Catching up with Jim Gray

by Jim Gray

Over the past 35 years, I’ve worked as a client support manager for a large technology company. My role is to support our large international customers and I’ve spent a lot of time traveling in this capacity. While it’s challenging to spend so much time on the road, it does have the benefit of meeting a lot of people and having the opportunity to fish in interesting and sometimes exotics destinations. I carried a fly rod on many of these trips and I’ve been lucky enough to fish extensively in parts of Asia, Europe and the America’s.

Since covid, my work travel has come to a halt; but now that I’m an empty nester, my wife and I use this time to travel for ourselves, usually to visit friends and family. I still carry and fly rod, a tenkara rod and sometimes a tanago rod. I try to get some fishing in on all my trips. The Austin Fly Fishers have asked me to start sharing some of my trips in the newsletter. I hope this inspires you to fish more, and if you have any questions about destinations you see me visiting, feel free to reach out.

I made a trip to South Florida in May and another in June. My goal was to target exotics and do some inshore saltwater fishing. Fishing in this part

Blue Tilapia

of Florida couldn’t be easier. Pull over next to any of the numerous freshwater canals and start casting. My inshore saltwater fishing took place along the intracoastal waterway often under one of the many bridges that span this water.

The fishing was excellent, especially the canal fishing for exotics -peacocks and Mayan cichlids are pretty much guaranteed, but I also caught grass carp, zebra cichlid, snakehead, blue tilapia and spotted tilapia. Using small shrimp flies on the intracostal, I picked up 6 reef species - mangrove snappers, sailors choice, checkered puffers, yellow grunt, tomtate and a beautiful sergeant major. I missed my opportunity for a big jack crevalle when a school came through smashing sardines. The blitz only lasted 15 seconds and I was too slow changing flies. You have to be ready. My favorite thing about both of these venues the saltwater and exotic fishing is that you never know what you will catch. There is so much variety.

In June and July, I made two trips to the Caribbean. For the first trip, I went with Captain Scott Hamilton from Jupiter Florida to West End Bahamas in his 27 foot boat. We were fortunate to have calm seas and the crossing took 2 1/2 hours. We stayed spent 5 days in West End, fishing from sunrise to sunset every day. It was absolutely amazing.

I caught 18 different species on fly. Between the 3 anglers, 25 species were caught. I had at least 10 opportunities to land really big fish; but was only successful on 2 of the attempts. I lost some fish to sharks, some to coral heads and some to my own lack of focus during key moments in fight. While losing big fish is always disappointing, it has motivated me to make a return trip as soon as I can and profit from the lessons I have learned. Every night was capped with a fresh fish dinner and a cold beer.

My second trip to the Caribbean was a family cruise. I took a ten kara rod and some small flies. I fished tide pools for a few hours in Nassau and on Grand Turk. The fish were small, but it was fun to catch some new species, including a school master.

I’ve also been doing some local fishing. With the extreme temperatures we are having, I’m limiting my fishing to sunrise until just before noon. I’ve been primarily fishing the Llano and San Gabriel. The fishing has been good, with lots of sunfish, bass and carp. I caught a huge smallmouth buffalo in late July. This was my largest freshwater fish ever and put up a great fight on the 6wt.

I have another trip planned for Florida in September, and I may try and get to Maine at some point. I’m also excited about fishing the Texas coast in Sept/Oct, when these hot days end. Until then, I’ll be hoping around our local streams with a few day trips tossed in to make things interesting.