Guiding Light in the Keys

Say that you have been driving south for two days and despite road exhaustion you are delighted to escape the flinty April cold of Michigan. Just outside of Miami you make a jog on the Palmetto Expressway, then another jog through the truck farms and you are past Homestead. Closer now. In the immenseness of its greenery the flat swampy terrain resembles nothing so much as a giant snake farm, but you know that not far on the left is the Atlantic and on the right, out beyond the miles of mangrove and saw grass, is the Gulf of Mexico.

Route 1 is slacked with trailers; from the air it would appear that you are trapped in a slow crawling trailer caravan, an imitation freight train hauling the weary to the sun for an Easter weekend rest. But you don't want to rest. You want to fish for a month, every day all day, way past the point of boredom or exhaustion or possible sunstroke or disgust. At Key Largo and on down to Big Pine you keep noticing there's a steady breeze out of the southeast, maybe twenty knots, and it has roiled the water and you hate it, but even this doesn't matter. You itch to be out there, to be staked on the edge of a flat in a skiff looking for tarpon or permit or bonefish or perhaps the waving-flag tail of a mutton snapper.

A flight down from Miami is even more dramatic. Following the Keys south, then west, at 5,000 feet you imagine that you can see the great sweep of the tide shifting from the Atlantic to the Gulf and back again. And the passing of the tidal thrust through so many configurations of land masses and small mangrove keys creates rivers. It occurs to you that you are not fishing a series of mangrove islands and their adjoining flats at all but twenty or so rivers whose courses may be seen only from the air.

Rivers or flats, the Keys are a wilderness of water, and a stranger could fish for a long time without even seeing any of the vaunted species that make angling here such a quantum experience. There is simply too much water: close to 750 square miles between Bahia Honda down through Key West with a slight crook southwesterly out to Boca Grande and the Marquesas beyond.

The stranger will waste his time blundering around from flat to channel with his nose in a series of imprecise charts and an inscrutable tide book. He will get lost, or at least run his boat aground. So the only sensible thing to do in order to save time and grief and raw nerves, stove-in hulls and gouged bottoms—and ultimately to catch fish—is to book a guide. In this vast stretch of country there are perhaps a dozen good ones, not to be confused with the backwoods handyman retards he might have encountered on other sporting ventures.

The skiff floats far out on the Gulf side of Jack Bank; it is still very early but there is a good tide. The light is bad, however, with thunderheads piling up, pushed by a fifteen-knot wind out of the south. The thunderheads reflect the sun and form a sheen on the water that is almost impossible to penetrate; though the water is only three feet deep, a 100-pound tarpon can pass by unnoticed. These are scarcely good conditions for the neophyte but he realizes he needs them to excuse his ineptitudes.

The guide, Woody Sexton, stands on the deck of the skiff holding a long push pole at midpoint so that is balanced in his hand. He is breathing hard because he has just finished chasing a pod of tarpon upwind and uptide but they stayed out of range.

“I see more fish,” he says.

“Where?” The customer's voice quavers.

“About twelve o'clock straight off the transom about a hundred yards, moving from left to right.”

“I don't see anything.” The customer is staring, rather than scanning the water as he should. He checks his fly line to make sure that the wind hasn't whipped it around the motor or the console.

“They're turning toward us.” The guide gives several hard pushes on the pole. “Get ready.”

The customer begins to false cast, ready to throw to the fish. He sees only waves and their small darkened troughs. “I don't see anything.”

“You're not looking. Coming at us a hundred feet. Ten tarpon. Shoot off the lead fish.”

“I still don't see them.”

“Cast!”

The customer casts and begins stripping his line. He thinks he has seen a shadow or at least a movement.

“You spooked them,” Sexton says. “You dropped your line on the lead fish and they spooked.”

The customer slumps in his seat. First-day blues. A few hundred yards away Cal Cochran, another guide, is pointing out something to his customer, Mead Johnson. Johnson casts and is on to a fifty-pounder. The first-day blues deepen.

Sexton decides to make the four-mile run over to Big Spanish Key, where we will have a slight lee from the wind. He is being sweet and generous, assuring that though the cast was in the wrong direction it was good. But Big Spanish only extends the comic possibilities of the day. The customer strikes a fish so hard with his brand new Great Equalizer, the largest tarpon fly rod available, that the tip touches the reel seat. The leader snaps. “You really crossed his eyes,” Sexton says, starting the motor.

That night the customer sees the fish over and over again as he tries to sleep; he is like a bridge player reliving almost grand slams in his dreams. His mind moves like a badminton bird between the desire to punch his guide, to catch a record fish, to be back home playing in the snow, to know enough about Keys fishing to do it by himself. Where no one could watch.

Sexton is to saltwater fly-fishing what an astronaut is to the space program—super technocrat. With his short gray hair and mesomorph physique, he reminds one of a retired NCO who has refused to go soft. He can be irritatingly humorless. Guides can kill the charm of a day's fishing by becoming screaming drill sergeants. It is, after all, a sport, and most notions of sport include the idea of entertainment. No customer likes to sit in the gun seat all day with the general feeling that he is a hopeless incompetent.

Though he has a certain honest charm, Sexton watches with absolute disgust when, after a day's fishing, the customer goes to an oyster house and loads up on quantities of shellfish and beer. Sexton worries aloud like an old lady about the dangers of alcohol and hepatitis. A disease lurks in every cherrystone. He does not like fish. He tells how, when he trained with weights, he would break a dozen eggs every day into a malted milk. And the customer knows that these finicky attitudes are carried to great ends. An errant cigarette ash in the Sexton skiff is quickly wiped up with a wet towel. All of Sexton's equipment, however old, looks brand-new. The customer's dog leaps up for a peek into Sexton's new camper. Horrors. A dog can scratch a car. Everything on earth threatens decay and one maintains oneself only with a devotion to discipline that makes many of Sexton's friends reach for a big drink.

As the customer draws nearer to sleep he feels more warm and less nitpicky about Sexton. So what if a man devotes to fishing the same kind of energy Lee Iacocca devoted to the Mustang. A day with Sexton isn't as terrifying as fishing with Stu Apte, for instance, who gives the impression of overbearing faultlessness. Perhaps too overbearing—another guide once went after him with a kill gaff. And unlike Cal Cochran, Sexton often acts puzzled and doubting. Cal Cochran has a macho routine on the waterfront that Marlon Brando should study.

When he is not enervated by bad weather, Woody Sexton gives the appearance of tremendous strength and vitality. He constitutes some sort of classic in conservative guiding; while most guides have turned to larger skiffs—Fiber Craft or Hewes—for the comfort of their customers, Sexton keeps his light Nova Scotia. The skiff was bought from a Hamiltonian Republican who named it Amagiri years ago after the Japanese destroyer that sank PT-109. The name is still on the skiff and has been known to vex some of the Navy personnel on the Keys. Sexton still spends a lot of time on his push pole, a diminishing practice which on a heavy skiff is absolutely brutal. A 1,000-pound skiff with a 135-hp outboard does not glide across a flat easily. Sexton, however, is willing to chase tarpon upwind and uptide, and the amount of power he gets into the pole is appalling. The skiff leaves a wake and if you are standing you maintain your balance with difficulty. This requires the kind of physique and conditioning that leaves the joggers and exercise buffs hiding in any available closet. (At home in the evenings, Sexton exercises his casting arm—which looks like an oak club—by going through all the motions with a twelve-pound sledgehammer with a foreshortened handle.)

Sexton divides his year in half, moving to the West Coast in early July and back to Big Pine usually in February. Typically, he spends much of his vacation time in the West, fishing steelhead and hunting ducks and chukars. During World War II he was a physical fitness instructor in the Navy. Up until 1966 he cut big trees during the winter on a freelance basis for the timber industry. Sexton gives the impression of being hyperintelligent, cranky and totally physical. One cannot imagine a more stylish or powerful fly caster, or anyone more capable at hooking and fighting fish.

At noon you are staked out in the Snipes and it is very hot and still. You hear the outgoing water gurgling through a tidal cut in the mangroves and you are tempted to throw yourself in to wash away the sweat that is dripping into your eyes and down your chest and legs. There are few tarpon around so you have decided to try the barracuda fly Ray Donnersberger has devised. One version has been called Red Death, a name that deserves to be hooted. But the fly, unlike many flies you have used on barracuda before, works. It is at least a foot long and evidently imitates the needlefish, a favorite food of the barracuda. Donnersberger claims the fly casts “nicely” and you agree, assuming you can stuff it down the barrel of a shotgun. But there are those who wouldn't need a gun. You remember an early morning at Vista Linda marina when Cal Cochran decided to cancel; the sky was dark and the wind was running over thirty miles per hour. A few guides were standing around taking turns casting. Cochran threw the whole line and leader about 100 feet across the marina lagoon into the wind.

This sort of act can cause a great deal of difficulty and misunderstanding between guide and customer. The guide might have logged twenty years on the water and his devotion to angling is all-consuming. The customer has been making money so that, among other things, he can afford the $90-a-day guide fee. Although the customer most often is not one of the great anglers of the world, a few guides have been known to get very hot over a blown cast. Even to the point of running a customer back to shore if the errors are numerous.

Most guides are fairly tolerant and affable, however, especially if a customer's interest is sincere. Even in the frenzy and exoticism of the sport, the good guides remember that their purpose is to enable a customer to catch fish.

The names of guides most frequently heard are Cecil Keith Jr., George Hommel Jr., Stu Apte, Roy Lowe, Bill Curtis, Harry Snow Jr., Eddy Wightman, Jack Brothers, Jimmy Albright, Arlin Leiby, Bob Montgomery, Jim Brewer, Steve Huff and Cal Cochran. A mixture of the great, the good and some retired. Albright, for example, has been famous for a very long time; Huff, who is only twenty-seven, will be famous for a very long time. A few are extremely versatile—you suspect that Bill Curtis, who works out of Key Biscayne, or Cal Cochran would gladly trailer their skiffs to the moon if they thought the fishing was worthwhile. Cochran tackles his job with the belligerence of a pro defensive end. Stu Apte has retired from guiding and become a copilot on a 747, which reveals something about the type of person who becomes obsessed with this sport. In his spare time Apte is making a movie about fly-fishing for tarpon from a canoe. One wishes him well. It is said he does not know how to swim.

 

Harry Snow Jr. is a justly famous guide as was his father before him. His family came originally from Nantucket to Saint Augustine, and later his father moved to the Keys to work on the railroad; he stuck around because he liked the fishing, ending up guiding such notables as Herbert Hoover. The other guides admit that on bonefish Junior is probably in a class by himself and have stories to illustrate. As an instance, Snow can place a customer on the deck, spinning rod in hand, and tell him to cast. Snow invariably can get a cast off first though he has to reach in the rod holder for his equipment. He also has the ability to find fish in the vilest of weather. One morning, sitting over breakfast at the Half and Half up on Big Pine with Woody Sexton and Steve Huff, Harry Snow Jr. looked particularly happy. Though he is booked much of the year he had received a paid cancellation and he and Woody were going to spend the day fishing for pleasure. You look closely into his sun-weathered face for traces of madness; how can he guide for maybe 300 days a year in the heat of the Florida Keys only to go fishing on a day off? He excuses his obsession by saying he wants to relax.

A stretch of bad weather translates into unpaid cancellations and a loss of income for the guides. High winds and clouds can pose additional dangers if a customer on a short vacation insists on going out. A Hewes skiff can streak across the flats at about forty-five knots and if bad light hides the configurations of the bottom it is easy to run aground. Sometimes bad weather pays off, though. Permit are less wary and take a fly better. And tarpon, if you can see them, are more prone to strike when it's choppy.

There are problems involving etiquette and secrecy. Many good spots have code names to conceal their locations: Animal Farm, the Eccentrics, Monster Point and others. Some areas are named after guides: Hommel's or Woody's Corner. Some secrecy is understandable; it is a guide's livelihood and he probably spent a great deal of time and gas money doping out the fishery. And though the area is huge, a dozen skiffs can make it appear crowded. But even if a bungling initiate, or a dread spy from Miami or Islamorada, had the chart name of the area, the precise slot the tarpon or permit tend to travel on a certain tide would be difficult to unravel.

But the biggest problem is when a guide cannot find fish during good conditions. Say there is a big tide and a fly-fishing customer wants to take a mutton snapper, a currently fashionable fish. The guide goes out from Key West, across an area called “the lakes,” to Woman Key and Boca Grande, expecting to see snappers behind the rays that move up on the flats with the tide.

But while in two hours spent poling the very best water he sees many rays, no snappers are feeding behind them. All of the good signs are there, including cormorants feeding behind the rays. Even the flat smells fishy. So what has happened? He decides it might be too bumpy along the reef line—a brisk southeast wind has raised a moderate surf. Maybe the snappers don't like it. There aren't many permit around either, though ordinary permit aren't disturbed by the weather. He is flatly boggled. The week before under similar conditions he saw thirteen snappers. Also the rare sight of five permit, two snappers and a cormorant following a single mudding ray. Maybe the way the waves draw in upon themselves along the reef, the shallow trough, make the fish think there is less water than there really is. If fish think. Or the weather has been cooler and the change in water temperature might have affected the feeding habits. Both guide and client are upset; the guide is perplexed, the client irritated. A guide is forced to think. If he is not prepared to think technically, to become a master strategist, it is unlikely he will survive, since the core of his livelihood is return business.

World War II proved to be very good for the offshore fishing around Key West, though no one realized it at the time. There were German subs in the area and they knocked off a few of our ships. These wrecks provide the prey with shelter from the predator; the wreck is a giant restaurant for a wide spectrum of sea creatures that ranges from the tiny crustaceans that plaster themselves on the steel to huge sharks and 300-pound jewfish. Some of the wrecks are extremely difficult to find and some are too far from Key West for any but the fastest boats. But Bob Montgomery has mastered both the finding of them and the light-tackle approach to fishing their bounty.

Montgomery was a flight engineer for twelve years in the Navy before he decided that the Navy was not “what it used to be.” He was raised on Mondongo Island off the west coast of Florida where his father was a fishing guide. He docks two boats at Garrison Bight, Key West, both of which he custom-built: a nineteen-foot Carey for the fiats and a twenty-three-foot Formula for offshore wreck fishing. Montgomery is an aggressive though very pleasant human. He likes the idea of versatility in fishing, and owning two boats gives him a wide range of options.

There is a touch of the blond Ernest Borgnine to Montgomery. He is jovial but with a firm sense of what he is on earth—he smiles a lot but only on his own terms. He is of average height but with massive chest and shoulders, and could easily be mistaken for a bricklayer or a retired jock who has become a beer salesman. And he would not be out of place in a deputy's uniform in one of those movies that highlight the powder-keg versatility for mayhem of the Deep South.

You wonder about a football-coach syndrome you find in the guides, Montgomery included. Everyone in the sporting world has remarked on particular types who are absolutely incapable of abandoning their obsessiveness for any occasion. And guides, whether at breakfast or a social dinner, are going to drill you into a corner about fishing or boats or the threat to business posed by a new guide in town. After a long day on the water it can drive you limp with boredom. You suddenly want to tour geriatrics boutiques with your maiden aunt. It's fun to bring up another subject—farming, or Watergate—and see how fast they can get back to fishing. Only sex competes. A sweet young thing in a bikini can disarm the most insistent sports freak, if only momentarily. “Yum yum wow gurgle. But you know those ole tarpon are stacked in the channel like cordwood.” Actually, if you are paying, it is an obsession you learn to appreciate.

Early one morning we left Garrison Bight in the Formula for a destroyer wreck out on the edge of the Gulf Stream. Montgomery's brother Gene, also a guide, was at the dock with a long face and two clients who looked like a guaranteed pain in the neck. Days can be long. We went around the tip of the island, then headed out in a fairly heavy chop. But the Formula has a V hull and is powered by two OMC 165s, so there was no real discomfort. We deep jigged when the Fathometer showed the destroyer and the schools of fish above it, but the wind made it too difficult to stay on target.

Around noon the weather abruptly changed and the water calmed down. We decided to fly-fish for dolphin along the weed lines that had begun to appear. We trolled until we hooked a dolphin, then cut the engine and began to cast. We caught several and they proved to be fine fighters on fly tackle. We noticed several sharks massing themselves under another bed of weeds, almost peering out, the water so clear that you could see them eye the pilchards we were throwing as chum. A large fly was cast and quickly taken but the leader popped. Another fly and a good hookup on the lip. Half an hour later and you have your first shark on fly, 100 pounds or so but a not very dramatic fighter.

Montgomery fishes about half-a-dozen wrecks in addition to taking customers out on the flats for permit and tarpon. He has an elaborate Vexilar Recording Fathometer mounted on the Formula console, and without such an instrument wreck fishing is out of the question, especially when you're going a long way to a little-known site. The wreck of the Luckenback is twenty-four minutes, twenty seconds at 3,400 rpm off Smith Shoals at 004 degrees on the compass. A long run. Shortly before you reach the spot, a few hundred square yards in all of that ocean empty of markings, you turn on the Fathometer and wait for the wreck and the fish to show. If you miss the wreck, you throw over a buoy, and circle until you find it. This all might strike some as excessively technical until they see the profligate number of fish: cobia, amberjack, yellowtail, snapper, barracuda, among others. Often giant jewfish rise up to take a hooked fish. After a moderate amount of chumming most fish take readily to the fly. You become selective in order not to exhaust yourself.

Montgomery gets very angry when spies attempt to follow him to the Luckenback, assuming they have a fast enough boat—the Formula does close to fifty. He once led a Miami boat thirty miles in the wrong direction before turning back, an expensive act of deception in terms of time and gasoline, but if the spot were widely known it could be cleaned out by fish hogs. All good guides release fish except for a record or a mount or an occasional fish dinner. But some guides hang fish to attract customers. The tarpon and permit end up in trash barrels.

Another unfortunate practice designed to entertain anglers who might better be tied to bar stools or TV sets is the daylong fishing contest to see which “club” can kill the most fish. Often long lines of shriveled barracuda and snapper are stretched out in the hot parking lot next to Garrison Bight. Intelligent guides have long since given up the idea that the ocean's bounty is endless. The decrease in number of game fish is obvious to anyone who has been in the business for a few years. The fishing is still good and with a little sense on the part of even the most bovine angler it can be kept that way.

After fishing in the Florida Keys for a number of years it becomes obvious that guides do not make a lot of money despite their high daily fee, and certainly not much commensurate with their abilities as men. A fully equipped skiff with motor costs at least $5,000, there are the many blown-out charters, and the rigor of the job equals that of a jackhammer operator. But there is a dignity and grace in the profession unavailable in all but a very few areas to very few men. You have to be good or you don't eat. Few of the guides could imagine doing anything else. At least until they simply wear out.

And there is the rapport that the guide, no matter the repetition, shares with his customer: the sheer fun and excitement of the sport. It is most palpable early in the morning. At dockside the customers are talking with strenuously subdued giddiness, trying to act offhanded and experienced. The guides gas up the boats and double-check the gear. They are wary and gruff, concealing their nervousness in all the details of preparation. But the nearly crazy unvoiced hope of all is that it might be one of those special days to be talked of with awe through all the boozy nights to come; say jumping twenty tarpon or a first permit on fly or a dozen bonefish. Or even the unmentionable—breaking Apte's record of a 154-pound tarpon on a fly. No wonder he's arrogant. And no matter that the boats will probably return in eight hours with the guides grim with uneven success and the customers looking as though they had just spent eight hours in a sauna under a sun lamp. When it is bad for some and good for others the anger of the losers is nearly primitive. The guides shuffle and grimace around the dock in the late afternoon sun wondering why they aren't doing something sensible for God's sake. The unsuccessful anglers lunge for their cars, which have heated up like ovens. But the lucky ones—and luck is always a factor, along with skill and good guiding—don't want to leave just yet. They move around the boat slips in sort of a peacock trance, talking to anyone who will listen for even a moment about their experience, certainly among the top few that angling—or life—has to offer.

1973