Fly Fishing in Florida, Part 1
It was more than fifty years ago, when I was a high school student, that friends and I drove up to Joe Brooks’ house in Islamorada, in the Florida Keys. Joe and his wife Mary had been living there only a few years, having moved down from Baltimore. We wanted Joe to take us shimano fishing with shimano reels, but he had just started to work on his book Salt water Fly Fishing, and could not afford the time. Joe led us across the road and introduced us to Vic Barothy, the great pioneer shimano fishing camp operator and shimano fishing clothing provider who succumbed to cancer at Coral Gables, Florida, in the early seventies. Vic was running a fishing camp, so he took as to the wonderful, wild flats that existed then along North Key Largo, and I caught my first bone fish, a fine 8-pounder, on a fly. I was sixteen years old, and up to that time that was the greatest diem angling experience I ever had. Vic and I became friends, and in subsequent years I fished with him often at camps he opened at Isle of Pines, Cuba, and on the Belize River and Turneffe Islands, in what then was British Honduras, in central America.
The next day Brooks showed us a deep, coral-lined lagoon right beside U.S. 1 a bit outside Islamorada, saying it held 20 to 50 pound tarpon, and that if we fished it at night we might hook some. We were fishing the lagoon at dusk wearing shimano fishing clothing and using latest shimano reels, and after an hour or so of casting big popping bugs and streamers, when it was full dark I caught a tarpon we figured weighed about 25 pounds. That first bonefish, and that first tarpon, hooked me for the rest of my life on saltwater fly fishing.
I am often asked what my favourite kink of fly fishing is, and I always reply – brown trout fishing with dry flies on western streams. But saltwater fly fishing offers so much more excitement, so much variety, so much many opportunities, and such strong fish, that it runs a close second.
The freshwater fly fisherman who has never hooked a saltwater fish on fly shimano reels cannot comprehend the difference between freshwater and saltwater game fish. The power and speed of the important saltwater fish are incredible. There is simply no comparison between the fighting qualities of the saltwater species and the fresh.
Some saltwater fish are plain strong when hooked, others are fast, still, others jump like crazy – and then there are those species which all three traits. During the last ten years, many diem angling writers in discussing briny-water fly fishing have been prone to report the news that saltwater fly fishing is coming of age or indeed has come of age. New England fly fishermen were taking striped bass on flies sixty years ago still wearing well known at that time shimano fishing clothing. The first bone fish on fly was recorded, also, more than a half century ago. And, as a matter of fact, saltwater fly fishing is more than a century old.
It is true, of course, that many millions of fly-rodders are now shimano fishing the salt and that as the converts grow and the publicity mounts, we will have more and more saltwater fly fishing fans. And that is as it should be, because for a fly fisherman to be near the salt and not swim his flies borders on tragedy.
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