Every Day Was Special

by William G. Tapply

  If bad weather can happen during our angling spring breaks, we’ve learned, it will, whether the locals tell us it’s commonplace or unusual, and we’ve come to expect it. Even so, how bad can it be when you’re fleeing from a New England winter?

  So this year Andy and I decided to target snook on the Gulf coast of Florida. Sanibel Island, to be exact, and for three good reasons: One, our friend Norm Zeigler, a certified snook guru, lives there; two, Sanibel bills itself as the Fishing Capital of the World; and three, neither Andy nor I had ever caught a snook.

  Andy hooked one on a plug in the Panama Canal when he was in college more than a quarter of a century ago. That was the sum of our combined snook experience.

  I’ve learned to take Chamber of Commerce claims with a grain or two of salt (Roscoe, New York, calls itself “Trout Town USA,” and Norfork, Arkansas, is the “Home of the World Record Brown Trout”), but the fact that the marketing experts choose to focus their PR slogans on fishing in the first place has to mean something.

  I don’t take Norm with any amount of salt. We’ve been friends for close to fifteen years, and all that time he’s been beseeching, bribing, begging, and blackmailing me to go down there so he can take me snook fishing. His e-mails over the years have had me drooling. And now he’s written Snook on a Fly, the definitive (and only, as far as I know) book devoted entirely to fly fishing for this intriguing fish.

  When I was a kid I devoured the general-interest hook-and-bullet magazines—Field & Stream, Outdoor Life, Sports Afield—and read as many fishing books as I could get a hold of. I wanted to do it all, of course, but four exotic (to me) species of gamefish snagged my imagination and haunted my dreams: Atlantic salmon, striped bass, tarpon, and snook.

  The stripers eventually returned to the New England coast, and they have turned out to be the perfect fly-rod fish—better even than I ever imagined. I traveled far and fished hard and long before I managed to catch a couple of tarpon and a salmon.

  But I still had never caught a snook. Never fished for snook. Never even seen a snook in person. Everything I knew about snook fishing came from reading—all those magazine articles, especially the homespun tales about casting plugs and flies against mangroves deep in the Everglades that the late, great Charley Waterman used to write for the back page of Saltwater Sportsman, the how-to chapters in some books, and the destination chapters in others, and, of course, Norm’s relentless e-mails from Sanibel, and now his book.

  I’ve done enough fishing to know that until you’ve actually done it, you don’t know anything. But everything I’d read and heard convinced me that snook are terrific fly-rod fish. They embody those apparently contradictory fish qualities that I find endlessly intriguing, wariness and selectivity combined with aggressiveness and size and power, and they hang out in the kinds of places I love to fish—on mangrove-lined shorelines where casting to targets is like bass-bug fishing for largemouths, and along sand beaches where you can hunt and stalk them like bonefish.

  But information is not understanding. I didn’t know anything about fly fishing for snook. The time to find out was long overdue.

  There are two kinds of fishing adventures (as identified by Winnie the Pooh and further defined by my father): Ex-plores and Expotitions.

  Ex-plores are spontaneous, close-to-home forays to intriguing, previously unexplored places that you’ve noticed while driving the back roads or spotted on a topographic map or heard about from a guy in the hardware store, where you never know what you might catch, and where the possibility of catching nothing is part of the appeal. Explores are undertaken with an open mind. Sometimes you discover something worth keeping secret. More often than not, they don’t amount to anything except … an exploration, and that’s always fun.

  Expotitions, on the other hand, are scrupulously researched, intricately planned, deliciously complicated, and generally expensive journeys to faraway and exotic destinations where the fishing promises to be special, and where poor fishing, regardless of how you rationalize it—no matter how much wildlife you see, how much fresh air and sunshine you absorb, how many interesting new people you meet, and what fascinating new culture you experience—is a distinct disappointment.

  The spring-break trips Andy and I take are full-blown Expotitions. Part of the fun is planning them—talking long-distance to local experts, reading all the books and articles and web pages we can find, arranging the lodging and guiding, reserving the airline seats and rental cars, researching and tying every conceivably useful fly we might want to try, assembling and packing the gear, daydreaming and anticipating.

  We left Andy’s house for the airport at 5:30 AM in the middle of a New England nor’easter, on the second day of March, for our snook Expotition to Sanibel Island. Freezing rain was falling on a foot of new snow and frozen old slush. The roads were treacherous. We almost missed our flight.

  Seven hours later we stepped out of the Fort Myers airport into 85-degree sunshine and softly swaying palm trees.

  It’s always a magic carpet ride.

  The cold front came swooping down that night. The next morning the thermometer read 62 degrees, and a brittle wind was blowing from the north, gusting 15 to 20 mph. Two days later a second cold front settled on top of the first, and the nighttime temperatures plummeted into the low 50s. Andy and I kept telling ourselves that these would be pleasantly balmy early-March days if we were back in New England.

  But this was Florida, and the snook weren’t happy. “They want warm water,” Norm said. “This cold drives ’em off the flats and beaches and back under the mangroves.”

  One day, guide Steve Bailey poled us up some creeks and through some cuts deep into the jungle, and we threw snook flies against the mangroves. Now and then a shadowy shape slid out from under the bushes and trailed our flies. We tried speeding them up, slowing them down, twitching-and-pausing, tug-tug-tug. We changed flies—Norm’s usually magical Schminnows, Sea-Ducers, Deceivers, and Clousers in colors ranging from white to chartreuse to brown and in sizes ranging from small to big. We even tried Gurglers. No hits.

  “Lockjaw,” was Steve’s diagnosis. “Too cold.”

  We walked some beaches on the incoming tide, sight-fishing, and we spotted a few skittish snook. A couple of follows. No hits.

  We haunted one of Norm’s favorite snook hunting grounds— the Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge, where the lagoons empty and fill on the tides and the culverts are snook magnets. We tried it in the morning and evening and mid-day, on the incoming and outgoing and flat tides. We saw a few cruising snook, heard others popping from somewhere out of sight. Once toward dark I hooked one, a strong sudden fish that jumped twice before coming unbuttoned. “Mouths like tarpon,” said Norm. “You gotta hit ’em two or three times with a hard strip strike.”

  Okay, sure, I thought. Next time.

  On our last morning in Florida, with two hours to fish before we had to pack up and head for the airport, the breeze was soft and the sun was hot, and we found snook in the wash along the beach. They came in singles, pairs, and packs of eight or ten, sometimes so close we could touch them with our rod tips. Andy landed two and broke off another. I landed none but had a satisfying number of follows and nips and a couple of brief hookups.

  We debated bagging our flight. It was tempting. But in the end, duty called, and we turned our back on it and went home.

  When I pulled into my driveway in New Hampshire that night, the thermometer read 3 degrees above zero.

  The Hunt for November Reds

  Charles Poindexter and I rendezvoused with guide Ben Floyd at the Isle of Palms Marina at 10 AM on the Thursday before Thanksgiving. We sat on the veranda sipping coffee and gnawing jerky and watching the moored boats and the brown pelicans bob on the choppy gray water. The rain was coming sideways on a hard southeast wind. The flapping of the flags sounded like musket shots.

  According to our plan, this was to be the day I caught the first redfish of my life. I’d been looking forward to i
t for a long time.

  “We haven’t had rain in a month,” Charles grumbled. “Day after day, calm, warm, sunny. T-shirts and sunscreen, sight-fishing for schooled-up reds. A typical Carolina autumn.” He narrowed his eyes at me. “So today you show up, and—” he flapped his hand at the storm-tossed harbor “—tornado warnings, according to the weather channel.”

  “Go ahead,” I said. “Blame me. I am known far and wide as the Kiss of Death. I am uncanny. You want to wreck some perfectly good fishing, just invite me along. Florida, Labrador, Belize, Alaska, Patagonia. You can’t escape me. Everywhere I go, I bring my wait-till-tomorrow New England weather with me. Now we can add South Carolina to the list.” I turned to Ben. “What do you think, Captain?”

  He was squinting up at the sky. The clouds were dark and roiling. “If you think you can hit the water with a fly,” he said, “I believe I can find us some redfish. Looks to me like this weather’s going to pass over. Let’s give it another few minutes.”

  “What about the, um, tornadoes?”

  “No guts, no glory,” he said, which I did not find entirely comforting.

  Fifteen or twenty minutes later the rain stopped. Ben studied the sky, then stood up. “Let’s go.”

  The three of us pulled on foul-weather gear and piled into Ben’s 17-foot Maverick flats boat, and he steered us out of the harbor and through a maze of channels and estuaries and barrier islands. We passed under a highway bridge, and pretty soon we found ourselves in a bay surrounded by a vast expanse of marshland. We were, I knew, within a few double-hauls of downtown Charleston, but we could have been in the heart of the Everglades.

  Ben cut the motor and climbed up onto his poling platform. “Somebody grab a rod,” he said.

  I looked at Charles. He waved his hand at me. “I’m not that good with a fly rod. In this wind I’d just embarrass myself.”

  “I don’t mind embarrassing myself,” I said. I selected a 7-weight and stepped up onto the casting deck.

  Ben poled along the edge of the marsh, then turned up a little tidal creek. It soon narrowed until it was barely 12 feet wide. Here the tall grass gave us a little shelter from the wind. I figured if I cast sidearm and kept my backcast low—just over the top of the grass—I might be able to hit the water.

  We watched for wakes and swirls and nervous water, but we saw nothing to cast to. Ben paused at some bends and cuts and openings where I tried a few blind casts. I managed to keep my fly in the water but caught nothing.

  After a while we found ourselves at the entrance to a pothole where three smaller creeks converged. It was about the size of the floor of my barn back in New Hampshire. I could cover it all from where we were stopped.

  Ben jammed his pole into the mud and tied it off. “This is the place,” he said. “One of my secret redfish holes. We got ourselves a nice falling tide. Let’s get serious. Tie this on.”

  He handed Charles a fly, and Charles gave it to me. It was a new one to me. It was tied on a long-shanked, curved, size-4 saltwater streamer hook. Its tail was as long as the hook and made from a mixture of black bucktail and black Flashabou. The body was closely packed black Krystal Chenille trimmed flat on the top and bottom and rounded on the sides in the shape of a long, skinny spoon.

  “It’s called a Wiggler,” said Ben. “Local favorite. Let it sink and hop it back along the bottom. Long, slow strip, pause for it to sink, strip again. Reds’ll mostly take it on the drop. You’ll just see the leader twitch, so pay attention. With the hook bent like that, it’s supposed to ride upside down.”

  “What’s it imitate?” I said.

  “Shrimp? Finger mullet?” He shrugged. “Ask the fish.”

  “I certainly will, if I can find one willing to talk to me.”

  I raked Ben’s secret redfish hole with his black Wiggler. I hit the deep cut along the left side, the edges of the oyster island, the places where each of the three creeks emptied. Once, a gust of wind caught a sloppy cast and blew the fly into the grass. I said something unprintable. Charles said, “Tornado.”

  I changed to an orange Wiggler, then a chartreuse Wiggler, then a crab fly. I retrieved it faster, slower. I used quick hops and long steady pulls, and all I hooked were a few clusters of oysters.

  Now and then a shrimp hopped out of the water, or a baitfish splashed. A few times something on the bottom sent a swirl to the surface. Clearly, there was life in this pothole.

  But nothing ate my fly.

  “What’m I doing wrong?” I said.

  “Nothing,” said Ben. “You’re doing fine. I know there’s redfish here.”

  “You try it,” I said. “Show me how.”

  He shook his head. “All I could do is what you’ve been doing.”

  “I know what you’re thinking,” I said. “You don’t want to show up the client. Come on. Really. I’d love to see you catch one.” I handed the fly rod to him.

  He shrugged, stepped up on the casting deck, and instantly showed me that he could handle a fly rod. He raked the pothole. He varied his retrieve. He changed flies.

  He caught nothing, either, and after fifteen or twenty minutes he reeled up and handed the rod back to me. “Falling temperatures, low pressure system going through,” he said. “Puts ’em off their feed.” He climbed back to the rear of the boat, slid a spinning rod from the rack under the gunwales, and pulled a bait bucket out from under the seat. He reached into the bucket, came up with a wiggly baitfish, impaled it through the lips on a bait hook, handed the rig to Charles, and arched his eyebrows at me. “Do you mind?”

  “Me?” I said. “Why should I mind?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Some fly fishermen… ”

  “Not me. I’d love to see Charles catch a redfish.”

  Charles took my place on the casting deck and flipped his baited hook against the bank of the pothole. About one minute later his rod bowed, and two minutes after that he was holding up the first redfish I’d ever seen in person. It was a silvery, broad-shouldered, deep-chested fish built more for power than speed. Its tail glowed in subtle shades of blue and red and sported the redfish-trademark black spot.

  Charles unhooked it, released it, rebaited, and a few minutes later he caught another one. After he let that one go, he said, “Guess they just don’t want flies today.”

  I jabbed my chest with my thumb. “The old Kiss of Death.” I turned to Ben. “You got another one of those spinning rods?”

  He grinned. “You bet.” He rigged me up and handed it to me. “Keep your line tight, and when you feel a fish, just reel up on him. Circle hook, you know.”

  A few minutes later I felt the tap-tap of a fish nudging my bait. I reeled up and felt the surge of a strong fish. It turned out to be a 22-inch red.

  “Nice fish,” said Ben. “Too bad it wasn’t on the fly rod. Sorry.”

  “Sorry?” I said. “Hell, that was fun. I’ve been focused too much on fly fishing lately. Fishing with bait takes me back to my roots. Let’s catch another one.”

  Charles and I ended up catching six or eight redfish apiece from that little pothole before the tide turned. They ate mud minnows fished right on the bottom, and they pulled hard. Some of them sported multiple spots on the bases of their tails, and I thought they were quite beautiful.

  I had imagined and assumed I’d catch my first redfish sight-fishing with a fly rod from the casting deck of a flats boat with a tropical sun beating down on my shoulders. But I wasn’t the least bit disappointed. Fishing was fishing, and catching was always better than not catching.

  For several years, my wife and I have been spending the week before Thanksgiving visiting with family in Charleston, South Carolina. We gorge on shrimp and oysters and barbecue, prowl the streets and shops of the gorgeous old Southern city, ogle the antebellum architecture, watch the native ladies weave reed baskets, walk the beaches, take photographs, and generally enjoy a warm-weather reprieve from our frosty New Hampshire autumn. Fishing hasn’t entered the equation, although it’s ente
red my mind.

  So that rainy, Thursday-morning getaway to the marsh with my local friend Charles Poindexter and our guide, Ben Floyd, was a bonus for me, a measure of the tolerance of my wife and family, and I figured I’d try to do it again when we visited next year. Maybe if I was lucky it would evolve into an annual event.

  That evening we were all standing around a newspaper-covered picnic table shucking steamed oysters and drinking beer when my cell phone vibrated in my pocket. “Hey, it’s Ben,” he said. “You free on Saturday? I got a cancellation. S’pose to be a warm sunny day, and I owe you one. Sight-fishing weather. I know where we can find a big school of hungry reds on the bottom of the tide.”

  I turned to Vicki. “Am I free on Saturday?”

  “Fishing, huh?” she said.

  I smiled.

  “You’re upset you didn’t get any on flies today, right?” she said.

  “I’m not upset about anything. I had a great time.”

  “Go fishing,” she said. “Unless you’d rather go to the farmers’ market with us.”

  “I’m free,” I told Ben.

  Saturday was a shirtsleeve-and-sunscreen day. Ben motored out of the harbor, negotiated a labyrinth of channels and islands, then cut the motor and climbed up on his poling platform. He pointed his pole at the rim of a flat marshgrass-covered island where the falling tide had bared some mud. “There’s a shelf along that edge there, water’s three or four feet deep, and then it drops off into a channel. That shelf is a kind of a funnel for baitfish, and there’s been a school of reds patrolling it the past few days on the falling tide. Grab a rod and climb up there and get ready.”