By Tom Evans’s estimation, there were, at most, twenty-five boats on the water on any given day during the 1981 Homosassa tarpon season. The fishery wasn’t the nearly empty space it was back in 1977, but it was all manageable. That didn’t last long. What started as a snowball (Lefty’s leak, Huff’s unofficial record, Evans’s official one) became an avalanche (the subsequent year-after-year records, the newspaper and magazine stories, Pate’s movie). In retrospect, the unsustainable popularity of the Homosassa fishery, the tragedy of its commons, seems like it was inevitable.
By the mid-1980s, according to Billy Knowles, Lee Baker, and Dale Perez, there were usually sixty boats on the water during the height of the season. By the end of that decade, says Gary Merriman, that number rose to seventy or eighty. Kent Davenport claims that by the time he started fishing Homosassa in the early 1990s—just after Pate’s movie came out—the number of boats on the water at the height of the season approached one hundred. “You could walk the flat across the gunwales,” he says.
It became, quite obviously, a problem. Boats spook fish. Tarpon ping-ponged from one boat to another, getting warier—and less likely to take a fly—with each new encounter. The fish started acting oddly, racing through the flat and forming daisy chains close to the ocean floor, as opposed to the water’s surface. They completely ignored flies that were placed right in front of them.
The boat launches were choked with traffic in the morning. Many of the new boats were helmed inexpertly. Almost all of the newcomers had at least two trolling motors on their boats and used them, instead of push poles, to move about the flat. Though the hum of a trolling motor is somewhat discreet, it still spooks fish. There was also still some running-and-gunning with the big engines to track down swimming fish, only now the fish no longer took flies as they did in the late 1970s. One new guide did try to learn how to pole the flat, bless his heart. His boat, however, earned the nickname “Circles,” because that was the motion it described whenever the guide started to pole.
The flat had turned into a circus, and the stars of the show were not happy. “You’d see the tarpon come in and start to bounce from boat to boat, all with their trolling motors going, and then the fish would suddenly turn and start flying out into the Gulf,” says Rufus Wakeman, who started fishing Homosassa in the late 1980s. “It was so depressing to see a big string of big fish move west in a hurry like that.”
And—again, inevitably, in retrospect—the tarpon fishing in Homosassa fell off a cliff. By the early to mid-1990s, “You could go out for seven straight days and not even make a cast,” says Bill Bishop. “Because there weren’t any fish to cast to.” Whenever fish did show up, they got mobbed and horribly hassled. “There’d be fifteen to twenty boats fishing a single string of fish,” says Jimmy Long, a Homosassa-based guide. In 1995, a massive red tide in May and June wiped out some of the fishing season. Evans spent forty days fishing Homosassa in 1996. He did not catch one fish. The record chasers at Homosassa were like the main character in John Cheever’s “The Swimmer.” When they started their quest, everything was bright and beautiful, robust and vigorous. But as the journey progressed, it got darker and darker, and by the end, everything was exhausted and tattered, and the home they thought was theirs was no longer.
Tarpon are an ancient species—fifty million years old, if you remember. During their time on Earth, they have survived the extreme heat of the early Eocene epoch, the extreme cold of the Pleistocene Ice Age, and the massive die-off of large animals that happened thirteen thousand years ago. They also, as individuals, can live to an old age. They have proven to be highly adaptable.
They certainly can become habituated to human behavior. A healthy population of tarpon frequent the docks at Robbie’s Restaurant in Islamorada, where they are fed daily by tourists. There is a group of tarpon that tend to stay near the docks and boat slips of Bud & Mary’s Marina in Islamorada, a no-fishing zone, and thus a safe haven. It makes sense that if tarpon can become conditioned to the food and safety that humans provide them, they can also become conditioned to any human-caused signs of potential danger or discomfort.
It is believed by scientists that the tarpon that come to Homosassa in May are a specific subgroup of the greater tarpon population. They have dark black backs, perhaps, it’s theorized, because they are reared and live much of their lives in the muddy waters of the Mississippi River Delta. They are shorter and fatter than the tarpon in the Keys, and they weigh more. This Homosassa subgroup likely returned to the area every spring, en masse, as part of their pre-spawning ritual because that’s what their forebearers did for eons—until something happened that changed their habits, or at least the habits of most of them.
Tarpon have been known to disappear from some spots in the world. Port Aransas, Texas, near Corpus Christi, was a famous tarpon-fishing destination in the 1930s and 1940s. At the height of its popularity, hundreds of tarpon were caught a day during the season there, and all of them were killed (these were the days when it was believed that our oceans contained a limitless bounty). The dead tarpon were displayed back at the docks as proof of a successful day of angling, then their carcasses were thrown back in the water or used as garden fertilizer. By the 1950s, the Port Aransas tarpon fishery was no more.
Homosassa’s tarpon were not eliminated in this way, of course. Even during the height of the world-record madness, maybe five fish a year were purposely killed, and even if five or ten times that number died after being released (from sharks or stress), overkilling wasn’t the reason Homosassa’s tarpon didn’t return.
The boats and the increased pressure surely played a role—and perhaps a significant one—in the destruction of the fishery, with tarpon adapting to that discomfort. There were other factors, though, that likely contributed in a much more significant way. After all, the tarpon in the Keys are subjected to a great number of boats all year long. And while they are much harder to fool with a fly these days than they were decades ago when they were less pressured, they continue to show up there in robust numbers. The tarpon in Homosassa, on the other hand, have not.
Artifacts from the Homosassa area indicate that Native American tribes first settled or visited there some ten thousand years ago, likely attracted to the numerous and bountiful springs. The largest of those springs culminate in the region’s four major rivers—the Crystal, Chassahowitzka, Weeki Wachee, and Homosassa (which in the Seminole language supposedly means “river of fishes”). The Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto marched through the area with his army in 1539, searching for gold. One of the first permanent white settlements in Homosassa was built by a man named David Levy Yulee, whose family had immigrated to Florida from St. Thomas in the 1820s (Yulee’s father purchased fifty thousand acres near Jacksonville with the idea of creating a Jewish agrarian utopia, which never quite got off the ground).
Yulee studied law in St. Augustine and set up a practice there in 1832. In 1845, when Florida officially became a state, he was elected as a US senator, the first Jewish person to ever hold that position. Yulee became known on Capitol Hill as the “Florida Fire Eater” for the vehement pro-slavery rants he delivered on the Senate floor. In 1851, he built a five-thousand-acre plantation, called “Margarita,” on the Homosassa River. There, his 150 slaves grew sugar cane, cotton, and oranges. Yulee was also president of the Florida Railroad Company, which constructed some of the railroad lines that Henry B. Plant would consolidate after the Civil War. In 1864, Yulee’s plantation house on the Homosassa River was destroyed by Union gunboats (the ruins of his sugar mill are now a state park). After the Civil War, Yulee spent nine months in prison for his role in helping Jefferson Davis briefly escape Union forces. Yulee never rebuilt his Homosassa home, and the area would remain relatively sleepy in terms of development for the next century.
The painter Winslow Homer began visiting Florida and the Caribbean in 1884, a ritual he would undertake in the late winter and spring for the next twenty-four years to get away from the lingering cold grip of the Northeast (he was living in Maine at the time). One of his favorite spots in the south was Homosassa, where he spent three full seasons.
Homer visited Homosassa primarily to fish, and he once told his brother in a letter that the angling there was “the best in America as far as I can find.” Homer was, by most accounts, a competent fly fisherman. He mostly targeted largemouth bass, which were plentiful in those days in the Homosassa River. Though his trips to Homosassa were more restorative than anything else, Homer did paint eleven watercolors depicting the area, with a few of them featuring fishermen holding bent rods high in the air.
Homer’s Homosassa paintings have a bit of a rough, unfinished feel to them, almost impressionistic. But Stephanie Herdrich, a curator of late-19th-century American paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, cautions against dismissing them as merely vacation watercolors. “They are a larger meditation on man and nature and the fragility of the two,” she says. And indeed in two of his most famous Homosassa watercolors—Red Shirt, Homosassa, Florida and Homosassa River (both done in 1904)—the jungle, with its towering palm trees and swaying bankside grasses, dwarfs the tiny fishermen found tucked into the corners of their respective paintings. What’s striking about all eleven of Homer’s Homosassa watercolors is how serene and sensuous they are, a marked contrast from his paintings set in the Northeast, where nature—mainly the sea—is depicted as menacing and disturbing, something to struggle against, not peaceably coexist with. Herdrich thinks it may be the case that the Homosassa paintings reflect Homer’s relaxed state of mind while there.
By Homer’s last visit to Homosassa in February 1908, the area appeared to be on the verge of discovery (Homer died two years later). John Jacob Astor, Grover Cleveland, and Thomas Edison had stayed in the area as well by that time. Dimock was there, too, reporting The Book Of The Tarpon, which would be published in 1911. But the Great Depression in the 1930s brought development and tourism to a halt. When Huff and Evans first arrived there in the late 1970s, they saw basically what Homer had seen.
The clear-cutting and bulldozing that Evans spotted from his plane while leaving Homosassa that spring in the late 1970s? It was likely the Villages of Citrus Hills, located near the Crystal River, which was built around that time, and now has four golf courses and around three thousand houses. (This is the community where Ted Williams spent his final years.) That planned community was joined by Sugarmill Woods, located near the headwaters of the Chassahowitzka River, which was also built and began to flourish around that time in the 1970s. It now has some four thousand houses and two golf courses, with forty-five total holes.
These two master-planned communities were on the vanguard of a major change for the area. Citrus County (where Homosassa is located) and Hernando County (which borders much of the Oklahoma flat south of Citrus County) were, for a few decades following the 1970s, two of the fastest-growing counties in the United States. In 1970, Citrus County had 19,000 inhabitants. By 1990, it had 93,500, and in 2020 it has 150,000. Hernando County had 17,000 residents in 1970. By 1990, that number had risen to 101,000, and in 2020, now stands at 194,000. Retirees fueled most of the growth, and dozens of planned communities were built to accommodate them. In the late 1960s, Citrus and Hernando Counties had only a handful of golf courses. By 2000, Hernando County had nineteen courses, which was three times as many, per capita, than the national average. The two counties have close to thirty-five combined as of 2020.
The one thing all of those new developments and golf courses have in common is the need for significant amounts of freshwater. That freshwater comes from a portion of the upper Floridan aquifer, which lies beneath Citrus and Hernando Counties and feeds the area’s springs. By the early 2000s, Hernando County alone was using fifty million gallons of water a day.I Home sites, agriculture, and some residual mining pumped out a lot of that water. So did the golf courses, which used something like 370,000 gallons per course every day of the year. (In 2001, six Hernando County golf courses were caught pumping more than their prescribed limit.) That water usage, coupled with severe droughts in Florida in 1980 and 1984, served to draw down the aquifer and reduce the flow of the local springs. Adding insult to that injury, much of the groundwater became polluted with pesticides and other lawn-maintenance chemicals, as well as nitrates from fertilizer, cow dung, and leaky septic tanks. Nitrate levels in the region’s four main rivers increased by a factor of five between the 1960s and 1990s. Eighty-five percent of the pollution in the Homosassa River is caused by humans (from fertilizer, livestock waste, etc.). In the Chassahowitzka River, humans account for 81 percent of the pollution.II
Historically, the area’s four main rivers, along with the many adjacent smaller springs—all of which collectively make up what’s known as the “Springs Coast”—pumped around a billion gallons of freshwater into the Homosassa Bay every day. This was the reason for that just-after-a-thunderstorm smell that was once omnipresent on the Homosassa flats that Dan Malzone talked about. But since 1980, there has been a drastic decline in the amount of freshwater entering the bay. The flow in the Crystal River has been reduced by 58 percent, and the flow of the Chassahowitzka River has been reduced by 55 percent. The Florida Springs Institute, a science-based nonprofit, recently released a report that assigned grades for Florida’s major spring-fed rivers, based on their flow. The Homosassa-area rivers did not fare well. The Crystal, Chassahowitzka, and Homosassa Rivers all received Fs. The Weeki Wachee River, star student of the bunch, got a D. Less freshwater means more salinity in the bay and in the springs, a problem that’s been exacerbated, as noted earlier, by rising sea levels in recent years. Ryan Gandy, a research scientist for Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, grew up on the Springs Coast. He says he used to fish for largemouth bass (a freshwater fish that can tolerate a bit of brackish water) in the Chassahowitzka River, as Homer had done in the Homosassa River. “But those fish haven’t been there for a while now,” he says.
This lack of freshwater has had consequences.
In the 1960s, commercial crabbing was the biggest industry in Homosassa. Blue crabs were everywhere—mating in rivers and floating the ocean currents in Homosassa Bay, plentiful to the point of absurdity. The crabs attached themselves to the trim tabs on the backs of flats skiffs. They tried to grab hold of push poles, their pincers futilely clacking against the graphite.
The tarpon that came to Homosassa feasted on those crabs. “Every day you’d see the crabs swimming all over the surface of the water and the tarpon busting on them,” says Ronnie Richards, a longtime local guide. Huff says that nearly every tarpon landed back in the late 1970s and early 1980s “had crabs coming out of it, from both ends.” It was the sheer abundance of the nutrient- and oil-rich crabs that likely attracted those Homosassa tarpon to the area in the first place, and also helped them attain their stupendous size. And it may be that the sudden disappearance of those blue crabs drove the tarpon away.III
The blue crabs of Homosassa Bay, as it turns out, needed freshwater, too. They mate in freshwater and, because the spring-fed rivers that empty into Homosassa Bay are not rich in organic nutrients, they relied on the plentiful brackish areas—which are rich in nutrients—to feed. The abundance or scarcity of blue crabs is “directly tied to freshwater flow,” says Gandy. The higher salinity levels that result from reduced freshwater flow are associated with lower survival rates, slower molting, and higher predation mortality for blue crabs, according to a study done by the University of North Carolina–Wilmington. As the freshwater flow into Homosassa Bay dissipated, so did the number of blue crabs. By 2000, Gandy says, the biomass of blue crabs in the area had dropped to half of what it was in the 1970s. (There are only a handful of commercial crabbers left in the area.) Thus, the Homosassa tarpon no longer had quite the impressive buffet spread they’d become accustomed to. And it is likely no coincidence that when the blue crabs no longer appeared in great numbers, neither did the tarpon. The equation is rather simple: less freshwater means fewer crabs, fewer crabs means fewer tarpon.
Alas, the state of Florida, that beautiful, fucked-up wonder world, seems to always do its best—at least when it comes to the work of its state officials—to remain beautifully fucked up…
The exhaustion of aquifers is a problem for more than just tarpon anglers, of course. Without proper management, entire ecosystems—and the state’s water supply—are in peril (80 to 90 percent of the freshwater used in Florida is groundwater). The Southwest Florida Water Management District (SWFWMD) is the state agency in charge of monitoring the health of the area’s aquifers and water supply. And it is their official position that a lack of rainfall, and not groundwater pumping, is the main cause of the depletion of the aquifer on the Springs Coast. “Rainfall in that area was a lot higher in the sixties and seventies,” says Kym Rouse Holzwart, a senior environmental scientist for the SWFWMD. “Then it went down.”
Scientific and environmental groups disagree with this assessment. “That’s a lie. It’s a political answer,” says Robert Knight, an environmental scientist who runs the Florida Springs Institute. “The SWFWMD toes this line because if they told people that they couldn’t take any more groundwater, every developer in the state would get a new legislature elected. The government and the water management districts are just doing the bidding of the developers.”
I suppose people will believe whichever side of this argument they want to believe, as is the standard operating procedure these days. But there are facts involved here, and let’s let them get in the way, shall we? Yes, rainfall is the way the aquifer is replenished. But the SWFWMD’s claim that there has been much less rain since the 1960s and 1970s? The data on the SWFWMD’s own website reflect that the 1980s were pretty wet, and that the 1990s were a bit drier, and that the first two decades of the new millennium have been mixed when it comes to rainfall, with one decade being dry and another being wet. In other words, the data demonstrate fluctuations in annual rainfall by decades. These fluctuations in rainfall have been the norm, and not the exception, forever.
So, the claim that there has been some drastic difference in rainfall by the decades is overstated, at the very least. But this is beside the point, and focusing on rainfall is a misdirection, and perhaps a deliberate one. What matters here is that, historically, throughout all of those drought years and all of those wet years—all of those fluctuations—the springs always maintained their sustained, normal flow, according to Todd Kincaid, a geohydrologist who has extensively studied the Homosassa area’s springs. The difference between now and 1910, or now and even 1960? The springs no longer sustain their normal flow, even in non-drought years. And that’s because of one thing: groundwater withdrawal. “People just want to believe in magic, that you can just take as much water as you like for as long as you like from the aquifer and have no deleterious effect,” says Kincaid. “That’s just ludicrous.”
Indeed, government agencies in Florida do not have a stellar track record when it comes to protecting and conserving the state’s water, in specific, and its environment, in general. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush did once try to help the springs, signing a springs restoration initiative into law. But four years after he left office, Rick Scott, a governor notorious for his pro-development and anti-environment stances, undid the law. In fact, Scott’s SWFWMD board was so egregiously anti-environment and so obviously in the pocket of one of the state’s biggest polluters (the sugar industry) that every single member was forced to resign after Scott left office in 2019. “We do the science and we publish reports,” says Knight. “And then the government changes laws to reflect that. But the SWFWMD doesn’t enforce existing laws. The pumping is the problem, and they’re still issuing permits every day.”
The problem isn’t really a technical one. It’s a political one.
It’s also a solvable one, which makes it all the more frustrating. It’s hard for us, as individuals, to truly believe that we have any control over some of our bigger environmental challenges, like global warming, which is almost so large a problem that it’s ungraspable. It is more within our purview to be able to exert some control, and have some influence, over smaller things that happen more locally, like the polluting of estuaries and the depletion of aquifers. But when that available control is left unexecuted, it makes these minor tragedies—which, all linked together, create the big, ungraspable one—more frustrating and, well, sadder. They are more tangible and they are preventable, and when they occur, the loss is felt more deeply.
What’s happened in Homosassa serves as a microcosm for what’s happened all over Florida, inland and on the coasts, from the nitrate-based toxic algae in Lake Okeechobee, which is periodically and disastrously flushed out to both coasts, to the freshwater-starved Everglades and Florida Bay, which are dying right in front of our eyes. Ill-thought-out development, bought-and-paid-for politicians, the drying up of aquifers, the unsustainable development of coastal lands, the intentional misinformation, the worshipping of economic progress above all other types of progress… all of this has led to an ecological catastrophe that’s yet to be fully acknowledged. The loss of the tarpon in Homosassa is just a harbinger of worse things to come.
In Homosassa, the crowds showed up. The freshwater flow decreased. The crab population crashed. The tarpon left. And, eventually, so did the anglers.
By the mid-1990s, most of the record-hunting regulars had departed Homosassa for good. The exceptions were Evans and Pate, the two men most dedicated to the pursuit. But even they showed signs of restlessness and frustration. Pate’s 1992 trip to Africa was an indication of a wandering eye (he would go to Sierra Leone a few more times and even ventured to Guinea-Bissau and Gambia in search of tarpon). Evans, though he continued to show up in Homosassa every year, started spending some serious time fly fishing for billfish, first in Central America and then mainly in Oceania. He broke some records for billfish, many in fact, and the billfishing in Australia and New Zealand led him to Dean Butler, who would become an important figure in Evans’s later years. But Evans and Pate were never completely out of Homosassa’s grasp. Neither could ever shake the place, unable to completely free their minds of what they’d seen during its heyday.
That heyday was over, though. The era from roughly the mid- to late-1980s until 2000 represented Homosassa’s dark ages. There were a few significant catches during those years, however. In 1986, Dan Malzone, fishing on the first of June, caught a 167-pound tarpon on twelve-pound tippet, which broke Apte’s 1982 world record by three pounds. And Evans registered his two records, caught on sixteen-pound, in the then brand-new twenty-pound class in 1991.
That year, Rufus Wakeman, a Falstaffian descendent of John Deere, hooked and landed a tarpon on sixteen-pound tippet that taped out bigger than Pate’s 188-pound tarpon, even though Wakeman’s fish was missing part of its tail from an old wound. Pate watched Wakeman fight the fish, only putting down his binoculars when Wakeman started up his motor and took the fish to shore to be weighed. “The scale jumped up above 190 initially,” says Wakeman. “My heart just stopped.” But it eventually settled on 186 pounds. “That missing tail, man,” he says. “That’s probably the only piece of tail I’ve ever been bummed about.”
Wakeman left Homosassa in 1995 after a few years of extremely poor fishing. “I wish it was thirty years ago,” he says now, recalling a song he used to belt out on the Homosassa flats, sung to the tune of “Loch Lomond”:
You take the High Rack
and I’ll take the Low Rack,
And I’ll catch a tarpon before ye.
And we’ll meet again
To try to catch ol’ Gunga Din
On the bonnie, bonnie flats of Oklahomie.
And then there was Clyde Balch, the plastic surgeon who began his professional life treating trauma patients but ended up as a cosmetic specialist. He started his surgery career in Miami, where he fished with Bill Curtis in Biscayne Bay, and later moved to Naples on the West Coast. It was Curtis who first brought him to Homosassa, where he would later fish with Malzone and, occasionally, Dopirak.
On May 15, 1994, Balch was fishing with Malzone when, he says, he saw a “big dark wad of fish on the bottom” and cast his fly, a Malzone creation called the “Guido’s Blonde Bomber,” into the middle of it. A fish took the fly, and nearly two hours later, Balch had a six-foot, five-inch-tall tarpon with a forty-one-inch girth lying in the boat. The fish weighed 177 pounds, the new world record for twelve-pound tippet, a full ten pounds heavier than… Malzone’s now former world record. Asked if Malzone ever seemed peeved about his record being broken, Balch says, “Nah. I guess if he had been he could have intentionally screwed up the gaffing.”
“I was happy for Clyde,” says Malzone. “But he acted weird about it. Not because of me. But because he always worried about Evans.” Balch knew that Evans was intense and insatiable, and that he had the time and money and desire to keep pursuing records. Balch also didn’t like Evans very much. “I always thought he was a bit arrogant,” Balch says. His anxiety was not misplaced.
Balch fished Homosassa for another decade or so. But, because of back problems, the now eighty-two-year-old hasn’t done any tarpon fishing at all in the last few years. He now spends his spring seasons in another pursuit. “I chase Ukrainian women. I go over to Ukraine every year alone,” he says, with a rather yucky grin. “But I have company once I get there.”
Pate’s 188-pound world-record tarpon, caught on sixteen-pound tippet in 1982, now seemed like it would never be topped. Balch’s 177-pounder on twelve-pound tippet looked that way, too. Homosassa appeared to be done for good, a fishing paradise lost, a piece of fishing lore, a story that old-timers would talk about constantly, boring the hell out of their younger acquaintances. This was a miserable period for the Homosassa fishery, especially for those who had seen it in its more bountiful state. And it was made all the more miserable by the dominating personality of a man who would first show up in Homosassa around that time. A man named Bobby Erra.
I. According to USGS data, 1.3 billion gallons of water were withdrawn from the upper Floridan aquifer—which ranges from South Carolina to Florida—in 1960. By 2005, the withdrawals had reached 3.2 billion gallons. The state of Florida accounts for 80 percent of withdrawn water from the aquifer.
II. Forest fires and biological decay are two types of nonhuman pollution, just FYI.
III. Scientists believe one of the reasons that so many tarpon congregate in the Boca Grande Pass is its abundance of blue and pass crabs.