By the dawning of the new millennium, Homosassa was an afterthought in the world of fly fishing. The great migration of tarpon that once annually came through there was no more. Balch’s 177-pound tarpon in 1994 was the area’s last significant catch, and record-hunting fever had subsided—not just there, but everywhere. Erra was on the scene, tormenting and terrorizing. The fishing got so slow that one man began bringing a burner on his boat every morning to Black Rock and cooking up eggs and bacon for his fellow anglers. Evans even took to occasionally reading his BlackBerry on the boat as Dopirak poled around the flat, something that would have been unthinkable years before. The white heat of the tarpon fly-fishing world had moved southeast once again, back to the Keys, where the fish were smaller but arrived annually in much greater—and more reliable—numbers. Tarpon fishing there was becoming hipper and younger just as Homosassa had become the province of old men who were haunted by memories, drawn there by the faint whiff of nostalgia.
And yet, Homosassa remained the only place, save for the west coast of Africa, where the truly giant tarpon swam, where fish of two hundred pounds and larger still occasionally made a visit. Even in its severely diminished state, Homosassa was still the spot where true world-record hunters—whose numbers, like the tarpon, had dwindled to a mere handful—still felt like they needed to go. Among them, of course, was Pate, who in the year 2000 was sixty-nine years old, and Evans, who was then sixty-one.
Steve Kilpatrick is tall (6'3") and big (230 pounds). He has chestnut brown eyes, and his dark hair is in slight retreat. The sixty-seven-year-old walks as if he’s a marionette, his appendages seemingly unattached to the rest of his body, wooden and stiff and moving to a staccato beat. There’s a reason for that. Kilpatrick has had seventeen surgeries during his lifetime, including two total knee replacements. That severe wear and tear is thanks to a working career that began at Georgia Pacific, where he worked with resins and plywood and particle boards in the company’s chemical department, veered into woodworking, then settled into guiding wealthy sports, for turkeys and, more notably, for tarpon. Kilpatrick grew up in Jacksonville and now lives in Chiefland, Florida, a small, agricultural, inland town that’s some fifty-five miles north of Homosassa.
Kilpatrick started tarpon fishing in the mid-1980s. Among his first mentors was Stu Apte. From Apte, he learned how to both fish for tarpon and how to guide for them, a valuable dual education. Apte also taught him about the lore of the sport, which included tales of the giant tarpon of Homosassa. Kilpatrick made his first pilgrimage to the fishery in 1985, when he, like many others (myself included) with no real firsthand baseline knowledge from which to judge it, saw a handful of big tarpon swim by on his first day there and thought he’d “found heaven.”
Kilpatrick became a licensed fishing guide three years later. Even with Apte’s training, he found the going in Homosassa very difficult early on—the vast flats were indecipherable, and the fish were so few, and the ones that were there were so large that it took him thirty-one days over a span of two years to finally land one. His learning curve straightened out after that, and by the turn of the millennium he was one of the most respected of the guides who ventured to Homosassa every May and June to fish. “He may seem like a country boy, but he’s the real deal,” Dopirak says of Kilpatrick. “He’s an excellent guide. He ties perfect knots and beautiful flies.”
It was Apte—the great connector of the tarpon world—who made the call to Kilpatrick that would lead to the landing of the largest tarpon ever recorded on a fly, an event that would momentarily upend his life and the lives of his clients, and crush the dreams and egos of both Pate and Evans.
“Steve, I have some friends, a father and a son, who need a guide in Homosassa,” Apte said. “You available?”
The father is Jim Holland Sr., a plaintiff’s trial lawyer from Vancouver, Washington. He is disciplined and driven, fit and bald and bespectacled, and never afraid to voice an opinion, which, one of his friends and longtime guides, Tommy Locke, says, “sometimes rubs people the wrong way.” Holland Sr. speaks in the quirky accent indigenous to the Pacific Northwest. He pronounces the name of his former favorite fishery as “Homa-sauce-a.”
In the early 1980s, when the famous rod designer Gary Loomis was in the process of forming his iconic fly rod company, G. Loomis, he appeared one day in the offices of Holland Sr., seeking legal advice for his new venture. Holland Sr. helped him out, and the two men became fishing buddies. In 1984, Loomis designed the famous IM6 graphite fly rod and decided that he wanted to put the rod to the ultimate test. So he took Holland Sr. along with him to the Keys to fish with, you guessed it, Stu Apte. Apte loved the rod and sang its praises, and G. Loomis soon caught fire as a fly rod company. Holland Sr. stayed in touch with Apte, and for the following few seasons, he returned to the Keys to fish with him, staying at his house. “We fished all day and then, at night, we’d go over notes and tie flies, and Stu would give me an exam,” says Holland Sr.
The son is Jim Holland Jr., who was, at a very young age, included in his father’s fly-fishing exploits. Holland Jr. began casting at age eight, under the tutelage of Steve Rajeff, a G. Loomis rod engineer and, arguably, one of the greatest casters who ever lived. Apte and Loomis also served as mentors to Holland Jr.
Holland Jr. took to the sport. He trout fished while in undergraduate school at the University of Washington. He caught his first tarpon in the Keys with his father in the early 1990s, and an obsession blossomed. “And then we naturally heard about Homosassa,” he says. The Hollands first fished there with Ted Johnston, the rather enigmatic real estate man who, if you’ll remember, fished with Ted Williams and arranged for the baseball great’s two houses in the Citrus Hills development in Crystal River. The Hollands began to make Homosassa an annual tarpon trip, mostly for a week at a time. “We went fully in,” says Holland Sr. “We were committed to tarpon fishing in Homosassa. We practiced for it all year ’round.”I
As the 2001 Homosassa season approached, the Hollands were lacking the one thing they needed most: a guide. Johnston had a conflict, and none of the other good local guides had any openings. So Holland Sr. called Apte, and Apte called Kilpatrick, who just happened to have May 6 though 11 open.
That season, Kilpatrick and Dopirak were sharing accommodations for the tarpon season, a poon shack consisting of two side-by-side dwellings in Aripeka, a tiny town located just a few minutes from the boat launch at Bayport. Their sports would come and stay with them while they fished. This arrangement meant that during their Homosassa week in 2001, the Hollands would basically be sharing a house with Evans.
The weather that week was abysmal, with overcast skies and a cold and constant north wind. In the first five days of fishing, only Holland Sr. managed to get a tarpon to bite on Kilpatrick’s boat. To that point, the highlight of the trip was the evenings—the big dinners and Evans’s excellent wines and the post-meal tutoring sessions that Evans led. “He took us to school,” says Holland Sr. “He described to us how he fought big tarpon, and he took out his log book and went through each significant fish he’d caught.” The Hollands had decided to use twenty-pound tippet, something Evans—who was using sixteen-pound tippet at the time—wasn’t thrilled about, still peeved that Pate had somehow convinced the IGFA to allow it. “But it was legal and it was their choice,” says Evans.
On the afternoon of May 10, Evans and Dopirak drifted along with the tide at the Middle Racks. Kilpatrick and the Hollands were nearby. Dopirak spotted a small string of tarpon. Evans picked out the one he thought was the biggest of the bunch and cast to it. The fish ate the fly and went ballistic, zigzagging away from the boat at a tremendous speed. Kilpatrick and the Hollands stood and watched the show from Kilpatrick’s boat. Just as Evans worked the fish in close, the fish leapt, or, really, tried to leap; its mass was such that it couldn’t quite clear the water. Right at the moment of the quasi-leap, Holland Sr. snapped a photo. The fish, headed away from the boat, is clearly enormous, even though only its head and upper back are visible above the waterline. Dopirak is seen standing on the platform, holding the push pole, calm and attentive-looking. Evans is in the bow, in a short-sleeved polo shirt and shorts, pointing the rod at the fish (known as “bowing” the rod), providing slack for his line so the tippet wouldn’t snap if the fish landed on it.
Soon afterward, Evans got the fish to the side of the boat. To that point, Evans and Dopirak had never automatically killed a tarpon, no matter how big they thought it was. Their working agreement was that they would always measure a fish first before striking it with the kill gaff. So Dopirak came down from the poling platform and kneeled down in the boat to grab the fish by the jaw and pull it into the boat to measure it (this was well before the Florida law that prohibited bringing fish of over forty inches into the boat). But just as he kneeled, the fish shot straight up, catching him under the jaw, chipping one of his teeth and sending him sprawling to the boat floor. The fish then sunk down six feet to the bottom. Evans, temporarily forgetting his mounting physical maladies, grabbed the kill gaff and got hold of the fish by its mouth and managed to pull it about halfway up to the water’s surface when it freed itself with a shake of its giant head and swam away. “That fish could have been one-eighty or it could have been two-thirty,” says Evans. “It could have been whatever you wanted it to be.”
There weren’t many fish around that season, but one thing was for sure: “The big poon was there,” says Evans.
The next morning, May 11—the last day of the Hollands’ trip—Holland Jr. had resigned himself to the likelihood that he was not going to catch a tarpon in Homosassa that year. The weather had been terrible and the fish hadn’t really shown up in good numbers. That happened on some fishing trips, and he was at peace with it. He and his father would be back the next year, and, anyway, he had the rest of his life to look forward to. He was twenty-five and in good health. He’d worked as a safari guide in Africa and was a certified airplane pilot and scuba diver. He was a year away from getting his degree from the Willamette University College of Law and then joining his father’s practice. He would, within a few years, get married and have children.
Still, on the ride out to the flat that morning, Holland Jr. couldn’t help but dream a bit. He kept thinking of that huge fish that Evans had hooked the day before. He mused openly on the boat, not really caring if his father or Kilpatrick was listening. “Can you imagine what it would be like to catch a two-hundred-pound tarpon?” Kilpatrick answered with something like, “You’d be famous for sure.”
The morning fishing was slow. They saw a few fish, but nothing within casting range. Later on, they moved down to the Oklahoma flat along with six other boats—including Dopirak’s—and they all set up in a line, all at respectful distances from each other. Kilpatrick was the last in line, the southernmost boat. It was Holland Jr.’s turn on the bow. Moments after they set up, Kilpatrick looked up at the boats to the north and saw some activity. Anglers were making casts. Some tarpon were on the move.
It turned out to be a giant school of some three hundred fish. Evans cast at them. So did Bill Bishop and the anglers in the other four boats. But no one hooked a tarpon. Kilpatrick had tied a yellow fly, known as a Lemon Drop, to the end of Holland Jr.’s leader. Holland Jr. threw that fly at the school a few times, but none of the fish were interested. The school swam by.
Kilpatrick told Holland Jr. that he wanted to change his fly. One evening earlier in the week, Kilpatrick had tied a fly with grizzly hackle, polar bear fur, and red-dyed deer hair that was stacked with red and purple fibers. He called it a “confucktion.” He now tied that fly to Holland Jr.’s leader. Then Kilpatrick made a wide loop around the flat, with the help of electric trolling motors, and positioned his boat and its angler in front of that same school of tarpon.
When the school was about 120 feet away, Holland Jr. began to false cast. When the school was ninety feet away, he let the fly go. “I didn’t purposely pick out the biggest fish in the school,” he says. “It was really just a big black mass of fish.” On the third strip of his fly, the lead fish in the school charged and ate it, and then violently turned sideways. “For a minute or two, it was utter chaos,” says Holland Jr. “My line was hissing through the guides and the fish was running away from us.” When the fish paused its run, Holland Jr. cinched the fly in the tarpon’s mouth with a few hard pulls. The fish came to the surface twice, showing only part of its body. It was clearly a big fish, but it was hard to tell just how big. Evans, who was maybe a football field away, saw the fish splash and turned to Dopirak and said, “Oh, man. They just hooked a big one down there.”
Holland Jr. says that after he hooked the fish and it made its initial run, Kilpatrick told him, “Junior, you’ve had a tough week. Have some fun with this fish and pull on it with all you got.”
“There was no thought that this could be a record fish,” Holland Jr. says. “I didn’t feel any pressure or anxiety. She was beating on me pretty bad, and I pulled so freaking hard on her, probably a little too hard, in retrospect. I flirted a lot with breaking her off.”
The fish dragged the boat north. With each roll and glimpse of the fish, estimates of its weight grew bigger. As it neared Black Rock—the place where, on many evenings, the tarpon had likely sought refuge in the company of hundreds of other tarpon—the fish began to “go crazy,” as Holland Jr. recalls. Ronnie Richards, in a nearby boat, warned Kilpatrick that there was a twelve-foot-long bull shark in the area. Kilpatrick spotted the shark and, in an instant, had his big engine on. He ran his boat almost directly over Holland Jr.’s tarpon, put the engine in neutral, and began revving it loudly for about ten minutes. The massive shark finally slid away. “Sometimes that trick works and sometimes it doesn’t,” says Kilpatrick.
After the shark left, and after the trauma of the revving engine, the tarpon appeared to lose its fight. It sunk to the bottom near Black Rock. Holland Jr., knowing that these respites with tarpon are often only momentary, began lifting the fish with the rod with all of the strength that he had. “I’m convinced that had I not flirted with exceeding the breaking strength of the tippet, I would not have landed that fish,” he would write later in an article that appeared in Fly Fisherman magazine. “Every tarpon you hook comes with an invisible timer, and you never know when your time is up.”
Finally, one hour and fifty-eight minutes after hooking the fish, the tarpon floated up to the surface, lying on its side. The men on the boat now knew that it was exceedingly large. Kilpatrick put a gaff in its lip and held onto its jaw, attempting to hoist the fish into the boat, something he’d done with ease with dozens of other fish. But he could only move the head of this one. The lip gaff bent. Holland Jr. leaned over the side of the boat to help out, and with considerable effort, the two men finally got the fish into the boat. Kilpatrick measured it. The girth was nearly four feet. The length, just a hair over seven feet. Kilpatrick plugged the measurements into a calculator. The weight came out to 204. “I thought I must have screwed it up,” he says. So he did it again… and got the same weight. “He called out the weight, and you could have heard a pin drop,” says Holland Jr.
Kilpatrick got on his phone and made two quick calls. The first was to Dopirak. “I told Al what we thought we had and told him that I was sorry, but that I was going to run the boat through the flat,” says Kilpatrick. The next call was to Dan Malzone, who had a certified scale in the back of his truck.
Kilpatrick had never caught a record, or a potential one for that matter. But he remembered what Apte had told him to do in the event that he ever had such a tarpon on his boat.
What happened next might not be suitable for minors or for anyone who happens to be reading this book while eating a meal. Feel free to skip the next paragraph if either is the case.
Just before he began the run back to the boat launch, Kilpatrick reached into his boat’s glove compartment and retrieved a box of tampons. Yes, tampons. He unwrapped a few of them and stuck them into the anus of the giant tarpon that was now lying across the boat’s floor. He then took a rag and shoved it down the tarpon’s throat. He also draped some wet towels over the fish and, now running back, continuously poured water over the top of it. “Stu always told me that while in transit, a tarpon can lose up to two pounds in fluids,” says Kilpatrick. “You have to stop them up.”II
At the boat launch, Kilpatrick hooked up the boat—with the fish still in it—to his Ford F-150 and drove to the Aripeka compound. Chickens and lizards scattered about the grounds as they arrived. Kilpatrick hoisted a rope over a big branch of an oak tree and, with the help of the Hollands, tried to pull the tarpon up but couldn’t. It was too heavy. So they propped the fish on the hood of the Hollands’ rental car and secured the rope to Malzone’s scale. Only then could they finally hang it from the tree and properly weigh it. The scale read 202 pounds, 8 ounces. Jim Holland Jr.—a young man and relative newcomer to the Homosassa record-chasing scene—had finally eclipsed the mythical 200-pound mark for tarpon on a fly, the Holy Grail that had been chased obsessively for four decades. “I was walking on cloud nine. It was one of the best days of my life,” says Holland Jr. “But then things started getting weird.”
The cloud nine part is captured in a one-minute-long video from that day that was posted on YouTube in May 2019 by a fishing guide from Tampa. In the video, shot outside of the Aripeka house, a boyish, beaming Holland Jr. stands beside his enormous, glistening fish. The sleeves of his shirt are rolled up around his biceps. Milling around him, occasionally offering congratulations, are smiling men twice his age—Kilpatrick, Malzone, Dopirak, and others. It’s as if Holland Jr. is a young member of the tribe who has returned from his first hunt and proven himself well beyond expectations, making his elders happy and proud.
They had a party that night at the poon shack. Evans procured some expensive rum. Calls came in from around the country, from Pate, Pflueger, Apte, and Andy Mill. Things began to get a bit blurry. A small crowd broke off from the party and started whispering about the catch, questioning its legitimacy because of the still somewhat controversial twenty-pound tippet size. Evans got word of what that group was saying. He bowled over, swallowed all of his feelings about that particular tippet size and the man who had championed it, and said, loud enough for most everyone to hear, “Shut the fuck up. This is a great catch.”
The drinks continued to flow and things got even blurrier. Late that night, Holland Jr. found himself sitting across from Evans at a table. Evans drew in a breath. His eyes were rimmed red. He looked straight at Holland Jr. “Good job, kid.” He paused, tapped the table twice with his rum and Coke. “You know you broke my heart today.”
It hurt for Pate, too. His 188-pound tarpon was no longer the biggest tarpon ever officially recorded on a fly. His years-long, ultimately successful campaign to get the IGFA to certify twenty-pound tippet had blown up on him unexpectedly. He would express his pain in a different manner.
The weirdness for Holland Jr. started pretty much the morning after his catch. It came in a few different parts: One had to do with questioning the legitimacy of his catch. Another had to do with a total breakdown of the relationship between the Hollands and Kilpatrick. And yet another had to do with the reaction of the general public to his catch.
As happens with any monumental feat, there were attempts to belittle it. Holland Jr. was initially painted by some as just some lucky young kid, a newbie with little experience. And while it was true he was relatively new on the Homosassa scene, he had, with the mentoring quartet of Apte, Loomis, Rajeff, and his father, one of the strongest tarpon fishing pedigrees—perhaps the strongest—of any twenty-five-year-old in the world. There was also more grumbling from the old school, which still didn’t like the twenty-pound tippet and didn’t think it was true “fly fishing.” But that, too, was easy for Holland Jr. to handle. It was legal tippet, so the old-timers would just have to suck it up.
The rumors that began to circulate about his catch, however, were a bit harder to deal with. It was whispered that he had been trolling his fly when he hooked the fish, which would have invalidated his catch. There were insinuations that because of the duration and difficulty of the fight with the tarpon, the son had handed the rod off to the father at some point to take a breather, which, again, would have made the catch illegal under IGFA rules. Neither of these rumors was true, according to the Hollands, Kilpatrick, and the other anglers who witnessed the fight. Nevertheless, they hung over the catch for a while like an unhealthy haze.
Kilpatrick, right away, believed he knew exactly who had started the rumors. “It was Pate,” he says. Jodi Pate Ahearn, Pate’s wife at the time, says that Pate did indeed “have a strong reaction” to the fish, mainly because Holland Jr. “wasn’t one of the main guys after the record.” Pate’s former guide, Lee Baker, who says he and Pate were “like brothers,” takes it a bit further. “That fish really ticked him off,” he says. “He protested it. He did everything he could to try to make it go away. We had outdoor writers on the boat one day, and he told them that it was an illegal catch. I said, ‘Billy, what are you doing?’ It was embarrassing then to be a good friend of his.”
Those protestations seemed to be at least listened to by those who mattered. Kilpatrick says the IGFA asked to actually see the fish, likely a precaution, given the magnitude of the catch, but still an unusual step, since the organization rarely laid direct eyes on any potential record catch (anglers usually sent the IGFA the application, pictures, tippet, and fly, but not the fish). So, the day after the catch, Kilpatrick packed the fish in ice, wrapped it in a tarp, put it in the back of his truck, and drove the four and a half hours from Aripeka to the IGFA headquarters in Dania Beach, just outside Fort Lauderdale. When he arrived, Kilpatrick says, he was met in the parking lot by someone from the IGFA, who inspected the fish and measured the tippet. Over the next twenty minutes, a few more IGFA representatives came out of the building to take a look at the tarpon.
The next morning, Kilpatrick says, someone from the IGFA asked him to stop by. “They interviewed me and asked me if I caught the fish, if I touched the rod, if the rod had been swapped,” he says. “The answer to all of that was no. It was a totally legitimate catch.”
In the end, the IGFA was satisfied by what it had seen and heard. Within months, Holland Jr.’s tarpon was certified as the biggest recorded tarpon ever caught on a fly. But the drama didn’t quite end there.
Kilpatrick took the fish to King Sailfish Mounts, a well-respected taxidermy shop in Fort Lauderdale. He did this with the explicit permission of the Hollands, who had tipped Kilpatrick $10,000—industry standard for a major world-record fish—and promised him a free mount of the fish. Kilpatrick says he gave King Sailfish a $1,500 down payment for a mold, and believed he was the point man for any mounts to be done—that the Hollands didn’t want anything to do with them. The fissure between guide and clients appeared a few days later, though, when Kilpatrick received a call from a representative from King Sailfish, who said that they’d received a legal notice from the Hollands proclaiming their rights to the fish and said that Kilpatrick should no longer have anything to do with it.
According to Holland Jr., he and his father did this because they believed Kilpatrick was trying to exert total control over the fish, which included any stories and photos of it. “I got some emails from outdoor writers that just read, ‘Who the fuck do you think you are?’ ” says Holland Jr. “When I called them up, they were pissed. ‘You think your story is worth ten thousand dollars?’ they asked me. When I asked them what they were talking about, they told me Kilpatrick was asking for ten thousand dollars to release the story and the photos. I couldn’t believe it.” (Though reports of the catch appeared on the Associated Press wires and in various newspapers, magazines, and on various internet sites, Holland Jr. would tell the official firsthand story in the piece he wrote for Fly Fisherman magazine.)
Holland Jr. believes that Kilpatrick thought some serious money could be made on the fish, somehow, through the stories or pictures or just by being the guide who led his client into the fish. (At the time, $8 million was being offered by a company to the person who broke the world record for largemouth bass, so money for records seemed to be in the air.)III Kilpatrick says it was all a misunderstanding, and that he wasn’t trying to take ownership of the fish or make any money from it. Nevertheless, the trust between guide and clients had been breached. “At that point, our relationship with Steve was totally broken,” says Holland Jr. “I don’t bear Steve any animosity anymore. It was a long time ago. I think there was a lot of stuff going on and he was trying to make a living. I’ve let it go.”
The last of the weirdness for Holland Jr. came with some of the general public’s reaction to his fish. Many of the stories in the newspapers, magazines, and on the internet were followed by indignant letters to the editor and comments, and he began to receive hate mail. “People asked how dare I kill an animal like that,” says Holland Jr. “I get it. I understand. But I made a conscious decision to kill that fish and I don’t regret it. Unfortunately, there is no mechanism to weigh a tarpon for a world record without killing it. If there was, I would have done it.” Holland Jr. also believes that, at fourteen-and-a-half pounds bigger than the previous world record, his fish probably saved the lives of two or three incremental fish. This defense, however, was not good enough for some and never will be.
And anyway, there were tougher issues Holland Jr. had to face just a year after his catch, when he was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, which produces inflammation and pain in the bowels, and ankylosing spondylitis, an autoimmune disease that is a form of arthritis, which causes him sometimes debilitating pain in his back and other joints. “Things have gotten bad, but I’ve tried to manage my health as best I can,” he says. “That year I caught the record was my last full year of good health. I guess I was at my official peak.”
Kilpatrick still returns to Homosassa every year, guiding clients, still after another record fish. He and the Hollands no longer speak. The Hollands continue to fish for tarpon, in Boca Grande, Cuba, and Belize. Holland Sr., the more outgoing and outspoken of the duo, went back to Homosassa for a few seasons after the world record was set, mainly fishing with Tommy Locke. For whatever reason—perhaps, as Locke has said, because of his outspokenness—Holland Sr. has never really fit in with some of the more curmudgeonly members of the tarpon-fishing scene. “He’s kind of obnoxious,” says Evans. No one, it appears, bears any such ill will toward Holland Jr. Nevertheless, he has never returned to the scene of his world-record fish and says he never will.
I. One thing all great tarpon fly fishermen have in common is a dedication to practicing—casting, tying knots, and attaching tippets to scales to figure out just how hard they can pull on it before it breaks. Once, when I reached Holland Sr. on the phone, he was outside his home, practicing his cast. Apte tied and re-tied knots until they were perfected. Pate constantly worked on strengthening exercises. Evans practiced casting until his back problems made that impossible, and, for many years, he spent two weeks in the Keys each year before going to Homosassa, as a sort of a spring training exercise. In his prime as a tournament angler, Andy Mill spent almost as much time practicing his cast and retrieve, and testing his tippets on weights, as he did actually fishing. Huff still practices casts in his yard every week.
II. Kilpatrick told this story to Evans, Butler, Dopirak, and me one night in Evans’s rented poon shack. It was after dinner—thank God—and many glasses of wine. When Kilpatrick mentioned the tampon part, Butler turned to Evans and said, with an impish grin, “Tom, I reckon we may need to go to the pharmacy tomorrow for some supplies.”
III. Bass fishing was then, and remains now, a much more popular sport than fly fishing for tarpon, due mainly to its ubiquity. There are bass ponds, lakes, rivers, and streams in every state in the nation, save for Alaska, and there are currently 9.6 million bass anglers in the country. Though there is no official count of US tarpon fly anglers, some reports suggest that there may be twenty-five thousand of them. So it’s highly unlikely that the world-record tarpon would be worth much at all. The Big Bass Record Club—the outfit that promised the $8 million for the world-record largemouth bass—turned out to be a house of cards, anyway, and collapsed before doling out any significant money.