FIsh
A
fter you’ve fly fished in salt water for a while you often develop an obsession with a fish. You have recurring dreams about a particular flat or beach where you saw them offshore, out of range but close enough to tantalize. You begin to decorate your den or office with photographs, paintings, and mementos of this fish. The fly that hooked your first permit is encased in a crystal globe. You spent far too much money on a framed print of a sailfish. You have a tarpon coffee mug and matching coasters. Then you begin to take risks—marital, financial, and mildly life threatening trips in snotty weather—to get
another crack at this species. With a great number of serious fly fishers it’s permit. Permit are really deep water members of the jack family that occasionally make strafing raids in shallow water to pick off crabs, shrimp, and urchins. They grow up to 50 pounds (but a 20-pounder on a fly rod is a really nice one), they make blistering runs when hooked, but the toughest part is getting a hook into one. Permit are notorious for rushing a fly, wheeling around it like a dervish, driving the angler into apoplexy, then rushing off without eating the fly. No one knows why—permit can’t even see that well. But people have fished for years just to catch one, and a couple permit and a few thousand dollars in lodging and guide fees for a week is considered a very successful trip. For others it is tarpon. This one is not as hard to understand because they will take a tiny fly and live in shallow water yet they grow up to 200 pounds. They make repeated leaps so high and so hot that it’s impossible to describe in print—Google tarpon jumps, watch some videos, and then come back. They make long runs that will test the drag of any fly reel to its burning point, they break rods, and they wear out anglers in the tropical heat. Sometimes they jump into the boat and become a dangerous animal in such a confined space. It’s also not hard to understand why some anglers devote their lives to catching marlin on a fly rod. In 1967, Lee Wulff, under pressure while camera crews circled his 15-foot wooden boat off the coast of Ecuador, hooked and landed a 148-pound world record striped marlin with a $12 fiberglass rod and a $30 single-action fly reel with just a click drag. If that wasn’t enough, the fish was not trolled to or chummed up, but stalked while it was cruising just under the surface. Wulff was 62 years old and the air temperature was over 90 degrees.
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