Posts tagged “Key West

BOOK REVIEW: Marquesa

Posted on January 19, 2012

Marquesa is a book penned well before the existence of blogs, but it is the type of published work every fly fishing blogger wishes he’d written. Author Jeffrey Cardena’s  account of his solitary venture by houseboat in the Marquesas Keys, an atoll sitting 30 miles west of Key West, is as compelling a first person fishing narrative as you’ll read. Cardenas was, and still is, a well-regarded Keys fishing guide, but his words are not confined to that world. He writes without pretense, in a natural voice that perfectly reflects his sheer joy and wonderment from being immersed in this wilderness with tarpon, permit, sharks and even cassiopea.  He limits his descriptions of the actual fly fishing–a very good thing–and when he does talk about it…

Cayo Hueso

Posted on August 1, 2011

There was a bluegrass duo at the bar and after the 13th request for “Dueling Banjos” the guitar player jumped off the small stage and grabbed the requester by the throat. This is a place that flips switches. It’s where Wallace Stevens threw down with Robert Frost and tried to punk Hemingway. The guitar player’s response fell within acceptable parameters. But it was time to leave. The Canadian had built a pickle-fork flats skiff that ran 74 and he put in a foot pedal throttle, like a car. In the morning he intentionally ran over cormorants as we blasted across bayside waters from Big Pine. He hit a well known flat and killed the engine and trimmed up. We did not have a push…

VIDEO REVIEW: Tarpon

Posted on June 18, 2008

Growing up in South Florida in the 80s, my friends and I had a certain romanticized idea of what Key West should be, one that never quite met reality when we took the trip down US 1 and hit the bridge from Boca Chica. But it did exist at one time, and that Key West is captured perfectly in Tarpon, the fantastic documentary made by UYA Films in 1973. Filmmaker Christian Odasso and producer Guy de la Valdene made the film to try and capture the vibe of tarpon fly anglers at a time when it was still generally a cult sport. In doing so they accomplished far more than creating fish porn, they encapsulated a cultural slice of Key West in the early 70s. Tarpon contains…

  

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