Flats guiding in the Keys back in the 1960s was a rather exclusive profession, the province of cranky, tough, hard-driving men who were sizzled by the sun, on the edge of exhaustion (at least some of them) from their freelance careers as late-night dope smugglers, and fiercely protective of their turf and the resource. It was a very difficult club to break into. They had their own set of unwritten rules—about etiquette on the flats, about how and when to fish certain areas. They did not embrace outsiders, but if an angler or fledgling guide demonstrated respect and played by the rules, acceptance would usually come at some point. However, if an angler or guide did not play by the rules, bad things happened. Tires were slashed. Boats were sunk. And in extreme cases—for those who openly flaunted the rules over and again—something known as the “sarcophagus” was employed. In this case, the offended guides would wait for the evening until the offender’s boat was left unsupervised. Then they would take ten gallons of resin that had been mixed with fiberglass, and cover the entire boat with the concoction, which would harden and make the boat and everything within it inoperable.
Hal Chittum, before he was a storeowner and then a boatbuilder, was a guide in the Keys for sixteen years, starting in the early 1970s. He would have started there even earlier, but the closed group of Keys guides would not allow him in for a few years until he finally demonstrated to them that he could—and would—play by their rules. “It was a culling process and it actually worked pretty well,” says Chittum. “I wish we had it these days.” He quickly became one of the best in the area at his craft, and he was the preferred guide of the likes of Apte, Pate, and Lopez. At one point, Chittum’s clients owned all of the significant world records for tarpon.
As you might suspect, the guides in the Homosassa area did not much like outsiders invading their territory, either. They particularly did not like the interloping guides from the Keys, with their fancy boats and gear, their general disdainful attitudes, and the attention they drew to the area.
One year early on in the great Homosassa run, Chittum decided to go up early, to do some scouting and get prepared for the four weeks he’d be guiding there. He checked in at the Riverside and went to the motel’s restaurant to get a late lunch. The place was nearly empty, save for three guys huddled around a corner table. Chittum took a table on the opposite side of the room and ordered a club sandwich.
Within a few minutes, the conversation coming from the other table began to get louder and, it seemed, hostile. “I heard the words ‘asshole,’ ‘Keys guide,’ and ‘big-mouthed sons of bitches,’ ” says Chittum. “There was this one guy among them who looked like a pirate, no shoes, sun-bleached blonde hair, big mustache. He looked right at me and said, ‘I’m talking about you, asshole.’ ”
The guy then stood up and rushed at Chittum. “And suddenly we’re in this barroom brawl,” says Chittum. “We’re trying to kill each other.”
They knocked down a table. Silverware, plates, and glasses crashed to the floor. The waitress ran to call the cops, who never showed. Neither man got in any killshots, but they were both bleeding. Finally Chittum, who outweighed the man by twenty pounds, wrestled him to the floor, where they both sat, too exhausted to carry on.
“What’s your problem, man?” Chittum asked the guy.
“My problem is that you’ve ruined the greatest fishery in the world by telling people about it. You’re the son of a bitch who brought Lefty up here.”
“I did not bring Lefty up here,” Chittum replied.
“Wait, what?”
“That’s not me!” Chittum said.
“It wasn’t?”
“No!”
And with that, the man stood up and extended his hand. “I’m Freddie Archibald. Let’s have a drink.”
“I was like, ‘what the fuck?’ ” says Chittum. “But we had that drink and Freddie and I became great friends.”
Keys anglers and guides also had their beefs with the Homosassa locals. They thought the manner in which they fished the place was rather primitive. The locals didn’t much like poling. They’d see a school of fish and crank up their engines and run over to them. This angered the Keys guides, with their poling platforms and poles and their insistence on stealth. In truth, though, in those early days, there were so many fish around, it didn’t matter all that much.
In the late 1970s, during the prime month of May, there were, on any given day, maybe ten boats on the water, perhaps a dozen. There was plenty of room. Everyone stayed well spaced out, but close enough to keep tabs on each other. “We were all looking over our shoulders, looking at everybody else,” says Evans. Apte was in his boat Mom’s Worry. Pflueger was over there in We Should’a. Curtis was atop the Grasshopper. Lopez was doing shirtless push-ups in the bow again. Pate was standing in the condominium. Wait, did she just take her top off? The wiry guide in the back, the nose guard in the front—Huff and Evans were easy to make out. Tangy, scented smoke wafted from Archibald’s boat. There went Navarre’s helicopter, on its way back to land.
They were all after something they now knew existed but had yet to prove: a tarpon that weighed two hundred pounds or more. The Holy Grail of fly angling.
With that much space, those first few years, though full of competitive tension, were well mannered on the water. When someone hooked a big tarpon, the other boats politely moved out of the way, while still paying close attention. (Pate always put a pair of binoculars on a fish hooked by another boat.) The guides were generally friendly with each other, much more than the sports were with their fellow sports. This made practical sense: the guides were the ones who orchestrated the show on the water, and they had to work with each other to make it all flow. They all had CB radios, though some, like Huff, rarely spoke into them. Cliques inevitably formed, and some guides began to pool resources and team up and share information. Some guides spoke in a code they had prearranged with other guides. One guide would tell another on the CB that he was having electrical problems, and that he needed black tape, which meant, in reality, “scoot over near me, there are tons of fish here.” Like pitchers and catchers worried about the other team stealing their signals, the guides changed up their code words every once in a while. “I need some black tape” one day might be “Could you bring me a sandwich?” the next.
Everyone knew that if Pflueger or Pate hooked a potential record, they’d likely be dragged off the flat and would not be seen again for a while. Apte commanded respect on the water, but there were several guides who yearned for his humbling. Curtis won no new friends when he adopted the local custom, holstering his pole and cranking up his engine to chase fish. He would run his engine, too, to find the floats that had been dropped by Navarre’s helicopter. “There aren’t any fish here,” Curtis would grumble into the CB for all to hear when he arrived at a float.
“I wonder why,” Huff would sardonically ask Evans.
And then the records started to fall.
Joe Robinson was in the insurance business in Miami. He started fly fishing in saltwater, like so many others, on the Tamiami Trail. He’d heard about Homosassa from Norman Duncan. “Norman came knocking on my door one morning at three A.M.,” says Robinson. “ ‘Holy shit, you would not believe the size of these tarpon!’ he said.”
Robinson fished with Dale Perez, who was an ex-baseball player who’d had cups of coffee with the Cardinals, Twins, and White Sox before his career ended when he tore up his knee sliding into second base. Perez nicknamed Robinson “One-Cast” because of his pinpoint accuracy with the fly. Robinson was a serious tarpon angler but not necessarily serious about the record. “My feeling was that I always wanted to let them go,” he says. He would make one exception to the rule during his tarpon-fishing career.
One day in May of 1978, Perez was poling Robinson and his wife, Jackie, near Pine Island. Perez spotted a small school of large tarpon. He pointed out the fish that he wanted Robinson to cast to. True to his nickname, Robinson made one cast, and the designated fish sipped in his fly and immediately jumped, something it would do another twenty-three times during the forty-five-minute fight. Perez landed the fish with a lip gaff, and not a kill gaff, knowing Robinson’s preference for not killing fish. As the fish lay by the side of the boat, Perez got out his measuring tape and his calculator, using the tried-and-true formula for estimating a tarpon’s weight (the girth squared times the length, divided by 800).I
“Joe, shit, this thing is taping out to around 180 pounds,” said Perez. “This is probably the record.”
Robinson hesitated and then said, without much conviction, that he still wanted to let it go. But Jackie persuaded him to take it in and weigh it. The fish did indeed weigh 180 pounds, and it broke Evans’s record of 177 pounds from the year before. Robinson’s record did not last long. Almost exactly a year later, Pate topped it with a 182-pounder, caught with Chittum, which he landed in twenty minutes, an unusually quick fight for him.
These catches were all in the sixteen-pound test tippet category.II Records were also falling in the twelve-pound category. Pate caught a 155-pounder in 1980 on twelve-pound, which finally topped Apte’s 1971 fish by a pound.III “It was just impossible to sleep at night then because of what you were expecting might happen on the water the next day,” says Robinson.
With the records beginning to fall each season, “the place started cooking,” says Evans. Much of that cooking took place off the water.
First of all, there were romantic entanglements. Pate, as stated, always had a woman staying with him while he was in residence at Homosassa. Some of the time, the woman was his wife. Some of the time, the woman (or women, on occasion) were not. Some were flight attendants. Some were women he’d met through the classifieds. Some were brought to Homosassa by a man from New Orleans. Lopez always had a few women hanging around. Others did, too. Even some of the guides got into the action.
Then there were the drugs. The drug of choice was the one that was storming the nation at the time Reagan was about to take office. Blow. Dust. Colombian Marching Powder. Cocaine might have been the only drug that came close to matching the adrenaline spike of hooking a tarpon (it also matched, during the inevitable comedown, the feeling of despair when a tarpon was lost). Some of the anglers and guides obviously sought that high off the water, too. Chief among them was Lopez, but he was far from the only one. All of this, combined with the competitive and strong personalities, began to wreak some havoc.
One early evening on the water, Pflueger’s engine broke down on his way back to the Riverside. He dead-drifted for a bit before flagging down two other boats that happened to be going in at the same time, and he asked for a tow. He hooked bowlines to the two boats, tilted up his motor, and off they went. Pflueger, back in his boat, began to notice that the passengers in the other boats seemed to be having a really good time, drinking and periodically leaning over to maybe snort something. They weren’t paying a lick of attention to where they were going, or to him back in the towed boat. Pflueger suddenly spotted a huge wooden channel marker. He noticed that the boats towing him were headed for either side of it, and that his boat was headed right for it. He started to yell as loud as he could, but no one heard him. “I thought I was going to die,” he says. “I knew I could jump overboard, but then my boat would crash into the marker and possibly kill them.” In a last-ditch move, Pflueger put his motor down and turned the wheel so it would drag the other boats. “They turned around and stopped just in time,” he says.
Evans and Huff were down near Pine Island, some thirty miles south of Black Rock, fishing the outgoing tide that in those days always encouraged the appearance of massive swimming schools of tarpon, a “poon river,” as Evans called it. They were perfectly positioned and had already seen a few fish, the vanguard of the coming wave. Nearby was another boat. On it was a man named Peck Hayne, who was fishing with Chittum. (Evans called Hayne “Peckerhead.”) Something seemed amiss on their boat. Hayne was on the bow, casting to fish that were now starting to swim by in masses. But Chittum was not on the platform in the stern, holding the push pole. Instead, he was lying down, crossways, by the back corner of the boat, with his feet over one side and his head over the other. “I said to Steve, ‘Look over there. Chittum is blowing bubbles,’ ” says Evans. “Steve ignored me and kept staring at the water. ‘Seriously, Steve, I think Chittum is drowning.’ ”
Evans says they poled over and asked Hayne what was wrong with Chittum. Hayne just shrugged. “He’s fine,” he said. But Chittum did not look fine. Far from it. Evans and Huff suspected that he’d ingested something, maybe too much of something. (“I was, um, sick,” says Chittum.) Evans jumped into Chittum’s boat, and Hayne moved over to Huff’s boat, and they motored back thirty miles to the dock. There, Huff walked Chittum back to his rental house like a trainer helping an injured football player off the field. He gave him some cold water and put him in bed and left. When he went back to check on Chittum an hour later, he was gone. Later, Evans and Huff saw him at the Riverside pool, upright, smiling, very much alive, partying with some fellow guests. “We thought he was dying and he was fine an hour later,” says Evans. “We ran him back and missed the greatest out-goer in the history of mankind.” Huff and Evans began to call Chittum “Shittum.”
Jimmy Lopez arrived in Homosassa one year in late April, early for the run. The former Delta pilot took his guide up in his four-seat plane, hoping to spot some fish on the flat. They flew around for an hour and a half without spotting any tarpon.
“I have an idea,” Lopez told his guide.
They flew back to the small airport. An attendant began refueling the plane. Lopez disappeared inside the airport. He reappeared with two young women the guide had never seen before. They took off and, again, headed over the flat. But they were no longer looking for tarpon. Lopez leveled off the plane and put it on autopilot.
“Hand me that map bag,” he told the guide.
Within were two plastic bags filled with cocaine. Lopez poured some out and began to cut it up. The women giggled.
At the Riverside one evening, Evans spotted an intact toilet behind the building. The motel was undergoing some renovations. He had an idea. Lopez had been driving everyone crazy with his intensity, both on and off the water. That night, Evans brought the toilet down to the docks and placed it on the bow of Lopez’s boat, a bright yellow Hewes that had been nicknamed the “yellow banana.”
The next morning, as the anglers and guides gathered around the dock to prepare for the day, everyone saw the toilet. Lopez, perhaps a bit tired from the previous evening’s activities, hadn’t shown up yet. No one knew how he’d react when he did. Would he go nuts?
Lopez appeared. He displayed no reaction when he saw the toilet. He walked onto his boat. His guide started the motor and shoved off. Lopez then stood, dropped his pants and sat on the toilet, and rode in that posture for a few miles down the river.
Many evenings began at the Riverside’s Yardarm Lounge or the Monkey Bar. The anglers and the guides (some of whom stayed at the nearby Tradewinds marina) would have a beer and maybe order some food. A large window in the Monkey Bar overlooked a small island, a mostly man-made pile of rocks in the Homosassa River, on top of which stood a small lighthouse. The island was inhabited by a group of spider and squirrel monkeys whose ancestors had been brought to the area to be used for research for the polio vaccine. The monkeys had been put on the island after they’d no longer been needed for the research. They were rowdy and mischievous, and liked to play with themselves in full view of the bar patrons.
Pate didn’t stay at the Riverside, renting a house instead. He remained apart from his fellow anglers for most of his time in Homosassa, but he did throw a party every season. The food was always good—Pate usually did some sort of low-country boil—but the affair was always rather sedate. Lopez’s parties, which were thrown nearly every night in his room at the Riverside or, really, anywhere he was, were rowdier.
Evans and Huff didn’t socialize much. They weren’t teetotalers by any means, but they were in Homosassa for a reason. They took it seriously and were usually pretty wiped out by the end of the day anyway. Neither of them liked the party scene. Huff, accompanied by Perez, went to a Lopez party once but left early when the room got eerily quiet and some women started snorting lines on a desk. “I was so naïve then,” says Huff. Evans went to an oyster shuck at Archibald’s house in the Homosassa River once and got pretty lit up on beer. Lopez gave him a ride home, running the river at full speed outside of the markers, where there were dozens of rock piles. “I thought for sure we were going to hit one of them and die,” says Evans.
Evans and Huff were both married, and neither approved much of the womanizing going on during those years at Homosassa. Evans made one exception to that rule, and it would play a role in the dissolution of his partnership with Huff.
The stories from on the water were stupendous, almost too hard to believe, but also, in the aggregate, too hard to ignore. On the Oklahoma flat one day, Perez held the boat steady for Robinson as fish came at the boat from every direction. The tarpon began to form a daisy chain. “And we were somehow in the center of it,” says Robinson. “It was thirty feet wide and fifteen feet deep with fish. From the top of the water to the ocean floor, you could see flashes. It was solid tarpon.” On the boat, Robinson froze.
“When are you going to cast?” Perez screamed at Robinson.
“I said, ‘Cast? Hell, I’m going to sit here and watch this,’ ” says Robinson. For five minutes, they did just that. “And then the chain finally broke up and they started swimming and I cast and hooked one.”
Chittum and Lopez arrived one morning at Black Rock and had it to themselves. Lopez was tying on a fly when Chittum yelled, “Hurry up! There’s some fish in front of us.” Lopez began to shake. “Hurry up! There’s more fish in front of us,” Chittum yelled again. Lopez began to shake harder.
“Hold on,” Chittum said a few moments later, his voice calmer now. “Just take your time. There’s more fish here than I can count.” Chittum and Lopez, too, were in the middle of a daisy chain, it turned out, one comprised of some two thousand fish. Lopez hooked five fish in under two hours. Over the next ten days, he jumped more than two hundred fish. He got sixty-one of those to the boat.
In the afternoons, on the Oklahoma flat, one only had to wait a bit. The show always eventually started. “You’d look to the west when the sea breeze came and see literally thousands of them coming onto the flat,” says Malzone. “It was the most amazing thing you’ve ever seen.”
It wasn’t just the numbers of fish, though. There were stories every day of massive fish seen but not hooked, or hooked but not landed. Fish of well over two hundred pounds. Everyone had a story. Some of the stories contained some hyperbole. These are, after all, fishermen we’re dealing with here. But those fish—those glandular mutants that Huff spoke of—were there.
And those stories of the monsters never to be caught but only seen, or hooked only to be lost, they were told with more relish, more vigor, and more feeling than the stories of the fish that were caught, even the ones that became world records. It makes sense. In angling, as in life, it is the ones that get away that haunt our dreams, that push us over the brink into a lustful madness. And Homosassa was the first place in these anglers’ lives where, hot damn, those dreams just might come true.
Apte was fishing the flat one day with his guide Ralph Delph when they spotted a giant school of tarpon. Apte was using twelve-pound tippet, just as he had done since he was a young man, eschewing the sixteen-pound class in favor of tradition. He cast into the school. A fish of about 140 pounds took his fly but then immediately spit it out. The school moved by. Delph decided to chase it. He poled like a madman, and soon had Apte in position again. Apte spotted what he thought was the biggest fish in the school and made a cast. The fish took. It was gigantic.
Apte fought the fish for forty-eight minutes (he always kept the exact time of his fights on his watch) and got it to the boat, where it lolled on its side. There was no doubt in either man’s mind that this was the biggest tarpon they’d ever seen. Each of the men had a gaff onboard. Delph opted to use his. He extended it over his head and swung down on the broad flank of the fish, as if wielding an ax. The gaff hit home, but the tarpon reacted with a great push of its giant tail. Delph went over the transom and into the water. The gaff pulled out, but Apte still had the fish on.
Nineteen minutes later, Apte again had the fish by the boat, and Delph again grabbed his gaff. “Why don’t you use mine, Ralph?” Apte asked. “It’s bigger.” Delph refused. He swung down on the fish again, and again it pulled him into the water. This time, Delph stayed attached. The tarpon swam to the bottom, some ten feet down. Delph went with it. The tarpon leapt. Delph held onto it like a rodeo cowboy. “Ralph didn’t look like he was having much fun,” says Apte. “In fact, he looked like he was drowning.”
Apte dropped his rod and started the boat. It was Delph’s boat, so he was unfamiliar with how the throttle quadrant worked. He put it in forward, and the boat shot toward Delph and the fish. Apte couldn’t stop it, and Delph had to let go of the tarpon to avoid getting run over. The fish got away.
Delph climbed in the boat, breathing heavily. He was covered in stinky tarpon slime.
“Why’d you run me over?” he asked Apte.
“I didn’t mean to,” Apte replied. “You were in trouble.”
The duo didn’t talk about the fish for the rest of the day. They didn’t mention it that night at dinner, or the following day on the water. Finally, two nights after the fish had been hooked, during dinner, Delph asked Apte, “How big was that fish?”
“You were wrapped around it, Ralph. You know better than I do,” said Apte.
Apte took a paper napkin and tore it in half. “Let’s each write down what we think it weighed,” he said.
They did, and then they handed each other the napkin halves.
Delph had written: “230+”
Apte had written: “230-plus”
For two of those great Homosassa years, Huff and Perez partook in something like a busman’s holiday, taking a few days off from their respective monthlong-plus guiding days to fish together. Robinson encouraged Perez to take the break. Evans was never happy when Huff did it—especially since it took place during the very prime of the season—but he grudgingly obliged. “The fishing was so good and it was all pretty intense, so it was good to take a few days to just fish,” says Perez. One of the reasons Evans didn’t like it is that he spent some of those Huff-less days fishing with Pflueger, who says, “I enjoyed fishing with Tom then. He was obsessed with tarpon. I think he loved tarpon fishing more than he loved his first wife. He was great at it. But I think Tom may have only caught one fish with me during that time because I was always fighting them for a long time.” Says Evans, “I hated fishing with Pflueger.”
Huff and Perez took turns poling each other, switching spots after every hookup. They came up with a novel way to sometimes access the fish, using Perez’s past life as a baseball player to get it done. “We’d see a string of fish go by and pole like hell after them, but couldn’t catch up,” says Huff. “We knew that they sometimes went into a daisy chain if they were spooked. So, if we couldn’t catch up, Dale grabbed an apple out of our lunch and launched it at the swimming string. He had a great arm. The apple would splash right on them, they’d chain up, and we’d pole up and start casting.” They called it the “Red Delicious method.”
One day, when it was Huff’s turn to fish, Perez spotted a school of fish from far off (the former baseball player had great eyes, too). Huff began to strip line out, not in any particular hurry. But suddenly Perez shouted, “Right here! Look at the size of that fish!”
A tarpon had snuck up on them. Huff spotted it, threw out seventy feet of line, and let the grizzly-and-purple fly sit until the fish got near it. He stripped the fly and the fish ate it. “Its mouth was so huge,” Huff says. “When it took the fly, Dale was right behind me. He said, ‘Oh, my God!’ I swear that fish was closer to three hundred pounds than two hundred. It looked like a manatee.” Huff cleared the line. The fish jumped three times. “Its back was as big as a refrigerator,” says Perez. “It was the biggest fucking tarpon I’ve ever seen in my life.” Perez began shedding his clothes because he realized there was no way that fish wasn’t going to pull him in. He picked up the gaff. But just ten minutes into the fight, the fish ate through the entire twelve-inch shock leader up to the tippet and swam free.
Pate and Chittum were fishing one day north of Black Rock, near the St. Martins Keys. Back in those days, fish were everywhere, so it was fun and productive, on some days, to go explore. On the boat with them was Patty, Pate’s third wife, and Jack Samson, then an editor at Field & Stream. The bottom in the St. Martins area was mostly dark grass, so it was harder to spot fish there than it was on the white sand of the Oklahoma flat. But the fish that day were in daisy chains near the top, making themselves easily visible.
Chittum spotted a particularly large fish swimming in one of those daisy chains. Pate was using a shooting head that he’d patched together the night before. He cast the fly and hooked the fish. “It was absolutely immense,” says Chittum.
Pate, as he pretty much always did with potential record tarpon, applied very little pressure to the fish. Chittum used the trolling motors to follow the tarpon. Two hours and many miles later, Chittum was still after the fish, but the batteries on the trolling motors were dying. When they finally failed, Chittum began to pole after the fish but lost ground. The St. Martins area was littered with small islands, which had deep cuts next to them, under the overhang of mangroves. The tarpon seemed to like to swim close to these parts of the islands, and Chittum and Pate grew worried that the fish was going to get hung up in the mangroves. Chittum poled as hard as he could but could not catch up. And then, distressingly for both angler and guide, the tarpon began to head for a point on an island. It was pretty clear that if the fish went around the point, it would break Pate off.
Samson had been a competitive swimmer in college. He stood up in the boat and declared that he was going to jump in and scare the fish away from the point. Samson also happened to be a very accomplished drinker of beer. “I think he was already into his ninth beer of the day, but before I could tell him to not jump in, splash. And he thrashed around but couldn’t keep up. We passed him like he was standing still,” says Chittum.
Patty, without saying a word, went immediately to the ice chest, grabbed a six-pack of beer, and tossed it to Samson. “We’ll come get you later!” she yelled.
“It was one of the coolest moves I’ve ever seen,” says Chittum. “But I had no idea how we were going to find him later. All of those islands looked the same.”
The tarpon avoided the point, and the fight went on for another couple of hours before the fish appeared to be ready to quit. Chittum got out the gaff. He needed to be about two feet closer to the fish to reach it. And then Pate’s homemade shooting head popped. “I looked at that fish for hours,” says Chittum. “It was 240 pounds, easy.”
When they eventually found Samson, the six cans of beer were empty, and he was all smiles.
One spring in Homosassa in the late 1970s, Evans was going through a divorce from his first wife, a woman he’d begun dating in high school and had married after college. A cold front that year in Homosassa lasted for nearly two weeks, scotching the fishing. Evans decided then, finally, to say yes when a man from New Orleans offered him the company of two women. Huff, now in another room at the Riverside, still didn’t like the womanizing from a moral standpoint, but he didn’t like it from a practical one, either. It was a distraction. There were no fish around, but still.
When the front finally lifted, the fish showed up. Evans sent his company away and told Huff that he was ready to fish. By now it was June—the prime season had been pushed back a few weeks because of the weather. There were thousands of fish, and they caught a bunch of them.
But something now was clearly amiss, something that had been brewing between the men for a while. They were both high-strung, type A personalities. It’s possible that there was something never really resolved about Huff’s 186-pound tarpon, or about Huff and Perez taking time off to fish together. Or maybe that tension, that fine line between the wealthy sport and the unwealthy guide, that less-than-clear division of labor and management—maybe that line was no longer walked, but crossed? It could be, too, that the time had just come after so many days spent together on the water, under pressure, trying to do what seemed like the impossible. The skiff, as Pallot said, is a very small space and can feel truly confined if the guide and the sport get out of rhythm.
And this is when their partnership ended. They each have differing versions of how it happened, of what was said and when it was said. The one thing they agree on: Huff told Evans that he was the most selfish person he’d ever met and fired him.
Though their versions of the story may differ, both of them get us to the same place: after more than a decade of fishing together, Evans and Huff were done. “That was that,” says Evans. “I’m not sure who was the selfish one in this case, but when Huff says something, that’s it.”
To this day, it seems, Evans can’t quite shake the hurt of Huff leaving him. “It broke me for a good while,” Evans says. “I really thought we were building this thing together. Honestly, from my point of view, it felt like a divorce.” He gets reflective about it, something he’s not usually prone to doing. “I’m sure I’m self-centered,” he says. “Tania would probably tell you the same thing, but she’s been married to me for forty years.”
Evans and Huff have maintained a mutual respect. They’ve talked on the phone, and they have seen each other a handful of times in the past four decades. The encounters have mostly been brief and cordial, the past either behind them or buried too deep to access in such a short time. There would be one meeting decades later, however, when the unresolved past would come roaring back and clashed over memorably, not by them, but by their children.
Huff continued to fish Homosassa for a few seasons, with anglers like Sandy Moret, Tom Richardson, and Bill Hassett. It would never really feel the same to him, though, and he would leave for good in the early 1980s, just as the crowds began to show up.
Evans became a bit unmoored after Huff left. The first thing he needed was a new guide in Homosassa. He knew that Robinson, at that time, was paring back his fishing days. So he called Perez.
On May 21, 1981, Evans and Perez were stuck on land in the morning because of a sustained thunderstorm. In Perez, Evans had landed a guide who was very similar to Huff. Both were excellent at poling and had good eyes and instincts. Both had that same soothing South Florida accent and, in fact, their voices were eerily similar in sound. There were differences, though. Perez was darker, both in appearance—with his black hair and deep, mournful eyes—and in demeanor. He was prone to sustained brooding silences that left Evans wondering what was bothering him. His boat wasn’t quite as squared away as Huff’s. Evans called it the “snagcraft,” and Perez sometimes had to lift the top of the motor and hit it with a wrench to get the engine started. And, unlike Huff, he did not like to be on the water during thunderstorms.
At around 3:00 P.M. that day, the sky started to clear, though the wind still blew at twenty miles per hour. Evans and Perez went out. They ran down to a place on the Oklahoma flat that Huff had nicknamed Fetlock, where the sandy bottom was dotted with some swaying, spongy grasses. There, Perez spotted the roll of a large tarpon. He jumped down from the poling platform into the gunwale, and drove his pole into the ocean floor to keep the windblown boat off the fish. Evans made a cast, and the fish flashed at the fly but missed. He kept stripping, and the fish came back, and this time, Evans hooked it. Just a few seconds after the bite, a big wave smacked the side of the boat. It knocked Perez into the water and tossed Evans into the stern. The fish jumped at that very moment, and neither man saw it. “We had no idea how big it was,” says Perez.
Evans stayed attached and got the fish in quickly, as was his custom. Perez, back in the boat, lip-gaffed it and dragged it into the bow and measured it.
“You did it,” he said.
The 186-pound, 8-ounce tarpon topped Pate’s 182-pounder from two years before, becoming the biggest tarpon ever caught on a fly in recorded history (it was on sixteen-pound tippet). More important to Evans, it exorcised a demon that had been hot on his tail for four years. He’d finally topped Huff’s unofficial 186-pounder from 1977.
That evening, Perez suggested that since they had the sixteen-pound record, they should give the twelve-pound one a try. The twelve-pound record at the time—155 pounds—was held by Pate, which added some incentive for Evans.
The next day, Evans cast into an oncoming school of tarpon and hooked one. Ten minutes later, he had the fish beside the boat. Perez hit it with the kill gaff, and was—yes—launched into the water. Perez was quickly pulled three hundred feet from the boat. Huff and Moret, who were fishing nearby, poled over. Huff handed Perez his lip gaff. With two gaffs now in the fish, Perez was finally able to subdue it. But just then, Evans came roaring over in Perez’s boat. He tried to slow it down by putting it in neutral, but the boat didn’t really have a neutral, and he slammed into Perez, who somehow managed to hold onto the fish.
That fish officially weighed 155 pounds, 7 ounces. Because it was within eight ounces of Pate’s record, it technically qualified as a tie with Pate’s fish according to IGFA rules.IV The two rivals would begrudgingly have to share the title. But not for long.
More records fell the following year. Apte and Delph were at Black Rock one day at dawn. Apte, still fishing twelve-pound, says he could just barely make out some fish gurgling seventy-five feet away in the dim light. He cast his fly in that direction and hooked a tarpon. Exactly twenty-two minutes later (remember: the watch), he landed the fish. They took the tarpon in, passing some boats that were just coming out for the day. The fish weighed 164 pounds, 12 ounces, beating Pate and Evans’s shared record by more than nine pounds.
Apte and Delph went back out in the afternoon. Apte hooked another fish, which took twenty-eight minutes to land. When they got back to the dock, the scale read 166 pounds. Apte, in what was a fitting capstone to his tarpon-fishing career, had broken the twelve-pound record twice in one day.
We’ve had a lot of fish-catching stories in this chapter, haven’t we? There is one more that we have to talk about.
On May 13, 1982, Evans and Perez were on the Oklahoma flat when they saw Pate, who was fishing that day with a Riverside bookkeeper and part-time guide named Rick Doyle, hook into a fish.
“Fuck,” Evans said.
“What?” asked Perez.
“Pate’s got a poon on. It might be the poon.”
Pate and his poon soon disappeared into the Gulf. Evans and Perez fished the rest of the day. As they idled up to the docks at the Riverside that evening, they saw a giant tarpon hanging by a hook. Pate was standing next to it, smiling, surrounded by onlookers, some of whom were taking photographs. Perez, distracted, ran his boat into the dock.
That 188-pound tarpon caught by Pate on sixteen-pound tippet beat Evans’s record by a pound and change. It would remain the world record for the next twenty-one years, an almost unimaginable run. It was considered by many during that time to be the best fly-rod catch ever, and it solidified Pate’s position as one of the greatest fly anglers who ever lived. And it would drive Evans crazy for each and every one of those years it existed.
This would drive him crazy, too: a few months after Pate’s catch, Evans received a letter at his Vermont home. Evans says it was from Pate. The letter began:
Dear Tom,
I am writing to inform you that the 188-pound tarpon I caught in Homosassa in May of this year has been officially accepted by the IGFA as the new world record, replacing yours.
Evans crumpled up the letter and threw it into a wastebasket. He now wishes he had saved it.
In 1983, Evans did not go to Homosassa, one of only two seasons he would miss in forty-three years. Work got in the way. His firm had taken a big position in the stock of an American oil company, and that stock was going south, and he needed to figure his way out of it.
The following year, in 1984, Evans booked a guide named Mike Souchak. Souchak’s father had been a professional golfer who had won fifteen times on the PGA Tour, which included one-stroke victories in separate tournaments over Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus. Souchak had graduated from Duke before becoming a fishing guide. He wasn’t as fish-savvy as Huff or Perez, but he was book-smart, sometimes annoyingly so to Evans. “We’d be at breakfast at the local spot, Becky’s, and Mike would read the weather report in the newspaper and would tell me that it wasn’t going to rain,” says Evans. “I’d look outside and it was raining. ‘Mike, it’s raining right now.’ And he would say, ‘No, the paper says it’s not.’ ”
Evans fished with Souchak that season with the growing realization that he’d need to find another guide soon. “It just didn’t feel right,” says Evans, who still had a Huff hangover. One day during the last week of the season, Evans slipped on some grease in Souchak’s boat and fell and landed on the boat’s battery. “I was all purple and green,” he says. At this point, both men realized that their partnership was over. Guiding wasn’t Souchak’s calling, and he knew it.V Evans needed someone who was as into it as he was.
On the last day of the season, Souchak suggested that Evans fish with a young guide he knew who seemed to be quickly figuring out Homosassa. The guide’s name was Al Dopirak. Evans went out with Dopirak that day, and they boated seven tarpon, all of them over 140 pounds.
That evening, Evans and Tania—who were married by then—drove to Tampa to stay in an airport hotel before their flight home the next day. Evans couldn’t sleep at all that night because of the spasms in his back from fighting all of those fish. He was ecstatic. He rolled over in the bed in the morning and told Tania, “I found him. I’m back in the game.”
I. Jerald Ault, a marine biologist at the University of Miami, has, in more recent years, developed a chart for the BTT that he says provides a more accurate measurement than the old formula.
II. They were actually on fifteen-pound tippet, but as I explained earlier, that category was replaced by sixteen-pound, and the record was moved up. So we’ll stick to calling it sixteen-pound. The same sort of thing applies to the twelve-pound category, which at the time, was ten-pound.
III. On the IGFA’s website, Pate’s 1980 catch is recorded as having broken the record held by Lenny Berg, an ophthalmologist who caught a 128-and-a-half pounder in 1979. Apte’s 154-pound tarpon on twelve-pound caught in 1971 was not officially part of the IGFA archives, most likely because it was recorded by the Miami Rod & Reel Club, and not Mark Sosin and the Saltwater Fly Rodders. Nonetheless, it was considered the “true” twelve-pound record, until Pate’s 1980 fish. Confusing, eh?
IV. According to the IGFA rules, for fish of over one hundred pounds, any new world record must clear the old one by eight ounces or more.
V. Souchak would quit guiding a little while later and head out to Las Vegas to play in poker tournaments and cash games, which he still does to this day.