Changes in Latitude

I have the coolest friends. I recently returned from a five day trip to the Florida Keys that three of my friends put together and told me when to show up at the airport. Scott Wessels of The Bears Den, one of the first people in Fly World to get behind my flies and who has supported me more than anyone over the years both on and off the vise. Scott wasn’t making this trip but thought I needed a change of scenery. Fellow Mainer Joe Babino who I met on a shark fishing trip with Cheeky Fly Fishing last year, now an ex-pat living on Grassy Key with his fiancée Lindsay. Joe reps for Cheeky and Diablo Paddlesports when he’s not working on his own business, Wikdfly, and a real job. And Sam Demarco who I met when he worked at The Bears Den. Also a New England ex-pat, Sam now lives in Jupiter and has become one of the most talented fly tiers I know and owns Aqueous Flies.

In the weeks leading up to the trip I had replayed visions of tarpon, reds, lemon sharks, jacks…basically everything…at the end of my fly line. Standing at Logan looking at the Departures sign and watching the rest of the travelers staring into their mobile devices, I put aside expectations, catch lists, grip-and-grin photo ops and blog ideas. I get enough of the “pressure to perform” fifty hours a week. This trip was about fishing, learning new things and being with friends.  

Sam picked me up in Miami and we headed south for Mile Marker 58 on the road to paradise. Since we are both fly nerds, we talked about flies, materials, hooks and techniques basically the entire way.

We met up with Joe at Florida Keys Outfitters in Islamorada, got the latest wind report and headed for Joe’s place on Grassy Key. Joe’s dog Hank greeted me like a long lost friend and I was introduced to Bruce, the newest member of the clan. Bruce wasn’t much into tennis balls.

Joe and Lindsay basically live in Paradise. Their backyard is a beach. My mornings before everyone got up were spent sitting in a chair staring at the water with Hank.

Once the dogs settled down, we rigged rods, loaded the gear and cooler into the boat and splashed it at a ramp just a short way down the road. We headed out as the sun began to drop with the plan of fishing dock lights for snook and jacks. The wind and snook were not overly cooperative but the jacks were.

One late afternoon we decided to head to Key West to fish in the lee provided by the waterfront. We found a group of really angry jacks around the pilings and did battle with them for quite awhile. And then the angels sang. We floated around a pier next to one of the restaurants and as we turned the corner, there they were, tarpon between twenty and a hundred pounds rolling under the dock lights. I was standing on the bow and without stopping to think I dropped a back cast in under the pier and stripped my fly into the light. It happened so quickly I didn’t have time to think, I just went on autopilot. A forty pound poon slammed my fly, I strip set the hook, bowed to the beast as it cleared the water 3 times and just kept telling myself not to think. Joe and Sam scrambled around trying to capture everything on video on their phones. I got the fish boat side and as I stepped off the bow platform to reach for the fish I raised the tip of my rod. The fish jumped again and with the change in angle it spit the fly. I was pissed at myself and disappointed the video did not come out but as I cracked a beer and watched Sam casting at more fish, I was thankful for the time the tarpon gave me and that my friends had been a part of it. We messed with those fish for hours. Sam was relentless and was treated to a lot of follows and several hits as was Joe, but in the end the fish won. They had caught us.

The wind continued to be a factor over the next few days. We covered a lot of water in the backcountry off Cudjoe, in and around Tom’s Harbor, Key Colony and some places that didn't show on the chart...probably because it was dark out and two guys from Maine were navigating. We even set up one afternoon with chum for sharks and had a great slick going drawing all sorts of bait into it. Things were looking good but then the lights went out. Visibility in the water was virtually non-existent so we never saw any shark in the slick but I’m pretty sure something came in and shut it down.

We didn’t go fishless. We managed a few snapper or small ‘cuda each day. That was fine with me; I don’t get to catch them every day.

Our last full day of fishing was spent on the flats off Key West. We saw a lot more life than we had in the previous days. Bonnetheads, a few reds, a few tarpon, rays with jacks in tow. At one point we were pretty sure we had permit close by but couldn’t get close enough for a good shot.

We gave those tarpon under the lights one more try before we left Key West that night. Sam gave a noble effort; they just were not going to eat. I’m pretty sure we needed to have a deep fried fly or some MSG to get them to chew.

It wasn’t all fishing. Lindsay works as a trainer at Dolphin Connection at Hawk’s Cay and invited us to meet the dolphins. Being face to face with these amazing creatures never gets old. Once you look into a dolphin’s eye you are never the same.

And before leaving we had to make a stop at Robbie’s to feed the tarpon. I was supposed to not only get bit but surrender my forearm to the tarpon of Sam’s choosing. Although I will tell you I’m fearless, I am in fact not and I couldn’t do it. I did however get bit by the damn pelicans.

Sam and I headed out after Robbie’s for the airport. On the way we stopped in South Miami to check out some urban fishing behind a mall.

We had been told this was a good place for a shot at some peacock bass. Just as Sam was relentless with the Key West tarpon, so he was with a couple of peacocks we spotted along the bank of the canal. He spent twenty minutes literally face to face with those two fish and finally got one to eat steel, a fitting way to end a great trip with good friends.

As I stared out the window into the darkness on the flight back to Boston I replayed the images of the trip in my mind. I’ve been on fishing trips to a lot of really cool places but this one will always stand out. Conditions were tough, fish were hard to find but we made it up as we went along and had a blast. I thought of a sign I saw at the end of Blimp Road.

Adventure begins where the road ends.

Adventures with these guys will continue. I look forward to every minute.

Thank you Scott, Joe, Lindsay and Sam!

Grassy Key, FL

18 Nov 2013

Euclid and Bluefish

I didn’t get it at first either. You’re asking yourself what the hell do Euclid and bluefish have in common and how does Mike Rice even know who Euclid was? I’ll answer the latter and explain the former.

I was first introduced to Euclid while on a trip with my Latin Club to Italy when I was a junior in high school. My Latin teacher, Mr. Kothe, invited me to have a beer one afternoon while we were in Venice to talk about scholarly things. We sat at a café on the edge of the Grand Canal drinking a Bavarian Spezial talking about life, knowledge and a girl that I thought the world revolved around. Mr. Kothe imparted to me passages from several poets about unrequited love and fools and ended with one of Euclid’s Common Notions:

“Things equal to the same thing are also equal to one another.”

We waited for another beer and he told me, “Someday Mr. Rice…not this day, but someday…Euclid will make sense to you, you will understand and you will find your way.”

He was right but it took me until sometime in my mid twenties to fully understand what it meant and why he said it at that time. Euclid may have been a math geek two thousand plus years ago but he was dialed in. Like so many things that Mr. Kothe taught me that seemed obscure at the time, I carry that concept with me and think of it often as I try to figure out life.

To explain the commonality between Euclid’s aforementioned postulate and bluefish, I have to tell another story before I get to the relevance of bluefish. I grew up on a farm in the hills of western Maine in a family that hunted. We hunted not for the “sport” of it but to put meat on the table. Hunting skills and the ways of the woods were handed from generation to generation. Opening day on the year I turned of legal hunting age was overcast and cold. I was nervous as we stepped over the fence of our field into the woods. I had gone with dad before and walked the woods and observed as he hunted but this time was different. That first day I couldn’t seem to do anything right. I tripped over every stick, log and rock. I made excruciatingly loud noises as I passed through the brush, got stuck in mud and I think I dropped my rifle a time or two. All of these blunders were met with that look, the one that I always tried to avoid getting from him. In the afternoon he sat me on a rock at the top of a bowl as he went below to hopefully push a deer out of the thicket back toward me. It seemed like hours that I sat there. It got colder, it started to rain…I just wanted to go home. Eventually he made his way back and we moved to the edge of a field. After discussing fields of fire and safety issues, he sat at one corner of the field and me at another. I kept looking over at him hoping he would get up and give me the sign to head for home. The dude never moved for the rest of the afternoon. At all. I thought I would lose my mind but there was no way I would show any sign that I was miserable. Years later he would tell me that his favorite part of hunting had nothing to do with hunting at all, it was just being out there away from everything complicated. He said that some of his best days hunting were days he didn’t see any deer.

Fast forward to late summer of 2006. Dad came down to Marshfield to visit and I wanted to take him fishing. We had never fished together much when I was growing up and other than a few head-boat trips he had never really fished on the ocean. At the time I was seven years into my fly fishing addiction, had a boat, all the gear and a ton of time on the water. I had spent countless hours alone on the water, in the sun, the rain, even in the snow pursuing my love of fly fishing. I wanted him to experience some of that. I wanted to show him my boat handling skills, knowledge of the rivers and parts of the ocean I called home and my ability to read the water and find fish. I had engine issues on my boat that hadn’t been fixed yet so my buddy Scott Washburn offered to take us out in his boat.

We met Scott at sunrise at the dock and we headed for the mouth of the river where we hoped to find some bluefish that had been hanging around. On the ride downriver I showed dad how to operate the bail on my spinning rod (yes I own one) and went over casting and what to expect if a bass or blue hit the Deadly Dick I had tied on. We got to a section of boulder fields at the mouth as the tide turned and started dropping. Birds were working over feeding fish and Scott got us right into them. The water was rough and we were getting bounced around but I didn’t think anything of it. I handed dad the spinning rod, put him in the bow and watched him make the first cast as I started casting my fly rod from the stern. I went tight to a blue as dad made another cast that ended with the line in a bird’s nest. I’ll be honest; I said a few four letter words under my breath when I saw that mess of line on the spool. I looked over at him as I put the blue onto the reel and for an instant saw the look upon his face that must have been on my face all those years ago in the woods. At that moment I realized that those looks were not so much directed at me as at himself, a realization that maybe things had not been explained or taught as completely as had been thought. I too had experienced moments like that with my daughter. Now I understood.

I hauled my blue in, released it, put my rod away and attacked the mess of line on the spinning rod. It wasn’t that bad and I had dad back fishing quickly. I stayed with him, talking him through the cast and the retrieve. He went tight to his first bluefish after a few casts and I will never forget the look on his face. One of surprise, joy and confusion all mixed together. He hooked a couple more blues and I noticed the look on his face was turning to one of anxious desperation and green tones. In my excitement to get him on fish I hadn’t even considered the conditions and his lack of experience being in a boat in two to three foot waves. The old man was getting seasick and having inherited his stubbornness and pride I knew he wouldn’t say anything. I released the blue he had on and told Scott I wanted to run inside to look for some bass. Once we got in on flat water dad looked a lot better and came back to life.

Later that day we sat on my stone patio drinking beer in the sun and I told him that my favorite part of fishing has nothing to do with catching fish, that I just love being on the water away from everything and that some of my best days on the water were days I didn’t catch a thing. I watched him with my daughter and thought about the events of that morning. Was this an example of history repeating itself? Had he and I in some way come full circle? In my world on the water had I become the teacher and he the student?  

I was driving home from work a few nights ago when dad called me to say that he had just finished dressing out a six point buck he had shot. He proceeded to tell me the story, how he had sat silently in his field in the cold and the wind waiting and watching for almost two hours for that buck to show. I totally understood the why and the significance.

I sit here on the river as I finish writing this and look out at the mouth where dad caught his first bluefish. Hunting to my father is what fishing is to me. And while we have had differences over the years, in many ways we are the same.

Euclid was right.

North River, MA

10 Nov 2013