TARPON
BONEFISH& TARPON
Editorial Board
Dr. Aaron Adams, Monte Burke, Bill Horn, Jim McDuffie, Carl Navarre, T. Edward Nickens, Kellie Ralston
Publication Team
Publishers: Carl Navarre, Jim McDuffie
Editor: Nick Roberts
Editorial Assistant: Isabel Lower
Layout and Design: Scott Morrison, Morrison Creative Company
Contributors
Monte Burke
Sue Cocking
Mike Conner
Chris Hunt
Peter Kaminsky
Alexandra Marvar
Kris Millgate
T. Edward Nickens
Bob Rich
Photography
Cover: Reagan Renfroe
Dr. Aaron Adams
Tom Corcoran
Marty Dashiell
Dan Diez
Paul Dixon
Greg Dini
Pat Ford
Ed Glorioso
Sarah Hamlyn
Benedict Kim
Paul King
Justin Lewis
Andrew O’Neil
Nick Roberts
Neal Rogers
John Rohan
Rob Romasiewicz
Dylan Schmitz
Nick Shirghio
Martin Silverstone
Andrew Tipler
Ian Wilson
Cover
Anglers fish the flats of southern Belize. Photo: Reagan Renfroe
Bonefish & Tarpon Journal
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Board of Directors
Officers
Carl Navarre, Chairman of the Board, Islamorada, Florida
Dan Berger, Vice Chairman of the Board, Key West, Florida
Jim McDuffie, President and CEO, Miami, Florida
Evan Carruthers, Treasurer, Maple Plain, Minnesota
John D. Johns, Secretary, Birmingham, Alabama
Tom Davidson, Founding Chairman Emeritus, Key Largo, Florida
Harold Brewer, Chairman Emeritus, Key Largo, Florida
Russ Fisher, Founding Vice Chairman Emeritus, Key Largo, Florida
Bill Horn, Vice Chairman Emeritus, Marathon, Florida
To conserve and restore bonefish, tarpon and permit fisheries and habitats through research, stewardship, education and advocacy.
John Abplanalp
Stamford, Connecticut
Rich Andrews
Denver, Colorado
Stu Apte Tavernier, Florida
Rodney Barreto
Coral Gables, Florida
Adolphus A. Busch IV Ofallon, Missouri
John Davidson
Atlanta, Georgia
Ali Gentry Flota Richmond, Virginia
Dr. Tom Frazer Tampa, Florida
Jeff Harkavy Coral Springs, Florida
Advisory Council
Randolph Bias, Austin, Texas
Doug Kilpatrick Summerland, Florida
Jerry Klauer
New York, New York
Dr. Michael Larkin St. Petersburg, Florida
Thorpe McKenzie Chattanooga, Tennessee
Wayne Meland Naples, Florida
Ambrose Monell New York, New York
Sandy Moret Islamorada, Florida
John Newman
Covington, Louisiana
Al Perkinson New Smyrna Beach, Florida
Paul Dixon, East Hampton, New York
Chris Dorsey, Littleton, Colorado
Chico Fernandez, Miami, Florida
Mike Fitzgerald, Wexford, Pennsylvania
Pat Ford, Miami, Florida
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10 The Future of Tarpon
New insights from the Tarpon Isotope Study and the Tarpon Acoustic Tagging Project will inform conservation on a regional scale. Monte Burke
16 The Spinning Fish Phenomenon
After troubling reports of spinning fish in the Florida Keys surfaced in late 2023, Bonefish & Tarpon Trust and partners quickly mobilized. Alexandra Marvar
22 In the Salt
Author and angler Thomas McGuane has left his mark on American literature while championing flats fishery conservation. Peter Kaminsky
48 Long Live the King
Bonefish & Tarpon Trust is working to ensure a sustainable future for Boca Grande’s iconic tarpon fishery through science-based habitat restoration. T. Edward Nickens
Tarpon migrate along the east coast of Florida. Photo: Paul Dabill
Setting the Hook
From the Chairman and the President
Florida’s iconic tarpon fisheries take the spotlight in this fall edition of the Bonefish & Tarpon Journal. Our outstanding contributing writers offer an insightful look into the past, present, and future of the Silver King through their compelling reporting from Key West to Islamorada to Boca Grande—storied waters where BTT is hard at work to restore the vital habitats that support the species and fuel our state’s worldclass fisheries.
Peter Kaminsky’s superb profile of acclaimed author and angler Thomas McGuane takes us back to the glory days of tarpon fishing in Key West, a special period captured in the celebrated film, Tarpon, starring McGuane alongside other literary giants and set to the music of the late Jimmy Buffett, a friend to BTT and supporter of conservation. In that era, the tarpon fishery seemed boundless and inexhaustible, but as we now know, that was not the case.
Eventually, what BTT Board Member and champion tarpon angler Sandy Moret refers to as “the weight of humanity” took its toll on Florida’s tarpon fisheries. The steady march of coastal development, accompanied by the loss and degradation of essential habitats and the resulting reductions in water quality and natural flows, led to a decline in the quality of the fishing for which the Sunshine State is famous. Monte Burke describes the tragic crash of Homosassa’s tarpon fishery in this issue, and in his piece, “Tallying the Tarpon,” Mike Conner reports on the concerning findings of BTT’s tarpon fishery assessment conducted with the assistance of many leading Keys guides. The assessment paints a picture of a Keys tarpon fishery that has declined over recent decades in the face of mounting pressures, including water quality issues and increasing boat traffic and shark depredation.
But there is good reason for hope, and our resolve has never been stronger. Since Keys anglers founded BTT more than 25 years ago, we have amassed the knowledge and expertise needed to right the ship when it comes to water quality, habitat restoration, and fisheries management to achieve a better future for tarpon. And we’re actively working in all three areas!
In his piece, “The Future of Tarpon,” Burke details the findings of the BTT-funded Tarpon Acoustic Tagging Project—the most comprehensive tarpon tracking study in history—and the groundbreaking Tarpon Isotope Study, both of which underscore the urgent need to improve how we manage our forage fish stocks and the tarpon fishery on a regional level. Tracking data has already been used to support the establishment of
Carl Navarre, Chairman
Jim McDuffie, President
North Carolina’s tarpon catch-and-release regulations, and BTT is engaging in other states with the goal of strengthening management of the tarpon fishery in the Gulf and the Southeast. Likewise, BTT is advocating in these regions for reformed commercial fishing practices for menhaden, a critically important forage fish for the Silver King, which is supported by the findings of the Tarpon Isotope Study.
As our work in the fisheries management space progresses, there’s also reason to celebrate when it comes to state funding for Everglades restoration and water quality improvements along Florida’s coasts and estuaries. As you’ll read in the opening Tippets section, BTT and partners successfully advocated for $850 million for Everglades restoration and $535 million for targeted water quality improvements to reduce harmful nutrients in key waterbodies. The state budget also provides $20 million to tackle Keys water quality issues and $2 million to research and address a suspected toxin affecting multiple Keys fish species. As outlined above, the state’s robust 2024-25 budget will benefit our tarpon fisheries as well as many of Florida’s other iconic sport fish.
On the habitat restoration front, BTT is working with intense focus in Southwest Florida on a number of projects, ranging from Rookery Bay to the Boca Grande area. In his piece, “Long Live the King,” T. Edward Nickens brings us the story of Boca Grande, Florida’s most famous tarpon fishery. With partners, BTT is identifying, conserving, and restoring vital juvenile tarpon habitats in the area. At the same time, we’re working with local guides and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission to oppose the use of banned “Boca Grande jigs,” which are detrimental to the fishery.
As we strive to safeguard Florida’s iconic tarpon fisheries in the face of looming threats, and work to ensure a bright future for the species through science-based solutions, one thing is clear: it has never been more important than it is right now for anglers and outdoor enthusiasts to be engaged in conservation. If we don’t step up to the plate for the species and vulnerable places we love, then who will?
As always, thank you for your continued support of BTT and for your advocacy on behalf of the fisheries that enrich our lives in countless ways.
Welcome Aboard
Rashema Ingraham Appointed BTT Caribbean Program Director
Bahamian conservation leader Rashema Ingraham began her new role as Caribbean Program Director for Bonefish & Tarpon Trust on May 1, 2024.
Ingraham served for the past eight years as Executive Director of Waterkeepers Bahamas (WKB), where she distinguished herself as an effective leader, accomplished conservation advocate, incisive communicator, educator, and community organizer. During her tenure, she co-founded the coalition “Our Islands, Our Future,” to oppose oil exploration in The Bahamas, developed new youth education programs, and played a pivotal role in establishing the Bahamas Mangrove Alliance (BMA), a multi-organizational effort to restore mangroves in the aftermath of Hurricane Dorian.
“Bonefish & Tarpon Trust is pleased to welcome Rashema Ingraham to this important leadership role,” said BTT President and CEO Jim McDuffie. “Throughout her career, Rashema has focused on driving positive change at the nexus of environmental health, community-based solutions, and sustainable economic growth. Her experience and perspective will be invaluable to BTT’s mission in The Bahamas and regionally.”
Based in Freeport, Grand Bahama, Ingraham will lead BTT’s Bahamas Program, focusing on government affairs, public policy, community engagement, and other high impact work in pursuit of the organization’s conservation mission. Beyond The Bahamas,
she will be an integral part of BTT’s regional team working in Belize, Mexico and other Caribbean nations.
“Joining Bonefish & Tarpon Trust is an incredible opportunity to broaden conservation efforts in The Bahamas and across the Caribbean,” said Ingraham. “I am ready to step into this role and engage governments, communities, and both cultural and economic stakeholders to preserve our marine habitats and fisheries for a thriving future. At my core, I am inspired to do this work so that my own children and their peers can grow up and thrive in a healthy world around them.”
A graduate of the University of The Bahamas, Ingraham was previously selected by the international Waterkeepers Alliance as one of the “Top 20 Global Waterkeeper Warriors” and named to the list of “40 Under 40 Most Successful and Influential Professionals in The Bahamas.” A frequent and passionate keynote speaker and expert panelist at international conferences, she was a presenter at COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland, and a panelist at the United Nations 2023 Water Conference in New York, NY. Most recently, she was a moderator representing the Bahamian perspective at a program sponsored by the Clinton Global Initiative and highlighting the role of women in climate leadership across the Caribbean.
Rashema Ingraham
Dr. José Trujillo and Sarah Hamlyn Join BTT’s Florida
Keys Team
Dr. José Trujillo and Sarah Hamlyn have joined Bonefish & Tarpon Trust’s Florida Keys team. Trujillo, a Postdoctoral Research Associate, leads BTT’s research on shark depredation in the Florida Keys, bringing his expertise as a shark behavioral ecologist to understand drivers and consequences of sharkhuman interactions. Hamlyn, a Research Associate, is supporting BTT’s response to the “spinning fish” phenomenon by engaging with Florida Keys fishing guides and conducting fieldwork.
Originally from Ecuador, Dr. Trujillo earned his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in marine biology at the Universidad Austral de Chile in Chile and earned a Ph.D. in marine science at the University of Otago in New Zealand. During Trujillo’s research in Chile, he revealed how the structural complexity provided by kelp forests serves as essential habitats for egg-laying sharks.
In Trujillo’s doctoral dissertation, he investigated the mechanisms by which young sharks effectively reduce predation risk, examining the escape behavior, kinematics and physiology of newborn blacktip reef and sicklefin lemon sharks. His research
reveals how these sharks capitalize on the physical and thermal features of the shallow reef flats around the island of Mo’orea in French Polynesia to enhance their escape when cohabiting with larger predators. Trujillo’s previous work is valuable to understanding the factors that contribute to habitat quality in shark nursery areas.
Growing up in Australia, Hamlyn has spent her life in, on and around the water. This connection to nature drove her back to the University of Adelaide mid-career to study Marine Biology. There her research focused on the indirect effects of climate change on calcifying herbivores in a model ecosystem, studying an offshore active volcano in New Zealand. In 2017 she landed in the Florida Keys to research and restore Florida’s Coral Reef, leading coral restoration operations for the Upper Keys and scientifically responding to threats like Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease.
Living in Islamorada, the “Sport Fishing Capital of the World,” Hamlyn spends every possible free moment on the water searching for tarpon, snook and bonefish across the stunning backcountry and flats in Florida Bay. This has cemented her desire to protect and understand this unique fishery.
Dr. José Trujillo
Sarah Hamyln
Tippets Short Takes on Important Topics
FLORIDA LEGISLATURE CONTINUES TO PRIORITIZE STATE’S NATURAL RESOURCES
Bonefish & Tarpon Trust supported robust funding and multiple bills during Florida’s 2024 legislative session to improve water quality and fish habitat along the state’s coasts and estuaries. In June Governor DeSantis signed the 2024-25 budget set forth by our legislators that continues to prioritize our natural resources.
The state’s budget provides significant funding for water quality, including $850 million for Everglades restoration and $535 million for targeted water quality improvements to achieve nutrient reductions in key waterbodies across the state and to implement the initial recommendations of the Blue-Green Algae Task Force. Additionally, the budget includes $55 million to restore Florida’s world-renowned springs and a $40 million investment to improve water quality and combat the effects and impacts of harmful algal blooms, including blue-green algae and red tide.
The budget provides $20 million for water quality in the Florida Keys and $2 million to research and address a suspected toxin affecting multiple Keys fish species with “spinning” behaviors and advocated for by BTT, Lower Keys Guides Association, and other partners. BTT was also successful in advocating for $500,000 to plan and permit hydrologic restoration projects led by BTT and partners in Rookery Bay. These funds are matched by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and will improve juvenile tarpon and snook habitat, prevent mangrove loss, and strengthen coastal resilience. The state’s 2024-2025 budget provides more than $2.35 million and ten new positions at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) for initiatives intended to enhance the resilience of saltwater fisheries, improve habitat and water quality, and further integrate habitat into fisheries management. Progress was evident in other legislative measures as well. The Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s proposed update to the state’s stormwater rules and design criteria (SB 7040/HB 7053) passed unanimously. These new rules were an outcome of the Clean Waterways Act (2020) and set new minimum performance standards and new requirements for the maintenance and operation of stormwater systems.
BAHAMAS MANGROVE ALLIANCE JOINS GLOBAL MANGROVE ALLIANCE
BTT and its Bahamas Mangrove Alliance (BMA) founding partners, Waterkeepers Bahamas and the Perry Institute for Marine Science, joined the Global Mangrove Alliance (GMA) on Earth Day 2024, marking a significant step forward in conserving and restoring mangrove ecosystems in The Bahamas. Mangrove forests are vital ecosystems, serving as natural buffers against coastal erosion, providing habitats for diverse marine life, and playing a pivotal role in carbon sequestration.
Established at the World Ocean Summit in 2018, the GMA fosters collaboration among NGOs, governments, scientists, industry, local communities, and funders to conserve and restore mangrove ecosystems worldwide. Including the BMA in the GMA signifies a united effort toward achieving this ambitious objective.
“The Bahamas Mangrove Alliance is pleased to join the community of organizations and other partners working to restore and conserve mangroves around the world,” said BTT President and CEO Jim McDuffie. “Our participation in the Global Mangrove Alliance is pivotal in amplifying our collective impact on mangrove conservation efforts. Together, we can leverage our resources, expertise, and networks to safeguard these critical ecosystems for future generations.”
The BMA has pledged to plant a million mangroves by the end of 2025. At the same time, BTT and the BMA partners are working together to pursue new policies benefiting mangrove conservation nationally. These commitments have attracted the interest and support of others. The BMA was invited to participate in a Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) program in The Bahamas in April and at the organization’s Annual Meeting in New York City in September. Learn how you can support this vital work at BTT.org/ bahamasmangroves
Anglers explore the Northern Everglades. Photo: Nick Shirghio
Students, volunteers, and fishing guides planted over 3,200 mangroves on Grand Bahama in celebration of Earth Day 2024. Photo: Dan Diez
BTT SUPPORTS BELIZE FLATS FISHERY ASSOCIATION IN OPPOSING UNWISE DEVELOPMENT
Belizean fishing guides, commercial fishers, and other concerned citizens rallied in late May to protest developments planned for Will Bauer Flats, also known as Angelfish Caye, and at Cayo Rosario. The rally followed a protest by the Belize Flats Fishery Association (BFFA) at Will Bauer Flats in February that achieved a temporary suspension of dredging operations. Although the suspension was lifted for a short time in the spring, the protest in May successfully stopped it again.
Coastal habitats are the most threatened in Belize, and they are most impacted by unwise development. Healthy flats ecosystems support not only the livelihoods of recreational fishing guides, but all tourism sectors and commercial fisheries as well. Protecting these habitats is essential for a flourishing marine environment and ecotourism economy. BTT stands with the fly fishing guides, commercial fishers, and citizens of Belize, and will continue to provide the science and educational outreach needed to support community-led efforts to protect their environment, livelihoods, and cultural heritage. Follow the Belize Flats Fishery Association on Facebook for more information.
NEW FILM DOCUMENTS BAHAMIAN FLY-FISHING GUIDES IMPACTED BY CLIMATE CHANGE
MEKO, a full-length documentary produced by Pandion Creative in association with digital agency Oakpool, will premiere on streaming platforms in early 2025. Starring renowned Bahamian fishing guide Omeko “Meko” Glinton, the film focuses on the impacts of climate change on the livelihoods of two of Grand Bahama’s original fly-fishing guide families. MEKO follows Glinton in the wake of Hurricane Dorian as he navigates living in a coastal community impacted by rising seas and extreme weather. A tale of resilience in the face of unspeakable destruction and personal loss, MEKO is a testament to the strength of the human soul and the pivotal role that fly-fishing plays in The Bahamas.
DUCKS UNLIMITED AND BTT TO COLLABORATE ON WETLANDS RESTORATION IN MEXICO
BTT, Ducks Unlimited and Ducks Unlimited Mexico (DUMAC) have signed a three-year Memorandum of Understanding to restore, conserve and protect coastal wetlands in Mexico.
“Each of our organizations shares a commitment to the restoration and conservation of coastal wetlands, recognizing the critical habitat they provide for waterfowl and fish,” said Jim McDuffie, BTT President and CEO. “This new alliance will accelerate BTT’s work in Mexico while enhancing our collective ability to achieve greater environmental impact and economic benefits for local communities.”
The initial area of focus will be along the Mexican Yucatán, where work is already underway by DU Mexico to restore altered hydrology and revive the mangrove ecosystem.
BTT FLORIDA LICENSE PLATE NOW AVAILABLE ONLINE
Skip the line at the DMV! You can now order your BTT Florida license plate completely online by visiting etags.com. If you hold a valid Florida Driver’s License or Official Florida Identification Card, you are eligible to purchase BTT plates for your car, truck, trailer and RV. $25 from every plate sold benefits BTT’s mission to conserve bonefish, tarpon, and permit, and the habitats that support the flats fishery.
Fishing guides and supporters rally at Will Bauer Flats near Placencia, Belize.
Photo: Benedict Kim
DU CEO Adam Putnam, BTT President and CEO Jim McDuffie, and DUMAC President Jack Hole.
the future of tarpon
New insights from the Tarpon Isotope Study and Tarpon Acoustic Tagging Project will inform conservation at a regional scale.
BY MONTE BURKE
After baseball great Ted Williams retired from his Hall of Fame career in 1960, his life became subsumed with another game: fishing, mainly for what he deemed “the big three”—Atlantic salmon, bonefish and tarpon. The latter fish became his abiding obsession. From his house in Islamorada, Florida, he fished for tarpon almost daily during the season. He preferred to go out by himself, but would occasionally hire either Jimmie Albright or Jack Brothers or George Hommell to guide him. He helped found the Gold Cup in 1964 and won the event the following year and again in 1967.
Sometime in the late 1970s, Williams got wind of what was happening in Homosassa, Florida, where thousands of giant tarpon arrived every May, and world records were being broken nearly every year. One season, he and the late Islamorada guide, Gary Ellis, decided to travel up there to try their hand. Williams was immediately smitten with the place and its fishing. In an attempt to get in sync with the species and to try to gain any edge
he could, Williams demanded that he and Ellis “only eat what the g*ddamn tarpon are eating” in Homosassa Bay, which he figured was sea trout, mullet, crabs and shrimp. So they did. Ellis would later report that he couldn’t really tell if they fished any better because of their diet, “but it was worth a try.”
Williams was honed in on the forage from a strictly angling point of view, but he was approaching something that’s vitally important to the species. Tarpon are what they eat, of course. But they are also where they eat.
**
In the 1960s, commercial crabbing was the biggest industry in the town of Homosassa. Blue crabs were everywhere—mating in the area’s four main freshwater rivers and floating the ocean currents in Homosassa Bay—plentiful to the point of absurdity. Guides Steve Huff and Dale Perez, who worked in Homosassa
in the late 1970s and early 1980s, say that the crabs would attach themselves to the trim tabs on the back of their skiffs and would try to grab hold of their push poles, their pincers futilely clacking against the graphite.
The tarpon that came to Homosassa every May during those years feasted on those crabs. “Every day you’d see the crabs swimming all over the surface of the water and the tarpon busting on them,” says Ronnie Richards, a longtime Homosassa guide. Huff says that nearly every tarpon landed back then “had crabs coming out of it, from both ends.”
The sheer abundance of the nutrient- and oil-rich crabs likely attracted those Homosassa tarpon to the area in the first place and helped them attain their stupendous sizes (the largest fly-caught tarpon in the International Game Fish Association’s world record book all come from Homosassa).
And it’s likely that the sudden disappearance of those blue crabs put an end to those glorious years in Homosassa.
Citrus County (where Homosassa is located) and Hernando County (which borders much of Homosassa Bay south of Citrus County) were, for a few decades following the 1970s, two of the fastest-growing counties in the United States, booming with dozens of retirement communities and the construction of more than 30 new golf courses. The one thing all of those new developments and golf courses have in common is the need for significant amounts of fresh water. That fresh water comes from a portion of the upper Floridan aquifer, which lies beneath Citrus and Hernando Counties and feeds the area’s springs.
By the early 2000s, Hernando County alone was using fifty million gallons of water a day. Home sites, agriculture and some residual mining pumped out a lot of that water. So did the golf courses, which used something like 370,000 gallons per course
Tarpon migrate through the Florida Keys. Photo: Marty Dashiell
every day of the year. That water usage, coupled with severe droughts in Florida in 1980 and 1984, served to draw down the aquifer and reduce the flow of the local springs.
Adding insult to that injury, much of the groundwater became polluted with pesticides and other lawn-maintenance chemicals, as well as nitrates from fertilizer, cow dung and leaky septic tanks. Nitrate levels in the region’s four main freshwater rivers increased by a factor of five between the 1960s and 1990s.
Historically, the area’s four main rivers (the Homosassa, Weeki Wachee, Crystal and Chassahowitzka), along with the many adjacent smaller springs—all of which collectively make up what’s known as the Springs Coast—pumped around a billion gallons of fresh water into Homosassa Bay every day. But since 1980, there has been a drastic decline—more than 50 percent—in the amount of fresh water entering the bay. Less fresh water means more salinity in the bay and in the springs, a problem that’s been exacerbated by rising sea levels in recent years.
Less fresh water means less tarpon forage, as well.
The blue crabs of Homosassa Bay, as it turns out, needed freshwater, too. They rely on it for mating. It also regulates the levels of salinity. Too much salinity, and blue crabs experience lower survival rates, slower molting and higher predation mortality.
As the freshwater flow into Homosassa Bay dissipated, so did the number of blue crabs. By 2000, the biomass of blue crabs in the area had dropped to half of what it was in the 1970s. Thus, the Homosassa tarpon no longer had quite the impressive buffet spread they’d become accustomed to. And it is likely no coincidence that when the blue crabs no longer appeared in great numbers, neither did the tarpon. The equation is rather simple: less fresh water means fewer crabs and fewer tarpon.
The Homosassa tarpon fishery crashed. What was once the tarpon capital of the world, though still fishable today, is but a mere shadow of what it once was, a giant loss in the world of angling. Its fall also serves as a warning, some harbinger of things that very well could come for other places, and other species, unless something is done to try to prevent it. And preventing it means actually impacting policy, management and public opinion. This requires not just knowing something is happening, but being able to prove it empirically.
Which is exactly what Bonefish & Tarpon Trust, along with two scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and host of other collaborators, is in the process of doing.
Dr. Lucas Griffin and BTT Research Fellow Dr. Andy Danylchuk, scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, just smile when they talk about their tarpon isotope study, the latest work they have conducted for Bonefish & Tarpon Trust. The reason? “This was a pretty novel project, cutting edge, and we pushed the envelope a bit,” says Danylchuk. “We had a hunch it would work, but there was some risk involved. The ‘a-ha’ moment for us was when we realized, ‘holy sh*t, this is working.’”
So what exactly are isotopes? In layman’s terms, they are atoms of the same element with different masses. And isotopes of tarpon—measured in a fin clipping —can tell us not only what a tarpon has eaten, but where it was eating. Both are important.
The isotope project was a companion study to a BTT-funded acoustic telemetry study done by Griffin and Danylchuk that tracked the movements of adult tarpon. Before that study, which began in 2016, very little was known about where tarpon migrated and the repeatability of their movements. The movement study revealed that there are two main “contingents,” or groups,
of tarpon in the Gulf of Mexico/Florida region. There is one in the western part of the Gulf that migrates east and north, past Texas, to the Louisiana Delta. And there is another contingency in and around Florida that contains within it two subgroups: one that migrates up the eastern shore of Florida past Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina to roughly Virginia, and one that migrates up the western shore, up the Gulf, also to the Louisiana Delta, which appears to form a natural barrier between it and the western Gulf contingency (though there appears to be at least some crossover between the contingencies there).
Tarpon, it was demonstrated by the study, spend a quarter of the year in the northernmost parts of their range, feeding on forage fish, like menhaden. “What that study told us is that these northern areas are very important to tarpon, that they were foraging areas that sustained them through the migration and the winter,” says Griffin. “But we didn’t have the data to empirically prove why these areas were important.”
So, in 2022, they set out to get it. The idea behind the isotope study was to collect fin clip samples from adult tarpon, which allowed the scientists to see what the tarpon were eating, but also “backtrace” individual fish to their feeding locations. At the same time, they took samples from tarpon prey, including species like crabs, shrimp, pinfish and menhaden. “When we match the
The participation of tarpon anglers and guides was critical to the success of the Tarpon Isotope Study. Photo: Greg Dini
two data sets together, we understand what they’re eating and where they’ve been eating, and we can produce a map of their diet and reliance on certain habitats within their range,” says Griffin.
And this is a game-changer when it comes to the conservation and management of the species. “We can now connect the movement of tarpon with their prey base and habitat along their migratory routes,” says Danylchuk. “And we can understand what they’re being exposed to in other parts of their range,
which allows for a more holistic approach to conservation and management.”
Starting in 2022, Griffin and Danylchuk began sending fin clip kits to fishing guides and anglers (clipping the dorsal fin of a tarpon is much less impactful than, say, stomach pumping, which is a method of understanding the diet of a fish, but something that’s nearly impossible to do with a tarpon). The kits included
The tarpon that inhabit South Florida in the spring actually come from two subpopulations: one subpopulation migrates up the Atlantic coast, another migrates along the western Gulf of Mexico. Graphic: Dr. Lucas Griffin and Dr. Andy Danylchuk
Migrating tarpon depend upon the rich prey resources that in turn depend on healthy estuaries. The western Gulf of Mexico subpopulation of tarpon mixes with the eastern Gulf subpopulation in the northern Gulf, where both depend on seasonally abundant prey like menhaden. Graphic: Dr. Lucas Griffin and Dr. Andy Danylchuk
An angler jumps a tarpon in Costa Rica before collecting a fin clip for the Tarpon Isotope Study. Photo: Paul King
scissors, vials and forms for documentation. In all, they sent out kits to 250 guides and anglers, and received more than 850 samples back. The majority came from Florida, of course, but they also received some from Louisiana, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and even Costa Rica and Trinidad. Captain David Mangum, a guide on the Florida Panhandle, was an enthusiastic participant, gathering roughly 50 samples over the two years. “I’m
BTT’s Dr. Aaron Adams surgically implants a tag in a tarpon caught in the Florida Keys for the Tarpon Acoustic Tagging Project.
into anything I can do to help tarpon,” he says. “It was a pretty easy process. We’d get ahold of the fish by the boat and I’d have the client lock some hemostats on the dorsal and I’d cut off a piece.”
The samples were sent to one of the collaborators on the project, Dr. Michael Power, at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, where they were analyzed for carbon, nitrogen and sulfur isotopes. (Another collaborator, Dr. Oliver Shipley at Stony Brook
Guide Charles Hill collects a tarpon fin clip in Costa Rica for the Tarpon Isotope Study. Photo: Paul King
Anglers prepare to collect a fin clip from a tarpon landed in the Florida Keys. Photo: Dylan Schmitz
Photo: Andrew O’Neil
University, provided additional analyses and interpretation.) The carbon and nitrogen values help determine what type of prey the tarpon are feeding on, and the sulfur values help determine where the tarpon eat, especially in relation to freshwater systems. Taken together, the values “paint a picture,” says Griffin. It was a novel technique for a marine species at this scale, an idea that came from the study of birds, where scientists have used feather clips to discern migration patterns in North America.
The collection of 319 samples from 38 types of prey was done in conjunction with the fin clipping, taken from the areas that tarpon are known to inhabit. Griffin and Danylchuk took those samples, dried them in an oven for 48 hours and then sent them to Dr. Power for analysis, which helped fill out the map of tarpon movement, prey and habitat.
The interconnectedness of it all is the key. It enables scientists, advocacy groups and even anglers to gain a wider understanding of tarpon, that holistic view. Traditionally, conservation and management have focused on the areas where anglers see tarpon, mostly in Florida. This study demonstrates, empirically, that the areas where anglers do not come into contact with tarpon are critical to the overall health and of the species population. Stakeholders are now armed with scientific evidence of the places tarpon eat and inhabit and, thus, where they may face potential threats. That evidence could be used to affect policy in, say, South Carolina, a place where the river plumes are vitally important to tarpon because of the forage there, but also a place where rapid development of the coast and coastal waterways possibly threatens the freshwater flow. “We tend to think of Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades when we talk about fresh water and tarpon,” says Danylchuk. “But the health of freshwater flows in other states in the species’ range is also vital.”
The evidence could also be used to influence policy on prey, like menhaden, an important forage fish for tarpon and many other fish, and a species whose regulation is uneven, at best. “This is a tool for conservation groups, policymakers and anglers. We can’t just focus on the tarpon when it comes to conservation and management,” says Danylchuk. “We need to be advocating for the protection of their prey and their habitat, and include those things in fisheries management. We now have the map drawn of who needs to be at the table for those discussions.”
There are two more initiatives, thus far unfunded, that could truly fill out a tarpon “map.” One has to do with juvenile (1-2 years old) and subadult (up to 10-12 years old) tarpon. These juveniles tend to congregate in places that are most impacted by poor water quality, like the Indian River Lagoon and the estuaries that
receive the periodical Lake Okeechobee discharges which are filled with hazardous levels of nitrogen and phosphorous. Griffin and Danylchuk already have many samples of juveniles, and a full analysis of those samples could provide a better idea of how poor water quality is affecting these soon-to-be adult fish.
The second is a large genetic analysis study, which would be done primarily through the state of Florida’s database of more than 10,000 tarpon samples, which have been collected over the last two decades. This analysis would help scientists learn more about population dynamics, and help establish a population baseline for the species, which “is something that is pretty common knowledge for some fish, but not for tarpon,” says Griffin. That baseline is vital for determining the stability of the two tarpon contingencies, and allows for conservation and management efforts to be more focused and more effective. For example, genetic analysis would address the question of whether the regional groups formed by adult migrations translate to genetically different sub-populations, or does the transport of larvae on ocean currents keep genes flowing between these groups? The information on migrations already shows the need for a regional approach, and the isotope findings point to conservation issues that need attention. Genetic analysis would reveal the geographic structure for regional management – should it be one management plan for the entire range of tarpon, or should management focus on the scale of the regional tarpon groups?
In the end, the work that Griffin and Danylchuk and their collaborators have done—and will hopefully continue to do—has given us tools. These tools allow for a greater understanding of tarpon and the protection of a species that’s important both economically and in ways that can’t be measured by money. And these tools also give us a chance to prevent what occurred at Homosassa from ever happening again.
Monte Burke is The New York Times bestselling author of Saban, 4th And Goal and Sowbelly. His latest book, Lords of the Fly: Madness, Obsession, and the Hunt for the World-Record Tarpon, is available now. He is a contributing editor at Forbes and Garden & Gun.
BTT’s Dr. Ross Boucek downloads tracking data for the Tarpon Acoustic Tagging Project from an underwater receiver. Photo: Ian Wilson
Guide Charles Hill measures a tarpon landed in Costa Rica for the Tarpon Isotope Study. Photo: Paul King
the fishspinning crisis
More than 50 species of fish. Sharks. Shorebirds. Beginning in fall of 2023, Florida’s coastal species have been stricken by a mysterious and sometimes fatal neurotoxin. Here’s what happened when scientists, state agencies, guides and anglers carried out a widespread, coordinated response.
BY ALEXANDRA MARVAR
On a blustery winter night in December, Allison Delashmit boarded a boat with team members from Bonefish & Tarpon Trust and the Florida Keys Fishing Guides Association.
“It was around nine o’clock. It was raining outside, and really cold. And we went out to try to see these fish acting oddly,” she said. “Multiple other people had reported seeing them doing weird things that day in a culvert here in the Lower Keys.”
Delashmit had only just recently stepped into her role as the Executive Director of the Lower Keys Guides Association (LKGA). She had a mind for marketing and bringing people together, but it was her husband who was the fishing guide. She hadn’t yet seen this weird behavior—fish twirling and breaching erratically—which BTT’s Dr. Ross Boucek had been tracking for weeks as it swept Keys baitfish populations, but that was about to change.
“We’re all standing there soaking wet, with a net, trying to catch some of these mullet that were acting bizarre, and Ross was taking samples. And I remember thinking, as I’m standing there, soaking wet and freezing: ‘What am I doing? Here I am sitting on the side of the road at midnight with fish that are spinning—and drawing blood from them.”
Delashmit wasn’t the only Keys resident who found herself abruptly inducted into the wild world of citizen science over the past eight months. Since October, reports had been rolling in. Boucek’s phone had been ringing off the hook. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission’s Fish Kill Hotline was getting these strange calls, too: Wildlife was spinning out in Big Pine Channel. Off Little Torch Key. At Cudjoe Gardens Marina. It started with baitfish. Then, bigger fish. Sharks. Even pelicans.
The issue drew national attention when word spread about the dozens of critically endangered smalltooth sawfish dying off. The FWC tallied 53 sawfish dead between the start of the event and mid-June, a staggering number considering there may be as few as hundreds of the U.S. population still left in the wild. For Delashmit, Boucek, and the dozens of Keys locals who’d been watching this situation build, it was time to gather data, and get the country’s top fish experts on the line.
THE MYSTERY OF THE SPINNING FISH
According to BTT Vice President for Conservation and Public Policy Kellie Ralston, by January, the BTT team felt they had enough reports of spinning fish in the Keys to make a grave determination: “We started to get the feeling that this was
something different—that this was bigger and potentially longer lasting than any issues we’ve seen in the past,” Ralston recalled.
“We certainly had significant red tide events in recent years, as well as blue-green algal blooms around the state, that have caused concern… but nothing to this extent.”
It would take months of data collection and analysis to home in on what was causing this “spinning fish” phenomenon, and that was essential before any steps could be taken to stop it.
The good news? Stakeholders had a serious head start. BTT— alongside LKGA, which launched their report survey not long after that fateful rainy boat ride—stepped right into full crisis response, delivering all the report data to date to a coalition of scientists and state agencies including Florida International University, University of South Alabama, Florida Gulf Coast University, FWC,
BTT is working with resource managers in Belize to conserve essential habitat for bonefish, tarpon, and permit. Photo: Jess McGlothlin
More than 50 species of fish have displayed spinning behavior in Florida Keys waters. Photo: Ian Wilson
and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.
From January onward, dozens of collaborative research missions were carried out, gathering more than 300 fish samples, and even more water samples, to have scientists test for more than 250 chemicals and natural toxins.
“Whatever this is, it does not discriminate based on species size, migratory pathways or behavior,” Boucek reported in the second of two livestreamed dispatches from leading scientists on the effort, broadcast on Facebook Live in May. “It’s indiscriminate across multiple species—basically, everything that swims in the water with gills has been affected to some degree.”
Environmental toxicologist Dr. Alison Robertson, a professor at the University of South Alabama and a senior marine scientist at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab, was among the scientists leading the charge. From the moment she got involved, she said, her lab team was at work seven days a week performing thousands of analyses of algae, seawater and fish tissue, and finding evidence of toxins both familiar and unfamiliar to the Florida Keys.
“When fish are affected by anything neurological, they do this sort of thing: loss of equilibrium, swimming upside down, breaching vertically in the water column, having impaired gill movement,” Robertson said.
There are a number of things that can produce these types of neurotoxins, from pollutants to parasites. Environmental changes like too little oxygen or too high a water temperature could cause effects like this as well. But this event was nothing like anything the scientists had seen here before.
“We’ve seen fish behaving weirdly through time in different places, but maybe not for this long,” Robertson added. “The duration and the geographical spread of the event is unique.”
Florida’s endangered smalltooth sawfish have been severely afflicted by spinning behavior. Photo courtesy of Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
Florida Gulf Coast University researchers collect samples in the Florida Keys. Photo: Andrew Tipler
The coalition launched investigations into four lines of inquiry, which Boucek and scientists Robertson, marine ecologist and algal bloom expert Dr. Michael Parsons at Florida Gulf Coast University, and others reported on during the two Facebook Live broadcasts. Those four leading theories under investigation were 1) potential contamination from human-generated sources, like wastewater effluent or pesticides; 2) evidence of degrading fish health metrics from, for example, pathogens or parasites; 3) contaminants in the water column, like red tide; or 4) contaminants from the sea floor.
What they found required work to sprawl far outside the lab.
ALL HANDS ON DECK
There were some 50 researchers involved in the response. But on the water every day, there were the guides. Approximately 70 guides from both the inshore and offshore fleets across the Keys were the effort’s indispensable “eyes on the water,” as Boucek puts it.
It was Keys fishing guides who filed the earliest reports of the phenomenon. But they weren’t just the canaries in the coalmine for early detection—they stayed with the effort the entire way, guiding research missions, and collecting valuable samples themselves.
As the research effort unfolded, Delashmit recalled, “the fishing guides continued to say, ‘We want to help. We feel like we can help—and we are not scientists, we can’t do the science, but we do have boats, so we can take the scientists out.’”
To help facilitate this, LKGA launched what Delashmit called
BTT’s Dr. Ross Boucek and Sarah Hamlyn sample a jack in the Florida Keys. Photo: Florida FWC
A University of South Alabama researcher doses cells with algal and fish extracts. Gambierdiscus in culture. Photos: Robertson Lab
the Guide Rapid Response Network. “Guides that are in our association can apply to be in this network,” she said, “submitting an application form and a W9, so we can pay them officially, with grant money.”
This “lateral partnership between the fishing community and the scientists,” as Boucek put it, is something both BTT and the LKGA had been working toward for years. While the circumstances were dire, stakeholders were buoyed with hope seeing it in action.
By the start of May, the LKGA had 10 guides signed on to the rapid response network. “Anytime there’s a need,” Delashmit said, “If Ross calls and says, ‘I need to go out and I need to catch fish, and we’re going to do a recovery study’—they’re at the ready.”
Boucek said the system was nothing short of a revelation: “Once we started doing it, I’m thinking, my god, this is just so much easier and makes so much more sense. Why is this not the common practice?”
Paying guides for their time to support science can help conserve and stretch grant funding, he explained: There are fewer up-front costs than a research institution would have because their boats are already operational and on the water, not to mention more suited to the environs and to the project of catching fish to gather tissue samples.
Plus, Boucek noted, there are the benefits of guides’ invaluable local knowledge, and the knowledge exchange when guides and scientists are working in tandem: “Science literacy for stakeholders or fishers, and ecological literacy for a scientist that’s behind a computer all day.”
It’s a partnership LKGA and BTT hope to keep in play. To help ensure that, Boucek is writing water quality grant applications, the funds from which would go entirely to supporting guides’ field
capacity when they assist with things like rapid response and water quality assessments.
“We each bring different knowledge to the table,” he said. “And when you develop a system like we’re developing that merges both, it becomes an extremely powerful tool.”
A University of South Alabama researcher examines effects of fish extracts on neuronal cells. Photo: Robertson Lab
BTT’s Dr. Ross Boucek holds a jack sampled in the Florida Keys. Photo: Sarah Hamlyn
ZEROING IN ON THE CULPRIT
The crisis response led to the launch of infrastructure to support these progressive ways for guides and scientists to work together. It also led to some answers.
Some six months into this collaborative quest for answers, a prime suspect surfaced: a bottom-dwelling algae called Gambierdiscus, named for the Gambier islands of French Polynesia.
One red flag, according to Parsons: A liter of water from the Florida Keys typically contains just a few dozen Gambierdiscus cells. Samples gathered from spinning fish hotspots had more like 1,000 such cells—as much as 30X higher than what Parsons and colleagues have seen over the past decade.
“The higher-than-normal water temperatures that we saw down in the Keys [in the summer of 2023] could have perturbed the system in such a way that Gambierdiscus is now at an advantage,” Parsons said in a BTT Facebook Live broadcast.
But, according to Parsons, Gambierdiscus numbers tend to peak in colder weather, and drop in the heat of summer.
In line with his predictions, reports of erratic fish behavior did drop off as summer of 2024 set in.
“Going through some of the data,” Boucek said, “what we saw is we had a pretty abrupt warm-up at the beginning of March, and right coinciding with that warm-up, we had loads of new reports coming in. Symptoms got way worse for some fish that were pretty resistant to it. And that maintained pretty consistently until we had a second warm-up around mid-May.” Then, when the water hit a certain temperature this summer, reports suddenly dropped off, “suggesting whatever this is has a very narrow temperature tolerance,” he said, “which does match the Gambierdiscus hypothesis quite well.”
WHAT’S NEXT FOR SPINNING FISH?
So, what will happen this fall when temperatures drop again? Will reports of spinning fish surge? That, the BTT team says, is the $2 million question.
“It could come back. The conventional lines of wisdom would say it should,” Boucek said. “But you know, the other element to this is when you have something that’s so extremely unusual, to the tune that no one’s ever seen this in the world like ever, what is the likelihood that becomes a ‘new normal’?”
Large-scale grants from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection and the American Sportfishing Association, along with significant funding from several private donors, were instrumental in the urgent, initial response from the start of the reports through the summer of 2024, Ralston said. Seeing just how much progress the coalition was able to make with those funds, state legislators opted to appropriate another $2 million to the effort for the 2024-25 budget year.
“The challenge is, certainly, that science does not necessarily give you a specific answer in a specific timeframe,” Ralston said. “My hope is that we’ll see at least a temporary decline [this summer], and hopefully, a permanent decline [overall]. But, we need to understand what happened now, so that we can be better poised to address needs in the future.”
Boucek says next steps will be a balance between 1) bringing experts from around the world to get diverse opinions on the data collected to use this event as a case study moving forward; and 2) being prepared, just in case, for a “round two.”
“It just goes back to our perception of ecosystems and habitats,” Boucek said. “We think they’re going to degrade slowly, and this progression of degradation is going to be something that’s obvious, and visible, and proportional over time—like we
should see, like, X loss of seagrass every year, or the water getting a little worse every year.”
In reality, though, ecological changes can happen in a flash: In Florida Bay in 1987, 60,000 acres of seagrass died overnight. In 2011, a cold weather event killed 40% of Florida’s boulder corals. This year, a significant percentage of the last remaining U.S. sawfish population was wiped out. “Things are fine until they’re not,” Boucek said. “So, the more comfortable we get when things are fine, the more we’re setting ourselves up for big problems when all of a sudden, that light switch turns on, that next heat wave comes.”
“I hope we come out of the back end of this and just know that we need to be so much more proactive about finding where we’re stressing systems out and fixing those things, so when the insult comes, the system can absorb it,” Boucek said. “We need to get out of this mindset that we can be reactive. Just because the water’s clear and everything looks good doesn’t mean it is.”
Alexandra Marvar is a freelance journalist based in Savannah, Georgia. Her writing can be found in The New York Times, National Geographic, Smithsonian Magazine and elsewhere.
WHAT CAN YOU DO?
Consider the fish.
Don’t shine flashlights into the water, as this can distress fish that are already compromised and sensitive. It’s been found to incite erratic behavior in fish that are behaving normally.
Report, report, report.
If you see strange fish behavior, add your sighting to the growing database helping scientists better understand this issue. Report to the LKGA or the FWC’s Fish Kill Hotline: 1-800-636-0511
Support ongoing research. This scientific study would be impossible without funding. Your donations to BTT and other organizations leading this research are an essential part of scientists’ search for causes and solutions.
Make your voice heard. Join the fight to protect and restore our water quality, so Florida’s water coastal and marine habitats are healthy enough to prevent or bounce back from events like this one. Learn more at: BTT.org/winbackourwater
In the Salt
Author and angler Thomas McGuane has left his mark on American literature while championing flats fishery conservation.
BY PETER KAMINSKY
Tom McGuane caught his first tarpon in 1951, on Florida’s West Coast, fishing a conventional rig, baited, he thinks, with a squirrel fish. He nailed his biggest tarpon—150 pounds, on a fly—at age 80. When I spoke with him this spring, he was eagerly anticipating the annual tarpon migration past Boca Grande, his winter home for the last 35 years. It is entirely possible, by my rough calculations, that Tom McGuane has fished the subtropical flats of Florida and the Caribbean longer than any sportfisherman...ever.
All through his Michigan boyhood, McGuane and his father trout-fished nearby waters. In the winter, his family frequently
traveled to Florida, where he flyfished for tarpon and bonefish and caught redfish and snook with a baitcasting set-up. Like most young anglers of that era, he was an avid reader of the hook and bullet magazines and found enchantment in the work of Al McClane and his generation of writers in the golden age of the Big Three (Field & Stream, Outdoor Life, and Sports Afield). “The early fishing writers seemed to fish for everything, so in my dream world, I wanted to fish for everything too,” he recalls. “Back in the 1950s, I liked to travel into Detroit to Paul Young’s fly shop. He pulled in every kind of flyfisherman and, with some luck, maybe I’d get to meet a famous one, like Ted Williams.
There was always talk of Atlantic salmon, bonefish, tarpon. All I wanted to be was a fisherman. Nothing defines my life as much as fishing...probably not even writing.”
Fortunately for the literature of angling, McGuane didn’t have to choose. He has made a good living as a writer, often about fishing. It took a while, though, for him to get on track. His early college years in Michigan can most charitably be described as undistinguished. Then, in 1965, he attended a summer program at Harvard where a literature professor, Gerald Chapman, saw promise in McGuane’s writing. With that encouragement, he went on to earn an MFA at Yale School of Drama and a fellowship at Stanford. He studied there,
McGuane battles a tarpon in Belize. Photo: Dorsey Pictures
under Wallace Stegner, a giant of American literature who captured the spirit of life in the West, a subject that McGuane has explored with similar depth and affection.
Toward the end of his time at Stanford, he paid a spur-of-the moment visit to the Winston Rod Company in San Francisco where he fell into conversation with the rod makers. “I had a little bit of money left over from my Stanford fellowship and wanted to move to Montana, so I asked, ‘What’s a good place?’” The consensus choice was Livingston, Montana. It had the Yellowstone, America’s greatest free-flowing trout stream, and—importantly, for the cash-strapped McGuane—the rent was cheap.
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With a grubstake of $600 remaining from his fellowship, he rented a small place in Livingston for $30 dollars a month. He fished as often as possible and worked at his writing. His first novel, The Sporting Club, was written there and it attracted a movie deal: a true El Dorado for a writer eking out a living through the printed word. The major Hollywood studios have always spent freely in hopes of grabbing onto the next hot thing. Montana had an early moment of hotness.
“I bounced back and forth on screenplays,” he told me. “Even the ones that don’t get made were really good paydays... but it was just sh*t work.” More movie opportunities as well as magazine assignments came knocking after the publication of The Sporting Club: enough for him to swing the $14,500 purchase price of a small ranch in Paradise Valley.
If McGuane had stayed put in Montana and only written about the hunting and fishing there, he would still be recognized as one of America’s most significant outdoor writers. But it is his time in the Florida Keys, during the heady, sybaritic 1960s and 70s that has achieved mythic status.
By way of explaining his lifelong attachment to the Florida Keys and eventual move there, he said, “In college I would read about the winners in the Field & Stream fishing contest. I’d go to
the bonefish, tarpon, and permit categories and it would always say ‘Big Pine Key...Big Pine Key.’ Everything was coming from Big Pine. I thought, I gotta get there.”
In 1969 he got there and for the first time, caught a bonefish all on his own: no guide, no veteran flats fisherman to tell him “Bonefish at 11 o’clock, 60 feet.” Much like a major league ballplayer who can recall a pitch that he has hit for a home run, McGuane has never forgotten that fish. “It took me weeks to catch one,” he said. “I remember being on Sugarloaf Key, on an old dirt road on the west side of the island. I was walking along with my fly rod when I stuck my head through the mangroves and saw tailing bonefish! I made a cast and caught one. I was astonished how strong the fish was. It was a big deal to me.”
The fishing scene in the Keys in those years was still governed by the mores of a bygone era—before Gulf Stream jets, thousanddollar flyrods, and stiletto-thin flats skiffs. “There was a certain formality,” he said, speaking about the guide corps of the time. “The idea of a guide in short pants was absolutely out of the question. Typically, they were dressed in a khaki shirt with their name over the pocket. Everyone in the inner sanctum was a Keys native. It was kind of hard to break into.” But McGuane had a disarming and unaffected way about him and the seriousness with which he approached fishing gained him entry into the club, or at least its forbearance. One of the Old School guides, Woody Sexton, who was often booked solid, passed along clients to McGuane who appreciated the extra work and practice, “Maybe two a week, clients that he never hoped to see again, people who were either drunk or couldn’t cast.”
Splitting his time between fishing and writing, McGuane became an accomplished flats fisherman. “Back in those days it was easier. You’d see bonefish on every trip. You’d see permit. You’d see tarpon. We were all do-it-yourselfers. We never fished with guides. You’d have to know how to launch a boat, how to read a tide table, how not to get lost, how to find fish.”
Tarpon co-director Guy de la Valdene (left), Thomas McGuane (back), and author Richard Brautigan (front) in the early 1970s. Photo: Tom Corcoran
McGuane accepts BTT’s Curt Gowdy Memorial Media Award in 2014. Photo: Pat Ford
In 1971, McGuane moved from Summerland to Key West, where his was the first bonafide flats skiff in the local marinas. Key West was a charming and diverse town of conch harvesters, Cuban emigres, big game fishermen, a long-time gay community, musicians, artists, and writers. McGuane was a charter member of a circle of tarpon-besotted anglers that included Guy de Valdene, Steve Huff, Jimmy Buffett, Gil Drake, Russell Chatham, and Jim Harrison. Sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll were the watchwords of the day...cocktails too.
A sense of what it was like when tarpon obsession met the Margaritaville lifestyle comes through in Christian Odasso and Guy de la Valdene’s film, Tarpon. While it conveys the raucous partying of McGuane and company, what strikes one most about it now is how entranced the anglers were by every aspect of fishing. In contrast to many current flyfishing films with pounding hip-hop and heavy metal music tracks, many of the fishing sequences in Tarpon play without music to compete with the mesmerizing sounds of the wind, of whishing fly line, and the aerobatics and watery explosions of hooked tarpon. Although not-yet-famous Jimmy Buffett provided music for the film, it is the scenes without music that pull you into the angling moment. McGuane’s role in the film is limited (writing assignments took up a lot of his time), but his shoulder length hair, lanky frame, and ready smile stand out.
McGuane partied, sometimes to excess as he has later said, but his writing from that period captures the evolution of flats fishing and the almost Transcendentalist spirit at its core. In his 1969 Sports Illustrated story, “The Longest Silence,” he set forth a counter-intuitive notion of what it is that the fisher seeks. “What is most emphatic in angling is made so by the long silences, the unproductive periods. For the ardent fisherman, progress is
McGuane fishes for bonefish in Belize while filming for Buccaneers & Bones. Photo: Dorsey Pictures
The cover of the iconic flim, Tarpon, released in 1973.
toward the kinds of fishing that are never productive, in the sense of the blood riots of the hunting and fishing periodicals. Their illusions of continuous action evoke for him finally, a condition of utter mortuary boredom.”
Elsewhere, in an essay called “Close to the Bone,” McGuane takes this sentiment further, describing the quest for a moment of timeless connection “...when the serious angler insinuates himself into the luminous subaqueous universe of the bonefish and catches one without benefit of accident, he has in, effect, visited another world, one whose precise cycles and conditions appear so serene. In his imagination, he is emphatic about emptiness, space, and silence.”
The flats fishery that McGuane helped to birth as a young man has suffered the depredations of environmental decline and fishing pressure in the intervening years. Global warming has raised the temperature of the shallow waters of the Gulf of Mexico. It threatens to destroy the coral reefs that make up the habitat of permit, bonefish, tarpon, and snook. Agricultural and residential run-off has savaged coastal waters. To confront the threats to fishing, McGuane has been among the most prominent champions of Bonefish & Tarpon Trust whose primary mission is the conservation of this fishery.
Advocacy for BTT by such widely admired anglers as McGuane, Yvon Chouinard, Tom Brokaw, Andy Mill and other public figures, is an important contribution to public awareness of the threat of extinction not only of gamefish, but to the whole web of species that inhabit the ecosystem. Compared to the mountain of data that scientists have produced for commercially important fish such as striped bass and tunas, bonefish and tarpon have hardly been studied. As an example of applying science to flats fish, McGuane points to BTT’s role in the discovery of the permit breeding grounds at Western Dry Rocks (south and west of the Keys), and subsequent legislation that now protects them. Moreover, McGuane says, “BTT has done a great job explaining the financial benefits of shallow water fisheries to local communities. For the Florida Keys they’ve said, ‘Here’s what flats fishing means to you in terms of cold hard cash.’ So instead of having other stakeholders claiming that flats fishing is of no use to local people, BTT challenges that idea by doing the numbers.”
Closer to his Boca Grande home, McGuane has praised BTT’s support of scientific inquiry. “Aaron Adams [BTT’s Director of Science and Conservation] outlined things that we could do to
protect the Boca Grande Pass and its huge concentration of breeding tarpon,” he told me while conceding that such proposals might, at this time, be unsellable.
“Boca Grande Pass should be a tarpon refuge,” McGuane said. “Every year, the state of Florida builds another set of ramps and every Saturday morning hundreds of boats pour down the ramps and target these breeding fish. It’s just outrageous!”
I have liked McGuane’s writing since I was managing editor at National Lampoon in the 1970s, when my downstairs neighbor laid a copy of Ninety-Two in the Shade on me. It was a roadto-Damascus moment. I had just begun to flyfish. It would soon take over my life. When I read that book, and, shortly afterward, Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It, I resolved to get out of the druggy frat house life of Lampoon and to make my way as an outdoor writer. I owe those two authors a deep debt.
One of the things that I have found so attractive in McGuane’s work is that right alongside the soul medicine of flyfishing, the communing with nature, the narratives of action that land like karate chops, McGuane’s writing is always anchored in the sometimes confounding, often humorous, behavior of humans, including himself. I was especially tickled by his account of catching a world-record mutton snapper and then eating it, with no apologia to catch-and-release orthodoxy.
“That night, this best of breed was dispatched as follows: deprived of head and innards he was stuffed with shrimp, shallots, buttered breadcrumbs, parsley, tarragon, and mushrooms, then rinsed down the gullet of hungry anglers with gouts of domestic Chablis.”
When I first spoke with McGuane for this story, he was preparing to depart Montana and head to Florida until spring. He shared an insight that I have often thought of ever since.
“I was walking along the West Boulder,” he said. “I always have my rod with me, in case I see a rising fish. I thought ‘Gosh, I have walked this trail for 50 years, looking at these great runs and pools.’ Then, I remembered a line from my old teacher, Wallace Stegner. He was asked, in a contentious way, ‘What’s nature for?’
And he said, ‘What’s nature for? Well, I have an answer for that. It’s not for anything.’”
Peter Kaminsky’s most recent book is The Catch of a Lifetime: Moments of Flyfishing Glory. Coming in 2025, The Zen of Flyfishing.
McGuane (center) heads out for a day of fishing with Capt. Rob Fordyce (left) and Flip Pallot (right). Photo: Dorsey Pictures
This winter, head south with Eleven Angling.
NEW ZEALAND
CEDAR LODGE
RIO PALENA LODGE CHILE NEW ZEALAND
OWEN RIVER LODGE
MARTÍN PESCADOR LODGE CHILE
Where Do Permit Spawn in The Bahamas?
Bonefish & Tarpon Trust begins work in The Bahamas
to locate and ultimately conserve permit
spawning sites.
BY SUE COCKING
Permit: one of the most enigmatic, unpredictable, maddening, and ardently-pursued gamefish in the Western Atlantic. Bonk one on the head with a live, silver-dollar crab and it will likely whip around and gobble the bait immediately. But cast a scentless, artificial rendition of that crab—say, a Merkin fly—to that same fish, and there’s a much better than even chance he’ll refuse it.
“They don’t keep you honest; they keep you humble,” said Justin Lewis, Bonefish & Tarpon Trust’s Bahamas Initiative Manager, summing up the allure of Trachinotus falcatus
Each and every one of this species that an angler manages to catch in South Florida and the Keys, Belize, Mexico, The Bahamas, and Central America (and all those he or she has swung at and missed) becomes a cherished memory that leaves us longing for a return engagement. And to ensure that those happy encounters keep happening, Bonefish & Tarpon Trust is building an information database to conserve this iconic flats bulldog.
In 2011, bolstered by extensive research and enthusiastic support from anglers and guides, BTT worked with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) to create the Special Permit Zone in the Keys and to implement size and bag limits for the species. Building from that success as well as a concurrent project to identify bonefish spawning sites in the Keys, The Bahamas and the Caribbean, BTT has begun the process of identifying permit fishing areas and spawning sites in the islands of The Bahamas, so that eventually this information supports
a permit habitat conservation effort.
“A lot of anglers are coming to The Bahamas now to specifically target permit,” Lewis said. “The fishery is still so new. The guides are seeing more, in part because they are actually looking for them. As the fishery develops, it becomes more important to identify the spawning sites so that we can eventually work with partners to get them protected. Just like with bonefish, if you don’t protect the spawning sites, the fishery will be short-lived.”
Permit are a developing component of The Bahamas’ vibrant flats fishery which, according to a 2018 BTT economic study, accounts for more than $169 million annually in economic impact to the island nation.
Step #1 in this effort is for Lewis and his BTT colleagues to talk with guides, anglers, spearfishers and commercial hook-and line fishers throughout The Bahamas to find out where permit are being targeted and if anyone has seen behavior that might be spawning. According to Dr. Aaron Adams, BTT’s Director of Science and Conservation, permit are ‘broadcast spawners’, which form large schools of males and females that release sperm and eggs for immediate fertilization in the water column.
Adams says research conducted in Belize shows permit there spawn from roughly March to November, typically a week after a full moon. The larvae drift around for a few weeks before inhabiting sandy beaches as juveniles. At about six to eight inches, the fish move into deeper sandy bottom and areas with sparse seagrass. Adams
The Bahamas are home to an emerging permit fishery. Photo: Nick Roberts
says data from permit studies in Florida show females become sexually mature at about 22 inches (fork length) while males reach maturity at about 19 inches (fork length). Permit can reach a maximum age of 23 years or more and weigh 60 pounds.
When it’s time to spawn, he said, they tend to migrate away from their home range on flats, reef edges and rock piles out to deeper reef promontories and wrecks.
Lewis says guides in the Abacos and Crooked Island were among the first to focus on fishing for permit in The Bahamas, followed by their colleagues on Andros and Grand Bahama. As a resident of Grand Bahama, Lewis says he sees fish in the 15- to 20-pound range spread all around the island. His personal best is a 31-pounder caught using a live crab. Adams says juveniles have been spotted along the beaches of Grand Bahama’s south coast.
“From what we know so far, the permit are unlikely to migrate from one island to another to spawn, so islands are probably connected by larvae,” Adams said. “Once we know the spawning sites, we can run computer models of ocean currents to estimate where larvae go. For example, bonefish larvae spawned off Abaco—if the currents are right—will end up on Grand Bahama, Andros and Eleuthera.”
Adams says some mature permit may share spawning grounds with other species such as grouper and snapper.
BTT’s goal in The Bahamas, he said, is to follow the process they’ve used to work with fishing guides to identify feeding and home range areas and spawning locations, and to share this information with Bahamas resource management agencies, like Bahamas National Trust, to protect these important habitats. As
An increasing number of anglers are traveling to The Bahamas to target permit. Photo: Justin Lewis
BTT Bahamas Initiative Manager Justin Lewis releases a permit on the flats of Grand Bahama.
with bonefish, it’s better to be proactive than wait until there is an imminent threat to the health of habitats important to permit.
For example, he said, a proposed cruise port on Long Island could impact both bonefish and permit spawning habitats.
“What we’re trying to do is create that map showing all these important habitats and use that as our focus to work with Bahamas collaborators for spatial management,” Adams explained. “We’re not saying, ‘don’t build it—just don’t damage areas they utilize for spawning.’”
BTT has already worked successfully with The Bahamas government to designate a dozen spots where bonefish spawn as conservation areas. Adams said that eventually the organization will share its permit findings with the Bahamas National Trust, Department of Marine Resources, and Department of Environmental Planning and Protection in hopes of adding permit spawning and feeding grounds to their management program.
Longtime flats fishing guide Whitney Rolle of McLean’s Town on
Grand Bahama’s East End supports the BTT permit initiative.
“That would be good,” he said. “You always want to protect the spawning grounds, but you have to find them. I’ve never seen them in the act like I have the bonefish. I know for sure permit is a deepwater fish, especially around the wrecks and the blue holes. I never see them there spawning, but I believe they spawn offshore out on the reef. I like to look for them in the summer months—in June and July—and they have roe in them.”
I flyfished three days in May with Rolle in Grand Bahama’s East End, eventually releasing six bonefish. Sketchy weather (rain, wind, lightning) discouraged me from the pursuit of permit. But late one afternoon, the skies cleared just enough over Sweeting Cay to spot a permit of about 20 pounds ambling unhurriedly on the flats about 40 feet off the bow of Rolle’s skiff. The only rod ready to cast was my 9-weight with a #4 pink Gotcha (no crab patterns available), so I put it out there about two feet in front of the fish—complete with knees shaking and breath held. He wandered over to it, tipped down for a couple of seconds to inspect it, then moseyed across the flat. I stripped the fly in as fast as I could and hurled it again at the slow-moving fish, which turned his head briefly toward the sinking fly, then continued on his way.
I retrieved the fly, inspected it for damage: rearranged eyes, torn-up flash, etc., but it was unscathed.
Rolle shook his head.
“Permit don’t like flies,” he said.
Maddening, yes. But endlessly tantalizing and well-deserving of protection.
Sue Cocking is a freelance outdoors writer in Sebastian, FL. For 20 years she worked as an outdoors writer for the Miami Herald. She loves flyfishing, scuba diving and traveling.
Many Bahamian guides, like Whitney Rolle and Randy Reckley (pictured here), are experts at catching permit on the flats. Photo: Nick Roberts
The Bahamas’ emerging permit fishery helps to support local communities and businesses. Photo: Justin Lewis
TALLYING THE TARPON
Good data suggests the tarpon fishery is in decline.
BY MIKE CONNER
Since tarpon are not what’s for dinner—unless you’re a bull shark—there was, until fairly recently, a dearth of hard data concerning their numbers, spawning and migratory habits, appreciable economic benefit and more. This is often the case with any species of fish not sold commercially for consumption.
Thankfully, the data gaps are steadily being filled thanks to the collaborative efforts of researchers and tarpon guides and anglers who have provided valuable anecdotal observations. A survey of nearly 1,000 anglers and guides conducted by the University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers has revealed how the tarpon fishery of today compares to that of the 1970s.
The Atlantic tarpon fishery has declined considerably, as much as 80 percent according to some, a sobering assessment that should result in an urgent response, and leverage unwavering support for the development of better conservation and management plans for the iconic Silver King.
WHAT’S BEHIND THE DECLINE?
Survey respondents cited myriad threats to tarpon—poor water quality, habitat loss, increased boat traffic and angling pressure among them. Respondents also support regulations prohibiting harvest (such as catch-and-release only), increased science efforts to understand Atlantic tarpon ecology for conservation solutions, and spatial management such as pole-and-troll zones. Fly fishers seem to be more supportive of increased regulatory oversight than other anglers. Let’s encourage anglers of all persuasions to work together and prioritize conservation efforts for the benefit of the species and the fishery as a whole.
Surveyed anglers are increasingly alarmed about the number of shark encounters that are resulting in lost tarpon in the Gulf of Mexico and Southeastern US. Over the past five years, guides in South Florida report losing between two and seven tarpon per year to sharks, mainly in passes and channels where they seasonally aggregate.
GETTING THE SCIENCE
Dr. Aaron Adams, Bonefish & Tarpon Trust’s Director of Science and Conservation says that researchers typically take a multilayered approach on conservation issues.
“With the Tarpon Acoustic Tagging Project our goal was to get a definitive picture of what the tarpon’s migration patterns are, and just how repeatable these movements are,” Adams explains. “We learned that it appears there are three sub-populations of tarpon. Two of them tend to mix in South Florida waters during spawning season. One sub-population migrates up the Atlantic coast as far north as the Chesapeake Bay, while another heads up the Florida Gulf coast as far north as the Mississippi Delta. Keep in mind that these sub-populations are the same species of tarpon, but with differing migration routes.”
Adams says that because the acoustic tracking tags last as long as five years (which is much longer than the satellite tags previously used) researchers can better study the seasonal
movements of tarpon over multiple years. It is similar to salmon returning to rivers and streams. “We have learned that young tarpon coming out of backcountry haunts join the adult fish on the coastal migrations,” Adams adds. This is simply entrainment, which also occurs with bluefin tuna and also young bonefish that follow mature bonefish to offshore spawning grounds, to know where to go when they are mature.
“Through the isotope (fin clip) study, which lasted three years, we can now confidently tell through tissue analysis if a tarpon is feeding primarily in a river or on the coast,” says Adams. “We can tell if its diet was or is primarily species like menhaden, which derive their energy from plankton, versus a diet of pigfish or blue crabs which get energy from seagrass beds. And the tissue analysis also reveals the portion of the prey that come from freshwater versus marine sources.”
Adams says such data provides BTT researchers and others the leverage needed when time comes to engage with resource
caption
A tarpon goes airborne in the Florida Keys. Photo: Greg Dini
managers to arrive at better management of tarpon forage species and the habitats that support them.
FROM THE EXPERTS
Sandy Moret, BTT Board Member and owner of Islamorada’s Florida Keys Outfitters, started fly fishing in the Keys in the late 1970s. He is quick to say there has been a significant decline in the tarpon fishery, and especially with migratory adult tarpon.
“I believe the number of migratory tarpon that travel through the Keys has fallen by as much as 80 percent,” says Moret. “Many believe that maybe a third of migratory fish stay in the Keys region year-round, mostly in the backcountry, so you could just say that these fish don’t travel that far.”
According to Moret, the overriding impact on the fish is obvious. “It’s basically the growing weight of humanity that descends on the Keys and other tarpon fisheries statewide. Not just direct angling pressure, but other boat traffic, pleasure boats, jet skis, all of it,” he says. “Years ago, far fewer visitors came to the Keys and other Central and South Florida inshore waters to fish for tarpon, and fewer residents specifically targeted tarpon. In the Keys most folks were diving, fishing offshore waters, or fishing in the Florida Bay backcountry for fish for the table. The tarpon were relatively unpressured. But all of that has changed due to the growth of watersports. Some of the historic backcountry banks in the Lower Keys where masses of spring migration tarpon traveled at one time, and were fished by guides, are now the scene of the ‘sand bar’ crowd who anchor up and party.”
Moret adds: “Sadly, much of this place is a marine sanctuary that is managed like a theme park!”
Captain Rob Fordyce is a Homestead resident who as a 17-yearold high school senior at South Dade High School in 1988 won the Master Angler (unguided) division in the esteemed Metropolitan Miami Fishing Tournament (MET). The months-long tournament was hotly competitive and fished by the world’s best anglers and guides both inshore and offshore, and Fordyce was its youngest Master Angler winner ever.
When asked how he could fish on weekdays and still get his schoolwork done, Fordyce chuckled. “I had 70 absences because I was on the water on weekdays, and about a week before
graduation school officials said I could not graduate,” he says.
“So my parents showed them the MET final standings and the fact I wasn’t out jacking around somewhere. I was doing something worthwhile! So they let me pass and take part in graduation. Maybe it helped that most of my teachers loved to fish.”
“It was certainly a different world back then,” Fordyce adds. “Fewer anglers, pristine waters and more tarpon basically, and the competition of the MET stoked me to make guiding a career.” Fordyce’s favorite fish is hands-down tarpon, and his tarpon fly tournament resumé is legendary.
He was involved early on in BTT’s Tarpon Acoustic Tagging Project. Though others may have tagged more fish, Fordyce tagged 12 fish over a pretty wide range regionally.
This chart of the Florida Keys from July 2018 is composed of clear satellite images stitched together from 16 different days. The high volume of boat traffic seen here is from the last day of lobster mini-season. Source: Dr. Steven Lombardo
Capt. Albert Ponzoa and Craig Rogers land a tarpon in the Florida Keys.
Photo: Neal Rogers
“I fish for tarpon all over South Florida, so I was able to tag fish in Whitewater Bay in the the Everglades, off Cape Sable, on both the oceanside and Florida Bay side of Islamorada, and as far north as Caesar’s Creek at the northern tip of Key Largo,” says Fordyce.
“Since the tagging efforts, BTT has collected data that proves what I and many tarpon guides knew full well all along, that the adult tarpon migration is absolutely repeatable,” he adds. “Like many fish and also wildlife species, tarpon are creatures of habit. They follow the food and seek out ideal water temperatures and come to the habitat that supports the forage.”
In light of BTT’s emphasis on tarpon habitat (for both migratory and resident juvenile fish), Fordyce has strong feelings about the cause and effect of seagrass throughout the Keys fishery and declining numbers of migratory tarpon.
“Seagrass loss across the board—in the backcountry and on the oceanside—has great bearing on the lack of big bonefish, but on the tarpon decline as well,” says Fordyce. “Take Nine Mile Bank for example. That bottom used to be a lush, olive-green carpet of grass. Today that bottom’s either brown or barren in the back and even on the Islamorada downtown flats. The forage, either crustacean or baitfish, declined too. I’m most concerned about the 20- to 50-pound tarpon that are pretty much missing, and that were our bread-and-butter from late-summer until latefall.”
Those fish home in on the shrimp hatches in Florida Bay back toward Flamingo, and Fordyce yearns for the days when you found that activity and fished for feeding tarpon for hours without moving.
When asked which part of the Keys migrating tarpon fishery has held up best, he was quick to say the oceanside. “They are usually harder to feed, but they are there in decent numbers,” he explains. “Florida Bay numbers have seen a tremendous drop. Those tens of thousands of migrating fish that we took for granted are just not there anymore. It’s little groups of 20 to 30 or so fish now. Are they gone, or are they doing something totally different?”
“In closing, I think the monetary value of tarpon has been ignored by fisheries managers for far too long,” Fordyce adds. “And the failure of the South Florida Water Management District to get the water to Florida Bay is inexcusable. The residents who hire guides and buy skiffs and fly and conventional tackle, and the influx of national and international anglers to tarpon fish here is huge economically. To lose the tarpon fishery, especially statewide, would have a devastating impact on many livelihoods. And our way of life.”
Captain Albert Ponzoa, who guides for tarpon out of Marathon, led off by saying that the tarpon appeared so early in 2023 that the ocean migration was over by the end of May, and that this year the timing was more normal but the fish numbers were low until late May.
“I am convinced that the general Keys tarpon decline is a westto-east progression,” Ponzoa says. “The Marquesas was once the place. Ten years later, it was Key West backcountry banks, and of course, Key West Harbor for the chumming and live-bait anglers. There still are fish there, but not anywhere like say, 20 to 30 years ago. Eventually the best fishing was Big Pine to Marathon. Now, it appears that the fly fishing as well as bait fishing is more dependable from Marathon to Islamorada.”
Ponzoa feels that tarpon will always swim the traditional migratory edges, despite other “fun” boat traffic on the increase. Direct tarpon fishing pressure may be more to blame.
“We have to address the possibility that there are just too many tarpon guides and dedicated tarpon anglers fishing the Keys from February to July, which I’m part of,” he says. “Add the fact that bridge fishing for tarpon is creating worsening shark depredation.
And when we release a tired flats tarpon, is it still being ‘sharked’ later? What is mysterious to me is where have so many thousands of tarpon gone? Have they actually died? If they’ve moved in mass, is anybody observing them elsewhere? We have a lot of finding out to do.”
POLITICAL PRESSURE
There is no arguing the evidence, and there’s pretty much a consensus among the tarpon fishing community that time is of the essence, and it requires getting resource management on board in order to force political will to reverse this fishery’s decline.
“Anglers are like the close family members of a cancer patient,” said Aaron Adams. “Part of our responsibility is to advocate for best possible treatment of the patient. This means we have to continue to pressure politicians and policy-makers (who are the doctors) to address the issues and adverse impacts on the ecosystems that tarpon call home.”
Mike Conner formerly guided fly and light-tackle anglers from Florida Bay to the Indian River Lagoon, and has written features for numerous outdoor publications. He currently serves as Conservation Editor for Florida Sportsman magazine.
BTT Board Member and accomplished tarpon angler Sandy Moret. Photo courtesy of Sandy Moret.
Lord Bubba
Robert E. “Bob” Rich, Jr. will receive the 2024 Lefty Kreh Award for Lifetime Achievement in Conservation at BTT’s 13th Annual NYC Dinner & Awards Ceremony.
BY MONTE BURKE
Bob Rich once told me the story about the time he took his new daughter-in-law, a Buddhist, out on her first fishing trip. They were on a boat off the Florida Keys. The day was calm and sunny. Bob immediately hooked and landed a 30-pound kingfish. Before he could say anything, his first mate gaffed the fish and threw it in the box. It’s blood spattered all over the deck.
Bob’s daughter-in-law’s face went ashen. She whispered hurried chants under her breath. Bob’s son suggested that his father take the two of them back to the dock. Bob obliged.
Bob then took the boat back out. Fish were everywhere. The half-dozen other boats around him were constantly hooked up, rods doubled over. This went on for hours. On Bob’s boat, they didn’t have so much as a bite.
That night, at dinner, Bob asked his daughter-in-law if she had
cursed him and his boat with her chants. She said no, that she had merely prayed for the fish’s soul to live on and not die with its body. Then she added that a hex on him and his boat might have been a byproduct. To try to dispel any hexes or general bad juju, Bob promised that he would never intentionally kill another fish.
A year or so after his kingfishing incident, Bob and I happened to be on an Atlantic salmon trip together, in Labrador. I noticed that he whispered something under his breath every time he let a fish go. Once, when he saw that I was watching him, he explained: “Just covering my ass in case it dies later.” **
I first met Bob Rich when I was asked to write a profile of him for the Forbes 400 issue. Bob had only one requirement for the
Author and business leader Bob Rich. Photo courtesy of Bob Rich.
story: that the interview take place on the boat of our mutual friend, the Staten Island guide and bon vivant, Captain Frank Crescitelli.
We all met at a dock in New Jersey at a dizzyingly early hour, well before sunrise. Bob was wearing a white longsleeved T-shirt that had been unevenly chopped at the elbows. Unruly strands of white hair poked from the sides of his baseball cap. “Nice to meet you,” he said, extending a hand. “I’m Bubba.”
With that, Bob and I climbed onto Captain Frank’s boat, nestled our way into two beanbags placed in the stern, and settled in for a two-and-a-half hour run to the Spencer Canyon for a day of tuna fishing.
Bob was 65 at the time, the chairman of Rich Products, a multinational food company based in Buffalo. He had taken over the helm after his father, Robert Rich, Sr., had died earlier that
same year. Rich, Sr., the son of a dairyman, had founded the company in 1945, based on an idea he thought up for a soybased, non-dairy whipped topping that could be frozen. That topping, which was less fattening, cheaper and less prone to spoilage, revolutionized the industry. He eventually expanded his company’s offerings, introducing Coffee Rich non-dairy creamer, frozen cakes and seafood, and became a staple of restaurants and grocery stores across the country.
Rich, Sr., was an exacting leader of his company (he was famous for carrying around a dog-eared piece of paper with his company’s yearly sales figures, starting in 1945, when they were $28,000). He was also hard-driving when it came to his kids and, in particular, his sons. Throughout Bob’s childhood, his father would roust his brother and him from bed at five a.m. to make them do pushups. Under his watch, the two boys ran early
Rich fishes the flats of Belize. Photo: Paul Dixon
morning sprints by a lake at their family summer home until they dropped. The father and sons played bruising games of football, which his father had played in college, and tennis and squash. “It was extremely competitive in our family,” says Bob, who thrived under the conditions, eventually becoming a collegiate hockey player.
After Bob graduated from Williams College in 1963, he decided that he didn’t want to go into the family business. “I wanted something bigger, different,” he says. He tried out for the 1964 U.S. Olympic Hockey team as a goaltender, just missing the cut. He considered careers in the Air Force or the CIA.
But his father wanted him in the business, and offered him a deal: he would build a plant in Canada and give Bob a $1 million budget and complete control. Bob took him up on it. A year later Bob’s plant rolled off its first offering, thousands of pounds of whipped topping. But there was a problem: the topping didn’t whip. He went to his father. “It’s amazing how smart he became in one day,” says Bob.
In 1978, Bob became president of Rich Products. He led the company through acquisitions and international expansion and the pioneering of new products. The company soared, supplying products to stores like Kroger and Walmart, and to restaurants that ranged from The Palm to Dunkin’ Donuts. By 2006, the company had $2.4 billion in revenues and owned a logistics subsidiary and three minor league baseball teams—the Buffalo
Bisons (Triple-A affiliate of the Toronto Blue Jays), the Northwest Arkansas Naturals (Double-A affiliate of the Kansas City Royals) and the West Virginia Black Bears (the Single-A affiliate of the Pittsburgh Pirates).
But that year—the year I first met him—his father’s death had hit Bob hard. “The father-child relationship is one of the least understood but most important drivers in a family,” he says. “I was always out to gain his respect, and that didn’t stop when he was gone.”
That father-son dynamic would play a big role in the second act of Bob’s life. **
Bob started fishing with his father when he was five years old, on Lake Erie, with some success, but nothing out of this world. “I wouldn’t figure out how good the fishing was on the lake until 50 years later, when I fished with Bill Dance in a tournament and he told me that Erie had the best smallmouth fishing in North America,” he says.
His flyfishing career started with a bang. In 1974, he booked a trip with Islamorada guide, Gary Ellis. Ellis suggested they go try for some big tarpon in Homosassa. “I asked him what kind of bait they ate. And he said ‘we throw flies,’” Bob says. So, with a heavy Shakespeare rod in hand, Bob went on his first flyfishing trip…and
Rich enjoys a day on the water. Photo courtesy of Bob Rich.
caught a 125-pound tarpon. “I was like, ‘what do we do now?’ I had no reference point,” he says.
It would be a while until he flyfished again, though he did take trips to the Keys with friends to fish with bait a couple of times a year. “I’d go as much as my liver would allow,” he says. It wasn’t until he married Mindy in 1985 that he really got into flyfishing. He and Mindy started travelling to Islamorada regularly then and fishing in tournaments, like the Redbone that was organized by Ellis. (Both Bob and Mindy have won tournaments, highlighted by Mindy’s triumph in the 14-pound category of the otherwise all-male Don Hawley Invitational Tarpon Fly Tournament.)
Bob eventually hooked up with a guide named Rusty Albury, and still fishes with him to this day. With Rusty, Bob caught the ten species—on all kinds of tackle—that were required to gain entrance into the Florida Metropolitan Tournament Hall of Fame (he was the second person to accomplish the feat). Along the way, he and Mindy fell in love with the species that haunted the flats of the Keys…that is, except for the permit. “I hate permit,” Bob says with a chuckle. “They are such a wonderful fighting fish and so hard to catch, they earn that hatred.”
As the years passed, the Riches moved full-time to Islamorada and each gravitated to one favorite flats fish. Mindy loves giant tarpon, while Bob prefers bonefish. “A walk on a bonefish flat for me is one of the closest things you can find to heaven,” he says. He and Mindy also do a lot of trout fishing—they own a place on the River Test in England—and, to Bob, “there is a wonderful analogy between being on a trout stream and a bonefish flat.” The duo fishes for bones mostly in Andros and Abaco, but have travelled as far as the Seychelles in pursuit of them.
The plight of the Keys bonefish is what got them both interested in conservation and in becoming founding members of Bonefish & Tarpon Trust. “There are indicators to me of what was wrong with the bonefish,” he says. “The freeze of a dozen years ago or so was one. But so was COVID. When the Keys were shut down for a month, guides reported great catches. Pressure and GPS’s and a lot of other things have added to it.” So why is the conservation of these fish and these flats important to him? “We came here for the tarpon and bonefishing,” Bob says. “They are the essence of the Keys. I can’t imagine the Keys without them. Our history here was built around them, and I want our future to be built around them, as well.”
In addition to fishing for flats species, Rich pursues Atlantic salmon. Photo courtesy of Bob Rich.
Fishing, Bob says, has always been about more than just the act itself. Much of it is about the people. Bob and Mindy became friendly with Ted Williams during the tournament season in Islamorada, talking baseball with him. “When he died, he wanted to use our boat to take his ashes out to sea,” says Bob. “But, um, that didn’t happen.” (Williams’ body was famously—and controversially—frozen by his son instead.)
Bob met Bass Pro Shops founder, Johnny Morris, in a roundabout way. In 1995, Bob was told he had to move his flats skiff from Bayside Marina because it had been sold and was being torn down for a retail store. A little while later, his Islamorada neighbor’s house was also sold, and the trees, plants and grounds were leveled. One day, Bob finally met the man who was the reason for both teardowns. “What are you going to do next, shoot my dog?” Bob asked him. The man turned out to be Johnny Morris, who was building a Bass Pro Shops at the old marina and a new house next to Bob’s. They’ve been friends ever since, and have fished all over the world together.
Bob also fished the world with George H. W. Bush. He and Andy Mill frequently took him out in the Keys for tarpon. On one trip to Harkers Island in North Carolina with Bush, Bob parked his plane at a nearby Marine Corps Air Station. After two days of fishing, when they returned to the station to leave, the entire base had turned out to salute the former president. “President Bush went out to review them,” says Bob. “He was wearing camouflage painter’s pants, a Vineyard Vines T-shirt and a Bass Pro Shops hat.”
When Bush returned to the plane, he was shaken. Bob asked
if he was okay, and the former president told him that the last time he’d visited this base was when he sent troops to Operation Desert Storm. “I was worried that some of them wouldn’t make it back,” Bush told Bob. “But they all did.”
“Those were great memories,” says Bob. “Fishing is the great leveler. Just put some fishing clothes on people and they’re all one in the eyes of the fish.”
But, he says, as he looks back on his life in fishing, there’s even more to it. “To me it’s been about the merging of fishing and worthwhile causes,” he says. “First it was working with Gary Ellis on finding a cure for Cystic Fibrosis through the Redbones. Then it was working with Project Healing Waters to help our wounded warriors. And now it’s about the welfare of the fish and the habitat. You can have a bad day out there, get skunked, but when your fishing is tied together with a cause, it makes the sport that much more exciting and worthwhile.”
In the intervening years since I first met Bob, he and Mindy have stayed busy. Rich Products hums along (Mindy is now the chairman; the company now has revenues approaching $6 billion). They’ve branched out into the arts, especially on Broadway, producing Chaplin and a revival of CATS, and helping to produce The Band’s Visit (which won ten Tony awards) and Jimmy Buffet’s Escape to Margaritaville. (Mindy has been involved in a total of 27 Broadway shows.) And Bob, now 83, has been churning out books—five total—something he began with 2001’s Fish Fights, which chronicles his Metropolitan Tournament Hall
BTT Advisory Council member Capt. Paul Dixon (left) and Rich on the set of Blood Knot in Belize. Photo courtesy of Paul Dixon.
of Fame quest with Albury. His book writing culminated with the 2015 award-winning novel, Looking Through Water, a fatherson story that, though fictionalized, has some roots in his own childhood and relationship with his father. The book has been turned into a movie—called Blood Knot—which stars Michael Douglas and will be out in the fall of 2024, just in time for BTT’s October 15th New York dinner, during which Bob will be honored for his vast contributions to the organization. (For more on Bob’s movie, see the back page of this issue.)
**
I can’t help but tell one more story about Bob. He and Mindy are a blast to fish with, and always bring along with them a heavy dose of fun. On one particular trip—the Labrador one I mentioned earlier—Bob was in fine form, telling ribald stories after downing a drink he coined “The Silver Loudmouth” (it’s straight vodka). One night, Mindy described how, on a lark, she had purchased a British lordship for Bob from a broker for a few hundred dollars. From that point on during the trip, whenever we wanted to get Bob’s attention and have a chuckle, we addressed him as “Lord.” It was a fun group. Sandy Moret was with us. So were the writer, Charles Gaines, and the sporting artist, John Swan. We were guests of Chris Verbiski, who owns two Atlantic salmon lodges in remote Labrador, where black bears outnumber humans. At the second of his places we visited, the splendid Hunt River Lodge, we fished mainly with dry flies, considered to be the
apex of the sport, and limited out nearly every day.
The most beguiling stretch of the Hunt River is the eight-mile stretch that runs between the river’s first and second falls. The previous owners of the camp never fished it. In fact, it had been fished so little that 13 of the 20 pools on that stretch remained unnamed. Verbiski had a camp rule: If a guest landed a fish of 20 or more pounds in one of those 13 pools, they had the naming rights, which was a rare shot at attaining some sort of angling immortality since salmon pool names are rarely, if ever, changed. There weren’t as many fish up in that area—some salmon couldn’t make it over the first falls. But the ones that did had “big paddles,” as Verbiski described it.
I got my chance at glory on the upper river one day with Gaines and Verbiski. The prospect of naming a pool was thrilling. I tossed around names in my head all day (would I name it after my wife? One of my kids? Keith Richards?). But the closest we came to naming a pool that day was a 15-pounder, caught by Gaines.
But one member of our group would cash in. Bob and Verbiski set out the next morning to the upper river. They anchored a canoe in an unnamed pool. Three giant fish were holding in it, “pool-namers,” as it were. Bob fished for them all morning, with no success. At about hour three, “I was ready to tell Chris to stick a fork in me,” says Bob. But he carried on, and after six hours of casting and 24 changes of his fly, one of the giants finally took an orange-hackled dry. Twenty nerve-wracking minutes later (the fish wrapped the line around a rock twice), Bob finally landed the salmon. It weighed 22 pounds.
On the way back to the lodge, Verbiski asked Bob what he was going to name the pool.
“Rich Pool? Robert Rich Pool?” Verbiski asked.
“I’ll tell you tonight after dinner,” Bob said.
And he did. With his typical penchant for playfulness, Bob decided to have a little fun with the usual solemnity that accompanies the hallowed sport of flyfishing for Atlantic salmon.
He named the pool “Lord Bubba.”
Monte Burke is The New York Times bestselling author of Saban, 4th And Goal and Sowbelly. His latest book, Lords of the Fly: Madness, Obsession, and the Hunt for the World-Record Tarpon, is available now. He is a contributing editor at Forbes and Garden & Gun
Looking Through Water has been adapted into the forthcoming film, Blood Knot.
Rich lands an Atlantic salmon. Photo courtesy of Bob Rich.
Trading chemicals for cuts
BY KRIS MILLGATE
V
irginia Barker goes to work every day knowing the community she lives in supports her reason for clocking in. She’s the Director of Brevard County’s Natural Resources Management and what she’s doing for Florida’s Indian River Lagoon is backed by a half-cent sales tax started in 2016.
“From 2011 to 2016, we saw the lagoon in a death spiral. Every year was worse than the year before,” Barker says.
“When the public voted for the sales tax in 2016, we finally had a dedicated source of funding and a very strong directive. The community was resoundingly in favor of reducing pollution and restoring health to the ecosystem. It’s important to quality of life
and community identity. People feel strongly about the lagoon.”
The Save Our Indian River Lagoon sales tax is good for 10 years, collecting half a billion dollars for septic improvements and nutrient reduction. Both override the lagoon’s natural functions.
“Pollution sources are out of sight, out of mind but we have 62,000 septic systems that are draining sewage and that migrates into the lagoon. Lawn fertilizer runs into it too,” Barker says. “This ecosystem is fragile. We can’t live the same way that other people do. We have to be way more careful about our impacts.”
Large mats of bottom (benthic) algae fueled by too many nutrients from wastewater and stormwater overgrow and kill seagrass beds. Photo: Dr. Aaron Adams
This Brevard County employee is being trained on the newest aquatic vegetation harvesting workboat (shown here removing unwanted aquatic vegetation from a stormwater pond), propelled by its powerful single engine, twin independent outboards. Photo: Brevard County Natural Resources Management Department
been tried before.
“I remember the mechanical harvest days when they had the barges,” says Flip Pallot, legendary Florida sportsman. “They’d pile up the duckweed, hydrilla, hyacinth, spatterdock and all the other invasive species. They would actually pile it up and it would rot, which was offensive to a lot of people.”
That’s one reason why mechanical harvesting lost favor, but not the main reason. The main reason was cost. Chemicals kill plants for less money and it’s long been thought that glyphosate in particular has a short lifespan which also made it popular, but new research by Bonefish & Tarpon Trust’s partner, Ocean Research & Conservation Association (ORCA), disputes that. Ninety-nine percent of sampled fish in IRL had glyphosate in their tissues. That’s why BTT is advocating for significant and meaningful reductions in the use of glyphosate and the return of mechanical harvesting with its Win Back Our Water campaign.
The other drawback with chemicals is disposal. Sprayed plants stay on site. Treated foliage dies then decays, adding more nutrients to an already overwhelmed watershed. Brevard’s harvesters not only remove plants from the water, but also from the site. The heaps of cuttings go to the landfill for now, but Barker hopes to launch a mulching program that turns the harvest into a spreadable slurry.
By fragile she means slow. Indian River Lagoon is a coastal channel with slow flow. Tidal influence is minor, so whatever enters from runoff takes a long time to flush out, if it ever does at all. The result is an overwhelming problem from too many plants on the surface of freshwater areas that drain into the IRL, and too much muck on the bottom of the IRL.
“That black mayo goo smothers life,” Barker says. “It’s been collecting on the bottom for the last five or six decades. We’re getting that out to get back to clean sand.”
Muck removal from the bottom of the IRL costs millions. So does mowing plants that are clogging the freshwater lakes, ponds, and drainage canals in the IRL watershed. The fastgrowing plants are accumulating quickly because of us. In addition to septic tank leaching, our neatly trimmed front lawns and back nines are green because we fertilize. The elements in sewage and fertilizer, mainly nitrogen and phosphorus, drain into the freshwater bodies that then flow into the IRL, resulting in nutrient overload which leads to too many aquatic plants. The go-to treatment for too many plants is chemical herbicides like glyphosate, but Barker doesn’t use the go-to. Mechanical harvesters are mowing aquatic plants in Brevard County instead.
“We will not be using herbicides, many of which contain phosphorus that just contributes to the problem,” she says. “We’ve been building our own internal harvesting team over the last few years. Last year we doubled our staff. We now have eight employees in our harvesting program and we’re adding more equipment.”
The equipment includes a mower made for working on water. It cuts plants instead of grass. Sounds novel, but it’s not new. It’s
Brevard County staff uses an aquatic vegetation rake, a specialized excavator attachment designed to quickly drain water while harvesting plants. Shown here, water hyacinth—a highly invasive aquatic plant introduced into Florida in the 1880s—is being removed from a stormwater pond. Left unchecked, this aquatic plant rapidly blankets freshwater lakes and ponds, resulting in nutrient load and flooding issues. Photo: Brevard County Natural Resources Management Department
A small, battery-operated, remote-controlled mini harvester patrols this stormwater pond in Brevard County for any unwanted vegetation and debris. Its compact design and ease of use is the perfect addition in a pond management toolkit for tighter, hard to reach areas and small waterbodies.
Photo: Brevard County Natural Resources Management Department
“Izaak Walton League of America turned cuttings into slurry and used that as fertilizer on fields,” says Dr. Aaron Adams, BTT’s Director of Science and Conservation. “One of the sources of fertilizer for some agricultural lands is biosolids, a byproduct of sewage treatment. If we’re willing to use biosolids from human waste, then we should be willing to use plant material that’s already in the system.”
Dr. Duane De Freese agrees. He’s the Executive Director of the Indian River Lagoon National Estuary Program. Indian River Lagoon is one of 28 estuaries nationwide designated by the U.S. Congress as significant, but non-regulatory. That means it’s a federal program managed at the local level. In this case, that local level includes Brevard County with its revival of mechanical harvesting among many other measures to improve the lagoon that pools along 170 miles of the nation’s non-tidal, coastal water.
“All waste has potential use. How we manage waste, that’s the future,” De Freese says. “No question in my mind, we need a paradigm shift in how we think about chemical use and how we manage our resources. Less is more. None is better.”
Brevard County wants none and it has a community-supported sales tax backing what it wants. Its glyphosate use is down to a few gallons a year and none of it can be sprayed within a half mile of the lagoon. It has also removed 11.7 million pounds of aquatic plants with mechanical harvesting since 2019. That’s enough to cover seven football fields with a foot of vegetation. Every harvested truckload entering the landfill is weighed. Every city, subdivision, and water district letting the county cut instead of spray receives a monetary kickback on that weight. The mass includes 16,000 pounds of nitrogen plus 2,700 pounds of phosphorus that is no longer festering in Indian River Lagoon.
“It takes a while to get these projects designed, permitted and funded, but we are coming up on 100 completed projects and the
water clarity is better. The seagrass is beginning to rebound,” Barker says. “We really feel like we’ve seen the bottom and now we’re heading in the right direction. We have to stay the course.”
Outdoor journalist Kris Millgate is based in Idaho where she runs trail, hunts birds and chases trout. When she’s on the coast, she likes casting to bones and jacks. She followed salmon migration solo during the pandemic for the Emmy-nominated film Ocean to Idaho. Her new Emmy-winning film, On Grizzly Ground, is available now along with her third book, My Place Among Beasts. See her work at www.tightlinemedia.com.
This highly effective vegetation harvesting workboat is equipped with a side cutter bar, deployed here, continuously slicing through emergent vegetation under the water’s surface as it hugs the perimeter of the stormwater pond. The vegetation then floats on the surface and, driven by the breeze, gathers to be subsequently collected with the front rake attachment. Photo: Brevard County Natural Resources Management Department
Filamentous algae from too many nutrients not only smothers seagrass, but can impact mangroves as well. Photo: Dr. Aaron Adams
Through the Guides Conservation Captain Q&A
Captain Jeovani Ortega
Ambergris Caye, San Pedro, Belize
How long have you been a fishing guide?
I’ve been guiding for the past 19 years. I was born and raised in a commercial fishing family. I was 15 years old when I started to fish, when I was taught by fly-fishing instructor Mr. Omar Arceo.
Do you have a specialty as a fishing guide?
Honestly speaking, I do not have a specialty, I just enjoy fishing everything. Having many different species to fish for and the crystal waters of the flats makes Belize so special. My favorite species to fish for are permit.
What is your favorite guiding story?
My favorite guiding story is the time when a 60-pound tarpon free jumped into my boat! Apart from that, every day is a new journey for me.
What kind of work have you done with BTT, and what did you learn from the experience?
I have helped with bonefish tagging and tarpon tagging with Dr. Aaron Adams and Dr. Addiel Perez. From them I learned about the spawning behavior of these fish: where they lay their eggs and how they travel.
What changes to the fishery have you witnessed?
When I was younger, there was a wide variety of fishes, and because of the many infrastructures on the coastlines, it has caused a decline to the number of fish that used to come and go.
Why is conservation important to you?
The conservation of the environment is important to me because I want my grandchildren to see what I saw when I was growing up. The protection of the fish I catch is important to me and my livelihood because this is what provides my family and me with food and shelter.
What concerns do you have about how ongoing development will impact Belize’s marine resources?
What concerns me the most is that it will drive all the species away from their natural habitat, and it will also prevent tourists from visiting our beautiful Belize. Coastal development is bad for tourism because it often leads to the destruction of natural habitats such as beaches, coral reefs, and mangroves, which are key attractions for tourists interested in eco-tourism and marine activities.
What can guides like yourself do to improve conservation and management?
We guides should unite as a family and stand up against any infrastructure that may affect our marine ecosystems. I try to be environmentally friendly as a guide by not littering, and by protecting the main ecosystem from the development of more infrastructure. Preserving natural habitats, biodiversity, and ecological processes is essential for sustaining life. By doing this we are maintaining a balance between human activities and environmental conservation to prevent habitat destruction and the extinction of species.
Capt. Jeovani Ortega lands a permit in his home waters.
LONG LIVE THE KING
Bonefish & Tarpon Trust is working to ensure a sustainable future for Boca Grande’s iconic tarpon fishery through science-based habitat restoration.
BY T. EDWARD NICKENS
It wasn’t all that long ago. Captain Ed Glorioso is only 39 years old, but he remembers the tarpon tournaments in Boca Grande, Florida, when anglers brought their dead fish to the old Miller’s Marina, and hoisted them up on the winches for photographs. He remembers the televised Professional Tarpon Tournament Series, started in 2004 in Boca Grande. It was ostensibly a catch-and-release tournament, but the intense competition and its televised nature made that lipstick-on-a-pig proclamation a joke. After the tournament, dead tarpon would wash ashore for days. And he remembers when the heavily weighted snagging jigs frequently used in Boca Grande Pass were outlawed, in 2013. Unfortunately, in the spring of 2024, a few anglers were still employing those deadly rigs, prompting Bonefish & Tarpon Trust to work with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission to jump-start education and enforcement actions in Boca Grande Pass.
The stupendous tarpon fishery centered at Boca Grande
Pass and nearby Charlotte Harbor has been the setting for unforgettable memories—both good and bad—for a very long time. Many consider the first tarpon caught on hook and line in Southwest Florida a 93-pound fish enticed with a live mullet and landed on a bamboo rod south of Boca Grande Pass in 1885, by an architect from New York City. In 1908 the stately Izaak Walton Fishing Club opened on Useppa Island, kicking off an era now heralded in cracked and faded photographs of anglers in dinner attire—men in bowties and white jackets, women in long highcollared Edwardian dresses—fighting leaping fish from canoes. One of the most impressive pageants of tarpon fishing in the region occurred in the mornings, when the steamship Valima departed from the 100-acre Useppa Island, towing a daisy chain of a dozen rowboats to Boca Grande Pass. Once in the inlet, customers gingerly stepped from the steamship to the rowboats, which were then untethered from the floating locomotive. When an angler stuck a tarpon, the guide’s first strategy was to row like
hell for the Boca Grande Lighthouse, where the boats could be beached so the anglers could fight the fish from the sand.
And from then until now, the months of April, May, and June have served as a sort of tarpon angling zenith, when the fish can be caught, arguably, as easily and as accessibly as anywhere else in the world. Hundreds of boats crowd the Pass. Thousands of anglers are on board, and tens of thousands of migrating fish create countless memories.
It has been an astonishing century-and-a-quarter for the tarpon fishery in Southwest Florida. But two questions nag those who know the region’s tarpon fishery the best: What is it about Boca Grande Pass and Charlotte Harbor that have created one of the most distinctive and beloved tarpon fisheries in the world?
And is there a reckoning on the horizon?
Charlotte Harbor attracts tarpon—and tarpon anglers—for a simple reason: The estuary’s massive 270-square-mile-footprint includes much of the richest, most productive nursery areas for juvenile tarpon in all of South Florida. When they first arrive at Boca Grande Pass, there is nothing to suggest in a larval tarpon its ultimate power, or the astonishing size it might attain, or the hold it will have over grown men and women. The tiny tarpon are still in the leptocephalus stage, just a few transparent inches of wiggle and squirm, but they were born far offshore and show up with as many as a hundred miles on the odometer. Then, with Gasparilla Island to the north and Cayo Costa to the south, these fish-that-are-not-quite-yet-fish make a final push through one of the deepest passes on the Florida coast, under cover of darkness towards the labyrinth of estuary and tidal river and shallow marsh retreats of Charlotte Harbor.
And that’s where the going starts to really get tough. The primary challenge for the tarpon of Charlotte Harbor is that the
Anglers fish for tarpon in Boca Grande Pass in 1933. Photo: Boca Grande Historical Society
places tarpon larvae and tarpon juveniles need to thrive are butted up against places where people want to live—or drive or shop or work. “These juvenile habitats are the ones closest to humans,” explains JoEllen Wilson, BTT’s Juvenile Tarpon Habitat Program Manager. And the threats are nefarious. In addition to outright habitat destruction, the changes brought about by disturbance of the landscape can have negative impacts far away. “Even if the regulations say you can’t build on the coast, but you’re building 100 yards from the line,” Wilson says, “that changes water flows and water quality. And impacts juvenile tarpon in significant ways.”
Compounding the challenge is that tarpon are such long-lived species, and don’t reach sexual maturity until they are seven to 10 years old. That creates a built-in time lag before problems with the health of juvenile tarpon show up in the adult population. “We don’t see the impacts of juvenile tarpon habitat degradation for 10 or more years down the road,” explains Dr. Aaron Adams, Director of Science and Conservation for BTT. “That means what we see in the water now is based on what was going on in those habitats 10 and 20 years ago.” The amount and quality of juvenile tarpon habitat is likely the most significant factor limiting overall tarpon numbers, Adams continues, which means that if we continue to lose habitat “we will continue to lower the cap of what is possible for the population size of tarpon in the future. What’s scary is that a lot of populations will remain relatively stable even as their environments degrade. But when you get to a certain point, they will crash. The problem with a fish like tarpon is that you don’t realize you’ve reached that threshold until you’re past it.”
Given its critical role in maintaining tarpon populations on a large scale, BTT centered crosshairs on Charlotte Harbor and Boca Grande Pass as early as 2012, with studies on the life history of juvenile tarpon in the region. Scientists knew there were juvenile tarpon in water bodies such as golf course ponds and drainage ditches. What wasn’t known was whether those waters functioned as suitable habitats, says Wilson, who first started
BTT and research partners capture juvenile tarpon using seine nets at the Coral Creek nursery habitat restoration site. Photo: Florida FWC
Tarpon guide boats being towed to Boca Grande Pass from Useppa Island, ca. 1905. Photo: Boca Grande Historical Society
working with BTT in 2009 and transitioned to a graduate student focusing on those initial habitat studies. Were the young tarpon living in such human-impacted habitats able to immigrate back to open estuary waters, and when they were, were they in healthy condition for the rigors of making it out of Charlotte Harbor and through Boca Grande Pass?
Glorioso took part in some of the initial samplings of juvenile tarpon habitats in Charlotte Harbor. When Wilson first took him to waters she planned to monitor for juvenile tarpon, “I thought she was crazy,” Glorioso laughs. “She showed me this stuff, just mosquito ditches and little ponds, and I thought: This mess is stagnant. Nasty. You wouldn’t think anything would live in there.”
But plenty of juvenile tarpon did, which changed Glorioso’s perspectives of what is, and what could be, productive tarpon habitat. The protection of tarpon, he says, has to start when the fish are barely large enough to see. Tourists stay in hotels and rental homes, and drive over small bridges and recreate around golf course ponds and stormwater wetlands and “have no idea that’s where tarpon grow up,” he says. “I didn’t. But then I realized that if we keep filling these things in, then we won’t have any tarpon. So, these conversations have to continue, and fishing guides are in a great position to help educate the public.”
For BTT, moving forward in the Charlotte Harbor and Boca Grande area meant moving from life history studies to handson efforts to restore habitats. In 2016, BTT kicked off a Juvenile Tarpon Habitat Mapping Project, working with anglers to identify habitats that held tarpon less than 12 inches long. More than 65 percent of those reported ponds and wetlands were classified as altered or degraded versus remaining in a natural condition. To restore such damaged habitats, BTT worked with the Coastal and Heartland National Estuary Partnership, Southwest Florida Water Management District, and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission to design and test three different tarpon nursery habitat models in the Coral Creek Preserve north of Boca Grande Pass. By manipulating the depth of creek mouth openings, and the excavation of deep holes to provide a temperature refuge for fish, researchers have pinned down the specific design attributes that maximize juvenile tarpon production.
One of the reasons Charlotte Harbor has been such a fruitful location for studies—and such a critical population source for tarpon—is development in the area has been relatively
Mack Mickle displays his catch of tarpon in 1935. Photo: Boca Grande Historical Society
A historical photo of Boca Grande, Big Shoals, and Cayo Costa. Photo: Boca Grande Historical Society
low compared to much of South Florida. “But now the rate of development has accelerated dramatically,” Adams said, a situation that has energized BTT’s habitat efforts.
“It’s obvious that Florida is not going to stop developing,” says Malcolm “Mick” Aslin, a Boca Grande businessman who has been deeply involved with conservation efforts in the region. Aslin and his wife, Kathy, supported that initial graduate research for the first studies of juvenile tarpon habitat, and have remained steadfast champions of BTT’s evolving efforts to restore habitat in the watershed. “Given that reality,” he continues, “the question becomes how we find win-win solutions for the economy and growth and still have the wild things and an environment more beautiful and habitable for both humans and wildlife.” It’s not an easy task, and there are no workable pie-in-the-sky solutions. “At first I thought, oh, we’ll throw a little money at this for a couple of years, and see what we can do,” Aslin says, laughing wryly. “But I’ve learned that this is a process. You have to find a focus and stick with it. My perspectives as a supporter of conservation had to evolve along with the science and the habitat work.”
That evolution is showing promise across varied scales. While BTT continues its studies of habitat design in Charlotte Harbor, the organization is in the last lap of a multiyear project to restore more than 1,000 acres of mangroves in the Rookery Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve, south of Naples. And BTT’s early juvenile tarpon habitat efforts have now matured to a program in which the most threatened habitats in the region are being classified in a way that land managers and conservationists can focus work on those habitats with the best chance of remaining, or returning, to a state of functionality. Funded by a NOAA RESTORE grant, BTT and its partners—Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation
Commission, Coastal and Heartland National Estuary Partnership and Charlotte County—are working to overlay known juvenile tarpon habitats with “threat maps” outlining public vs. private ownership, potential development plans, the flow of freshwater streams and creeks, and even potential disturbances due to sea level rise and storm vulnerability. Dubbed a “Vulnerability Index,” the work will take the guesswork out of next steps for tarpon conservation. Once such a matrix has been established for Charlotte County, BTT will take the template to other regions rich in juvenile tarpon habitat.
It’s been a remarkable 12 years for BTT’s Juvenile Tarpon Habitat Program in the Charlotte Harbor and Boca Grande Pass region, with a zero-to-solutions trajectory: This is the problem. This is how to fix it. This is where to start.
And the solutions can’t come too quickly. Because the tarpon of 10, 20, and 50 years in the future are in the nursery habitats of Charlotte Harbor at this very moment.
One hundred years before JoEllen Wilson and Capt. Ed Glorioso first collected juvenile tarpon from the Charlotte Harbor estuary, A.W. Dimock published his epic tome, The Book of the Tarpon Tarpon fishing in Charlotte Harbor and Boca Grande Pass have produced many a big fish story, but few can compare to one of Dimock’s tarpon tales, and a tarpon story with a lesson still relevant today. Dimock and his son, Julian, who he called “the Camera-man,” were fishing near Boca Grande Pass in a canoe when a six-foot-long tarpon engulfed a Spanish mackerel Dimock had reeled to the side of the boat. “…His shining, silvery scales grazed the side of the canoe as his great bulk shot six feet in the air,” Dimock wrote. An astonishing battle ensued.
Dragging the canoe behind, the tarpon headed first for Captiva Pass, then changed course and charged for Boca Grande Pass. “I could do nothing to check the fish,” Dimock wrote. “Gaily he traveled, with occasional frisky leaps in the air, for he was outward bound and rejoiced in the trouble preparing for us.” Each time Dimock fought the fish to the canoe, it surged anew. Once in the
Capt. Ed Glorioso prepares to release a tarpon in the Boca Grande area. Photo courtesy of Ed Glorioso.
Each tarpon sampled at the Coral Creek restoration site is measured and equipped with a Passive Integrated Transponder (PIT) tag through an incision, much like a microchip for your pet. PIT tags allow BTT scientists to track growth and emigration for each fish. Photo: Florida FWC
The next generation. Photo: John Rohan
inlet, an outgoing tide had stacked up breakers in the pass. Dimock had to let the line run more freely “that the canoe might quarter the crested billows.” Soon enough, he was out of line. The tarpon took it all, leaving Dimock and his son to fight swells in the inlet so tall they lost sight of land as the canoe sagged in their troughs.
Later that day, after the pair paddled back to their houseboat, Irene, the tide turned “and the incoming flow from the Gulf brought rolling porpoises, leaping tarpon, and hideous sharks through the now smooth waters of the treacherous pass.” Julian asked his father if he wanted to go in search of tarpon again.
“I quoted to him,” wrote Dimock, “’A sportsman stops when he has had enough,’ and told him that I had had enough for the day.” Even then, more than a century ago, the wisest anglers knew when it was time to give the fish a break.
If the future is to hold anything like the tarpon fishing of the present, much less the past, anglers will need to continue to give fish a chance. And our human societies will need to do the same with the habitats that tarpon require. Glorioso has seen the evolution in how anglers handle tarpon, from hanging them up for display, to not bringing them in to the docks but still pulling them halfway onto the boat, to now keeping their heads completely in the water. “Half the time I won’t even touch the fish,” he says. “I tell my clients—I’m grabbing this line for the release and you better have your camera ready. Because we’re letting this fish go and getting it back in the game in as healthy a condition as possible.”
Back in the game—that’s a fitting refrain for the work BTT is doing for tarpon in Southwest Florida. Boosting overall tarpon populations by restoring juvenile tarpon habitat is the only way to ensure that tarpon numbers don’t go off a cliff. “It’s like a recession,” Adams notes. “Economists can only say we’re in a recession after the fact. So, we know the cliff for tarpon is out there. And we’re working our butts off to reduce the speed at which we are approaching the edge.”
An award-winning author and journalist, T. Edward Nickens is editor-at-large of Field & Stream and a contributing editor for Garden & Gun and Audubon magazine.
Anglers battle Boca Grande’s Silver King in the early 1900s. Photo: Boca Grande Historical Society
BTT Awards Grant to Tampa Bay Waterkeeper
BY CHRIS HUNT
Agrant from Bonefish & Tarpon Trust to the Tampa Bay Waterkeeper could mark the genesis of a comprehensive water-quality monitoring effort to search out the sources of pollution in Tampa Bay and offer stakeholders opportunities to clean up the largest estuary in Florida.
As part of its larger Win Back Our Water campaign, BTT’s grant to the local water quality watchdog organization will spur scientific data collection from select locations in Tampa Bay. By collecting water quality data from a handful of chosen locations, with the help of the University of South Florida, TBWK hopes to pinpoint sources of contaminants like fecal indicator bacteria (FIB) and even industrial heavy metal runoff. Armed with the data, the organization can then approach local decision-makers and assess options to deal with the pollution problems.
“This is significant, because we’re learning that many of
the waters most impacted by pollution in Tampa Bay are also important nurseries for our tarpon, snook and redfish,” said Justin Tramble, Executive Director of Tampa Bay Waterkeeper. “But it’s not just the fish that are impacted—this pollution is harmful to people, too.”
Perhaps the best possible outcome from this testing effort will be the ability to move beyond simple public awareness. Armed with scientific data identifying point-sources of pollution, groups like TBWK and BTT could directly address municipal, regional and state regulatory agencies and lawmakers, and begin to work toward solutions.
“Over the past few years, we’ve been able to generally understand the types of pollution that are found in the bay,” Tramble said. “But it’s been kind of a redundant effort. We can say, ‘Such-and-such place is testing positive for fecal indicator
bacteria. Tell your friends.’ This grant will help us take a deeper dive, to drill down and find out why certain sites are testing high for FIB.”
“Then,” Tramble continued, “we’ll be able to go to the municipalities and recommend some actionable solutions to remove or reduce the pollutants in our water.”
Fecal indicator bacteria are largely attributed to human waste runoff, perhaps from faulty wastewater treatment efforts or from aging and failing septic systems. Pinpointing the source or sources of this bacterial pollution in Tampa Bay is important, both for the watershed’s economically vital fisheries, and also for overall human health in the region.
The grant, too, will help TBWK with its efforts to identify sources of industrial heavy metal pollution found in Tampa Bay’s waters. For the most part, it’s believed these pollutants come
from stormwater runoff from city streets, agricultural fields and plants and factories. If point-sources can be identified, Tramble said, his group can then work with all involved stakeholders to recommend more or better stormwater treatment efforts.
Also, by finding areas that consistently test higher for pollutants, and overlaying that data with known gamefish nursery waters, TBWK and BTT can aim restoration and cleanup efforts more precisely.
“It will help us figure out what needs to be done to help protect and restore this important juvenile fish habitat that’s being impacted by poor water quality,” Tramble said. “What we’re finding now, unfortunately, is that areas that are the most fragile and most important for juvenile fish are also the most abused.”
Areas that are vital to juvenile tarpon, snook and redfish, like seagrass beds and protected mangrove creeks, often fall
Tampa Bay recovered from a collapse caused by too many nutrients decades ago due to the efforts of many to correct the problems. Now a new generation must meet the challenge, as nutrients and pollutants are once again causing problems. Photo: Rob Romasiewicz
victim to the elevated nutrient levels that are associated with FIB contamination, Tramble said. The nutrients remove dissolved oxygen from the water, choking out grass beds and removing important juvenile fish refugia from the ecosystem.
Dr. Jody Harwood, a biologist with the University of South Florida, is executing the water sampling, and she’s got years of experience with this kind of work. With the help of the BTT grant and on behalf of TBWK, she hopes to be able to match pollution with pollution sources on the microbial level.
It may seem like a simple task, she admits, but it’s much more nuanced.
“I call it the ‘Florida miasma,’” she said. “Urban water quality sucks, and you can quote me on that. It’s a death by a thousand cuts, because the pollution is so varied. It comes from humans, organic sediment from agriculture, stormwater runoff, animals… you name it.”
But, she said, this monitoring effort offers some real hope, because, at the most basic level, it will allow researchers to pull specific bacteria and virus DNA collected from water samples and
TBWK Executive Director Justin Tramble (far left), University of South Florida PHD Student Aldo Lobos (second from right) and TBWK Staff. Photo: TBWK
Tampa Bay is home to redfish, tarpon, snook and other economically important sport fish. Photo: Rob Romasiewicz
A TBWK staff member conducts fieldwork. Photo: TBWK
hopefully match it with pollution sources. The science behind the effort is impressive—researchers will be able to identify genetic markers in the collected water and bring the pollution into crisp focus. For instance, Harwood said, if the DNA is associated with the human gastrointestinal tract, the pollution is coming from human waste.
The idea, Harwood explained, is to start the monitoring in some fairly contained areas, like in the largely enclosed Bayboro Harbor near USF-St. Petersburg, or around the Davis Island Dog Beach.
“The best approach is to start in the contained areas and then kind of work your way out,” she said. Researchers will test for sewage contamination and sleuth out genetic markers associated with humans, dogs and other organisms. “Then we can bring the results to the table and hopefully show the need for a larger study. And, if we see an indicator of sewage pollution, it gives local entities the evidence they need to take the data to a higher level and to take the next steps.”
This kind of monitoring effort is definitely a marathon and not a sprint. But, with help from BTT, Harwood’s team, on behalf of TBWK, could begin to identify the most noxious sources of pollution in Tampa Bay and offer a roadmap for eventual cleanup.
“Hopefully,” Harwood said, “the results will help build momentum for more science with the end result being cleaner water for fish and for the people of Tampa Bay.”
BTT’s Win Back Our Water campaign, of which this effort is a part, is a wide-ranging water-quality campaign that seeks to identify and address sources of pollution, ranging from the presence of FIB in estuarial waters to Everglades restoration and pollution from pharmaceuticals and glyphosate pollution associated with herbicides used to attack invasive plants across Florida.
Chris Hunt is an award-winning journalist and an enthusiastic fly fisher who splits his time between the mountains of eastern Idaho and the blackwater rivers of North Florida. He writes about conservation, travel and the fly fishing culture all over the world.
A TBWK staff member collects water samples for testing. Photo: TBWK
Tampa Bay is a vital part of Florida’s multi-billion-dollar recreational fishery. Photo: Rob Romasiewicz
2025 Artist of the Year
PETER CORBIN
Painter Peter Corbin has been named Bonefish & Tarpon Trust’s 2025 Artist of the Year. His painting, A Chance for Permit, will be available in Copley’s Winter Sale 2025, held in February, with a portion of the proceeds benefitting BTT. Each year since 2011, Copley Fine Art Auctions has sold a new work by BTT’s Artist of the Year in support of the organization.
“I acquired my first Peter Corbin painting at the Copley Auction about six years ago,” said Bill Legg, who chairs the Artist of the Year Selection Committee. “It caught my attention because it was not the usual guide and angler, but a father and his child. Peter told me that it was a commission from a man depicting him instructing his son while wading a flat. The interesting sidenote is that the model for the boy was Peter’s son.”
“I have greatly enjoyed Peter’s work and was thrilled when he agreed to be this year’s Artist of the Year,” Legg went on to say. “The subject, permit fishing, is particularly appealing because we have all seen them approaching with baited breath only to have our hopes dashed. As Steve Huff says, ‘Permit are not honest fish’.”
Corbin is primarily known for sporting art landscapes, merging the natural wonders and elegant drama of the sporting life with the realm of fine art. His vivid sporting art scenes convey a sense of place, mood, and atmosphere in the light reflected off the water or the transmitted light through the clouds or trees revealing influences of the Hudson River School.
“I have been fortunate to be able to combine my love for
painting light with my passion for fly fishing and shot gunning,” said Corbin. “Recording my subjects’ experiences in their favorite sport and the places they cherish is the essence of sporting art.”
Corbin studied both painting and sculpture at Pomfret School, Wesleyan University where he received a B.A. with High Honors in Art, and the California College of Arts and Crafts. His greatest influences have been A.B. Frost, Ogden Pleissner and Winslow Homer. He grew up in a home filled with fly rods, shotguns, Labrador Retrievers and the sporting art of A.B. Frost. Using his experiences as a lifelong angler and hunter he has traveled from The American West, British Columbia, South America, Europe, New Zealand and Africa recording portrait commissions for his clients’ love of the outdoors and places they cherish.
His paintings are on public display at the American Museum of Fly Fishing, the National Art Museum of Sport, the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, the Catskill Fly Fishing Center & Museum, and many other venues. His one-man exhibitions have appeared at The National Sporting Library & Museum, the Cascapedia River Museum, The Leash, The University Club, The Union League Club, and elsewhere. Corbin’s work is the subject of two films, Line Dance – The Art of Fly Fishing by Peter Corbin and The Sporting Art of Peter Corbin. His work has also appeared in numerous books, including Three Rivers – One Artist’s View, An Artist’s Creel, and The Bonefish, and many publications, including Garden & Gun, Field & Stream, Gray’s Sporting Journal, and Sporting Classics.
A Chance for Permit by Peter Corbin, oil on canvas, 20 x 30 inches.
11th Annual Florida Keys Dinner & Circle of Honor Inductions
Photos: Dan Diez
Bonefish & Tarpon Trust’s 11th Annual Florida Keys Dinner & Circle of Honor Inductions at Cheeca Lodge & Spa on May 2 brought together the angling community to celebrate the lives of three conservation heroes—Captain Rick Ruoff and the late Captains Joe Gonzalez and Travis Holeman. All three were honored with the 2024 Outstanding Guide Award in recognition of their lasting contributions to fisheries conservation. The special program was emceed by T. Edward Nickens, author and Garden & Gun contributing editor, and included remarks by Shawn Hamilton, the Secretary of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. All event proceeds benefitted the BTT George Hommell Florida Keys Habitat Fund.
Ruoff’s career on the flats has spanned more than 50 years, during which time he also had a profound impact on conservation. In his acceptance speech, Ruoff stressed that “our planet needs love,” and that while our fame fades, the work we do in conservation lives on. As an early Commodore of the Islamorada Fishing Guides Association, he elevated the organization’s dedication to conservation causes, with a notable focus on Everglades restoration. Since 2021, Ruoff has lent his expertise to Bonefish & Tarpon Trust’s Board of Directors. He has played a critical role in BTT’s bonefish research, helping to identify bonefish spawning sites in the Florida Keys.
A Florida native, Gonzalez began fishing his home waters of Biscayne Bay at a young age, exploring the Florida Keys and
The Bahamas during his summer breaks. He went on to guide for more than 30 years, splitting his time between the Keys, Everglades, and Biscayne Bay. Gonzalez was also a committed advocate for flats fishery conservation. He tagged over 1,300 bonefish, more than any guide on record, for bonefish research. He was also instrumental in the success of BTT’s Project Permit, tagging more than 130 fish. Gonzalez was a regular participant in BTT’s International Science Symposium, where he served on the Bonefish Panel.
Holeman began his career in Texas and Louisiana before landing in Florida waters. He captured numerous IGFA records and appeared on many popular and award-winning television shows, sharing his passions with a national audience. His remarkable angling skills were rivaled only by his unwavering dedication to conservation. Holeman was one of the early champions of BTT’s Project Permit, which began in 2011. His extensive knowledge and countless hours invested in research helped to lay the foundation for the project’s remarkable success.
Ruoff, Gonzalez, and Holeman are now enshrined in the BTT Circle of Honor alongside other legendary anglers, fishing guides and conservation leaders. The Circle of Honor is housed in the Florida Keys History & Discovery Center in Islamorada and features an annually rotating exhibit about the honorees as well as educational content about the significance of the flats fishery.
Capt. Rick Ruoff accepts the 2024 Outstanding Guide Award.
Shawn Hamilton, Secretary of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, shares remarks.
Capt. Steve Huff introduces his longtime friend, Capt. Rick Ruoff.
Capt. Bob Branham presents the posthumous Outstanding Guide Award to the family of Capt. Joe Gonzalez.
Back row: Robert Spottswood, Jr., FWC Executive Director Roger Young. Front row: Joshua Grier, Nicholas Genesi, Contender Boats President Joe Neber, FWC Chair Rodney Barreto, Diana Neber, BTT Vice President Kellie Ralston, Krissy Hewes Wiborg, Nelson Fonseca.
Family and friends of Travis Holeman accept his award.
Author T. Edward Nickens, Capt. Rick Ruoff, and BTT President and CEO Jim McDuffie.
BTT Board Member Rich Andrews, Chris Galvin, and BTT Board Member John Abplanalp.
Capt. Rick Murphy, BTT Founding Member Jeff Harkavy, BTT Founding Member Stu Apte, Capt. Steve Huff, Greg Moffitt.
BTT Montauk Angling Retreat
Four anglers convened in June for BTT’s annual Montauk Angling Retreat, an immersive two-day guided expedition for striped bass with two of the industry’s most esteemed captains, 2022 BTT Circle of Honor inductee, Captain Paul Dixon, and the accomplished Captain Brendan McCarthy. This extraordinary experience also features a three-night stay at a private residence on the scenic shores of Lake Montauk and
private dinner prepared by a world-class chef. Don’t miss your chance to experience fly-fishing for stripers like never before! Reserve your spot at the 2025 Montauk Angling Retreat by bidding online during BTT’s 13th Annual NYC Dinner and Awards Ceremony held on October 15. Visit BTT.org/ events to learn more.
Cal and Dave Collier enjoy an action-packed day on the water.
Chris and Mark, the winners of last spring’s trip, sight-fish for stripers on the flats.
Hook & Knife Charters and Halyards Restaurant are proud to partner with Bonefish & Tarpon Trust, supporting their mission to conserve bonefish, tarpon, and permit. The Halyard Restaurant Group values the Trust’s efforts in science-based conservation, education, and advocacy, and appreciates their work to create healthier tarpon fisheries in the southeastern U.S. and preserve these habitats for years to come.
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bonefishtarpontrust.org halyardrestaurantgroup.com
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For more information, visit us online at www.asf.ca/membership or contact Cindy at cbartlett@asf.ca 1-800-565-5666
The Grandpa’s Tale
BY BOB RICH
The old man had been thinking a lot about life lately and death too for that matter. “It’s those darn funerals,” he thought. “Every time I get to feeling the happiest, boom, word comes along that another friend of mine has died.” Some days he felt that that was all he was doing, going to funerals and writing those ubiquitous notes to the families of friends. “Words cannot express,” etc., etc.
But today would be different. He had made a date with the twins, his beautiful lively four-year-old grandchildren, one girl and one boy, flaxen hair, penetrating blue eyes and the most inquisitive minds he could remember. Today he would be the wise man, the teacher, the font of all knowledge. Today was his chance to play the role of ‘grandpa’ and he had chosen a wonderful stage. He was taking the twins fishing.
His son and daughter-in-law were dropping the kids off on their way to a mixed doubles tournament at the tennis club. His preplanning had been done. He had stopped at the bait shop and bought worms and made lunches—actually his wife of thirty-five years had made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches while he had loaded everything onto the boat, a twelve-foot dinghy with a 2½ horsepower outboard, just enough to power them around the tenacre lake that provided recreation for him and for his five other neighbors whose houses circled its shores.
The door burst open and there were the kids bubbling with excitement for the adventure ahead. Life jackets tightened, kisses for grandma and they were on their way. With no clouds in the sky, he was glad that he’d had the kids’ mom apply sunscreen generously before they’d come over.
He put bobbers on their lines and showed them how to bait their hooks. The sight of worms always reminded him of the juicy night crawlers he used to catch on the moist front lawn with his own grandfather before their fishing trips so many years ago. The man smiled.
It didn’t take long for the first hook up. With her grandpa showing her how to lift up and reel down, little Emily landed the first fish, a six-inch sunfish while her brother frowned jealously at her side. The grandfather showed her how to take out the hook and hold her fish without being pricked by the spiny dorsal fin.
“Oh, Grandpa, look at his colors, he’s beautiful,” Emily shouted almost breathlessly. “Can we keep him?”
“Well we could, honey,” he replied, “but he would die and those colors would go away. Maybe it would be better to let him live and we can catch him again another day.”
“So if we let him go, he can go back and be with his family?”
“Yes, Emily,” he said.
“Okay,” the little girl said. “Let’s put him back.”
“Wait a minute,” little Brad weighed in as his grandfather thought he might. “My dad says it’s all right to keep a fish if you are going to eat it.”
“Well I guess he’s right,” the grandfather said thoughtfully. “Would you rather eat him right now instead of our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches?”
“Well no,” Brad said. “Let him go, Emily, fast before he dies.”
“Don’t fish feel pain when they die, Grandpa?” Emily chimed in, a tiny tear rolling down her cheek.
“Whew,” the grandfather thought to himself. “I think I taught a life’s lesson, but I feel like I dodged a bullet as well, as did that little sunfish.”
The rest of the fishing trip went well, perhaps thanks to the three anglers’ act of clemency by releasing the sunfish. After eating their sandwiches, both of the youngsters caught more sunnies and perch and an occasional small mouth bass, all of which were also released to “go back to their families.”
The grandfather loved the look of enlightenment on his grandchildren’s faces as he told them all about each species and launched into stories about previous fishing trips. They seemed especially interested in hearing about the trips their grandpa had taken with their father.
“Who makes the rules about letting fish go, Grandpa?” Emily asked.
“Well at the end of the day, we all do, Emily.”
“But where do the rules come from?” Brad asked.
“Well pal, they come from our hearts and from our heads. We want to make sure that there will always be plenty of fish for you and for your children and for your grandchildren.”
“Ugh,” Brad said. “I’m never getting married.”
“We’ll see,” said the grandpa, “we’ll see.”
After a few hours, they headed back to the dock where grandma was waiting to hear the children’s excited stories and hurry them off for their naps before their parents came to pick them up.
The grandfather unloaded the boat, washed his hands, sat down on the couch in the den, picked up one of his favorite fishing magazines, the Bonefish & Tarpon Journal and flipped on the CBS Saturday morning sports channel in time to watch one of his favorite weekend fishing shows, Silver Kings
This week’s show featured the beautiful photography of a young professional fisherman, Captain Jared Raskob, catching and properly releasing large bonefish and tarpon in the Florida Keys. His good feeling about his morning outing was heightened as he watched a message from the show’s Conservation Partner, Bonefish & Tarpon Trust, whose staff shared interesting scientific information on these fish and the importance of protecting them so that they will be available for our children to enjoy as well. What a great message! He thought about waking up his two little fishing buddies to hear too, but decided they needed their sleep.
The next thing he knew, he heard men shouting profanities at each other. He opened his eyes to see that the noise was coming from the TV set. Hairy-backed men in tank tops in the cockpits of giant sport fishing boats holding stout fishing rods were straining to subdue what were obviously very large fish on the other end of the line. He must have dozed. What a different fishing trip this TV show was portraying than the wonderful outing he’d enjoyed that morning with his beautiful grandchildren. Speaking of whom, were now sitting next to him as one of the TV anglers horsed a giant shark up to the transom of the sportfish while one of his mates leadered the fish and not one, but three others sunk gaffs into the struggling fish. Blood everywhere, more cursing. “Oh great,”
the grandfather thought, “a shark tournament, indiscriminately killing magnificent animals for cash and to titillate beer swilling Neanderthals on the boats and waiting for the weigh-in back at the dock.”
Where was that clicker? “Darn, I’m sitting on it,” he thought grabbing the remote control and turning off the television. He looked at the two who were both looking white with their mouths agape after watching the televised carnage.
“Let’s take a walk, you guys,” he said taking their hands and heading outside. Seagulls squawked their way off the wood bench on the dock to make room for the three anglers. The grandfather knew an important conversation was on its way.
“Grandpa,” Brad started it out. “Were those men killing those fish?”
“Well, yes, buddy, I’m afraid they were or they were trying to.”
“Don’t fish feel pain when they die, Grandpa?” Emily chimed in, a tiny tear rolling down her cheek.
“Yes, Emily, I think they do.” This was going to be more difficult than he had thought. “Grandpa,” Brad asked, “do those shark men have different rules than us? Don’t their rules come from their heads and hearts? Didn’t their grandpas tell them about the rules too?”
“Yes, Brad,” the old man said. “Maybe they’ve stopped listening or maybe they’ve just forgotten.”
Just then, the children’s parents walked out on the back lawn.
“Thanks, Grandpa, we love you,” the kids said in unison, as they ran to join their parents.
Halfway there Emily stopped and turned. “Can we go fishing next Saturday, Grandpa?”
“And we’ll throw everything back” Brad added, “and grandpa, we’ll never forget.”
“Forget what, slugger?” the boy’s father asked joining the conversation.
“We’ll tell you later, Dad,” Emily answered.
The old man smiled as he waved to his departing fishing buddies and their folks.
“Oh, the wisdom of children. What a day we had,” he thought as he sat down again on the bench to watch the shadow lengthen on the shoreline.
He thought of a quote by Henry David Thoreau that he’d heard a long time ago. “Who hears the fishes when they cry?” Until this moment, he’d thought that it was simply a rhetorical question. Now he knew the answer. Children hear the fishes when the fishes cry.
“I think I’ll send a note with a check to Bonefish & Tarpon Trust tonight,” he thought as he saw what looked like a little sunfish ripple the surface off the end of the dock.
Bob Rich is the author of Looking Through Water, which inspired the forthcoming film, Blood Knot. Rich is also the author of Fish Fights, The Fishing Club, and The Right Angle, and the coauthor of Secrets from the Delphi Café.
PROTECT WHAT'S OUT THERE
40+ YEARS OF PROTECTING THE WATERY WORLD WE CALL HOME.
Bass Pro Shops® and Cabela’s® are proud to stand alongside our customers in supporting the Bonefish & Tarpon Trust by donating $100,000 in 2024. These funds have supported projects like Bonefish Spawning Aggregations in the Florida Keys, Spawning Permit Research and The Conservation Captains Program. Together we are making a difference. Learn more at basspro.com/conservation
