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By Capt. Tony Petrella
Capt. Dave Gibson was leaning heavily on his pushpole when I looked back at the poling platform. My near-mirror-image was grinning broadly with that gap-toothed smile that has everybody convinced we’re brothers. I had just missed my third good redfish on a day when Pine Island Sound was trying real hard to be nice to me, and I must have looked awfully dejected.
There was a hint of pity in his voice, mixed ever so slightly with exasperation when he quietly asked, “Sarge, do you want to actually start catching some of these fish, or are you happy just practicing your distance casting?” I hung my head in shame.
“Strip-strike,” he repeated for the tenth time. Shoving the pole under his right arm as if it were a 20-foot fly rod, he mimicked the motions with both hands. “Strip-strike! Keep the rod tip down low to the water and pull back hard with your line hand when you feel a fish. You trout guys are all alike at first. You feel a tap, raise the rod tip and yank the fly right out of the fish’s mouth.
“These aren’t tiny little dry flies, brother. In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a whole lot of bucktail and saddle hackle waving around behind the bend of that hook. You’re going to get lots of short strikes. So, you strip-strike to keep the fly in front of the fish. That way, if he misses it the first time it just makes him that much madder and that much more intent on eating it the second time he attacks. Simple!”
Indeed. “Simple” was how I felt at that moment. I thought about how frustrated I’d been over the years while guiding trout anglers on the AuSable and Manistee Rivers back in Michigan. Cast off the bow of the boat, not the side, I’d tell them. Mend line, I’d tell them. Why, oh why couldn’t they understand something so “simple”? OH!
With determination born of abject embarrassment, I flipped the chartreuse Clouser out of the water and held it with the fingers of my left hand. Thirty feet of fly line was floating in the shallow water. Fifty more lay in the well behind the Action Craft’s casting deck. On the platform, Capt. Dave was squinting into the bright glare bouncing off the Sound.
“Tails,” he said anxiously. “Lots of tails! Just hold onto that gun, Sarge, and don’t do any shootin’ till I get the boat positioned. I’ll tell you when to cast. And this time…”
“I know, I know, captain. Strip-strike. I won’t forget!”
The boat eased around to the left by ten degrees and Dave quietly stabbed the pole into the turtle grass to stop our swing. “Take the pair at 11 o’clock, 60 feet,” he said softly. “Wait till they tail, then lay the fly two feet beyond and three feet in front. Remember, they’re feeding into the current, heading to your right.”
I waited. I cast. And it all happened just the way it’s supposed to. The lead fish raised his head, glanced at the fly for a nanosecond and decided that it looked edible. I kept stripping and the fish kept coming. I stripped a little faster and the redfish decided that enough was enough. I hauled back with my left hand, then whacked him again—just like Ruark always cautioned about lions and tigers and bears. Oh, my, what a nice fish.
As expected, the redfish was pretty surprised that his lunch had just bitten him back. Also as expected, he tested the warranty on my Integrity reel and quickly found out that he was going to lose this round. Meanwhile, Capt. Dave had hopped off the platform and stuck a net into the water. “Here’s your fish, Sarge. About 32 inches and, oh, nine pounds. I’m gonna grab a quick photo and then we can release him. Congratulations. I didn’t think sergeants ever listened to captains, but you kept that left hand working the fly line exactly right.”
Dave Gibson and I first met at a fly-fishing show in Chicago. We had nodded hello, and chatted briefly. Occasionally, while passing by, I paused to watch the continuous-loop video that was playing in his booth. Meanwhile, he tied and gave away—to children, mostly, I noticed—dozens of saltwater flies while carrying on a nonstop advertisement for Pine Island Sound. “He is,” I thought, “the Chamber of Commerce Poster Boy for those folks. He really gets excited about the place.”
Halfway back to my own display, I stopped and slapped my forehead. Pine Island Sound. Fort Myers. You fool! I turned around and walked back. Dave looked up at me and smiled when I asked, “Fort Myers is just south of Venice, right?” “Yeah, forty minutes, maybe an hour,” Dave replied. “Depends on whether you take I-75 or US 41. Either way, it’s a white-knuckle drive most of the time because of all you Yankees who come down in the winter.”
“Well, this Yankee is spending the winter in Venice starting next month. Maybe we can fish together,” I said. So, here we were. This trout-fishing Yankee was getting the education of a lifetime. One of the very first things I learned was how many misconceptions we Midwesterners have when it comes to the entire saltwater environment.
I had lived in West Palm Beach several “lifetimes” ago—as career changes might be judged—but held the mistaken belief at that time that golf, rather than fishing, was God’s own form of relaxation. Later, I came to appreciate something Paul O’Neil once wrote: “I am against roads. I am against detergents. I am against insecticides. I am against logging. I am not against golf, since I cannot but suspect it keeps armies of the unworthy from discovering trout.” I finally gave up golf for fly fishing, but still clung to some notion from my misty past in Florida that one simply tossed a lure of some kind into the water on the incoming or outgoing tide and presto! dinner was being served, sir.
Tides, I have learned, are like weather forecasts. They merely are educated guesses upon which you can formulate a rough plan, but which must be regarded as rumors that may or may not contain more than a shred of truth. More than one sorry angler has followed his tide tables to a barren mudhole because he didn’t consider the wind direction and velocity, which very simply blew his water—and fish—back into the Gulf of Mexico.
Water temperature is a major factor in the salt, precisely as it is for freshwater fish. Cold days with wind out of the west/northwest are best spent at home in front of a fireplace if you have it—most Floridians don’t, of course—or at the tying bench. Certainly, a recent issue of Florida Sportsman or Philip Wylie’s classic book, Crunch & Des, are a better use of time than chasing after fish that aren’t there. Even the mullet leave when the temperature drops.
Navigation on the flats also is an extremely important consideration because of the very nature of the environment. In fact, within minutes of launching from the Pineland ramp that first day, I asked Dave Gibson how he kept from smashing his flats boat into an oyster bar or sand reef. “Well,” he drawled, “the first thing a guy told me when I came down here 25 years ago was to never run your boat where the pelicans are standing up.”
I thought about that for a few seconds while he deftly maneuvered the speeding boat in what appeared to be random arcs. “Why the zigzag?” I asked. “The next thing that old guy told me was a sort of rhyme,” Dave replied, sweeping the wheel into a hard
left-right slalom. “It goes, brown, brown—run aground. White, white, white—you might. Green, green, green—you’re clean. Blue, blue—go on through.
“Study the water ahead of us,” he said, “and guide me through the next mile or so.” I felt a moment of panic, but squinted through the Polaroid lenses like a bombardier in the flak over Ploesti. “Left,” I said. “Now right for two hundred yards. Then left…” Dave interrupted. “Sarge, that last heading would leave my keel on an oyster bar.” So much for my first course in navigation.
It was, however, far from my last lesson in how to roam the waters of southwest Florida without causing my insurance rates to resemble what they were when I was a
20-year-old kid with a Jaguar XKE.
“Fishing the flats is a lot like flying,” Captain Jeffrey Cardenas told me one day. Since both of us are pilots, and he’s guided thousands of anglers around the Florida Keys and the Marquesas, I tilted my head appreciatively and listened carefully. “You always have to stay ahead of the boat,” he said, paraphrasing one of the first commands my flight instructor pounded into me.
“As Captain, I’m responsible for the safety of my passengers. That means I take nothing for granted. Storms can move sand around overnight. Places you used to run flat out can hurt you if you’re not paying attention. Same with the weather. Nasty things can pop up fast, especially down here around Key West. Bad things can happen if you’re not careful.”
Even if you are careful, strange things can happen. I once asked Steve Huff, one of Florida’s most highly respected guides, what was the worst thing that ever occurred when he had clients in his boat. Steve looked at his wife, Patty, and they both sort of shrugged. Steve took a sip of beer and sighed.
“Well, one of my longstanding clients brought a friend along one day. A guy I’d never met before. He was a real big guy, but he just wouldn’t put any pressure on the fish and he kept losing tarpon after tarpon. It was really frustrating, because the fish were everywhere and my regular client really wanted this guy to catch one.
“Finally, I said look—only two things are going to happen. You either really sock that fish and tire him out enough for us to land him, or you break off.” He took another sip of beer and sighed again. Louder. He looked at Patty. “Except, there was a third possibility I hadn’t considered. When he hooked up again, I yelled for him to really put the rod to that fish. He did, and the tarpon came up out of the water. I heard the guy yell, but I was concentrating on positioning the boat to keep the line clear. When I looked back at the bow, the guy was laid out flat.”
Another sip of beer. Another, louder sigh.
“He was dead. Oh, I broke off the fish and we ran back to the dock, but it was too late. The guy was already blue. So, after an ambulance took him away, my client and I did the only thing we could do. We ran back out and went fishing. I mean, this was one terrific school of tarpon!”
* * *
And now for these past few years I’ve held the honor of United States Merchant Marine Officer. That means people call me Captain and pay me money to take them fishing in lots of neat places from Tampa Bay south to The Everglades National Park. And every single day I’m guiding, I tell the story of a Yankee trout fisherman who had such a hard time understanding such a “simple” thing called the “strip-strike”. And, every single time I tell the story, it makes me a better fisherman!
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