Archive for May, 2009

Film Tour in Maine Equals Cornell ’77?

Posted on May 11th, 2009

I missed the Fly Fishing Film Tour in NYC, read that in Indiana it was quite lame, and thought until now that the place to catch it had to be Austin, TX. But I may have to reconsider. On Thursday, June 4th the Tour is rolling through Portland, ME.  Flies and Fins is hosting it, with striper guide Eric Wallace as the point man, helped in no small part by Alex the Wildman. College Kid Ben, The Roughfisher, I’m sure Marshall DeMott, and all the cool kids will be there. I’d drive up myself if it wasn’t six hours away and I wasn’t leaving to go tarpon fishing the next day. The Portland crowd has less than a month to work it out and…

Tagged: , , , , , , , , ,

Devil in God's Country

Posted on May 7th, 2009

We made the commitment to try for 100 pound fish. So Ron Hyde and I spent two days hunting big tarpon in the Everglades from his Seminole Flats Skiff. The web of channels weaving through the vast mangrove islands is God’s Country, beautiful and unrelenting. Hyde has been catching big tarpon in this area since the 1950s. I have not–The biggest tarpon I have hooked on a fly weighed 60 pounds. These are different animals. Tarpon take 15 years to grow beyond the century mark and by that time, says  Hyde, “they’re big intelligent fish that can eat whenever they want, and they’ve seen just about everything.” The big female tarpon can live into their 50s. I’ve caught big tarpon by other means, but…

Devil in God’s Country

Posted on May 7th, 2009

We made the commitment to try for 100 pound fish. So Ron Hyde and I spent two days hunting big tarpon in the Everglades from his Seminole Flats Skiff. The web of channels weaving through the vast mangrove islands is God’s Country, beautiful and unrelenting. Hyde has been catching big tarpon in this area since the 1950s. I have not–The biggest tarpon I have hooked on a fly weighed 60 pounds. These are different animals. Tarpon take 15 years to grow beyond the century mark and by that time, says  Hyde, “they’re big intelligent fish that can eat whenever they want, and they’ve seen just about everything.” The big female tarpon can live into their 50s. I’ve caught big tarpon by other means, but…

Tagged: , ,

Back to the Glades

Posted on May 4th, 2009

The headwaters to the Florida Everglades start all the way up in Orlando, where Shingle Creek starts the flow of freshwater south to Florida Bay. Before the developers and the sugar plantations got to it, the massive flow moved unimpeded through a complex 8.9 million acre web of lakes, rivers, and marshes down into the mangrove estuaries of the southern coast. The Everglades hasn’t been what it is supposed to be in over a century, since the election of Napoleon Bonaparte Broward as the state’s 19th governor, and along with that his mission to drain the Glades, starting with the New River Canal in 1906. The National Park today consists of 1.5 million acres of protected wetlands.  It’s deathly hot, bug infested, wild, dangerous,…

Tagged: , , , , ,

FLIES: The Hamilton Eat-Me

Posted on May 1st, 2009

The Hamilton Eat-Me is my favorite fly. The Florida guide Scott Hamilton introduced me to his pattern 10 years ago on a trip where we used the same fly to catch baby tarpon, dolphin (mahi), and false albacore. He gave me one and the next day I used it freshwater fishing and caught largemouth and peacock bass. Since then I’ve caught 21 different salt and freshwater species with an eat-me. Hamilton says the species count is well over 100. (Like Alex said today on 40 Rivers, a good streamer/baitfish pattern will work for just about anything.) It’s a simple, durable, deadly baitfish pattern. I like simple. I like durable. Deadly, too. When I started epoxying my fingers together tying a few years ago, I…

Tagged: , , , , ,

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.