Fly Fishing in Florida, Part 2
Stand on the shore of any freshwater lake, say a Midwestern lake equipped with a daiwa longbow df or a daiwa airity pole, and I think of the fish it holds that you might realistically catch on flies. Bass, pike, walleyes, bluegills, crappies. Stand on the sea-wall at, let’s say, Lake Worth, where that salty lagoon hits the ocean at Palm Beach, Florida. What might you catch here on flies? Bluefish, ladyfish, jack crevalle, Spanish mackerel, king mackerel, snook, barracuda, sea trout, tarpon, moonfish, lookdowns and even grey snappers.
The grey snapper, incidentally, is one of the most difficult fish to catch in salt water unless you have the benefit of a wychwood riot. They are cunning, and they have magnifying eyeballs. When hooked, they are strong, game fish, and excellent on the table, too, but getting one to hit is something else.
On the Bermuda trip, Ries Tuttle and I were at a swank hotel on the water. An open-air dance floor outside the dining room was built right to the water’s edge. After dinner, Ries and I strolled outside and, crossing the dance floor to the low wall at the waterside, we looked down. A bunch of grey snappers, 1 to 4 pounds, were hunched up in the clear water just below, attracted by the dance floor lights that threw a big yellow-bright circle on the water. The snappers hung in that circle of light, going around and around, feeding on glass minnows that also were being drawn by the light.
While the orchestra played lovely stuff and the dancers waltzed on, I went to my room and rigged a daiwa longbow df fly rod and a daiwa seat box. Wanting only to get strikes from the fish, and not caring if I hooked but lost them, I put on a 7x leader tippet, a meter 1-pound test strand such as we’d offer cagy trout. I went on down, walking through the lobby and dining room carrying my daiwa airity pole and a box of flies, smiling back at the people who gaped at me. Out to the dance floor I went, excusing myself as I worked and threaded my way through couples lost in the strains of the band. Once at the wall, looking down at the snappers, I got a workable length of line out, then picked it up and threw my backcast high in back of me – let things 30 feet of fly line sail over the dance floor over the heads of dozens of swaying, swooning dancers.
I kept the line-up okay on my daiwa longbow df and got a pile of goof casts to those fish – but never had a hit. They’d swim up to the fly, look it over, and turn away. I tried pattern after pattern, different sizes and colours, fast retrieves and no retrieves, everything, and couldn’t get a strike. The snappers would come and look all right, but just wouldn’t take even though they were feeding constantly on hogmouth fry and grass minnows that blundered in range. I took the daiwa airity pole and tried, with no luck. We finally quit, edged around the dancers, and went to our rooms. I’ll always remember the fly line rolling out over the heads of these dancers, and the incredible wariness of the snappers.
Fortunately for us fly fishermen who are using wychwood riot, most of the salty species we go for are much more cooperative, in fact, that is one of the good things about saltwater fly fishing: excluding the tough ones, such a grey snappers and permit, most of the saltwater fish that we do not spook, and that we get our flies out of daiwa seatbox to properly, will hit.
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