26 sailfish and the tarpon crush: Excellent adventures whose memories never get away
Writing outdoor columns during the late winter months becomes a bit challenging.
Most of the regular suspects I fish for are either lying on the bottom due to cold water temperatures and couldn’t care less about eating, or they split sometime in the late fall and are now basking in the warm waters off south Florida.
With this in mind, I pulled out my scrapbook and began reliving fishing excursions from my past, many of which I had totally forgotten about. No surprise there, huh?
Anyway, I came across photos of two such memories that had me daydreaming about them for hours.
Actually, it was pretty darn cool because, believe it or not, I began remembering specific parts of these two days of fishing when everything, and I mean everything, came back into focus. It was as if I was once again there — down to things that were said and seen, and even the smells in the air.
If you fish with regularity then you have experienced one or two days when simply put, the bite was so extraordinary that no matter what you did, or didn’t do, the fishing was as good as it could possibly be. It’s like walking into a gambling casino with a handful of quarters, dropping one coin in each slot machine and every single one pays off. It might only happen once in a lifetime, but when it does happen, every trip after that simply can’t measure up.
The first photo I came to showed a younger version on me holding a sailfish. I have caught a lot of sails in my lifetime but this picture was from one of those days.
A captain friend with a large sportfishing boat invited me, my boss at the time, Vic Johnson, and two other friends to come and use his boat and captain, which he had taken to Fort Lauderdale for the winter months.
Invites like this don’t come often so off we went. I believe it was late January, cold as hell, and getting to warm, tropical weather had us all thinking shorts, T-shirts and, of course, cocktails. I’m not much of a drinker, but my friends just couldn’t get enough and it wasn’t until 2 a.m. that we got to bed, knowing the captain would be ready to roll at 7 a.m. to try our luck with sailfish.
I’ll bet you can guess that my companions were not themselves as we got on the boat, and to make matters worse, the wind had flags standing straight out. It was rough as could be and, even though you are close enough to the beach to see sunbathers, they began dropping like flies as they turned green, then white and on down the color spectrum. By 8 o’clock, I was the only one left in the cockpit when a rod doubled over. Sailfish on!
There was no mate to help, my friends never moved off the floor inside the cabin, and so it was just me and the fish. By 11:30 when we headed in, I had landed 26 sails! As we headed in, I mixed a rum drink to celebrate and, oddly enough, my friends refused to join me. Go figure.
My second excellent adventure was with one of the best friends I have ever had, Warren Matthews. Warren sadly died of a heart attack while fishing with me, but that is another story.
With hundreds of hours together fishing, this was a spur-of-the-moment late afternoon tarpon trip in Port Royal Sound. The tide was falling, there wasn’t another boat around and within a couple of minutes after putting the baits in the water we hooked up to a tarpon.
Before I could get in the other rods, another one hit and we had two on. Tarpon will kick even the biggest guy’s rump with deep runs and awesome aerial jumps. Landing both, another rod went down, then another.
In the space of an hour and a half, we hooked and landed 13 tarpon and missed just as many. It was sick how many fish there were and we could have possibly doubled the number caught but we were both so spent neither of us wanted to tangle with another fish.
Talk about a day made in heaven, that day took the cake.
So, keep at it and one day you too may be fortunate enough to have a day when it all comes together, and I guarantee you’ll be telling that story over and over again to anyone that will listen.