Father's Day Tarpon
"School of Tarpon coming towards us, Two o'clock!"
Hearing your guide say that never gets old, but it was about the tenth time I had heard it the past few hours and I hadn't felt the tug yet. Nonetheless, I worked out some line and started false casting to a spot where I knew the fish would be moving through. This was a good school, eight to ten fish swimming near the surface, high and happy, which I later discovered meant they were more likely to eat.
"Try to get your fly out past that lead fish so she doesn't see it, and then strip it in front of any of the other ones in the school." The first thing that went through my mind was, why the hell am I supposed to do that? The second thing that went through my mind was, how the hell am I supposed to do that, without lining her? Anyway, I tried to do as I was told and slapped the line on the water right in front of her, she took off the other direction and the rest of the school followed her.
"Oooh, dammit, we missed a good chance there. Don’t worry about it that was a tough angle." I appreciated the guide's comments and patience, but deep down I knew if I had been with my buddies back home on the MO, the comments might have been slightly different, like, ''Wow, why don't you just throw the rod at em?"or ''Nice cast, are you still drunk?"
So I punted and handed the rod to my Dad and told him to ''Give 'er a shot."
As I was rummaging around the cooler looking for a Key West Lager, our guide said it again "Two Tarpon at Twelve o'clock, moving slow. "
Well this ought to be interesting I thought as I popped the top off my beer and grabbed a seat to watch the action. I had dragged my Dad down here on Father's Day weekend to fly fish for tarpon. He was already having a blast just being here and neither of us was thinking too seriously about him actually landing a tarpon. After all, this was tough business even for veteran fly anglers let alone a guy that mainly stuck to spin and ice fishing. Dad has thrown a fly rod a few times though so I knew he'd at least have a chance to get a fly out there somewhere in the general vicinity of the fish and at least feel like he had a chance. As I watched the fish swimming towards us I could tell they were probably going to get pretty close to us, maybe too close, "Ok Ivan, with these two, go ahead and throw about ten feet in front of that lead fish and we might have a chance to show it to both of them." So Dad worked out a bit more line, made one last false cast and laid out a perfectly simply forty foot cast, and the fly plopped in the water about ten feet in front of the lead fish. Lucky cast I thought, or maybe not so lucky but rather, simple.
I instantly thought of the five or six times earlier where I had double-hauled and overshot my target by twenty feet. The fish were closing in now and they were BIG. When they were within about ten feet of Dad's fly, which he had now begun to strip, the lead fish gave a little tail-kick and perked up, like a kitty chasing string, "She’s on it, keep stripping!"
I barely heard our guide's voice due to the fact that I was completely mesmerized by watching this scene unfold in front of me. In an instant, the huge fish opened its huge mouth, inhaled the tiny fly, closed her mouth, and kept swimming.
"She ate it! Strip, Strip, Strip!" Dad kept the rod tip low and stripped until the line went tight, then gave it one last little yank.
What happened next is impossible to explain to anyone who has not seen a tarpon hooked on a fly rod, but I'll try. The fish turned 180 degrees and took off, and all the excess line that was pooled up in the bottom of the boat and in the water completely disappeared in a split second as the fish started screaming out across the flats, towards Cuba.
Just like that, there was a tight line to the Tarpon, and Dad had her on the reel. I vaguely remember, ''Woo-hoos!", and other shouts and yelling from all three of us. I looked up at Dad's face to see a huge ear to ear grin. I also realized that I had a huge ear to ear grin. I slowly turned around and looked at our guide to see that he had an even bigger ear to ear grin and he was staring at me with the', 'That just happened" face. It was perfect.
On her way to Cuba, this fish didn't really sky out of the water much like some of the other tarpon do, but she did come up and splash and shake her head a few times, but now she was just pulling. I was scanning the water in the general direction of Dad's line, trying to see where she was, when I noticed something else on the water, WAY out there.
"What the hell was that way out there, did you see it?" I asked our guide, "That's your Dad's fish," he said as he jumped down off his platform and started the motor. "We gotta go chase her." I could not believe he was serious, but I knew he was.
100 feet of fly line and 400 yards of backing and it was disappearing fast. So we started following her around while Dad went to work trying to reel it all back in. We'd gain a hundred yards, then lose it. Gain it then lose it. This went on for a half an hour or so until we finally saw the fly line knot come in through the guides and onto the reel. Our guide cut the motor and said, ''The rest is up to you."
Dad fought her exactly as he was instructed, cranking on her hard to the right when she was trying to go left, then flipping the rod over left and cranking on her hard to the left when she was trying to go right. Left to right, right to left, back and forth until she finally turned upside down and eased up alongside the boat. After a few pictures and a DNA swab, our guide revived her and let her slip back into the ocean where she slowly swam out of sight.
It was perfect.