The keys down here have a considerably less swampy character than those above us along the Gulf of Mexico. They are higher and, in some cases, have headlands, beaches, and woods. In the spring these are great meeting places for migrant warblers headed for cool northern forests.
We shut off next to an empty beach of wild palms amid clouds of wheeling white seabirds, and Guy begins poling down the face of Ballast. There is a wash here that raises and drops the skiff. The bottom is rock and packed sand, dotted with sea fans, a desperately difficult place to pole without falling out of the boat. When fish are spotted the poling is so noisy that the tarpon are often spooked, and the boat cannot be easily or quickly positioned for incoming fish. So you abandon yourself to the combinations and hope they come up in your favor.
Almost to Woman Key, we find tarpon: a string of fish, they are traveling on a bright sandy bottom, as distinct as fractured sections of pencil lead.
We are in good position and it is now only a question of waiting for them to come within range. At first we see them from afar, splashing and marking their progress purely in surface movement. At this remove, they are no more scary than a school of feeding jacks.
Then, as they approach, their above-the-surface presence of wakes and splashes is replaced perceptually by the actual sight of fish as specific marine entities, individual torpedoes coming at you. It is hideously unnerving, if you care about fishing.
I like my cast and at the first strip two fish turn out of the string to follow. Then one of them quite aggressively takes the fly and turns off to the side. I continue the strip I started with my left hand until I come up tight. Then, with the butt of the rod in my hip and the rod tip low and to the side, I hit two or three times hard.
The fish is in the air, upside down, making a noise that reminds you of horses, thunderous and final; your eye remembers the long white rip in the ocean. Then a short accelerated run is followed by an end-swapping jump by a game animal that has pulled all the stops. At the third jump the run begins. The fourth jump would be better observed through binoculars; the line no longer even points at the fish.
The tarpon has burned off a hundred fifty yards in such a way that the centrifugal surge is felt in the reel, shuddering my arm. Now he must be followed in the boat. The backing goes onto the reel at the expense of a painful swelling of the forearm and the shirt clinging wetly. After some time the fish is close enough that we can reasonably exert some pressure. Guy keeps the boat parallel to him, silver and brilliant in the deep green water, and the fight goes on, interrupted by inexorable fifty-yard runs from which we patiently recover. Now the fish makes a number of sloshing, head-rattling jumps, after which, in his new weakness, I can turn him slightly on his side.
In a moment he is beside the boat, bright and powerful-looking. I take the pliers and seize the shank of the hook, and with a twist the tarpon is free, though he is slow to realize it. I reach down and hold him for a moment, and I sense in this touch his ocean-traveling might. An instant later he has vanished.
Guy tells me firmly that it’s my turn to pole.
Silver King: A Glimpse
WE WERE LOADING LUNCHES, rods, and tackle into my skiff by the glare of the car’s headlights. The weather was deteriorating. I turned to marine weather on the skiff’s radio and learned that we were in a tropical disturbance and that a hurricane plane had been sent out to view the center of it. George Anderson and Jimbo Meador were my companions, men who never confuse angling with male bonding: fine dining and gentlemanly hours were out the window. We had fueled up at the dock instead of siphoning gas from the rental car with a borrowed garden hose as George and I had done in the past. We were going to look for tarpon in a new place, a stretch of beach, a deep pass and broad, sandy banks that looked ready to receive spring migrants. We had a watermelon in the icebox, sandwiches, a couple of gallons of water. With George aboard, this would be all there was to eat until the last drop of gas had been burned looking for fish.
He had tied up a supply of leaders, cautioning us to lubricate our knots with Chapstick instead of spit. “Use spit and you overheat these copolymers. You break off a lot of fish.” George had been chasing tarpon so long this spring in the keys that he had tendinitis from pulling up leader knots. Jimbo had never caught a tarpon before and right now it was the only thing in the world he cared about. I had made a blind guess that this area would hold fish, but I couldn’t be sure.
I eased the skiff up onto a plane. The quartering chop was coming at us from the southeast and the boat pounded up sheets of spray that stung our faces. I strained into the darkness ahead of the semi-airborne skiff, trying to remember any obstructions that might lie in front of us. “I remember this old boy from Baldhead Island,” came Jimbo’s Alabama drawl above the wind, “going from Southport across the Cape Fear River headed for Frying Pan Shoals, I guess …”
“What about him?” I hollered.
“Well, he hit something in the dark. Found him dead in his skiff.” I looked even harder into the blackness ahead, picking out a few lighted markers, a few house lights along the shore, those of a barge and then a tug. We didn’t realize what a lee we’d enjoyed until we got around the island. The wind was gusting up to twenty-five knots and prospects for fly-fishing were bleak.
By the time dawn began to break under scudding clouds and gray skies, we were searching for tarpon. George scanned the water intently. I stripped out line and false cast the twelve-weight line when a gust of wind flattened the backcast and sank a size 3/0 tarpon fly into the back of my head, the barb buried well below the skin. “We’ve got fish!” George shouted, then suggested I kneel on the deck so he could examine the fly. I doubt that he ever took his eye off the fish as he seized the fly with his pliers and yanked it out of my scalp. Next he removed a long file from the pocket of his shorts and retouched the hook point. Stepping back to the casting deck I felt a trickle of blood going down the back of my neck. Later, when I told a friend at the dock how George had helped me, the friend asked, “Does he do children’s parties?”
The fish were, in fact, traveling slowly toward us, rolling with open mouths and looking like a nest of enormous baby birds awaiting a worm. I cast to the edge of the school and was able to turn one fish, who then gathered himself under my fly and sucked it down. I hooked him and he burned off for about fifty yards. Out of nowhere, a hammerhead shot through the school looking for my tarpon. I tightened the drag and broke the fish off, leaving the shark sluicing through a piece of empty ocean. Re-rig, start over.
Hours later, we found the most beautiful big school of tarpon under a sky burnished pearl by the tropical wind. They were barely moving, their thick green backs just under the surface and their steeply angled, gunmetal-gray fins piercing the surface in such numbers that, from a distance, they looked like a small island. We eased up on the school and Jimbo cast into them, stripped, and hooked a fish. Stepping backward off the casting deck, he nearly went over the side. There was a circle of white around his eyes as the fish headed for the sky in the first of a series of ocean-bursting jumps. George stood next to Jimbo and coached him to keep a deep bow in the rod and put maximum pressure on the fish. After several hundred-yard runs, the vaulting leaps were reduced to surface lunges and the fish was soon alongside the boat. Jimbo sat down, pouring with sweat. George and I could reimagine our own first tarpon as we looked at the silvery bulk of this great game fish. We knew the euphoria our friend was feeling, and the odd, pure relief at the moment of release; the tarpon eased itself back into the darkness under the skiff and resumed its migration.