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Surfing: The art of learning from your mistakes
The surf-break at Molasses reef: He launched the Lucky Roller about three in the afternoon from the Port Largo homeowners park in Key Largo. The weather had been downright nasty even for late March. Though not hurricane season, he felt one was coming. For many days a front had been blowing 25 knots or better out of the southeast and that morning a strong cold front began to blow down from the north. The wind slowed from a hard run to a walk to a crawl. The feathered clouds above seemed to want to form their own disturbingly calm vortex, like when the eye of Hurricane Irma when it went through the Keys and sucked all the water out of Florida Bay. He could feel the air temperature begin to drop. He floated the Lucky Roller, fired her up, backed her around and headed out. He wanted to see if the abrupt wind shift from SE to NE coupled with the surf buildup of a week’s worth of heavy winds out of the southeast might create a surf break five miles offshore at the edge of local Molasses reef. His was a novel thought, and one that might change his…
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Trouting the Beaverkill
Along the far bank is a ledge of New York granite that runs the length of the pool. At first and last light the darkened granite looks like the silhouette of a prehistoric bear standing up to his belly in the stream, fishing. The branches of a Douglas fur hang over the bear’s massive shoulders and reach out over the head of the pool. Upstream the leaves of dainty poplar and beach wave in the light over the riffle water on the long flat channel into the deep pool that begins under the bear’s snout.On hot summer days, wading in jeans and felt soled wading shoes and keeping your casts quick and short and just beneath the overhang, you can take trout after trout in the slick nipple of water that peaks behind each rounded stone in the riffle water above the big fishing bear granite. Small grizzly hackle flies tied with a white deer hair tuft for visibility and buoyancy work best.One sunny, breezy June day. you wade into center stream and settle yourself on a long, wide flat rock. Small trout sip gnats in the deep hole beneath the bear’s head. Excited you tie on a tiny black…
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Hooray for Turtle Turds!
On New Year’s Day we were anchored south of the Ocean Reef Club off Key Largo and chumming hard. We had caught several nice mangrove, mutton, yellowtail, lane snapper and porgies on the shallow patches inside of Hawk’s channel, when a scene out of Caddy Shack occurred where what appeared to be a solid human turd floated slowly through our chum-slick on the tide. The boat owner suggested we take our lines out of the water until it passed. None of us required urging to comply. Thereafter we continued fishing for another hour when yet another, slightly smaller turd floated by. For the last three weeks we have seen strong west winds blow dirty water out of the Gulf of Mexico. Also, the Key Largo sewer authority has been connecting Ocean Reef Club’s sewer system to the relatively new Key Largo tertiary sewage treatment center. For many years going back and many years to come a sewer pipe off Key Biscayne otherwise known as the shit hole, has and will release billions of gallons of partially treated sewage from Miami into the Gulf Stream. I wondered if any could have been responsible for what I was seeing. Either way it…
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Center of the Universe Pond
At Center Pond, native brook trout is what’s for supper. After a 5 mile hike up the mountain we put up our camp and took to the lake in the two canoes. If Center Pond was out West in the dessert canyon country it would be considered a box canyon covered by a large shallow lake. The lake ranges from 15 to five feet deep. At the stream entry end of the lake it is deeper and full of rocks. At the drainage end it’s shallow and the bottom is silted in. The mountain tops rise up on three sides and the wind swirls up the center of the lake, making it tricky sometimes to throw and see a dry fly. Dry fly fishing is best in the still of the morning and when it calms in the afternoon. Native brook trout feed on dry flies like a size 16 Hornberg or Adams or on nymphs and leaches like the famous bead head nymph or black woolly bugger leach fly that we purchased along with our fishing licenses at Two Rivers Canoe and Tackle in Millinocket. The water in Center Pond is the color of old dried blood from cedar…
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The Maestro – by Phillip Caputo
David Wilson could be described as a bulky leprechaun. At five-eleven and about 190 pounds, his frame is that of an ex-running back who could use a few laps around the field. His square face topped by curly, ginger-brown hair and set off by pale, merry eyes, makes you think of an Irish bartender telling an off-color joke. To say that he loves to fish would be like saying that Julia Child loves to cook. No niggling purist, he can, and will fish for anything that swims with anything that casts a line and hook, but his greatest joy is orchestrating angling weekends for his friends. He’s caught enough fish in his life, from half-pound brook trout to giant Bluefin tuna, that catching them doesn’t thrill him half as much as watching other people catch them. Last August, he phoned my wife and me in Connecticut from his office in Miami where he works as a financial planner. He said he was going to flee the stifling South Florida summer for Montauk, where his family maintains a cottage and where he intended to spend a weekend in early September fishing for blues and stripers. A confirmed bachelor at thirty-nine, Wilson…
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The Great Shot
He started out in the morning, early. Sounds glared out in the pre-dawn: spoon in the coffee mug, twang of the egg skillet, running water; and then those few minutes of silence while he stared into the coffee mug because it was blacker than the night outside the window. He put the coffee mug down and stood and picked his pack off the other chair. He took up his old 16-guage pump by the case handle and tucked it under his arm so he had a hand free to lock the door. He put on his cowboy hat and went outside. The rain muffled everything, even the closing of the car door. The car started with a cough and he backed her out and put her in forward. It was a twenty-mile drive to the new place and he drove slowly, thinking that the rain would keep the birds on their roosts. He found an old sweet song on the radio and let his mind wander. No other cars on the road. In the fringe of the headlights the desert began. The sun wasn’t rising. He flicked the radio off. You never can rely on the weather, he thought, not…
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The adventure of light, and nature
Alone with his camera, he stopped at another bend on the path around the moat. He’d left his friend rigging fishing poles to catch their supper back at their campsite. Here, he thought, would be a good place for a sunset shot. The sea-rock and limestone path he walked around defined the moat at old Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas. Fifteen paces back along the moat wall, he set up his camera on the tripod. He set the exposure for fifteen seconds and walked back to where the path turned into the sea and posed with his back to the camera, his face to the setting sun. He focused across the flat, steel-blue sea. A long grey cloud edged the horizon. As the sun set, sunlight patterned the sky and the sea, darker at his feet and above and orange and blue and white just above the cloud. He stood in the quiet lee of the fort. The sea lay flat, blocked from the wind by the fort’s high masonry wall; sixteen million bricks, and still unfinished. Above the rampart, the wind gusted twenty knots or better. The wind hummed out across the gulf. The sea changed hues as…
