one of the best bluefish and…