Great Point lighthouse is a popular tourist attraction on Nantucket Island in Massachusetts.

Running out of the inlet, he said, “I feel good about where I am, Dad. I feel good about what I’m about to do.” We were headed towards Cape Lookout and I knew he was talking about fishing and I know he was talking about things other than fishing, and he worked the boat through the rough water where the outgoing tide was piling up in tall rollers and calm water lay ahead.

That albacore season with Jack, everything seemed to be on hold, and teetering, and it was a long Indian summer of warm days and he was out of school during the pandemic, starting his senior college year with online classes, and finally had time for something he’d never had time for before: Getting serious about saltwater fish on the fly.

For three years he’d guided for trout in Montana during the summers, rolling back east barely in time for the first day of classes. But that summer was different, in every imaginable sense, for everyone and certainly for a rising college senior. And one of the silver linings was this: He’d spent the summer on our boat, and on his friends’ boats, chasing Spanish mackerel and bluefish and redfish, live-baiting for kings, practice-casting on the beach, and tying flies.

We’d been hard after the false albacore for two weeks, with intermittent success. During our best chance we’d each landed a fish from a popcorn-blitzing school and he was fighting his second, and in a moment of selfish disregard I cast from the console and sent a lead-wrapped size 2 heavy-gauge hook through one side of his ear cartilage and out the other. I cut the line and he landed his fish with the heavy fly flapping against his ear lobe, and then we motored away from the other anglers so I could work the fly out as he fought nausea and fainting. I was a little on edge, waiting for him to blow up—I would have, and who wouldn’t?—but he was perfectly calm. “This is fishing, Dad,” he said. “This stuff happens. Give me a minute, okay? Let me catch my breath and see if I can stand up and we’ll get back after them.”

Then, clearing the inlet, we raced towards the Hook, set on beating the other boats to the fish, the rising sun a golden scimitar on the horizon. It was three days before Halloween and he was unshaven and grizzled, with Chaco tan lines striping the tops of his feet. He even smelled like an angler, shorts and shirt slimed with fish scales and blood and sweat, and why wear a clean set when more of the same is coming?

I’m a brooder with a slight tendency to pout when I don’t like the way the stars line up, and I’d found more reasons than I should to lament certain moments of the last few months. Jack’s last year in college. His last autumn close to home. Most likely our last chance at false albacore in what could be a longer stretch than I wanted to contemplate. I’d started to count the grains of sand slipping through the glass, and hoard each one as if it was the best there would ever be. It was an unhealthy approach, for both my head and my marriage, but running out of the inlet with Jack I suddenly realized just how different my headspace was than my son’s.

In the inlet, I sensed constriction and constraint and the turbulent waters of the far-off shoals. But for Jack, the future was as boundless as the great curve of blue that heralded the ocean ahead, as full of possibility as every new day on the water.

And just then I remembered a moment from the day before. I’d arrived in the late afternoon, and Jack had the fire crackling in the fire pit, and an extra Manhattan waiting on the picnic table beside the fly rods, and he grinned as I walked through the gate. He handed me the drink as I sat by the fire and his girlfriend smiled. “You know Jack,” she said. “He wanted everything perfect for you.” It was one of those times that under different circumstances might not have snagged in my heart. Just a chummy gesture among pals. Instead, it will go down as one of my most favorite fishing memories, although there was no fishing in it, no zinging lines or thighs pressed against the gunwale, only my son who’d gone to the trouble of carefully placing each element of that backyard tableau together to let me know: So glad you’re here, Dad. So glad we can fish together.

With the inlet behind and the smoky scrim of Cape Lookout seven miles distant, Jack bore down on the throttle, oblivious to my agitated state of mind. And that’s when I realized that I needed to recalibrate my own perspectives on the days and years ahead. Open water lay before us both. We each were on a course towards horizons unseen. I’ve chased the new and the unknown all my life, and all my life those pursuits have been a source of vigor and elation. That could only change if I let it.

The bow settled and I felt the bezel turning on my own inner compass. Running towards the cape, I scanned the water for diving birds and breaking schools. We had a full day of fishing ahead, my son and I, and neither of us would rather be anywhere else in the world. Whatever grain of sand was to follow was less consequential than the moment at hand.

…In our last issue of 2021, you’ll find themes consistent with this message of looking optimistically toward the future while respectfully recognizing the past. We welcome the venerable writer T. Edward Nickens as a new contributor. His thoughtful piece in The Undertow explores his own epiphany about hopeful perspectives on unknown horizons. Meanwhile, we also look back with respect on those who’ve preceded us; James Spica guides us, fly rod in hand, along the literary footsteps of popular New England writers, and we pay homage to SoCal fly fishing pioneer Sam Nix. Chico Fernandez provides a treatise on fly casting, Carlos Cortez schools us on not being mind-tricked by permit, and Michael Smith, another new contributor, reminds us to make time to fish.

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More about Saltwater fly fishing in Cape Cod…

George V. Roberts – Plymouth, Massachusetts

September – George V. Roberts Jr

Mark White – Atlantic Striped Bass – A Species in Peril

Atlantic Striped Bass: Pisces in Peril | Mark White

The post That Albacore Season – T. Edward Nickens first appeared on Tail Fly Fishing Magazine.

The post That Albacore Season – T. Edward Nickens appeared first on Tail Fly Fishing Magazine.

The post Stripers in the Suds – John G. Sherman first appeared on Tail Fly Fishing Magazine.

The post Stripers in the Suds – John G. Sherman appeared first on Tail Fly Fishing Magazine.

I was in my late thirties, a fishing bum without a trust fund. But I had an idea. I’d rent a house near the beach for two weeks in the thick of it. I could fit three groups of three anglers for three days each. If it wasn’t happening out front, we’d drive the coast, looking for birds. This would not be a luxury-vacation package. There’d be no champagne between tides, no shore lunch, and dinner would be at Riptides, where pub food ruled the menu. This would be about the fishing.

In May I found the house. It was a three-bedroom ranch that sat two streets up from the beach. It was owned by a retired Boston firefighter and his wife. It was nothing special, no rose-clad cottage with an ocean view, but it would do. We’d only be using it to sleep. Each angler would have his own room. I’d zip into a sleeping bag on the sofa. There was a fireplace. And the offseason rate was good. I gave the firefighter a check for the entire amount.

I had a website then and a fairly extensive mailing list. But I wasn’t going to offer this to just anyone, especially anglers within easy driving distance or ones who would pay this year, and then next year rent a house themselves, bringing their own friends to take over the beach during prime time. I wanted trusted clients from afar. If they flew in I could pick them up at Logan or Providence.

I did a mailing—a straightforward letter, no photos. I was selling the steak rather than the sizzle.

I pitched it to Gary over the phone. Gary was a commercial pilot from Vermont. He had bought a bunch of stuff from my website, and I had done some custom tying for one of his trips. He really liked my interpretation of Borski’s Bonefish Short; he couldn’t reach Borski to buy originals.

“I’ve caught some of the biggest bass I’ve taken right off this beach with a floating line and a hair-headed fly,” I told Gary. “I don’t want to oversell it, but this is world-class fishing.”

Gary was very interested and thought he might book a week for himself. The money would be great, I thought. I was talking on a fitness forum with a woman named Lori. Things were getting interesting, and I was thinking about flying down to Atlanta to meet her. Gary’s check would cover that.

Time passed and the small window closed, with no takers. I was thinking I had played it too conservatively with the promotion. I sent a few more effusive emails, made some desperate calls—a couple of bites, but nothing.

Then it happened.

Saturday was move-in day, but I didn’t move in. I had my fishing gear in the back of my Isuzu Trooper, but that was about it. No bag of clothes. Just my sleeping bag.

The small parking lot above the beach was empty. A couple of people were walking their dogs along the shoreline, but there was no one with a fishing rod. Just me.

There was some bait in the water, peanut bunker, but not the glut of previous years.

An hour and a half of casting produced a single fish, a 20-inch schoolie. Not a fish anyone would cross the country for. Not a fish you could make a living from.

At Riptides, Dail put a beer in front of me. “Where are your friends tonight?”

“They didn’t come,” I said. “The fishing’s off.”

“Dail, can you put something else on?” said a guy down the end of the bar, motioning to the television.

“There is nothing else,” Dail said.

Even though there was no one else in the house, I slept on the sofa that night. I was already planning to get out of there at the end of two weeks without having to make a bed or wash a dish.

Just after sunrise, I stopped at the beach before heading home. It was pristine, but nothing moving. I didn’t even put my waders on.

It was just as well no one had signed up. While the nation reeled over the terrorist attacks, my worries were closer to home. My father was going to the bank every day. Why? He always kept his spending cash in the pocket of a coat hanging in his closet. When I went through all the pockets of all of his coats, I found nearly $1,500. I’d also found a couple of cans of dog food in the pantry. The thing was, we didn’t have a dog.

When I did go back to the beach house, later that week, there was $150 sitting on the kitchen table next to the unopened bottle of Cruzan Single Barrel I had bought for the clients I’d been expecting. Bill and Sheila had stayed there one night, and Bill had left the money to help with expenses. No fish, Bill’s email had said.

That was before my father’s death, my marriage to Lori, nursing school, hospital jobs, house and mortgage, graduate programs, and the small office I occupy today in an outpatient clinic, as far from that beach as you can imagine, if only about 30 miles.

I still stop by the beach once in a while in September, and sometimes I string a rod and walk down to the water. But the fishing has never been the same.

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The post September – George V. Roberts Jr first appeared on Tail Fly Fishing Magazine.

The post September – George V. Roberts Jr appeared first on Tail Fly Fishing Magazine.

Inshore Surf Sight Fishing for Corbina

I’m wandering the beaches again on an early April morning, looking for California corbina. I walk three beaches for about  7 miles, looking at structure and looking for fish. The third beach doesn’t show much promise until I’m about to leave. I look down and see two corbina sitting right at my feet like a pair of silver ghosts. They immediately blow up and run for deeper water. 

Okay. We have some fish here, and it’s the early season. Soon I see a pair of fish, then a triple, and finally a pair in the distance. I line up a cast at an angle and slightly past them. I’m fishing a fly I developed for sight fishing, a bright pink Surfin’ Merkin. I can see the bug in front of the fish. A couple of quick strips puts the fly right in the distant pair’s path, and I let it sit. My type-6 line is on the bottom, the bug is anchored, and I have a good position. 

As soon as the fish near the fly I start bumping it to look like a burrowing sand crab, which causes the fly to kick out puffs of sand, its legs simulating the paddle legs on the real thing. Both fish begin to follow the bouncing fly, and eventually one lunges ahead of the other to eat. I watch both fish and fly to judge when to set the hook. As soon as I see the fish lunge and arch its back and the pink fly disappear, I know it’s on. 

Immediately both fish blow up and flee to deeper water. The head of the hooked fish is shaking all the way into the backing. Montana-based Sweetgrass Rods designed this bamboo rod for me, specifically for this fish—and it’s a great stick. The click-and-pawl reel is screaming now, and the bamboo is bouncing with each shake of the fish’s head as I clear the backing. Eventually I surf the corbina in on the waves and slide it onto the wet sand for release. The overhead light brightens the purple iridescence of its back and the chrome sides. The bright pink fly looks like a wad of bubble gum stuck to the fish’s lip.

This is the season’s first fair-hooked, sight-caught corbina—a fish to which I’ve been addicted for a very long time. 

Corbina, which run from California’s Point Conception down through the west coast of Mexico, tend to show up with the mole crab beds in the spring as the sand pushes into the beaches. Although the season generally runs from April to August, the unique and challenging corbina are really only available for surf sight casting in the summer. You can fish for corbina blind. You can also cast to suspicious swirls or short sightings—what we call vicinity casting. But the real deal is sight casting and actually watching corbina eat your bug. Corbina are easy to snag, so most of us only count fish hooked in the lip.

A lot of factors need to line up for a good shot at sight fishing: good sun overhead, no fog, good structure, low wind, and solid sand crab beds to hold the fish for a while. But great conditions aren’t guaranteed, so you have to work with what you have; when the stars do align, however, sight fishing for corbina can be awesome.

I’m always scouting locations, looking for beaches that are cut up with structure like buckets or troughs, which will fill up at different tidal cycles. As corbina push in looking for a meal, they’ll pile up in some of this structure, which gives the angler a better opportunity to present a fly. Scouting multiple beaches at low tide can pay off when I find one that is set up better than others. 

Troughs will have lateral current, and corbina typically feed into it. Anglers can follow a fish and get multiple presentations. My favorite is a trough that dumps into a bucket and turns 90 degrees out to the ocean with a flat right next to it. The fish will pile up at that corner and hop onto the flat to feed before rolling back to the deeper corner water.

Some sections of beach will be structured more like a flat, and water will push in a sort of sheet. In this situation, fish will sometimes ride that water in with their backs up out of the water, feed, and then leave with the tidal recess. Swirls, backs, and wagging tails clue anglers to the presence of fish. Without structure like buckets and troughs, you may have a short window to present before the fish has fed and left. 

Most of us sight fishing for corbina use rods from 4-weight to a 7-weight with a variety of lines: 30-foot sinking head integrated lines for most situations, intermediate heads for calm days, and in rare instances floating lines.

The fish will swim right over the sunken head. You can use a larger-test leader and pull on the fish harder to get them in quick. If you are fishing a sinking line, give it a test cast and see how much the line swings in the current before anchoring in the sand. This will give you a rough idea of how much to lead the fish to avoid presenting the fly on top of them or behind them. 

My go-to sight-casting fly is a pink Surfin’ Merkin, which is based on the Merkin permit fly. The Surfin’ Merkin has been tweaked to make the fly look and act more like a burrowing sand crab. It is also pink (rather than Merkin gray) for improved angler visibility, which doesn’t seem to bother the fish. You’ll see that bright salmon pink at a distance and at some depth in structure. Being able to see the fly and the fish greatly improves your odds of getting a grab and setting the hook.

I mentioned a bamboo rod earlier; over the years I’ve migrated to slower rods because most of this game is in close—as in 5-to-30-feet close. No kidding. A corbina will sometimes follow my fly until its head is out of the water at the sand’s edge before eating. So I often have to cast with part of the fly line’s head still inside the rod. I’m not casting to the fences here, so a slower, more accurate rod works better for the close game.

Sight fishing for corbina in the California surf is by nature a tricky and local endeavor—and for these reasons a like-minded community has developed around this fishery over the years. Initially there were just a few of us nuts out there; now there are more. Those interested in giving corbina a try might enjoy my friend Al Quattrocchi’s book The Corbina Diaries, which covers the history and techniques of this game. 

For many years we used to fish a spot we shared with an older spin fisherman named Matt. Initially he was a bit grumpy when we took to fly fishing in his area of operation. He fished live sand crabs and wore a hat right out of the Crocodile Dundee movies, so we nicknamed him “Corbina Dundee.” One day I was sight fishing a single fish that was ping-ponging between a group of swimmers on its right and left. Matt, who had finished fishing, was busy watching. I couldn’t get a good presentation. My only option was to lob out a cast perpendicular to the fish’s travel—and sure enough, the fish turned 90 degrees and followed the fly. I kept slowly bumping it all the way to the edge of the waterline, and my fish ate the fly with part of its head out of the water before screaming off to the deep. Laughing, I looked to Matt, who had observed the entire incredible show. 

Sight fishing corbina in the surf isn’t easy, but the cool people and the crazy fish keep me coming back. And even if you strike out, you get a nice walk on the beach out of the deal.

Bio: Paul Cronin has been fishing local California beaches for 20 years. When he isn’t fishing, he designs and builds robots in his workshop.

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Los Cabos – Saltwater Fly Fishing

Saltwater Fly Tying – The Salty Stripper

Fiberglass Rods for Saltwater Fly Fishing

Lessons Learned Inshore Surf Fly Fishing

Within Tail Fly Fishing.com are several great articles on inshore surf fishing for several species of saltwater fish.  Stripers in the Suds is another great article to learn more about the sport of inshore surf fly fishing.

The post California Corbina: Sight Fishing the Surf first appeared on Tail Fly Fishing Magazine.

The post California Corbina: Sight Fishing the Surf appeared first on Tail Fly Fishing Magazine.

Captain Earl Waters stripped off 60 feet of line from the reel and handed me the thick, one-piece composite rod. “Here,” he said curtly. “Cast.”

I unfurled the length of the line after a couple of back casts, shooting the fly straight to nowhere in particular.

“Hand the rod to your buddy,” he said, directing Charlie Madden to do the same drill.

Waters had stopped his pristine, teal-green Silver King skiff, with a coral-colored cap, about a half-mile out in the Gulf, just outside of the Homosassa River channel. We were apparently being interviewed realtime for a skills check. 

Madden made his cast. Seemingly satisfied with the results, Waters fired up the outboard and zoomed south toward the flotilla of boats spread across the expanse of shallows outside of Chassahowitzka Channel.

It was May 15, 1993. Madden and I were, at last, tarpon fishing the equivalent of golf’s Augusta National. We were rubes, with about a year of saltwater fly fishing under our belts, and had thin wallets with just enough credit between us to split two guided days at Homosassa and two nights at the storied Riverside Inn.

Booking it had not been easy; we couldn’t find a guide who’d take us. Without a history and a bankroll to fund at least a week or more on the water, Homosassa guides were not particularly interested in taking on new clients, especially neophytes. 

We reached out to David Olsen, former manager of the now-defunct Fly Fisherman in Orlando, Florida, for help. A few days later, Olsen called back: “If you guys can fish May 15 and 16, I have a guide who’ll take you. Name’s Earl Waters. I vouched for you guys—told Earl you could cast and see fish.”   

Thus, the on-the-water interview, which had really begun at the Homosassa launch ramp.

Our initial introduction at the ramp wasn’t much more than a head nod of acknowledgement that we were Waters’ clients. After readying his skiff, he examined the four-piece graphite rod and Islander reel that Madden and I planned to share. 

“You can put that rod back in your car,” Waters directed. 

Reading the perplexed look on my face, he answered my unspoken question. 

“That rod is too small for these fish.”

I was bummed. The four-piece, 12-weight Loomis IMX, stamped “DEMO” just above the single cork handle, was my prized tarpon possession. I’d found it in a bin marked “half-price” in a sporting goods store in Denver on a recent business trip. That it was now being relegated to the hotel room, along with the dozen IGFA-leadered flies, neatly fixed in a new leader stretcher rigged specifically for this trip, was painful.

In retrospect, I fully appreciate the atmosphere of that morning. Waters expected much, considering his clients and friends included the likes of Al Pflueger and John Emory. Indeed, in Monte Burke’s Lords of the Fly (an extraordinary, must-read compendium on the 50-year history of fly fishing for tarpon—specifically for record fish at Homosassa), the arcing intersection of legendary guides and anglers, chasing tarpon for the better part of half a century, explains it all. 

Over our two days, Waters became genuinely sociable, and generous with information on all manner of tarpon fishing, even though finding the tarpon proved elusive. Shots were few and far between, but Madden did manage one bite and landed a classically average Homosassa tarpon.

Despite the slow action, Homosassa was mesmerizing. It possessed a magnetic draw for Madden and me that could not—and would not—be ignored.

In the Beginning

Homosassa, situated on Florida’s Gulf Coast about 70 miles north of Tampa, is legendary. Its legacy of tarpon fishing began about 1970. 

“When Lefty Kreh wrote about a trip he’d made to Homosassa in The Tampa Tribune, fishing with ‘the MirrOlure guys,’ Harold LaMaster and Kirk Smith, the word got out,” Captain Dan Malzone said in a recent interview. “LaMaster and Smith invited Kreh to fish with them as they chunked lures into the hole around Black Rock, which was stacked thick with big tarpon. I owned three sporting good stores at the time, so naturally, I’d heard about it.

“In 1972, Keys anglers Normand Duncan and Gary Marconi caught wind of Homosassa’s giant tarpon that nobody fished and started fly fishing there. They invited me to fish with them in 1974.  In the mid 70s, we were the only guys on the water.”

Subsequently, Malzone would fish Homosassa three days each week, Friday through Sunday, the only days his businesses would allow him, for the next several years.

In 1976, Florida Keys guide Steve Huff and angler Tom Evans, who would book Huff for 45 straight days, had had a rough spring, nasty weather keeping them dockside more often than not. One windy morning, with a low-pressure system settling on the Keys, they had breakfast with Duncan at a local diner. He suggested they drive up and fish Homosassa, where the weather might be better. “Where the hell is that?” asked Evans.

“We drove up to Homosassa,” Huff said in a recent interview, “launched the skiff … and never saw a fish all that first day. So the next day we hired a plane from a local airport to fly over the area to look for fish. And we found them … tarpon were everywhere.” 

Huff and Evans hit the water soon after they landed. “Tom hooked up on a big fish,” Huff recalled.  “He immediately became smitten with the big fish at Homosassa and wanted to come back.”

The following year, Huff and Evans spent three consecutive weeks fishing Homosassa. The flats were still mostly absent other anglers and skiffs, but record chaser Billy Pate had gotten word of Homosassa’s giant tarpon. Like Evans, Pate had the financial wherewithal to pursue big fish for weeks at a time, and he spent the entire tarpon season chasing records at Homosassa.

“On Memorial Day 1977, Pate and his guide (Hal Chittum) were the only ones on the water besides Tom and me,” Huff said. “About three in the afternoon, fish began pouring in from the west by the thousands. Tom caught seven tarpon that afternoon, all over 150 pounds. His seventh fish was 177 pounds.”

Continue reading this and the hundreds of other impeccable features in the pages of Tail Fly Fishing Magazine, the only magazine dedicated to fly fishing in saltwater.

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Alive & Well in the Florida Keys

A Fish My Age – Henry Hughes

Worm Swarming—At Long Last

The post Homosassa:  A Reminiscence of The Greatest Tarpon Fishery first appeared on Tail Fly Fishing Magazine.

The post Homosassa:  A Reminiscence of The Greatest Tarpon Fishery appeared first on Tail Fly Fishing Magazine.

Part of Gartside’s genius was developing deadly yet easy-to-tie flies. His Gurgler and Slider topwater patterns became saltwater standards. Jack’s book Striper Strategies was described by reviewer Steve Raymond as “one of the most remarkable striper-fishing manuals to see the light of day.”

Gartside, who died in 2009, was one of a kind. He appeared on the cover of Fly Fishing in Salt Waters, making a cast while riding his large inflatable giraffe “Gerald.” When Lefty Kreh was asked his opinion of Gartside, he said, “His paint don’t dry.”

I met Gartside while helping at Robinson’s booth at a fly fishing trade show in Marlborough, Massachusetts. Robinson’s friend Dale Linder was also attending the show. Gartside was holding court, joking and tying flies at a nearby table. He invited the three of us to try fly fishing for striped bass when the weather warmed up.

On a bright June afternoon, we waded onto a Newburyport striper flat. Gartside caught one small schoolie after another while the rest of us got skunked. Not one to mince words, Gartside told me my retrieve resembled a motion he associated with self-gratification.

I was more concerned with the waves filling my boots. When I realized I couldn’t walk, I yelled for help.

“Don’t worry!” Gartside replied. “When your waders are full, you’ll reach neutral buoyancy.”

Linder had more humanitarian instincts. Luckily, he was also strong. He waded over and hoisted me up. I leaned forward and dumped out the water. I headed to shore on wobbly legs, telling myself, I don’t belong here. But we weren’t done. Gartside had another spot for night fishing.

The evening sun was slipping from from view as the tide came in. We stumbled through the grassy hummocks and sucking muck of a tidal flat and arrived at a point. Gartside walked out onto a rock jetty and started casting. Robinson, Linder, and I spread out along the shore.

I was using a borrowed 8-weight outfit heavier than anything I’d ever used. The sink tip and bulky streamer added another degree of difficulty, and I was hesitant to wade out very far in the dark, unknown waters.

I’d make woefully short casts, sit down on the sand for a while, get up, and do it again. I sweated, cursed, and caught nothing. Around 1 a.m., the agreed time to depart, I heard Robinson and Linder talking as they walked back up the beach. Then I heard a splash.

There was enough moonlight to see surface swirls of what I suspected were feeding fish. I slapped out another cast, stripped twice, and got a jolting strike. Slack flew up through the guides, but before I got the fish on the reel, a loop of line was yanked tight around my right index finger.

The rod was straight out now. So was my finger. Unaware of my predicament, Robinson started yelling, “Let the fish run, Jack! Let him run!”

I grabbed the line below the first guide, pulled, and got enough slack to free my trapped digit. There was a momentary tug of war, then the hook pulled out, and the line went limp. Robinson and Linder made a few casts, but the fish had departed to deeper water. As we reeled up to leave, Robinson said, “Well, at least you had one on.” It wasn’t much consolation.

We found Gartside standing where we’d left him. He had a fish taking drag, but it turned out to be an unremarkable striper, foul hooked in the tail. The walk back to the car held another surprise.

Gartside inflated a small rubber raft. I was puzzled. It looked like a child’s pool toy. But it became apparent that we’d need the damn thing to get back to terra firma. A wide ditch that was ankle deep on the way in was now a flowing canal. Gartside assembled a plastic paddle, handed it to me, and said, “We’ll go one at a time.” A length of thin rope was attached to the raft for retrieval.

Some experiences enlighten us. Others just remind us of the fragility of our existence. I paddled anxiously across the outgoing current as Gartside yelled, “Row a little faster, Jack, unless you want to go out to Plum Island!”

Here We Go Again

Fast forward to 2017. I’ve lived in Lakeville, Maine for 18 years. Ed Roberts, who I frequently fish with, lives half the year near Grand Lake Stream, a premier landlocked salmon fishery, and half the year in Florida. Both of us have more than 60 years in the rear view mirror, and like me, Roberts is originally from Connecticut. He’s a stalwart friend with a good sense of humor.

Among other things, Roberts time-shared a Battenkill River fishing camp with Joan and Lee Wulff. He made his living as a mechanical engineer, and he’s also an expert rod builder who works with bamboo as well as graphite. It’s not a cliché to describe him as young for his age. Forget white hair as a marker of senescence. For arm exercise, he does hammer curls with dumbbells I strain to lift.

When he captained an offshore sport boat on the Connecticut coast, Roberts and his clients fished for everything from sharks to yellowfin tuna. Now he fishes the flats when he winters in Vero Beach, Florida. He also spends a week in Rhode Island every summer, fly fishing for striped bass at night. He invited me to try it.

Wading the ocean after sundown? Fishing a channel coming out of a tidal marsh? I had my doubts. Roberts described a spot where he rarely encounters other fishermen. To get down to the water, he hangs onto a rope tied to the base of a tree. He says it’s easier than it sounds.

I was still hesitant, so he had me try the fly rod he uses; the action fit me to a T. He offered to build me an identical 9-weight. Okay, Ed, I’m in.

Into the Night

It’s June 2019—my third trip now. The long day’s drive from Maine includes the usual stop in New Hampshire for tax-free liquor. We arrive in Rhode Island late in the afternoon.

The house we rent, like our arrival routine, has become pleasantly familiar. Boxes and coolers are emptied into cabinets, drawers, refrigerator. The portable grill goes on the table out back. Tackle goes in the front room.

We sit at a small table on the front porch overlooking Narragansett Bay, decompressing from eight hours on the road. Roberts lights a cigar while I poke through fly boxes. We decide when to eat. After supper, we assemble rods, check tippets. Tackle goes back into Roberts’ SUV.

Fishing at night, we don’t attract unwanted attention to where we fish. It’s silly to think of other fishermen as interlopers, but our sense of ownership is reinforced by the solitude we have come to expect once the sun goes down. Half an hour before dark, we turn onto the familiar grass-crowned two-track. No one else is parked at the sandy dead end.

We suit up and walk in. Crossing the elevated field, we can see the incoming tide filling the back reaches of the marsh. Two herons stand motionless on a distant mud flat. The air still has the low-tide tang of salt and clean decay.

The coiled rope is where we left it hidden last year, tied to the base of a small cedar. The slope I once imagined as daunting is neither long nor steep. The rope is a convenience, not a necessity. Roberts gives it a test yank before we go down….

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Jack Gagnon was a monthly contributor and part-time editor for the Northwoods Sporting Journal (sportingjournal.com) in West Enfield, Maine for 15 years. His work has appeared in Trout, Fly Fisherman, Virginia Sportsman, Gray’s Sporting Journal, The Upland Almanac, and Sporting Classics.

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The post Striper Redux – Jack Gagnon first appeared on Tail Fly Fishing Magazine.

The post Striper Redux – Jack Gagnon appeared first on Tail Fly Fishing Magazine.

But the North Pacific can be a fickle mistress, and the trick is to read her moods and accept her at her best. There will be days when that same dictionary doesn’t hold enough terms of endearment to do her justice—and this is one of those days, the pleasure of the moment amplified by the memory of the week before and NOAA’s prediction of the week to come. To have remained ashore this morning would have been churlish.

Yesterday’s wind has gone wherever it meant to go, and Clarence Strait rests as still as a backyard bass pond. Miles away to the east, the mainland Cleveland Peninsula appears to lie within easy reach of a canoe, although I know better than to try. Our skiff’s four-stroke outboard purrs quietly as a kitten, but the noise is still enough to leave me feeling vaguely embarrassed, as does the brief disturbance our wake creates when it slaps the nearby shore.

The silence that rises to greet us feels immensely welcome when I reach the point, cut the motor, and let the skiff slide to a gradual stop. Across the channel a northbound cruise ship glides along, bearing its own community of visitors determined to make Alaska feel as much like the places they came from as possible. Perhaps it’s best that way. Mid-channel, two purse seiners cross paths bound in opposite directions, each evidently with its own ideas about where to find the fish. That’s it. Otherwise, my wife, Lori, and I are alone on the water save for Kenai, our immense, seaworthy yellow Lab, standing at the bow like the figurehead of a Viking warship.

While Lori twists the tops off our aluminum rod tubes—we’ve learned to respect the vulnerability of unprotected fly rods in bouncing skiffs—I watch the shoreline slide along a hundred yards to starboard. I’ve timed our arrival to coincide with the morning low tide, but the currents and terrain are so complex here that one never really knows how the drift will behave until one can feel it. Easing gently back toward the mouth of the bay, I like what I’ve found. Strong currents make for difficult fly fishing.

Earlier in the summer, a mature bald eagle took possession of a tall, dead tree on the rocky point. The bird uses the tree not as a residence but as a vantage point from which to hunt. Now I watch it keenly as it lifts and sets off across the glassy water. Instead of stooping dramatically like an osprey, the eagle flies in search of fish as if it were making a bombing run, and after banking sharply a quarter mile offshore, it begins to descend. Then it hits the surface in an awkward splash and begins to struggle, talons locked upon something weighty.

The eagle cannot get airborne again—its wings are too wet, the load too heavy. But it isn’t giving up, either, and as it flaps laboriously back across the water toward shore, I spot the early morning sunlight flashing off something large and shiny in its grasp. It has caught a salmon that can only be a silver, and the fish was swimming close enough to the surface to be in reach of an eagle’s claws and hence a fly line.

Time to get ours in the water.

The vast majority of salmon taken on fly rods are caught in fresh water as they transition from the marine phase of their complex life cycle and move upstream toward the spawning grounds where they will reproduce and die. Fishing for them there is logical enough on many levels, ranging from the practical to the aesthetic. Rivers concentrate fish and identify prime locations to cast to them, and swinging streamers is a wonderful way to fish for salmon. Furthermore, the inevitable cycle of life and death never loses its capacity to impress as I watch it play out before me in real time.

Anadromous fish are at their best, however, before they begin to undergo the profound physiological and anatomical changes fresh water induces. Granted, “best” is a subjective term, but most anglers who have experienced salmon in the salt agree that they are more vigorous and challenging on the end of a line than they would be a few weeks after traveling up their natal stream. They strike harder, run more powerfully, and jump more frequently in the salt. They also taste better and are more nutritious, which may not matter to some but certainly does matter to coastal residents who have relied on salmon as traditional table fare for generations.

The rate of decline varies considerably by species. Pink salmon—the lightweights among the five salmon species in terms of both size and reputation as an angling quarry—can actually be a lot of fun as bright fish migrating along shorelines, but they require little more than a whiff of fresh water to start turning into the grotesque, dead-weight humpies that most experienced anglers would just as soon do without. These changes are usually apparent in pinks holding in the salt near a stream mouth even before they enter fresh water. Silvers and kings, by contrast, often remain bright and strong miles upstream from the sea, with considerable variation among drainages. I’ve enjoyed angling for those fish for decades—but they still weren’t as challenging on the end of a fly line as they would have been at sea.

Over the years, I’ve taken numerous representatives of the last two Pacific salmon species—sockeyes (reds) and chums (dogs)—on fly tackle in what was technically salt water, by which I mean that if I dipped my fingers in it and licked them my tongue would register “salt” in the impulses sent to my brain. Those encounters, however, took place in tidal estuaries. These intertidal zones are among my favorite places to fish for salmon, since the fish (save for the pinks) are still bright and beautiful, and while I’m catching them I can observe the diversity of wildlife that makes the marine environment so fascinating. If I’m in the mood for seafood, I can even wait for low tide and dig a bucket of clams before leaving. The technical aspects of the fishing, however, don’t differ all that much from what takes place farther upstream. So for the rest of this piece I’ll focus on what I consider one of North America’s greatest angling challenges: catching Pacific salmon on flies at sea.

First, a matter of definition: When I say fly fishing, I mean, well … fly fishing. I do not mean mooching with a fly rigged to a banana weight connected to a fly rod. I do not mean trolling a fly on a downrigger. It’s not that I’m a snob, and anyone who chooses to fish using those techniques is free to do so with no disrespect intended. I simply fish the way I choose to fish, and TFFM is a fly fishing magazine.

Geographically, I’ll focus on Alaska’s Southeastern Panhandle, for several reasons. Its all-but-infinite labyrinth of islands and bays offers complex inshore terrain that can concentrate fish and provide shelter from the open ocean. Every small community in the area offers access to good water, and most of them are interesting destinations in their own right. Salmon bound for streams all up and down the Pacific coast pass through these waters seasonally, so their numbers are not dependent on spawning success in any particular drainage in prior years. This kind of fishing requires a target-rich environment, and the fish are here. This coastline is spectacular, and diverse wildlife abounds. I used to live there and know the fishery better than a casual visitor can. With all this said, I readily acknowledge that the British Columbia coast offers the same benefits as a saltwater salmon destination.

As for the fish, I’ll concentrate on silvers and kings because they are the most rewarding, and their feeding habits make them a feasible quarry at sea—in contrast to chums, which feed largely on jellyfish, and sockeyes, which prefer zooplankton. We’ll go in chronological order beginning with kings, which arrive inshore earliest, even though they are significantly harder than silvers to catch on flies.

While some resident “feeder” kings can be found near shore throughout the winter, both the number and average size of the fish increase with the arrival of migrating kings, usually sometime in June. This schedule makes them the first of the Pacific salmon to arrive every year, as acknowledged in the term “spring salmon,” one of the king’s many nicknames. Peak king fishing usually takes place between mid-June and mid-July along the Alaska coast, with some variation by location and from year to year.

The hardest part of catching saltwater kings on flies is getting the fly down to the fish because they run deeper in the water column than other salmon species. A fast-sinking shooting head is essential, but a knowledge of local tidal currents is equally important. As with current in a river, the brisker the flow the harder it is to get the fly deep. I generally fish for kings within an hour of slack tide, either high or low, and avoid extreme tides all together. Casting “upstream” into the tidal current and allowing the fly to swing beneath the boat might not seem elegant, but it’s the most efficient means of getting the fly down to the 25- to 50-foot depth usually needed to reach kings.

Fly fishing for ocean kings is a bit like big-game hunting: A lot of time can pass between encounters with the quarry, but just one such encounter provides an immense sense of accomplishment and satisfaction. My best ocean king was a 40-pound fish I caught one morning near Sitka. I had previously lived for several years next to the famous Kenai River, where a king that size was just another nice fish. Although I’d taken larger kings on flies from the Kenai, none came close to inspiring the excitement of that fish from the Pacific. After a surprisingly subtle strike on my standard baitfish imitation, the fish cleared the water a half-dozen times as it ripped off 200 yards of backing into the channel. Then it reversed course and headed inshore toward a kelp bed that could have spelled disaster. Turning the fish put more pressure on my 10-weight than any tarpon, tuna, or giant trevally I’d ever asked it to handle. After all that, a prowling sea lion almost nailed the fish as it came to the net. That story illustrates why I’m willing to invest the time and effort needed to hook a king in salt water.

Silver salmon provide an interesting contrast to kings and are generally a much more fly-rod-friendly quarry at sea. While early returning silvers often overlap with kings, peak silver fishing usually takes place later in the summer, from late July until September. Silvers tend to be much more abundant, and when they’re there it’s not unusual to hook multiple fish on one tide change.

Silvers feed higher in the water column than kings, which makes them far easier to fish for with fly tackle. An intermediate sink tip line will usually suffice, and I’ve even caught them right on top with floating lines. I like to have a spectrum of line options available so I can reach fish at whatever depth they’re feeding.

Kings and silvers at sea both feed on a variety of squid, shrimp, and baitfish. They are rarely selective, and presentation at the optimal depth is always more important than specific choice of fly patterns. I do most of my fishing with a generic baitfish imitation that resembles a herring as much as anything else. Eyes and some flash are important ingredients in any pattern meant for saltwater salmon.

Any experienced angler can look at a salmon stream and identify likely places to start casting. The ocean, by contrast, is a huge place, and the challenge of locating fish there can feel intimidating. Anglers trolling with conventional tackle can cover a lot more water while prospecting for fish than we can casting with fly rods. But even if you’re not lucky enough to have an eagle on the payroll to do the scouting for you, there are some tricks that can help get you casting to productive water.

Terrain features like the rocky point I described earlier can concentrate fish migrating inshore toward their natal streams, and underwater humps—identified with the help of charts and a simple depth finder—attract baitfish and feeding salmon. Kings in particular will often congregate near dropoffs adjacent to kelp beds. The “fish finder” function on modern sonar can also be useful, especially for locating kings. Personally I’m averse to relying too heavily on technology in the outdoors, so I have never used it much for fish finding myself.

When I’m fishing with friends who are using conventional tackle, I often spend my time casting an 8-weight near the surface for silvers or pelagic rockfish until they start hooking kings. That tactic saves a lot of wear and tear on my casting arm, and I don’t regard it as cheating.

Relatively free of obstructions, the skiff’s forward deck makes the craft’s best casting platform. Ever the gentleman, I’ve ceded it to Lori while I do my best from the cluttered stern. Sulking at my side, Kenai makes it clear that he wishes we were duck hunting, but at least he knows enough to dodge the flying loops in my running line.

For 20 minutes, we drift along on the tide as casually as Huck Finn on the Mississippi. Then Lori whoops and Kenai rouses from his lethargy as a yard-long, mint-bright silver goes airborne beside the boat. I start to reel in frantically so that I can grab the net, but suddenly I’m hooked up, too. In contrast to kings, which can strike with a subtlety that belies their size, silvers often slam streamers hard. With my concentration elsewhere and one hand already reaching for the net, I might have lost my rod to this one. I’ve come perilously close before.

Chaos reigns briefly as the two fish circle in opposite directions and cross our lines while Kenai barks encouragement. But it’s open water, and save for one determined run by Lori’s fish for the nearest kelp bed, there is little room for error other than that of our own making. Ten minutes later, we’ve landed both silvers and are back at it again. Evidently we’ve found the fish, because Lori is hooked up again before I’ve found the drift I want. And so the action goes for nearly an hour until it stops as abruptly as it began—perhaps not to be repeated for the rest of the day, the rest of the week, or the rest of the season.

Who knows why? Mystery is just a part of the sea’s intrigue, and one more reason why I keep coming back.

Bio: A former Alaska resident who now lives in rural Montana, Don Thomas and his wife, Lori, have fly fished salt waters all around the globe. After growing up on Puget Sound and living in a coastal Alaska village, he has a soft spot for the North Pacific. Don’s and Lori’s work has appeared in numerous national publications.

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The post Chrome from the Sea first appeared on Tail Fly Fishing Magazine.

The post Chrome from the Sea appeared first on Tail Fly Fishing Magazine.

The best time to experience a bait ball and frenzied billfish on the fly is late October though late November, as long as favorable conditions prevail and the sardines do not move out too quickly.

The speed of a striped marlin is often exaggerated, with reports exceeding 50 miles per hour. While marlin are capable of impressive bursts of speed, they top out at around 25 miles per hour. A typical striped marlin is between 150 and 250 pounds, but a 12- to 15-year-old fish can approach 450 pounds.

The sardine schools have only their great numbers as defense. To confuse predators, they form tight balls, relying on the probability that some will fall but enough will survive. Not only do the sardines have to endure assault from below, but they are also attacked by frigates from above.

Marlin are pack hunters; they systematically take turns charging the bait, bills slashing, in an attempt to disorient, injure, and isolate individual fish from the school. Isolated prey last no more than a few seconds outside of the protective cloud of the ball.

The most common marlin flies are white topped with green or blue; they can be tied as straight baitfish patterns or a popper head can be added to create surface disturbance. You simply toss them into the boil and strip them to suggest wounded or isolated prey. During times of high activity, a few strips are all that is necessary.

The frenzy can last for minutes or hours, but it typically stops as quickly as it starts.

Even if it lasts only minutes, it’s truly a sight to see.

A Photo Essay by Andrea Izzotti
Words by Joseph Ballarini

Bio: Andrea Izzotti is an award-winning wildlife photographer based in Genova, Italy. He is the author of Tales from Blue and Other Colors (2020) and Travelers in the Blue (2020). His work has appeared in National Geographic Italy, National Geographic Viajes, National Geographic Kids, Focus, Focus Wild, as well as other books and magazines. You can visit his website at andreaizzotti.it.

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The post Los Cabos – Saltwater Fly Fishing first appeared on Tail Fly Fishing Magazine.

The post Los Cabos – Saltwater Fly Fishing appeared first on Tail Fly Fishing Magazine.

I work in a fly shop. I hear and see every opinionated cliché that our beloved little niche sport conjures up. Often it comes from my customers, sometimes from my peers. 

“Always fish IGFA tippet.” 

“That fly with a spinner blade is so dirty!”

“Euro-nymphing is just Chuck and Duck Lite.”

“Bluefish are trash fish, a striper is a real gamefish.”

For the love of God, just go fishing. 

It would be compounded if I were friends with my customers and local guides on Facebook (as many of my coworkers are), but that’s one vitriolic cesspool too many for me. A peer will frequently inquire, “Did you see the rant about [insert technique] that [insert local guide] did on Facebook?” And while I’ve blessedly ensured my answer is always “Nope,” I’m never surprised when my peer relates the gist of the outburst. 

We’ve already willingly handicapped ourselves: We’ve taken the proverbial plunge into choosing to throw small, non-bait, handmade bits of feather and fur and tinsel. We’ve already decided that we have to get within 50 feet of our quarry if we’re going to present to them. We’ve already decided that our rods will be lighter-duty, more flexible, less wieldy despite putting ourselves at the mercy of offshore winds. We’ve decided that we’re going to comb the world in search of particularly difficult or hard-to-find fish—eaten by flies, ducking under mangrove arbors, being smacked in the face by tag alders along the way—just to make a cast that requires more room despite a particularly confined space. We’ve done all of this to ourselves; so this oasis of stupid doesn’t need to become a virtual battleground about the best, most traditional, or “highest” methods.

Ethics are a bit different. In my mind, there’s a fairly significant difference between whether or not scenting your fly is actually fly fishing and whether or not a certain fishing practice is better or worse for the resource. When it comes to protecting everything we hold dear and preserving it for future generations, any amount of discussion is good. It keeps the ethics of fishing at the forefront and keeps conservation in our brains. If talking about whether a technique is really fishing at all, or whether it’s snagging—that’s an ethics debate. If you’re talking about whether a particular kind of hook or presentation more frequently results in a deep-hooked or foul-hooked fish, then let’s get into it. I’d love it if everyone spent the time they take arguing about how to fish to talk instead about why to fish, or about how to be a better conservationist, or how to introduce someone to the sport. 

I meet many customers who are sheepish about mentioning methods outside of fly fishing. They’ll talk about a great day of fishing and then get a haunted look on their face as they intimate that some of the fish were caught on spin tackle. I can see the inner conflict, the uncertainty or guilt at mentioning conventional gear to a fly-gear guy. I’ll save you the trouble: You caught fish, good for you! And I say that with no sarcasm. You went out and fished, and that’s better than the person sitting in traffic next to you who may spend their weekend getting trashed at a club, searching for something that they’ll never find in the maw of a city. So you kept a couple fish for dinner? Sure is better than the person at the grocery store who doesn’t know or care where their food comes from. That old chestnut about stepping back and seeing the forest from the trees, about looking at the big picture, is appropriate here. 

In recent years, the sport of fly fishing has done its level best to escape the shackles of elitism. More young people, more women, more minorities are taking up the sport. The final mantle we need to shed is petty purism, which plagues every niche sport in some way (traditional archery over a compound bow comes to mind). If you’ve handicapped yourself by taking up this silly sport (yes, it is very silly), you’ve done well, my fellow idiot. Don’t argue with your peers about who’s the bigger idiot—we have enough ways to use the internet to demonstrate our idiocy without turning new anglers away with our bickering. Just go fly fishing.

By James P. Spica (Editor-at-large)

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The post Fly Fishing: Handicapping Ourselves first appeared on Tail Fly Fishing Magazine.

The post Fly Fishing: Handicapping Ourselves appeared first on Tail Fly Fishing Magazine.

What makes redfish so perfect? First, anglers can sight cast to them, thereby getting in some technical fishing. Second, pound for pound, redfish are a hard-fighting species. And finally, they’re just absolutely beautiful. Fly anglers can pursue redfish all year, but a fall fishing trip is ideal: Beginning in September and October, when late-summer heat gives way to more moderate autumn weather, redfish sense the falling water temperatures and change their behavior dramatically. Instinctively recognizing that their forage is about to disappear, they begin to feed heavily at all times and in places where they usually would not. When this happens, fly anglers interested in exciting sight fishing will want to target redfish in three specific habitats: High tide flats, low tide flats, and small creeks. 

High tide flats fishing, possible in only a few places in the world, is plentiful in the Lowcountry in autumn. Around the full and new moons the tides are abnormally high; water floods up into the spartina grass surrounding the creeks, creating a field of flooded grass in which redfish may gorge on crabs. As the stronger-than-normal current comes into the marshes, redfish take the opportunity to go deep in the grasses to hide from predators and procure an easy meal. When they stop to slurp up crabs in the shallow flooded marsh, redfish often stick their tails straight up in the air, which indicates their position to the fly angler hoping to sight cast with a fly rod and weedless fly. Determine the direction the redfish is headed and place the fly just a few feet in front of it. Make short strips just as he gets to the fly. Redfish anglers generally don’t suffer for lack of feedback, because redfish either hammer a fly–in which case line will commence screaming out of your hands–or spook off, leaving only a wake and shaky knees behind them. 

A low tide flat is a large muddy area that holds at least a little bit of water even at the lowest of low tides; redfish love these low tide flats especially because their number-one predator, the bottlenose dolphin, hates them. Dolphins love a meal of redfish, but they’re careful to avoid very shallow water, especially at falling tide. Low tide flats also usually feature numerous oyster mounds that serve as “structure” for redfish. Growing schools of redfish will swim around and around from one oyster bed to another, feeding on anything in their path as temperatures continue to dip. 

Redfish make long blistering runs in these large muddy flats because they have nowhere to go but out and away from the skiff. From fall through winter, Lowcountry low tide flats fishing provides exceptional sight-casting opportunities because the water is so clear: When you enter a flat you can often see the redfish exploding on baitfish and shrimp in large schools from 50 yards away. A trip to the low tide flat is also great for newcomers to fly fishing: Larger schools of fish mean anglers can usually get a few good shots before the school is spooked–and even after that, there are still more schools remaining. 

Creek fishing is my personal favorite for many reasons, but especially because I enjoy the idea of catching a big fish in a small creek. When you set the hook on a 30-inch redfish in a 10-foot-wide creek, you’d better have brought your A game because there’s no telling where that fish will decide to go. It may head around the corner 60 yards in the creek to wrap you around grass. It may try to break you off on the nearest oyster bed. It may head straight for you under the boat and out of the creek. Redfish like the shallow creek for the same reason they like the flats: These habitats are difficult for predators–both human and dolphin–to access. 

Redfish will push far up into the shallowest part of the creeks at low tide to feed and to hide–and that is precisely when we like to target them with fly rods. Pole silently up a tiny creek on a crisp fall morning and spot schools of large 20- to 30-inch fish busting on baitfish, their backs and tails out of the water–and shaky knees and intense memories are all but guaranteed.

The sights, smells, and sounds of the marsh draw angling novices to South Carolina every year; the delights of the fishery ensure that even the most experienced fly anglers never want to leave. Hiding in plain sight, a short drive and a world away from the East Coast’s bustling cities, South Carolina’s Lowcountry redfish are the only excuse a fly angler needs to schedule a fall road trip. 

Photos by Paul Doughty

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Fly Fishing the Lowcountry – Part One

The Lowcountry: Part Two – Species, Seasons, Selections

Fly Fishing the Lowcountry – Part Three: Migratory Species of the Lowcountry

The post Redfish Road Trip: Saltwater fly fishing first appeared on Tail Fly Fishing Magazine.

The post Redfish Road Trip: Saltwater fly fishing appeared first on Tail Fly Fishing Magazine.