On the late afternoon of May 11, 2001, Robert “Bobo” Cunningham landed his plane at the small airport in Hernando County, kicking off his annual Homosassa fishing trip. At the time, he was attempting to break the world record for tarpon on eight-pound tippet with his guide, Steve Kilpatrick, whom he’d booked for the coming weeks. Cunningham drove the twenty minutes or so from the airport to Aripeka, and then turned into the driveway of the compound that Kilpatrick and Dopirak were sharing that season. As he pulled in, Cunningham was greeted with the sight of a 202-pound, 8-ounce tarpon hanging from an oak tree—Holland Jr.’s record. He got out of his car and walked up to the fish and touched it, almost as if to make sure it was real, and then fell in with the party at the compound, which was already well under way. “I wasn’t fishing twenty-pound tippet, so I didn’t really get upset about it,” says Cunningham. “In retrospect, it was such a perfect example of the way things go in life. Somebody who was not that serious about the world record actually catches the thing and then goes home and never comes back.”
Cunningham was born and raised in Mobile, Alabama. As a child, his parents nicknamed him “Bobo” (pronounced “Bob-oh”). “I never really shook it,” he says. “It kind of gets silly at my age [seventy-two], but you just put up with it.” Before going to college, Cunningham enlisted in the US Marine Corps. He became a helicopter pilot and was sent to the Vietnam War, where he flew on more than five hundred missions from 1965 to 1970. During the Tet Offensive in 1968, Cunningham was in the process of evacuating some injured US soldiers from the side of a mountain when he was hit in the calf by a round that pierced the armor of his helicopter. His co-pilot took over the craft as he bled all over the floor. Cunningham was sent to a hospital in Japan for a few months, then returned to Vietnam to finish out his tour. He earned both a Distinguished Flying Cross and a Purple Heart for his service, and he still has the AK-47 round in his leg. “It’s my memento,” he says.
After receiving his JD from the University of Florida in 1975, Cunningham was admitted to the bar in Alabama and began a long, distinguished, and profitable career as a plaintiff’s attorney. In 2002, on a pro-bono basis, he represented the University of Alabama’s football team in its appeal of sanctions placed upon it by the NCAA. A year later, he was the lead attorney in a twelve-billion-dollar judgment against ExxonMobil for withholding gas well royalties from the state of Alabama. In 2012, he was appointed the leader of the trial team for the multi-district, class-action lawsuit against BP for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. After settlements and a trial, the plaintiffs were awarded more than $14 billion. “That was really the culmination of my career,” says Cunningham. “I had a personal connection, too.” That personal connection was the Gulf of Mexico.
The grey-eyed, trim Cunningham had kept himself in good shape after his stint in the military, participating in triathlons and, later, breaking two Alabama state records for the bench press at the Masters level. But he felt that something was missing, something that not only allowed him to escape the pressures of work but also provided the sort of adrenaline rush he’d experienced back in that helicopter in Vietnam.
He found it on the water. Cunningham had always been a fisherman—his grandfather and father fished, and often took him along as a boy. But it wasn’t until a fishing trip in 1989 to Costa Rica, where he first laid eyes on an IGFA record book, that some focus came to his fishing. He decided to comb through the book and chase after the records he believed he could break. (Cunningham wrote a book about his personal quest, called Chasing Records, which was published in 2012.) A lot of the fish he targeted were in the Gulf, where he broke records for redfish, mahi-mahi, cobia, and yellowfin tuna. In the Mississippi Delta, he broke records for freshwater fish, like the bowfin and the spotted gar. In all, he set fifty-nine IGFA records, on both fly and conventional tackle.
Those records acted as sort of a gateway drug. Tarpon, he soon came to realize, were the ultimate, the fish that, on the fly at least, rose above all others. He broke the Louisiana state record for a fly-caught tarpon. And then, soon enough, he was headed to Homosassa, the biggest stage. He first fished the area in 1999. “My advantage is that I wasn’t there when it was so great,” Cunningham says. “The first time I saw one of those big tarpon, I was hooked.”
Kilpatrick became his guide. Because of Kilpatrick’s relationship with Dopirak, this meant that Cunningham and Evans were in close contact for his first few seasons in Homosassa. The two men mixed, well, like oil and the Gulf of Mexico. Evans, ever the wrestler, always seemed to find a rival on the water, someone to stare down. He called Cunningham “Boo-Boo,” like Yogi Bear’s pal. The brusque, forthright Yankee-born-and-bred Evans had always had a bit of trouble stomaching the Southern gentleman type. And, as a former Wall Streeter and anti-regulation kind of guy, he had no love for plaintiffs’ lawyers to begin with. (“Evans would always bring up the plaintiff’s lawyer thing whenever I saw him,” laughs Cunningham.)
The feeling was mutual. Cunningham spared no mercy on Evans in his book, describing him as “Gruff. Profane. Curt. And did I mention arrogant?”
Still, there was a begrudging mutual respect. Evans admires Cunningham for his military service. And though he is no fan of people who chase what he deems to be “minor” records, like the bowfin and the spotted gar, Evans says that it is “a good thing that someone is into the tarpon record.” Cunningham says he’s always been impressed with Evans’s continuing desire to show up in Homosassa after seeing the great years and then the great decline. “Most people would have given up a long time ago,” says Cunningham. He wrote in his book that he learned to “respect Evans for his undeniable angling ability.” He described Evans sitting in the boat, reading his BlackBerry as Dopirak looked for fish as “a statement… unconventional and eccentric, and a sort of flamboyant gesture like a great, hot-dogging athlete might make to show he is so good that he can get away with being unconventional and almost disinterested.” Cunningham added that he also learned to “avoid overexposure to [Evans’s] caustic personality. Life is too short to spend much of it listening to him bitch.”
“Dopirak deserves a damn medal for putting up with him for that long,” he says.
Dopirak and Kilpatrick, sensing their clients’ thinly veiled animosity, started renting different houses after a few seasons. Evans and Cunningham now see each other on the water and, on the very rare occasion, for a quick drink, when the antagonisms usually don’t stay under the surface for very long.
One might have reasonably thought that Holland Jr.’s world-record fish in 2001 would have sent a jolt of needed energy into the Homosassa fishery. Instead, the opposite happened—it laid an enervating haze over the entire scene. The record was now, it seemed, out of reach. Pate kept coming back for a few more years. Balch hung around until he was no longer physically able to fish for tarpon. Evans never stopped. But there weren’t really any dedicated newcomers who came in solely to try to top Holland Jr.’s mark, or the records for the sixteen- and twelve-pound tippets. The newcomers, like Cunningham, aimed, at least at first, for other records, and in particular, the eight-pound tippet one, which was held by a man named Del Brown, who caught a 127-pound tarpon in 1985 with Steve Huff. Targeting that record made logical sense. There were more 130- to 150-pound tarpon in Homosassa than those in excess of 203 pounds. Logic didn’t make the task any easier, though.
There was another record chaser on the scene by this time, a relative newcomer who started in the 1990s. He was very different from the rest of the gang, very Zen about the whole thing. I say that knowing that I’m at risk of falling into the hole of a racial stereotype. But it is true. He is a family physician from Palos Verde, California, now seventy years old. His name is Brian Tang. Evans, of course, immediately started calling him “Poon Tang.”
Tang came to Homosassa the first time having never fly fished before. “I did practice with a fly rod for a few months before I came,” he says. “I’m still a terrible caster, but I was much worse then.” Tang decided that going after the eight-pound tippet world record “seemed like fun.” He fished with Ray DeMarco and Mike Souchak and Dan Malzone before settling in with Dopirak every June, after Evans had left for the season. While May was traditionally the month when the truly large tarpon migrated through Homosassa, there were always some fish that hung around until July. They were usually smaller than the May fish, but plenty of them exceeded 127 pounds.
From the beginning, Tang had a different mind-set than the other record chasers. “It’s all pretty foolhardy,” he says. “It’s just fishing.” He’s well aware of the history of Homosassa and the record chase and the toll it took on some lives. “Most of these guys are divorced,” he says. “I don’t want that.” Tang takes long, leisurely naps on the boat daily. He brings his wife of forty-three years along with him in the boat, and she fishes as the primary angler for a week. He says he has no illusions about the sport and his position within it. “The only reason I’m in the bow of the boat and not the back is because I have a bigger credit card,” he says. “Al [Dopirak] is a much better fisherman than I am.” He likens world-record tarpon fishing to bullfighting. “I’m the guy who sort of weakens the bull, who puts swords in it,” he says. “Al is the guy with the cape.”
Tang says he’s come close to the record a few times. A few years ago, he submitted a 147-pound tarpon—which would have topped Del Brown’s record by twenty pounds—to the IGFA, but the catch was disqualified because his eight-pound tippet tested at 9.1 pounds. “That broke my heart, but I got over it quickly,” he says. “If I don’t win, if someone beats me, I don’t really care. I’m just happy to have played the game.”
In the end, Tang and Cunningham may represent some evolutionary step in the world-record chase. While they are still deeply involved in what many would characterize these days as a rather anachronistic pursuit, they are both outwardly happy and content people.
Evans was becoming, it seemed, the opposite. His physical decline—which started slowly at first, with the old football injuries and the torn rotator cuff and the back problems from the bike crash in 1996, then happened all at once, with the botched back surgeries in the 2010s—mirrored the decline of the Homosassa fishery. His mood had grown darker. “I hate the fucking poon,” he would say on nearly a daily basis. “He doesn’t play fair anymore.” Evans was not going gently into that good night. He no longer cared much what other people thought of him. He tells a story from around that time, of being invited to a dinner party and meeting a new couple, a husband and wife who had recently moved to his Vermont town. At the party, Evans realized immediately that he didn’t much like the husband’s politics, and he let him know it. Evans and then Tania argued with the man, which quickly grew into a shouting match. As Evans and Tania got up to leave the party early, the husband told them, “I hope you hit a patch of ice on the way home and run into a tree and your seat belts and airbags don’t work.”
The death of his favorite fishery, the physical decline, the darkening mood… all of it made what he accomplished in the first decade of the new century that much more impressive.
The 2003 tarpon season in Homosassa was pretty much like the previous decade before it. “Really shitty,” says Evans. A few fish showed up in the first few days of May, maybe a dozen or so, and they were hounded by anglers in Black Rock in the mornings, and on the Oklahoma flat in the afternoons. And then, from May 5 through May 12, the fish disappeared. Not one was caught. In fact, not one was spotted. “They just weren’t there,” says Kent Davenport, who was at Homosassa at the time.
Evans was sixty-four years old in 2003. Despite his repaired rotator cuff and bothersome back, he believed he could still wrestle in a big tarpon on sixteen-pound, using all of his old fighting tricks and pulling as hard as he could.
On the afternoon of May 13, Evans and Dopirak were floating near the Eiger Rocks, the place where Evans had first fished Homosassa twenty-seven years earlier. Neither man had much faith in the day. It had started out just like the previous eight days before it, with no fish seen. Evans sat amidships, looking out over the water and occasionally taking a peek at his BlackBerry. “I really admired Tom for his dedication at this point,” says Dopirak. “It had been years, more than a decade, since we’d boated a possible record fish. If I had been in his shoes, I’m not sure I ever would have come back.”
Just after they had eaten lunch, Dopirak spotted something coming from the north, a little glitch in the matrix of flowing water, white sand, and the occasional pile of black rocks. That something was three tarpon. “Here they come, dawg,” Dopirak said. “You better get up there,” referring to the casting platform on the bow. Evans grabbed his rod and huffed and puffed his way to the bow. He spotted the fish. Dopirak pointed with his push pole. “Thomas, that one in the back, that’s the biggest one,” he said.
When the string of fish came into casting range, Evans laid out a cast, placing it just off the tail of the second fish. He made three strips, and the last fish in the group turned and swallowed the fly. Evans, knowing he was not fit for a long fight, “put the wood” to the fish, according to Dopirak. Just half an hour later, the fish was to the boat.
By this time, Evans had decided that with so few fish and so few opportunities, he was “too old to be nice” and he would “put a hole” in any fish that looked like it could be a record. Dopirak did just that, and wrestled the fish into the boat. The fish bled as they raced back to the boat ramp. (They did not use any rags or tampons to try to staunch the loss of fluid.) Back at the poon shack, the fish weighed 190 pounds, 9 ounces. A few months later, the IGFA approved the catch as the new world record for sixteen-pound tippet, eclipsing Pate’s iconic record from twenty-one years before. “The curse was over,” says Evans. He did not write Pate a letter to inform him that his most treasured record was no more. Evans did call Ted Juracsik, though. He had caught the fish on a Tibor reel and wanted to let him know. “Oh, man,” Juracsik said. “That’s going to kill Billy.”
Some of the intervening years that followed that catch were the worst Evans had ever experienced in Homosassa. He landed just two fish in both 2004 and 2005. In 2006, he landed three. He had one decent year in 2008, when he landed ten tarpon. But that turned out to be an outlier. The next year, he managed just four fish. “We had a whole lot of days—seasons, really—of just staring out at an empty sea,” says Dopirak.
The year 2010 was another tough one. Evans managed only three tarpon. One of them, though, turned out to be momentous.
On the afternoon of May 10, 2010, Evans and Dopirak were again on the Oklahoma flat, this time on the southern end. They’d seen a few fish the previous day but hadn’t gotten any good shots. With the sixteen-pound tippet record in hand, Evans had gone down to twelve-pound, to target Clyde Balch’s 1994 world record of 177 pounds.
The scene that day played out much like it had in 2003. Dopirak spotted two tarpon swimming quickly toward them. Evans went up into the bow, settled himself, and picked out what he determined was the bigger of the two fish. He made a cast with a brown bunny fly. The fish ignored it. So Evans made another cast, and hooked the tarpon and let it run, knowing he had to use a bit more care with the twelve-pound tippet. The fish leapt. Evans didn’t see it; he was focused on clearing his line. Dopirak did, though. “Damn,” he said. “That’s a two-hundred-pounder.”
“I don’t know, Al,” Evans said. “I don’t think this fish is big enough.” Maybe Evans’s low reserve of energy was sapped. Or maybe it was just impossible to tell just how big a tarpon was in the water. But Dopirak had a feeling about this one. “I guarantee you this one is big enough, Thomas,” he said. “Let’s get it.”
Thirty-five minutes later, Dopirak gaffed the giant tarpon. The fish weighed 194 pounds, 8 ounces, obliterating Balch’s record by seventeen and a half pounds. The catch was astonishing, given the size of the fish and the featherweight tippet with which it was landed. “It’s the greatest fly rod catch ever,” says Huff. Andy Mill, Stu Apte, and many others agree. (That it was caught on the old-school, original largest tippet size for fly records—the twelve-pound—also satisfied the hard-liners within the tarpon world.) There was one other element, in addition to the size of the fish and the tippet, which made the catch particularly remarkable: “He caught that fish when there were no fish around,” says Dopirak.
At the age of seventy-one, thirty-four years after first visiting Homosassa, Evans caught the fish of a lifetime. It wasn’t the two-hundred-pounder that he had sought for so long, and the sting of watching someone else hit that mark would never truly be salved for him. But he had accomplished something with a fly rod that a certain select group—really, the only people whose opinions mattered to him—believed was equally impressive as, if not more than, the two-hundred-pound mark.
Of course, every new world-record holder creates a former one. For more than a decade and a half, Balch, according to Dan Malzone, had never shaken his worry about Evans breaking his record. And now it had become reality. “Clyde called me,” says Malzone. “He was really mad and said that he hoped Tom’s line wouldn’t pass at the IGFA.” But it did.
Another former world-record holder likely had no idea that Evans caught a significant fish in 2010. Billy Pate, by that time, was deep in the throes of his battle with Alzheimer’s disease, the illness that had taken the life of his mother, and the one he had feared and worked so hard to prevent with his rigorous workouts, innumerable daily vitamins, and chelation therapy.
Pate’s final world-record tarpon had come in 1982. But he never stopped his pursuit of the two-hundred-pound tarpon in Homosassa until he was mentally and physically unable to do so. In the Homosassa movie he’d done with 3M, he’d claimed he’d come tantalizingly close to consummating his nearly lifelong obsession on many occasions, hooking at least fifteen tarpon of more than two hundred pounds. “You can be sure that I’m going to land one of these son-of-a-guns one day,” he declared in the movie, and there really was no reason to doubt him. He was among the very best tarpon fishermen of his era, and remains a legend to this day.
His fishing regimen began to change a bit in the early 1990s. He met a woman named Jodi while on a steelheading trip in the Pacific Northwest, after putting an ad in the local paper for a housecleaner. She was smart and attractive and could cast a fly (indeed, she would go on to set sixteen world records in the IGFA’s women’s category). They were married in 1992 and traveled the world fishing together, including an annual five weeks in Homosassa.
A year after he and Jodi were married, Pate decided that he no longer needed guides in Homosassa. He would now fish alone, maneuvering his boat with the foot pedals he’d installed on the massive platform, or go out with his very capable wife. Despite the parting of ways, Pate remained beloved by his Homosassa guides Ragland and Baker. “He was always very conscious of his guides and their welfare,” says Ragland. Pate paid his tarpon guides for seven straight days, even though he usually only fished six of them, which provided his guides with a rare, but much appreciated, day off every week in the middle of the grind of the tarpon season. “I really enjoyed fishing with him. I always looked forward to it,” says Ragland. Baker says he felt the same way.
Though he would never again land a world-record tarpon, Pate did find some success fishing without guides. One day in Homosassa in 1995, Pate headed out to the flat by himself. He positioned his boat away from the scrum of the others there, playing a hunch that some fish would swim his way. His hunch proved correct. He spotted a school to the outside of his boat and hooked what looked like a massive tarpon. He fought the fish away from the other boats for half an hour, but it eventually dragged him right into the middle of them. The tarpon leapt among the boats, as if putting on a show. Guides on the other boats chatted on the radio about the fish, which looked like a potential world record. Several of them offered to help Pate land the fish, but he turned them all down. Finally, after a few hours, Pate lip-gaffed the fish and dragged it into his boat by himself. “The entire thing was pretty impressive to watch,” says Gary Merriman.
Pate took the fish back to the shore to have it weighed. While it was certainly long enough to break the record, the fish was fairly skinny by Homosassa standards. Pate told anyone who’d listen that the 173-pound tarpon he caught that day was the most satisfying one he’d ever landed.
Tarpon and women. Those were the two subjects that Pate always liked to talk about, according to his friend, the outdoor writer Doug Kelly. Kelly says he helped Pate set up his internet dating profile when the World Wide Web started to become ubiquitous. In 2005, Pate—by then divorced from Jodi—went to Ukraine “on a junket where you meet women,” says Kelly. He was there for a week and was not having a very good time. “All of the women he met wanted children, which he didn’t want,” says Kelly. So Pate decided one day to make the long drive to Kyiv, to do some sightseeing.
In Kyiv, as he left a restaurant one day after eating lunch, he walked by an attractive, full-figured woman. He introduced himself. Her name was Tetyana Kushynskaya, but she went by Yana. She was a classically trained pianist. “Billy asked me to help him learn piano,” says Yana. “And he started showing me pictures of fish.” Pate stayed in Kyiv and proposed to her three days later.
After he got back to the United States, Pate continued to correspond with Yana via phone and email, and helped her get her papers squared away for the move to the United States. A few months after they first met, Yana arrived in the Keys. Soon afterward, Yana became Pate’s fifth and final wife. He was seventy-five at the time.
“Billy was very kind to me,” says Yana. “He treated me like a queen.” Pate had a mock IGFA world record certificate made of his 188-pound tarpon with her name and the words MY TRUE WORLD RECORD written on it. Yana quickly became involved in the Islamorada community, becoming the pianist at a local church.
Pate and Yana fished a few times together as he made some of his last casts in his pursuit of a world-record tarpon. When they were first together, Yana says, Pate was fanatical about keeping his boat, his gear, and himself in top shape. But, just a year or so after they were married, “he grew less and less interested in fishing, and I started to notice that he had trouble with his memory,” she says.
She wasn’t the only one who noticed. In the late 2000s, the IGFA asked Pate to do a tarpon film. In a reunion of sorts of their Homosassa/3M film, Baker served as Pate’s guide, and Ragland manned the camera boat. They went to Buchanan Bank, long Pate’s favorite spot in the Keys. “The fish would come down on the northwest side, in the basin,” says Baker. “I set us up so that Billy had a head-on shot at the oncoming tarpon.”
Baker says he spotted the fish, then alerted Pate about their imminent arrival. But Pate kept doing a curious thing. “The fish would get into casting range, and instead of fishing them at twelve o’clock, Billy would cast away from them, to nine o’clock,” says Baker. “School after school came at us, and he kept doing the same thing. I kept telling him to take the straight shot. He’d say, ‘Okay,’ and then he’d throw it at nine o’clock. I had no idea what was going on.”
The shoot was somewhat of a disaster, saved only by a few fish hooked on the seventh, and last, day of shooting. “Later on I realized that Billy was probably in dementia at the time,” says Baker.
Some time later, Baker and Ragland went to Pate’s house in Islamorada for a visit. “It was a bad time,” says Ragland. “It was obvious that Billy had no idea who we were. His house was filled with mounts and pictures. I pointed to a picture of me and asked, ‘Do you remember that guy?’ and he said, ‘No.’ I was really sorry to see him that way.”
Sometime in 2008, Pate made one last trip to Homosassa. He’d been invited to a banquet held by a local fishing group. He planned to take Yana out on the flat the day after, just to motor around and see it. Pate was fine on the night of the event, but the next day he woke up and didn’t feel good. “He said, ‘Let’s go home,’ ” says Yana. Pate would never see Homosassa again.
Yana soon became a full-time nurse to her bedridden husband. Near the very end of his life, Pate was noncommunicative, save for one word—the name of his hometown. “He would just say ‘Greenville,’ ” says Yana. “He repeated it hundreds of times a day.”
On April 18, 2011—fittingly, during the beginning of tarpon season in South Florida—Billy Pate died at the age of eighty-one. He left behind a complicated legacy. He was, undoubtedly, one of the greatest fly fishermen who ever lived, especially when it came to tarpon. (By his own estimate, he caught five thousand of them during his lifetime.) He was, by many accounts, a Southern gentleman—quiet, soft-spoken, well-mannered—and was, and remains, fiercely loved and protected by his friends. “He was a fine man,” says Tom Gibson, who accompanied him on his tarpon trips to Africa. Though Pate disliked Evans, he never disparaged him publicly. But Pate also pushed the envelope of seemliness when it came to his ardent womanizing, and he fell prey to his own ego, which would metastasize in instances like groundlessly disparaging Holland Jr.’s catch. In the eyes of many of his contemporaries, he brought much unwanted attention to the sport and spoiled it, all for the sake of self-promotion. He was, in the end, a flawed human, like the rest of us.
Just a little more than a month after his death, Pate’s funeral was held at World Wide Sportsman (which was, by then, owned by Johnny Morris, the founder of Bass Pro Shops). After the ceremony, a fleet of thirty boats—mostly shallow water skiffs, but also some bigger crafts—left the World Wide marina and headed for Buchanan Bank. There, the boats anchored around a little thirty-foot-by-thirty-foot area known as the “Pocket,” the best fishing spot on Buchanan Bank, a sort of cul-de-sac where, for some mysterious reason, the tarpon loved to hang out. Green carnations were dropped in the water and quickly swept away by the strong outgoing tide. (“Green was his favorite color,” says Yana.) A priest said a few words. Pate’s ashes were poured into the Pocket, as he had directed in his will.I
And then Ted Juracsik stood up in his boat. “Billy was a great friend of mine, a nice and honest guy,” he said in his Hungarian accent. “When he asked me to make him some reels, I built two prototypes. I gave one to him, and I kept the other.” Then Juracsik reached into his pocket. “Here’s mine,” he said. “I figure Billy should have both of them.” And with that, Juracsik hurled the reel into the water.II
In 2011, with the sixteen- and twelve-pound tippet records in hand, and with no desire to try for the twenty-pound record, Evans switched up his game. He would now, he decided, go after the eight-pound record, Del Brown’s 127-pound tarpon. It would present an enormous challenge for him—his age, physical state, and the lack of fish in Homosassa were serious impediments. More than that, though, the eight-pound tippet—which an angler might use for largemouth bass fishing—required a type of finesse that Evans had never demonstrated in his fishing career, much less his life. All of those angles and that leverage that he had used to quickly subdue large tarpon were of little use. Pulling hard on eight-pound tippet pretty much guaranteed a break. The tippet class required nearly endless patience, and it was much more a team effort than the larger tippet sizes, with the maneuvering of the boat and the gaffing of an often “green” fish (meaning one with a lot of energy and fight left). “A big tarpon on eight is really landed by the guide and not the angler,” Evans says.
Evans’s first attempt at the eight-pound record came in the Keys, during one of his warm-up trips before Homosassa. He was fishing with the well-regarded Keys guide Tim Klein when he hooked a fish that they estimated was 140 pounds, well clear of Brown’s record. Evans played it well, slowly and gently. When he got the fish to the boat, it was still somewhat green. As Klein reached for his gaff, Evans couldn’t believe his good fortune. “I’d only been at it for a few hours,” he says. “It was too easy, too fast. I didn’t think I deserved it. Little did I know I was in for more torture.”
Klein hit the fish with the gaff, and it pulled him into the water. “I looked up and saw my boat floating away and I knew that Tom didn’t really know how to run it,” says Klein. He was standing in five feet of water. The bottom was mushy. He managed to work his way back to the boat, dragging the tarpon. He handed Evans the gaff and pulled himself back in the boat. Somewhere in that transition, though, the tension on the gaff went slack, and the possible eight-pound record wriggled free and swam away.
Evans realized after that trip that the pursuit of the eight-pound record would require more help. He needed a third person on the boat, someone who could act as a gaffer, someone with loads of experience with big fish. He knew just the guy to call.
Dean Butler grew up in Melbourne. He played Australian rules football as a youth, and got a job selling ball bearings when he was out of school. “It was a good job. I was in charge of some people and I was good at managing them and I was well looked after,” says Butler. “But all I really wanted to do was fish.”
He quit that job and, with a man named Rod Harrison, started a sportfishing travel and production company. They ventured to the remote corners of Australia, developing fisheries, shooting videos, and promoting trips for potential clients.
In the early 1990s, Butler and Harrison, looking to break into the US market, invited Lefty Kreh to fish with them in Oceania. Kreh was the most famous fly fisherman in the world at the time, and the sport’s biggest promoter, something Butler, a student of the sport and a fledgling outdoor writer, knew well. Kreh accepted the invitation, and the three men went to Papua New Guinea and fished for that country’s native black bass, a species that Kreh would always recall as one of his favorites. Kreh stayed at Butler’s house for a few days before going back to the United States. After the legend had departed, Butler realized that Kreh had left behind a pair of his tighty-whitey underwear. Ever the fly-fishing history geek, Butler mounted the underwear in a frame, which he hung up in his home.
By 1995, Butler and Harrison had split the business. Butler got the travel side. He heard about some good striped marlin fishing off the coast of Australia, and he decided he would try for them with a fly. “I knew that Pate had been down here fishing for marlin with a fly, but no one was really doing that at the time anymore,” says Butler. “I wanted to create a little niche.”
Butler did more than that. Within just a few years, he’d become one of the most respected marlin fly-fishing guides in the world.
When Evans decided to add a billfishing trip to his annual Homosassa one, he initially went to Costa Rica. And while he found some success there, he sensed that he was missing out on something. “I felt like I was just dicking around,” he says.
One year in the early 2000s, his stepson, Chan Morgan, showed him a guide he’d found on the internet: Dean Butler. “Dean had some pretty impressive-looking stuff on the web, so I gave him a call,” says Evans. When he called, Butler was away on a trip. Evans spoke to Butler’s wife, Corinne, telling her that he wanted to book her husband for a month to try to break the world record for striped marlin on twelve-pound tippet. When Butler got back home from his trip, Corinne handed him some Post-It notes on which she had written down his phone messages. One of them read, simply: “Tom Evans—sounds like a big fish.”
Evans flew down to Australia, and he and Butler fished the Port Stephens area, a couple hours north of Sydney, for that month. They had terrible weather, with the wind howling at thirty miles per hour each day, and Evans only caught one fish, a small black marlin. But they had a blast and discovered that they were kindred spirits. “I knew Dean and I were on the same page,” says Evans.
Marlin fishing with a fly is not a sport for everyone. The marlin are teased up from the depths with a hookless lure attached to a spinning rod. Once a marlin shows interest, the lure is reeled in—with the marlin hopefully following—close enough to the boat for a cast with a fly rod. Working in coordination, the guide (Butler) yanks the lure out of the water, and the client (Evans) attempts to throw a giant fly right onto the spot the lure has vacated.
It is not an easy sport and, to some purists, it’s not a very sporting way to fly fish, either, because of the teasing lure that’s used to attract the fish and the way the captains use their boats and big engines—especially when not fishing for records—to help fight the fish. (“Tarpon is more one-on-one,” says Butler.) It’s also a sport that can drive deep-sea fishing captains mad, because of the long periods of not seeing any fish and the extreme difficulty of not only getting a marlin to bite a fly but also fighting it to the boat once it’s hooked. “Fishing for marlin with a fly rod is really a stupid idea,” says Butler. “You find out quickly who is up for it and who is not.” Adds Evans, “We put three diesel captains into the cuckoo house. Most marlin stories are torture stories,” which seemed to be something that he was extremely attracted to. Over the next decade, fishing off the coasts of Australia, New Zealand, and Vanuatu, Evans and Butler managed to break nine marlin world records.III (Butler has thirty-one big-game IGFA records in total.) Evans believes that his marlin fishing made him a better tarpon angler.
So when Evans decided in 2011 that he needed help with the eight-pound tarpon record—very likely the last of his tarpon quests—he hired Butler to come to Homosassa. Since that season, Butler has nominally been the gaff-man on the water. But he’s much more than that. Butler has become somewhat of a caretaker for Evans. He makes sure the poon shack and all of Evans’s gear is squared away. He gets the groceries. He fixes Evans’s drinks and makes sure that he takes all of his prescribed meds. Butler makes his breakfasts and lunches, and cooks dinner for all in the poon shack on most nights. Dopirak describes Butler as “Mr. Whatever-It-Takes.” Like Dopirak, Butler is highly competent with boats, engines, rods, reels, gaffs, flies, and knives, and the duo—with all of the significant records between them—may be the best big-fish, fly-guiding team ever assembled. More than that, though, Butler’s presence injected a much-needed strong dose of energy and that native Aussie love of fun into what had begun to become a rather glum endeavor.
I. The guides Jack Brothers, Jimmie Albright, and Cecil Keith also had their ashes spread in that spot.
II. An estate sale of Pate’s belongings—rods, reels, flies, mounts—raised around $150,000. His famous boat, with its large platform, was bought privately before the estate sale, by a collector from England and a Keys guide named Mark Cockerham, with the idea that it could one day be included in a fishing museum. “It had been sitting out for years by the time I got it, and the bull ants and rats had pretty much destroyed it,” says Cockerham. “I fixed it up and was able to get it running.” The boat hasn’t found a home in a museum yet, and still sits in a yard in Islamorada.
III. These marlin feats were made even more remarkable by the fact that longliners had pretty much wiped out most of the populations of marlin in those areas by then.