Forty-two years after Huff’s catch, I am sitting in the stern of a boat that was designed, constructed, and sold by a prominent Miami gangster, who is now deceased. We are floating off of Homosassa on an enormous white sand flat that’s nearly thirty miles long and interrupted here and there by piles of dark black rocks. The flat is known to anglers and guides as Oklahoma. It is eleven o’clock in the morning. The sky is clear, the wind light, the sun blazing hard enough to induce a squint behind your sunglasses.
The boat is being moved, quietly and with purpose, by a man named Al Dopirak, a fishing guide who hails from nearby Pinellas County. He stands above me, on the platform on top of his boat’s motor, rhythmically, and without any evident effort, placing his eighteen-foot graphite push pole in the water until he finds purchase on the sea’s floor, then pushing it, gloved hand over gloved hand to its top end, then pulling and sliding the pole back up through his hands and doing it all over again. He never once takes his eyes off the water—in front of the boat, beside it, and, occasionally, behind it. Dopirak, sixty-three, is blue-eyed and deeply, and seemingly permanently, tanned. He has a cotton-white goatee and blonde-streaked hair that nearly reaches his shoulders. He looks like a younger, leaner Jeff Bridges, a South Florida cowboy of the flats. He prefers to address everyone and anyone as “dawg.”
In the front, standing on the bow and gazing out over the sea with his hands monkishly clasped behind his back, is the Australian, Dean Butler. He is one of the world’s finest deep-sea fly-fishing guides, despite the fact that he lost the use of two fingers on his right hand—the pinky and the ring—when he fell through a transom door while trying to land a marlin and had two tendons cleanly cleaved by the boat’s propeller as he surfaced. He is here in Homosassa as a quasi first mate—a potential gaffer, a manager of rods, a tyer of knots and leaders and flies, another set of eyes on the water, a chef, a bartender, and a grocery-getter. Butler is fifty-six and sports a perpetual grin under his salt-and-pepper goatee. His blue eyes contain within them an unmistakable hint of mischief. He rarely utters a sentence without using the word “fuck,” in some form. Presently, he turns to us, behind him in the boat, and says, “It feels like it’s going to happen today,” and turns back around to again watch the water. Then, with only a slight turn of his head this time, he adds as an afterthought, “I base that on fuck-all, of course.”
He is addressing Dopirak and me, yes, but the main intended audience for the comment is the eighty-two-year-old man sitting in a lawn chair that’s been placed just in front of the steering console. This man is tall and weighs somewhere north of three hundred pounds. An orange hat rests upon his white hair. His dark sunglasses are held onto his head by a pair of Croakies that read “Life is too short to drink cheap wine.” He has on a purple long-sleeved T-shirt with printed pictures of his numerous world-record tarpon on the back. His feet, swollen and covered in liver spots, are propped on the elevated bow area in front of him.
This man is Tom Evans. And he did not hear Butler’s comment because he is currently sound asleep, his chin on his chest—a state in which he has been for the past half hour, interrupted only twice by identical guttural utterances: “C’mon, poon.”
It’s been forty-three years since Evans first came to Homosassa in search of the world-record tarpon on a fly. Since then, he’s returned every year and has missed only twice—once in the mid-1980s when he couldn’t get away from work, and once again in 2015, when he had a mild falling out with Dopirak, and he and Butler went to the Panhandle to fish with one of the best young tarpon guides in the world in what would turn out to be a disastrous trip for all involved. The vast majority of Evans’s Homosassa trips have been a month long in duration, meaning he’s spent somewhere between 1,200 and 1,500 days here, or close to three and a half years of his life.
They haven’t all exactly been glorious years, either. In fact, it’s all been a bit mental, something he readily admits. “If I really think about it, it’s crazy. I come down here and fish, and every six or seven years, I get a victory,” Evans says. “The rest of the time, I’ve gotten my ass kicked.”
The “victories,” as he sees it, are the times when he has hooked and landed a record-breaking tarpon. Evans has set seven tarpon fly-fishing world records, as his shirt indicates. The first of these was a 177-pound tarpon he landed on Memorial Day in 1977, exactly a week after Huff caught his 186-pound tarpon. That it was a full nine pounds lighter than Huff’s fish never sat well with Evans, but this one counted, nonetheless.
As for getting his ass kicked? According to Evans, that’s all of the time he’s spent in Homosassa save for those seven days during which those record fish were caught. The ass-kickings include days when he landed fish that weren’t big enough to break the record or lost a big fish that might have, or spent eleven hours bobbing up and down in a boat without seeing a single fish, or had to spend the day stuck on land because of the weather.
And now, in early May 2019, he’s back again for another season in Homosassa, another shot at victory. Or, more likely, another opportunity to get his ass kicked.
The prior winter, I found myself driving around the almost implausibly quaint town of Grafton, Vermont, a place known for its exquisite aged cheddar cheese. I was looking for a driveway or a mailbox or anything that might have been a sign that I had arrived at my destination. Grafton, in the southeastern part of the state, is just rural enough to render any mapping apps useless. I had already passed through the center of town and over the pretty Saxtons River a few times. The three feet of fresh, damp snow that had fallen overnight made the town seem even quainter, but it wasn’t helping matters at all. That I had come to talk to someone about tarpon fishing here among the cows, the trout streams with their six-inch native brook trout, the snow—all of it some thousand miles away from the tropical climes in which tarpon swim the flats—made the entire endeavor feel even more out of whack.
Eventually, though, I did find the driveway, which snaked between rows of dark pines and led me to the house of Tom Evans.
The home, a converted 19th-century farmhouse, is one of two houses owned by Evans and his second wife, Tania (the other is in Jackson Hole). Inside, it was warm and cozy. A robust fire burned in one of the house’s six fireplaces. Tania, an eighty-two-year-old former ski instructor and owner of a decorating business (the two of them met when she gave Evans a ski lesson at Stratton Mountain), loves it here in southern Vermont, and that’s why they stay. She grew up in Connecticut and proudly describes herself as an “inveterate Yankee.” She’s trim and straight-backed, and exudes the healthful glow of a person who has spent a good portion of her life outdoors, skiing and hiking.
Tania gave me a brief tour of the house. It is filled with the fruits of Evans’s collecting life. The first floor is constructed from salvaged 19th-century wood and decorated with American art and furniture from that period. In the basement, there is a room done in the same way, but modeled on American art and furniture from the 1680s. Perched throughout the house are priceless wooden duck decoys. And below it all is a cellar with thousands of bottles of wine.I
One room, on the second floor, is decidedly different from the others. It is thoroughly contemporary. On the walls are dozens of pictures of huge, glassy-eyed, dead fish hung by hooks or ropes on the docks of various sunny locales around the world. Standing next to these fish—tarpon and marlin and all of them, at one time or another, world records—is Evans, decades younger and a hundred pounds lighter, holding a fly rod in one hand and what might pass as a smile across his face.
It was in this room—a study—that I found Evans. He was sitting in a big modern chair, red and built for comfort, not aesthetics, and had one leg propped up on an ottoman. It was clear from first glance that Evans is broken. He can barely move, and when he does, he winces and sighs in pain. His present physical state is mostly the result of the years of football and wrestling and a bad bike crash in 1996 and the surgeries needed to alleviate the damage done by them. But all of those days on the water fishing for tarpon and billfish—up to eighty days a year for more than four decades—have certainly not helped matters.
Though he occasionally goes out for dinner or to visit his stepchildren and their families or to fetch the newspaper at the general store in town, Evans is now, for all intents and purposes, a shut-in for all but one month of the year. He spends his time in his study trying to read books (the author C. J. Box is one of his favorites), but the days are long, and the flickering lure of the giant television in his room is usually too hard for him to resist. He watches Fox News or Fox Business for long stretches at a time, and doing so appears to leave him agitated and aggrieved. He is now pretty sure that the world is going to shit. He has put all of his wealth into hard goods—real estate, art, furniture, wine, and silver bars, no longer trusting that the global economy in its present form will hold. (He might have been onto something here.)
But all of that pain and agitation and aggrievement is temporarily put aside, and the muscles in his face ease up a bit as he turns down the anchors on his television.
“Let’s talk about tarpon and those great years in Homosassa,” he says.
Back in the boat, Evans awakens with a grunt and shake of his head, just as Dopirak has nudged us to within shouting distance of the four other boats floating the Oklahoma flat today. The nap is over. It’s time to get to work. Which means, really, that it’s time to hurry up and wait.
As we approach the other boats, I detect a subtle shift among them, an ever-so-slight moving out of the way. Maybe I’m seeing something that’s not, in fact, there. Maybe it’s only something I expect to see. Or maybe not.
After all, Tom Evans is back in Homosassa, back on the water for another day. His presence on the flat today, forty-three years after he first visited and after all of his records here and his demonstrations of sheer will (or lunacy), is something the anglers and guides in the other boats can’t help but notice. He is, by the book, the greatest big tarpon angler alive. The old king has arrived in his court. Some of the anglers and guides in the other boats don’t much like the old king, but they grudgingly acknowledge his majesty anyway.
I have Babe Ruth on my mind today, so again, maybe I’m just projecting something onto this scene that’s not there. But again, maybe not. There are two reasons I’ve been thinking about the Babe. The first is that I’ve been told the cast-iron tub tucked back behind the shed in the yard of the house in nearby Aripeka that Evans has rented for the tarpon season was once used by the Babe, who visited the area in the 1930s to fish. The second is that the night before, when I hopped on a plane to fly to Tampa, rent a car, and drive north to Homosassa to spend some time interviewing Evans, I received a text from Andy Mill, the former US ski team member who has become a renowned tarpon angler.
Good luck w Tom down there. As you well know, you’ll be with the Babe. He may not be able to walk, but he’s still the Babe!
Evans is certainly Ruthian in his appearance and accomplishments. And, in a sense, his presence on the Homosassa flat today is akin to some alternate universe where the Babe never got sick and withered and died and, instead, somehow continued to show up at Yankee Stadium every year into his eighties, hobbling into the batter’s box with the assistance of a cane, remaining in the Yankees’ lineup because of his ability to still occasionally knock one out of the park.
There is one way in which Evans is not like the Babe, though, and that has to do with fame. Despite the fact that he is undoubtedly one of the greatest tarpon fly rod anglers who ever lived (and, perhaps, the greatest billfish fly rod angler), Evans is not nearly as well known as some of his contemporaries, like Stu Apte, Billy Pate Jr., and Bernard “Lefty” Kreh. Those three men are among many who found within the world of angling a method of self-promotion, who fished for records but also for adulation, and had newspaper and magazine features written about them, authored autobiographies, and starred in fishing films. Evans did none of that. That he can be a grump is part of the reason he has not received adulation and fame. But it’s more than that. Though he readily admits that seeking records is, to a degree, about seeking attention, he says his main focus has always been on the records themselves and not what those records can do for him in a bigger, more promotional sense.
That said, those deep within this sport have always kept tabs on their fellow anglers. Those who know, know. The anglers and guides in those other boats today on the flat, who appear to have granted passage to Evans, are among those who know. Evans is a man who was here in Homosassa during the frenzy of its heyday four decades ago, a man who kept coming back during the dolorous decades when it later fell apart, and a man who keeps coming back now, though he is in no condition to do so.
Dopirak and Butler are part of all of this now, too, part of the recognition, the king’s courtiers, the men who help Evans into the batter’s box and help him round the bases when he connects. They are the all-star support team that’s been assembled around him as he works on the coda to his life as a world-record tarpon hunter, like mountain Sherpas who play an indispensable role in reaching a summit. Dopirak has been one of the best—if not the best—guides in Homosassa for thirty-plus years now. His eyes, his patience, his historical and contemporary knowledge, his hunches, his sleight of hand, his knowing how to fish the other anglers on the water as much as the fish, and his ability to put his boat in exactly the right spot for his sport to cast are just a few of the things that have set him apart. Butler has gaffed more big world-record fish than perhaps any man alive, most of them marlin, which are larger, more dangerous (because of their bills), and harder to gaff than tarpon. With Dopirak finding the fish and maneuvering the boat, and with Butler preparing the rods and tying leaders and readying the gaff, everything is done for Evans save for the casting, the feeding, and the fighting of the fish.
Evans describes himself as the “weak link” of the team, but the three aforementioned tasks that he is responsible for are all still incredibly difficult to do well. He is still a fine caster, with a forthright stroke that might not be a thing of beauty but is uncannily accurate. He still manipulates the fly well enough to elicit a strike. His weaknesses have everything to do with his lack of mobility and stamina, which have come with age and injury. Fighting the fish—just staying upright long enough to complete the demanding task—is the biggest concern.
Evans has undergone eleven orthopedic surgeries, starting with a knee operation at the age of thirteen. He has two artificial hips and one artificial knee. He has survived a bout of prostate cancer and has had three worrisome melanomas removed from his skin. He’s nearly blind in his left eye.
The biggest problem, though, is his back. Of those eleven surgeries, seven have been on his spine, and the two most recent ones—especially his last one in 2015, which resulted in a devastating hematoma that went untreated for days—have been botched to the point where he cannot stand upright now for more than a few minutes at a time. The battery that’s been installed in his back, meant to inspire his nerves to fire correctly, “doesn’t do a damn bit of good,” he says. His rapid weight gain in recent years has to do with his lack of mobility, along with his robust appetite for food and fondness for good wine. And though the pain in various parts of his body can be excruciating, after a bad experience with opiates, he takes nothing stronger than Advil for relief, and even that sparingly. Despite it all, or perhaps because of it all, his pain threshold remains high, even in his eighties.
The lawn chair is in the boat to help alleviate some of this discomfort. Dopirak’s skiff has been jury-rigged to help Evans in other ways, too. On the bow, on top of the three-foot-high platform that’s found in nearly every shallow water skiff in the world (it’s where an angler traditionally stands to cast), is a cage, with three-foot-high metal legs attached to a circular metal bar with a small opening on the stern side that provides the entry-and-exit way. A thick blue rope is attached to the cage so that Evans can pull himself out of the lawn chair and up onto the platform. The cage allows Evans to lean rather than stand. He hates the cage, which he calls a “baby carriage,” and he curses it with regularity. “Fucking thing,” he says. “I can’t fish with it [it hinders the retrieval of his fly], but I can’t fish without it.”
Next to the cage is a tall bucket, meant to collect Evans’s fly line as he retrieves it so it doesn’t get wrapped around a bar on the cage or scattered about the boat. The bucket also serves as a holding place for Evans’s rod when he’s not in the cage. Butler makes sure that the line is already pulled out of the reel, and that the fly is notched securely in the cork handle of the rod so that Evans can easily just grab the rod and go.
Ideally, a shot at a tarpon works like this: Dopirak spots the fish and tells all in the boat the direction from which it/they are coming down the flat, something like, “Dawg, we have three coming at twelve o’clock.” (The face of a clock is traditionally used by guides to point out the location of oncoming fish, with twelve o’clock being straight off the bow, three o’clock being perpendicular off the boat to the right, nine o’clock perpendicular to the left, and so on.) Butler then clears anything out of Evans’s way as Evans gets out of his lawn chair and into the cage. Butler does not touch the fly or the rod, since doing so is against the rules of the International Game Fish Association, the body that keeps angling records; the angler is to angle by him or herself. When finally in the cage—a process that takes some time—Evans tries to locate the fish. Once he’s done so, Dopirak will move the boat into position (Evans likes an 11:30 shot directly into the wind). And then Evans makes a maybe thirty- or forty-foot cast and begins retrieving the fly, trying to tempt a silver-plated, prehistoric-looking creature into biting it.
On a typical tarpon skiff, the angler is already standing on the platform and ready (in theory) to cast at a moment’s notice. That’s obviously not the case with Evans, but he’s compensated very well for his shortcomings by Dopirak, with his excellent eyes that are able to spot tarpon from a great distance away, and Butler, with his overall preparedness for anything Evans may need. On occasion, Dopirak will spot fish that he knows Evans will never be able to cast to—tarpon often seem to appear out of the blue, behind the boat or to the side or even in the front. “There are some sliding by,” Dopirak will say rather quietly, quickly turning his attention elsewhere, keeping his focus on potential fish in locations that he feels Evans has a decent shot at.
All of this may seem like a lot of work and sort of crazy, like attempting to roller-skate in deep, soft snow. All of it, really, makes something that is already challenging to the point of being nearly impossible—that is, fly fishing for giant tarpon—even more challenging. And the entire endeavor is made even more difficult by the fact that the number of tarpon that swim in Homosassa each season is but a tiny fraction—maybe a tenth—of what it was thirty to forty years ago. But every once in a while, and just enough to validate it all, everything comes together, and the Babe proves he can still swing it. The day before, Evans had enticed two fish to bite, which was more action than the other boats on the water had had combined. And just a week from today, he will have a very good shot at yet another victory.
But, why?
Why does Evans, in his physical state, keep going back to Homosassa and attempting to do something that was nearly impossible to do when he was young and strong and mobile?
Nostalgia certainly plays a role in all of this. All of that collecting Evans has done in his non-tarpon-fishing life—the art, furniture, decoys, and wine—has something to do with it. His home in Grafton, at least outside of his study, has a museum-like quality, as if something, some past, is being preserved. Evans is the foremost collector of the wooden decoys made by a carver who was regarded as the master of the form, Elmer Crowell, a man from East Harwich, Massachusetts, whose prime as a carver lasted roughly from 1912 to 1922.II Evans collected the decoys because of what they represent: a time in America when a gentleman sportsman living on the Cape could, right from his doorstep, be easily and fully consumed with sporting and other outdoor pursuits, like fishing and bird hunting and clamming. This period came and went quickly—it lasted a decade or so before development engulfed and despoiled everything. The decoys are the only thing that remain.
Homosassa these days is, in some ways, also a museum, a place that really only exists now in Evans’s mind, where there was once a golden era that is now long past and will never happen again. Nostalgia, though, is not only a longing for some lost past but also a mechanism for coping with the present reality. And it is merely part of the story, part of the answer to the “why.”
And here’s where we enter the museum and go back in time and return to 1977, for it was that year that ignited Homosassa. Something significant happened when Huff and Evans caught their respective monster tarpon that year. Some perceived limit, both theoretical and actual, was expanded. Those fish set off a singular era that turned Homosassa into the epicenter of the fly-fishing world, an era that lasted maybe six years.
Those fish at Homosassa also would, as both men gradually came to understand years later, partially lead to the dramatic and heartbreaking change to the fishery. Word got out about Homosassa and its stupendous tarpon after Huff and Evans caught their fish, and with it came the masses of anglers and guides. Some of them parachuted in for a few days or a week at a time, hoping for some magic. Others were more hard core, coming year after year in the spring for a month or more at a time, joining Evans and Huff in the pursuit.
Lefty Kreh, perhaps the most famous fly fisherman to have ever lived, and the sport’s greatest carnival barker, was early to Homosassa and unable to keep its secret, playing a large role in the greater fishing world’s discovery of its tarpon.
Stu Apte, a former boxer and pilot of both fighter and commercial jets, is the Muhammad Ali of the tarpon world, a braggart who has backed up his words with incredible fly-fishing feats. He pioneered many of what are considered to be the seminal techniques and tackle for tarpon, and he remains, at ninety, a living legend. He twice held the world record for tarpon with two fish caught in the Keys—a 151-pounder in 1967 and a 154-pounder in 1971—and he headed to Homosassa in the late 1970s to try and retake his crown.
The athletic Jimmy Lopez, an orphan raised by a judge in Miami, could have been, some contend, the world’s greatest fly angler had he not run off the rails. He, too, once owned the world record for tarpon, with a 162-pound, 8-ounce fish caught in the Keys in 1974. One year in the early 1980s, he attempted to fish for tarpon for 125 days straight, spending much of that time in Homosassa. But that trip, like the rest of his life, was derailed by the personal demons and drugs that would eventually do him in for good.
Then there was Al Pflueger Jr., a gentle giant and the son of a famous taxidermist, who spent years in Homosassa after the record and was among the best at spotting and hooking fish but among the least when it came to fighting and actually landing them.
Carl Navarre Sr. owned Coca-Cola bottling franchises in South Florida. He was a top tournament angler in his day and would, for a time, also own Islamorada’s Cheeca Lodge, long the center of the flats-fishing world in the Keys. He frequently fished with his son in Homosassa. He sometimes sent up a helicopter over the flats, searching for schools of tarpon, and would have one of his guides in the helicopter drop floats in the water to mark spots. Though the technique worked well in the Keys, it was not as successful in Homosassa.
After retiring from baseball, Ted Williams put much of his vast energies into fly fishing for tarpon, bonefish, and Atlantic salmon. He is thought of as one of the all-time greats in the fly-fishing world, his supernatural eyesight and hand-eye coordination coming in handy in that pastime, as well. He was intrigued by Homosassa and its big tarpon—the favorite of his “big three” fish, as he would tell anyone who cared to listen—and fished there as he neared his sixties. But the scene, with all of the people and the competition, left him more crotchety than he already was. He eventually retreated back to his hermetic life in the Keys, but he would return to the Homosassa area to live out his final years.
Billy Pate Jr., of Greenville, South Carolina, annually took up residence in Homosassa and would break many tarpon records there, including one that lasted for twenty-one years. At age thirty-five, the redhead sold his father’s carpet business for millions of dollars, then dedicated the rest of his life to the pursuit of world-record fish—and women. A Southern gentleman who craved attention, Pate made a film about himself in Homosassa that brought in hordes of new anglers to the area and angered his fellow record chasers.
Others, like Flip Pallot, Norman Duncan, Chico Fernandez, Guy de la Valdène, Jim Harrison, and Russell Chatham, dropped in during those early years to see what all the hubbub was about.
During that era, these anglers were, of course, accompanied by fishing guides, vital cogs in the pursuit of tarpon. Huff, Dopirak, Hal Chittum, Eddie Wightman, Jim Brewer, Bill Curtis, Billy Knowles, Dale Perez, Nat Ragland, Harry Spear, Gary Ellis, Eustace and Mike Locklear, Neil Sigvartsen, Ray DeMarco, Freddie Archibald, and Jim Farrier were just a few. These men would never reach the level of fame of the sports they poled around, but they were no less deserving of it.
And so, for a relatively brief period that lasted from the late 1970s until the early 1980s, something unique happened in Homosassa: the best fly anglers and guides in the world at the time all gathered together in the same spot at the same time with the same goal—to break the world record, and possibly the mythical two-hundred-pound mark, for the world’s most glamorous and sought-after fly rod species, the tarpon.
They came together in the mornings at breakfast. They were all on the water during the day, in competition. They ate dinner together at night, and socialized and partied, some harder than others. The world record fell nearly every year during these heady years. But records weren’t the only things that were broken. Hooks, lines, rods, reels, hearts, and marriages didn’t survive, either. The egos involved made the atmosphere electric. The difficulty of the quest made it legitimate. And the drugs and the women that were swept in with the tide made it all veer out of control. It was something, a period of time, a gathering, that had never happened before in the world of fly fishing and will never happen again, a collision of the top anglers and the top species of fish, which led, eventually, to smashed lives for nearly all—man and fish—involved.
Fishing—the sport, the pastime, whatever you want to call it—is, in the end, about stories. The storytelling begins well in advance of the act of actually casting for a fish. It starts with the daydreams that can sneak up on any committed angler at any random time—during a business meeting or when a piece of water is glimpsed on a long drive. It goes into the planning of a fishing trip, the thinking through of what you will bring, the conditions you will face, who will be there with you, all of the strategizing and the preparatory tying of flies and leaders.
It happens before you hit the water, when you pull your fly rod from its tube and join the blanks, and then hold it up to your eye to sight it through the big snake guide, when you attach the reel and thread the fly line through the guides and tie a fly on the leader and then lean the rod against the car and gaze at that ensemble of equipment that to some of us is achingly beautiful in its potential energy.
It also happens with the silent internal monologue that takes place in your head throughout a day on the water, the questions, the answers, the self-castigation, self-correction, and self-satisfaction, for fly fishing is very much a sport of the mind. Even when fishing with a guide or someone else in a boat or on a river, you are mostly within your own head, constructing your own narrative, perhaps even thinking ahead to the obligatory stories you must give voice to at the end of the day, the big one that got away, the big one that didn’t.
Fishing is often employed as allegory. Jesus told his fishing apostles, Peter and Andrew, to cast aside their nets and follow Him and become fishers of men. The ancient Chinese proverb warns, “The fish sees the bait, not the hook; a person sees the gain, not the danger.” There is the dignity of Hemingway’s aging Santiago and Melville’s “grand, ungodly, god-like” Ahab.
Stories about fly fishing have been told for nearly two thousand years. Trout and Atlantic salmon fishing, the oldest varieties of the sport, make up a good bit of the literature, sort of in the way that baseball dominates the literary world of spectator sports in the United States. But pretty much anything you can catch on a rod and reel has been celebrated in writing. Some numbnut I know even wrote an entire book about largemouth bass.III
Tarpon are fairly well covered when it comes to “how-to-catch-’em” books. But the story on the following pages—about the glory years in Homosassa, but also about what led up to that point in time and what has happened since in this world—is what intrigued me the most. It has to do with the “why” in fishing. Everything within it is linked, “an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of another,” as Chekhov wrote, connecting the past to the present. When one end of the story is touched, as Chekhov continued, “the other end quivered.” It contains joyous discovery, furious competition, over-the-top obsession, incredible willpower, and heartbreaking falls from grace. It details an uncertain future. It sheds some light on the motivations of Man, and possibly reflects, in some refracted way, something larger about our current state.
But what about that “why”? Why so much fuss over a fish, then and now? Why does this story warrant this telling?
I think it starts with this: tarpon are an easy thing to become obsessed about.
I. Evans is known as “the White Tie Collector” in the wine world, and is considered a top collector of French wines. He has since sold much of his collection.
II. Two Crowell decoys have sold at auction for $1.13 million apiece, part of an overall sale of thirty-one of his birds that went for a total of $7.5 million.
III. That would be me.