There are two kinds of saltwater fly fishing: inshore and offshore. Offshore fly fishing is the deep-ocean kind. Inshore fishing means angling in brackish waters, tidal estuaries, and salty bays and lagoons, as well as an ocean proper but within reasonable distance of shore.
Inshore fly fishing tackle wholesale attracts the greatest number of anglers. For one thing, the inshore brand is more generally available. It exists along every coast – in this country from Maine to Florida, to Texas, to California, to Alaska. Inshore fly fishing can be done by casting from the banks, by wading, or by fishing from small boats with fox fishing tackle and fox lures. A great deal of this inshore saltwater fly fishing is even done is fresh water – in fresh or partly brackish lakes or canals where we have tarpon, snook, and other species that can thrive in water that is entirely or partly fresh. There are huge sharks, for example, and even sawfish in Lake Nicaragua in Central America, 125 miles from the Atlantic. More species of fly-taking fox fishing tackle are generally available to the inshore angler, and inshore saltwater fishing also is less expensive than offshore sport. Particularly when it comes to fox fishing tackle. For the offshore variety, you have got to have a sport fisherman or similar boat of your own, or go on a charter cruiser with professional captain and mate. You also have to buy expensive gear, this is unless you find a good fishing tackle sale.
There are probably fifty or mre species of inshore fish speared from New England around Florida, into Gulf and along the Pacific Coast that will take fly rod fox lures, but the ones most in demand are striped bass, bluefish, smook, tarpon, bonefish, permit, sea trout, mackerels, channel bass, ladyfish and barracuda – not by any means in the order named. Among experienced saltwater fly-rodders the most desirable inshore fish are the scarce and hard-to-take permit, the speed-king bonefish, the wild-jumping tarpon, the shrewd snook, the powerful striped bass, and the bruising bluefish. It is interesting to note that each of the species just named, each of these great saltwater fish, could be caught in a foot of water against a grassy bank.
Until recent dredging and silting and shore-filling condominium construction, one of my favourite all-time salt fishing tackle sales grounds was the Loxahatchee River on central Florida’s Atlantic side. Upriver not far from the US 1 bridge is shallow oyster bar. It sweeps along the west bank, not 100 yards out from a gorgeous home where – almost every time I fished there – a couple of rambunctious boxer dog loped about ten yard. We would fish the bar from a small boat, using either surface poppers, fox lures or streamers, and every time in the winter season we would boat six to a dozen bluefish ranging from 2 to 5 pounds. Every time, that is but one winter when I fished the lower Lox twice and never saw bluefish. The point I’m making is that here we have an ocean fish which, when in the lower Loxahatchee, is swimming in as civilized waters as we might find.
Wednesday, 6 June 2012
Fly Fishing on Turneffe Islands, 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 seat box to properly, will hit.
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 seat box to properly, will hit.
Fly Fishing on Turneffe Islands, 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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)