Trout Eyes Page 4

  We stopped at Joe’s favorite runs and pools, beached the canoe, and climbed out. We covered the water with our woolly buggers, casting, mending, stripping, lifting, casting again, and every few casts came the bump and tug of a trout. We hooked some, failed to hook many. The trout ranged from seven or eight to twelve or thirteen inches. They were fat and cold-bodied, and they quivered with pent-up energy in my hand, and gradually, as the morning sun sucked the chill from the autumnal air, it could’ve been May or June. I was fishing for trout again.

  When we stopped to eat our sandwiches, Joe said, “There are some big trout here. Honest. I don’t know where they are today.”

  “I’m having fun,” I said. “I don’t care.”

  By late-afternoon the sun hung low in the sky and long shadows were spreading over the water. I noticed that my fingers and feet had grown numb.

  I was casting mechanically now, thinking about how good it would feel to wrap my hands around a hot mug of coffee . . . when my bugger stopped in mid strip. I tightened, felt the solid hookup, raised my rod, and a deep swirl opened on the water at the end of my line.

  From behind me Joe yelled, “Oh-kay! About time.”

  It wasn’t the twenty-inch trout Joe had practically guaranteed. But that brown trout was a fat seventeen-incher. A really nice fish.

  I released it, bit off my fly, reeled up, and took down my rod. “Good way to end the day,” I said.

  A good way to end the season, I was thinking.

  * * *

  We were paddling down the river, Joe in the stern and I in the bow, heading for his truck at our takeout. The sun was slipping behind the hills, and a layer of mist hovered over the water, and long shadows were creeping out of the woods.

  Suddenly Joe hissed, “Shh. Listen!”

  I stopped paddling, and then I heard it, too. It sounded like a balky old engine coming reluctantly to life somewhere in the distance, accelerating from a hesitant thump-thump to a steady thrum, pausing, then starting up again.

  It was ruffed grouse, drumming on his log—next to the laugh of a loon, nature’s most haunting, evocative sound. I wished Burt could have been there to hear it.

  PART II

  Pass the Salt

  “This salt-water fishing, it is for men with hard stomachs—like sex after lunch.”

  —Charles Ritz, To Me, At Lunch

  “. . . there is great pleasure in being on the sea, in the unknown wild suddenness of a great fish; in his life and death which he lives for you in an hour while your strength is harnessed to his; and there is satisfaction in conquering this thing which rules the sea it lives in.”

  —Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

  “It is easy to tell tourists from tarpon. Tarpon have a narrow, bony plate inside the mouth on the lower jaw. Tourists (especially in St. Petersburg) have both upper and lower plates.”

  —Ed Zern, How to Tell Fish from Fishermen

  7

  Fear and Loathing in Belize—Part I

  About four feet of Mason leader material was looped around Andy’s bent knee. He kept fiddling with the Mason and frowning at the book he’d propped open on the table beside his bed.

  I was sprawled on the other bed with a glass of Jack Daniels sitting on my chest. It was our first night on Ambergris Cay, our first night ever in Belize. That morning we’d scraped frost off the windshield for our drive to Logan Airport in Boston. We’d flown in a big plane and then in a small plane, and then a motor boat took us through narrow jungle channels to the lodge on the white beach where we got our first-ever glimpse of a turquoise tarpon flat.

  We drank Belikan beer and dined on deep-fried conch with vegetables that tasted like sweet potatoes. After dinner we met our guide for the week, a round, middle-aged Belizian named Pancho. He had a gold tooth and a quick smile and a soft rumbling voice.

  Andy asked him what we might expect for our upcoming week of tarpon fishing.

  Pancho flashed his tooth. “Wind, mon. Mostly expect beeg wind.”

  “Well, there’s always wind,” said Andy hopefully. “Right?”

  “Not always,” said Pancho.

  I watched Andy play with his monofilament for a while, then said, “What’re you making?”

  “Bimini Twist.”

  “Looks frustrating.”

  “It’s fun,” said Andy. “I love knots.”

  “So why this particular knot?”

  “It goes between the leader and the shock tippet.”

  “Is it necessary?”

  “Lefty recommends it,” he said.

  I knew you shouldn’t argue with Lefty. “Make one for me?”

  “You really should learn how to make your own Bimini Twist.”

  “I know,” I said. “But I’m on vacation. I don’t want to think about all the things I really should do. Make me a tarpon leader and I’ll give you some of my Jack.”

  Andy shrugged, and I knew what he was thinking, because it had been his mantra ever since we booked our week in Belize six months earlier. Tarpon fishing is different from trout fishing. There’s no room for error. You gotta get it right the first time. You might get only one shot at one of these great fish, and you don’t want to blow it.

  I’d read Lefty Kreh’s book. Well, truthfully, I barely skimmed the long sections about knots. Unlike Andy, I don’t find much romance in knots.

  I mainly studied the photographs. There was one shot of Lefty unhooking a gigantic tarpon. It looked as if that fish could’ve taken Lefty’s head into its mouth. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hook a fish that big. I mean, I did, of course. But it was scary, too.

  * * *

  Wind. Pancho was right. It howled all day and all night. It ripped the surface of the flats, churned up the marly bottom, turned the turquoise flats brown, and drove the tarpon into the deep water. “Meester Tarpon don’t like mud,” said Pancho.

  Each day played out pretty much like the previous one. We hunted for bonefish in the morning on the incoming tide, and we caught a few. Not many. They were hard to spot under the gray sky and wind-riffled surface. Pancho theorized that gray skies made the bones even spookier than normal.

  After lunch, Pancho poled along the dropoffs and channels while Andy and I took turns on the casting deck peering hard into the water. We saw very few tarpon. For one reason or another, we never got a shot.

  Back at the lodge, the ten other anglers submitted similar reports. A few hard-earned bonefish. Few tarpon seen, none jumped.

  At night, the wind shook coconuts off the trees. They crashed on the tin roof like howitzers exploding.

  After four days of it, I had no more adrenaline left. My knees ached from rocking on Pancho’s casting deck. My head ached from eye strain. My spirit ached from diminished hope.

  The afternoon of our fifth day was no different from the others. Pancho poled in the wind, and Andy and I took turns not casting from the deck. The first two days we’d swapped every hour. Then we made it every half an hour. Now fifteen minutes was plenty. When I was up there on the deck, I found myself daydreaming and looking forward to relaxing with a Belikan beer and a Colonial cigarette.

  “We’ll stake out here for a while,” Pancho said. “Two channels comin’ together here. Tide’s right. Good place to see tarpon.”

  He drove his pole into the mud bottom and tied it off with his stern line.

  Andy looked at his watch. “Your turn.” He stepped down.

  I sighed, picked up my 12-weight, climbed onto the deck, and went through the routine. I peeled line off the reel, made a long cast, and stripped it in, laying the coils carefully on the deck so they wouldn’t tangle when the tarpon made his first hard run. Ha, ha.

  I left a long loop of line hanging out of the tip of my rod, checked the point of the hook against my thumbnail, then held the fly between my thumb and forefinger. Locked and loaded.

  I rocked and looked and daydreamed, and I was thinking it must be close to Andy’s turn when Pancho hissed, “Tarpon! Two o’clock!�
��

  I looked. Gray, corrugated water reflected a roily gray sky.

  “Where? I don’t see ’em.”

  “Comin’ at us, mon. Three o’clock now. A hundred feet. Get ready. They comin’. Six. No. Seven of ’em. Beeg tarpon, mon. This is your shot.”

  Okay, no pressure. Right.

  Where the hell were the fish?

  Then I saw them. Black shapes, bunched together, moving like a single organism. They were closer than I expected. In half a minute they’d pass right in front of me, barely fifty feet away.

  I threw my tarpon fly away from my body, false-cast once, loaded the stiff 12-weight, double-hauled, and laid the fly out there about fifteen feet ahead of the lead fish.

  “Yeah, good shot,” whispered Pancho. “Leave it . . . leave it . . . now streep. Yeah, keep streeping, mon. He sees it. He comin’ . . .”

  I saw it all happen, and I can still see it now, almost twenty years later, a slow-motion movie in my head, the dark torpedo shape, the third one back in the school, veering toward me, speeding up, then suddenly turning—

  “Hit heem!” yelled Pancho.

  Strip strike, I told myself, and with my rod pointed at the fish I yanked back with my line hand.

  “Again. Hit heem again.”

  I struck again.

  And that’s when my tarpon launched himself into the air, and none of the pictures or movies I’d ever seen enabled me to fully imagine the power of that leap, or the size of the fish, or the sound of his gills rattling when he shook his head, or the crash his body made when he fell back to the water.

  “Good job,” said Pancho. “He hooked good. Corner of his mouth, mon.”

  “You bowed to him,” said Andy, and I thought I heard shock and amazement in his voice.

  Where did that come from? Strip striking, bowing to a leaping tarpon? I never did that before.

  The fish jumped three or four more times within fifty feet of our boat. I heard Andy’s camera clicking.

  Then my tarpon took off across the flats. Not as fast as those bonefish we’d caught, but fast enough, and unstoppably powerful. I tucked the rod butt into my belly, held the rod high, and let the fish run against the drag of my reel.

  Soon the backing appeared and the gray fly line disappeared in the distance.

  Way out there on the flat the tarpon rolled.

  “Gettin’ air,” observed Pancho.

  He’d stopped running. When I tried to retrieve some line, the fish took off. More backing peeled away.

  He stopped again. I began reeling, and at first I thought my fish was beat and I was reeling in the dead weight of an exhausted giant tarpon.

  After a minute I realized that I was reeling in only the dead weight of a heavy fly line.

  I sat down. Andy handed me a Belikan.

  “Down and dirty, mon,” said Pancho. “Gotta turn his head, show Meester Tarpon who’s boss, get heem in fast. Your fly just wore a hole in his mouth. Too bad. That was a beeg fish.”

  I looked at Andy. “I guess I must’ve skipped one of Lefty’s chapters,” I said. “It never occurred to me that I’d actually have to know how to fight a fish that big.”

  He shrugged. “Live and learn. Next time you’ll know. It was fun, though, wasn’t it? I mean, seeing that fish suck in your fly, and then all those jumps?”

  “It was the most fun I’ve had in my whole life,” I said. “It’s just . . . you know.”

  “Guys who fish for tarpon a lot,” said Andy, “they just want to jump them. Find ’em, cast to ’em, hook ’em, get a couple jumps, and then shake ’em off, go find another one. That’s the fun of it.”

  I’ve spent the last twenty years of my life trying to convince myself that letting that Belize tarpon get away because I didn’t know how to fight him didn’t matter.

  But I can’t help it: It would’ve been even more fun if Andy could’ve taken a picture of me unhooking a tarpon with a mouth that could swallow my head.

  8

  Fear and Loathing in Belize—Part II

  The first time I went to Belize the wind howled for a week. Andy and I stayed in a lodge with ten other fanatical tarpon anglers, and in that entire week, twelve fishermen, supervised by six highly-motivated guides, jumped exactly one tarpon. That lucky angler happened to be me, although at the time I felt profoundly unlucky. It was the first tarpon I’d ever hooked. I had no idea how to subdue a giant fish, and I let it get away.

  Thereafter, I bored as many people as possible with my own Old Man and the Sea story. The Big One That Got Away. Ho, hum. I knew it was a cliché, but I couldn’t shut myself up. That fish was six feet long, and he came rocketing out of the water barely 40 feet from the boat. His big round eye was staring directly at me, and behind me, Pancho was murmuring, “Oh, beeg feesh.”

  Everyone kept telling me how great it was to jump a tarpon, how all the fun of it was in seeing those magnificent fish take your fly and then launch themselves out of the water, how actually fighting them was exhausting and bringing them into the boat was meaningless.

  I believed all of that in theory. It didn’t change the fact that I’d blown the chance of a lifetime.

  * * *

  Three years after my tarpon misadventure, Andy and I returned to Belize. This time, our goal was to catch a permit.

  With my tarpon failure still burning in my memory, I did my homework. I practiced seeing, casting to, fighting and landing strong saltwater fish by sight-fishing for the striped bass and bluefish that swarmed my New England coastal waters. I tied a batch of permit flies. I learned leader formulas. I even memorized some knots.

  I reread Lefty’s book, and I read several other books on flats fishing. I studied magazine articles. I looked up everything Del Brown had ever said about permit. Brown had caught more permit on flies than anybody in history, and he’d invented the definitive permit fly, a crab imitation that he called the Merkin. Permit subsisted mainly on crabs.

  Most people didn’t know what a merkin was. Brown’s wife did, though, and when she heard about Del’s fly, she insisted he call it something else. So he tried to convince people to call it Del Brown’s Permit Fly. As a result of this little marital controversy, anglers who normally didn’t care about improving their vocabularies looked up “merkin” in their dictionaries. Naturally, Del Brown’s permit fly is still known as the Merkin.

  A man with a spinning rod and a bucket of live crabs has a good chance of catching a permit. Permit are usually smart enough to recognize the difference between an actual crab and a crab made out of feathers and hair and fur and lead dumbbell eyes. Permit come equipped with superior olfactory equipment. They feed as much by smell as by sight. Drop a real crab in the path of a feeding permit and he’ll probably eat it. Drop a Merkin or a McCrab in front of that same fish, and even if you didn’t corrupt it with a single molecule of sunscreen or insect repellent or fly-line dressing, the fish will take one sniff and swim in the other direction.

  Except once in a while, for reasons known only to Mr. Permit, he will dart over and eat a fake crab. Not often. Catching a permit on a fly is universally considered the ultimate fly-rod challenge.

  According to rumors, one guy who made a name for himself as a permit fly-rod expert collected a bucket of live crabs every morning before a day of fishing. He smashed up the crabs in the bucket and soaked his flies in the juice. Purists considered this cheating. Pragmatists argued that permit were so hard to catch that any edge was justified.

  Pictures of this expert holding up big permit with crab flies in their mouths appeared in angling magazines with great frequency. He neglected to mention crab juice in his articles.

  * * *

  When we arrived, Taku, our guide, made a point of telling Andy and me that he was tied with Pops for the season’s permit lead at the lodge. The guides took this unofficial competition very seriously. Their pride and reputations depended on how many permit their clients boated.

  Taku was a smiling, easy-going young guy from Belize City
, and when he saw Andy double-haul a crab fly into the wind, he laughed happily. When he saw me try it, his expression was more ambiguous. Crab flies are big and bulky and heavily weighted, and in the wind—that persistent Belize wind—throwing one on a nine-weight is like casting a sock full of sand, and it’s a good idea to duck when you see a backcast coming at you.

  It became apparent that fishing for permit really meant fishing for our guide’s reputation. I wanted to catch a permit. But even more, I wanted to keep Taku smiling.

  We hunted permit from the boat every morning. Taku poled along the deepwater flats, and Andy and I took turns on the casting deck, squinting into the gray wind-riffled water, looking for the blurry shapes of cruising permit or, even better, the sickle tail of a feeding permit with his nose down.

  We decided to swap turns on the deck every time we got a shot at a permit, and for the first two days, each of us got several shots. Taku always spotted the permit before we did. Mostly we saw cruising fish that weren’t particularly interested in eating, and more often than not, the plop of a Merkin sent them scurrying in the opposite direction.

  On the second morning, a cruising permit turned and swam over to take a look at Andy’s fly. Taku whispered, “Leetle streep.” Andy gave it a twitch. The permit bolted.

  When he climbed down off the deck, his hands were shaking and he was sucking in deep breaths. “Omigod,” he said. “Did you see that? I think I’m gonna have a heart attack.”

  After two days, that was the highlight of our permit fishing. One permit’s hesitant expression of interest, or curiosity.

  That night back at the lodge, we learned that one of Pops’ clients had boated a permit, dropping Taku into second place.

  The next morning when we lugged our rods down to the dock, Taku was not smiling. Andy and I exchanged glances. The pressure was on.