On a cold, dark night on a Spanish stair. (Or a warm windy day as the bite turned on at sunset.) Fished for an hour at dusk, mostly achieving nothing. I don’t know if it was the change in fly or the time of day but a flip switched and the hits finally started coming. Weird things start happening when you stick your point and shoot underwater and there’s not much light.
Tagged: Dylan, peacock bass
Pierced, spiked and branded, with the austere bars of Black Flag.
Tagged: Flurda, forced fly fishing analogies, peacock bass
Doing a little free-word association, what comes to mind with the jack crevalle. Whether they’re half-pounders or 20-pounders, jacks are just mean. Nobody’s going to put together a four-digit travel budget plan to chase them but when they’re around and engaged in brutality against the lesser species (known as bait), tie on your most durable popper and be glad for it. BONUS COVERAGE: More free word association. Tarpon. Ascendancy. False Albacore. Velocity. Trout. Sagacity. Peacock bass. Vibrancy. Bluefish. Savagery. Carp. Quixotical. This could go on.
During my Friday rundown of blogs I enjoy, I came across this perceptive post on the cultural phenomenon that is the Florida Keys Happy Hour. Well said, sir. (Be sure to click on the mugshots.)
Tagged: Happy Hour, Headhunters Fly Shop
An unexpected package came in the mail last spring and I opened it. These electric little plastic baggies fell out and I thought, this was meant for somebody on the Furthur tour. But it was clearly labeled, Free Range Dubbing. I didn’t know what to make of it, or with it. I am not a fly tier but someone who ties flies, a selection of saltwater patterns and some bastardized variants, none of which require dubbing. I resolved to learn some patterns that do, but I am lazy. And forgetful. The other day I started rummaging for other materials and saw the package and remembered. I bought some dubbing wax. I know just enough to be dangerous but it doesn’t matter because there…
If I lived there still I might get tired of it. Maybe. (If I lived there I’d do everything possible to be in the express lane passing through Whitewater Bay.) But if I’m down there and I have a free moment in the right place, it’s a safe bet to figure what’s lighting up my train of thought.
Tishan played free shows at the park across from Burger King and when you can’t drive yet you go where you can get to. The crowd always strange–kids, the elderly, homeless, surfers with bloodshot eyes. The music is not really for you but it gets into you and it’s a short leap beyond Legend to King Yellowman and the yearly Sunsplash at the Sportatorium and for a while when you’re young music is as much a part of you as breathing.
Tagged: Brutal Out Deh
At this moment, there are exactly 113,347 fly fishing blogs in existence. Twice that many have come and gone. (Where are you, Blanco Honky?) But of all the blogs that are, were and will be, none can make the same claim as the the Urban Flyfisher: World’s First Fly Fishing Blog. His name is Alistair, he fishes in Scotland, and this is his story. You are recognized as the first fly fishing blogger. With no real contemporaries at the time, what compelled you to start a fly fishing blog? Essentially I wanted to start a diary that I could update easily involving photos. I did not know any html so found this new fangled thing called “blogging” and it looked like it would…
In the back corner I sat and ate two cheeseburgers at the saddest fast food joint in the universe. It occupies the ground floor of a building off Lincoln Road, through the gauntlet of shops and street performers and open air restaurants filled with people drawn in from every habited continent. A current of energy flows by, funneling from Collins and Washington and A1A, but it doesn’t swirl into the windowless interior where the broken silver haired man sits staring at an empty cup of coffee. The Venetian is the back way off the island, safeguarded by a series of toll booths and draw bridges that bring transit to a halt. At the foot of one bridge women on skateboards wait for the gates…
Tagged: Biscayne Bay, South beach, tarpon
I dig cheap sunglasses. I used to buy counterfeit Oakley jackets for five bucks in Midtown until I feared they were burning out my retinas. And I started fishing heavily. On the water switching from regular (street-legal) polarized to Costa 580 lenses rocked my world. I have two pair and the frames don’t fit me right but I don’t care because they give me HD X-Ray vision. I don’t wear my HD shades on the street anymore. They are susceptible to the indelicate hands of my two young children, who like to grab them bend them smudge them and, in the younger’s case, use them as a teething biscuit. For that reason alone I hit the Walgreen’s circular-spinning sunglass rack and found a bitchin…
Tagged: Foster Grants, Midnight Run, polarized sunglasses
