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Wednesday, March 01, 2006
OUTDOORS:
Copyright © 2006 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc. | ||||
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Friend and fellow Maine saltwater fishing guide Eric Wallace of Yarmouth landed himself an affordable place to stay on Cudjoe Key, a salty island of sun-bleached coral and limestone, pastel-colored houses and swaying palms just 20 minutes north of Key West -- the most southerly point in the nation. He would be there for the month of February and had invited me and a friend to join him. "It's not the perfect time to fish, but the weather will be a whole lot better than it is here," Eric told me one forgettable day in January, as rain doused Maine's half-frozen lakes and smelt camps bobbed down the Kennebec River. Were we interested, he wondered? Twenty degrees of latitude, 2,000 miles and 50 degrees Fahrenheit later, my friend Matt Boutet and I landed at Miami International Airport -- where Maine accents are exchanged for Spanish ones and pants and jackets give way to shorts and flip-flops. We rented a car and headed south. The drive along U.S. Route 1 was fitting, I thought, since I've lived near its northern terminus, along the Maine coast, for most of my life. The night air was flush with salt and a pervasive humidity that seemed to ride on your shoulders. We drove with the windows down. Herons squawked from roadside marshes. Night birds sang. The warm sea swelled on limestone shores -- heaving like a mass of Jell-O in the tropical night. Cuban music echoed from late-night bars. The local newspaper -- the KeyNoter -- featured an entire section on the week's fishing catches: sun-burned fishermen in Hawaiian shirts hoisting wahoo, sailfish, marlin and mahi mahi. From Miami to Cudjoe Key, there were more tackle shops than in all of Maine -- each lit by a neon sign advertising Cuban sandwiches for lunch and live crabs for bait. The Keys -- from the Spanish word Cayo, or Cay, are strung like pearls in a sea of turquoise 150 miles south from Miami; each connected by a bridge to the next. The longest -- Seven Mile Bridge -- is in Marathon Key. Near Islamorada, we came across a bridge and saw Robbie's restaurant and marina, where a sign offered visitors the opportunity to "Feed the Tarpon." It was closed for the night, but we crawled through the thorny puckerbrush then waded out onto the docks. Fish blood stained the marina's rickety piers and a sticky film of salt coated wood like fresh paint. But the tarpon were everywhere. In the distance, we watched a big one breach like a dolphin in slow motion, its silver shoulder reflecting the glow from dim dock lights. Then we saw another. And another. We'd come to Florida not just to see the tarpon, but to catch one. Tarpon are the largest member of the herring family, not-so-distant relatives of the alewives that flood our own Kennebec each spring. They are a mysterious fish, too; as coveted as Maine's wild brook trout, as glamorous as the big salmon of the Penobscot. It was all I'd been able to think about for months. We arrived at the house on Cudjoe Key at 5:30 a.m. -- just before sunrise. We'd been traveling for 14 hours since leaving Portland. Shells crunched beneath our tires as we pulled into the driveway. A light flickered inside the house. Eric greeted us by the door. "Get an hour of sleep, then we'll head out," he said. We rigged our rods, tied knots and prepared our gear instead. Sleeping was out of the question. The house had come with a flats skiff -- a Florida-style fishing boat with a gondolier-style platform over the motor, used for pushing the boat in shallow water and sighting fish from above. It was capable of running full-throttle on plane through four inches of water -- a necessity in the Keys, where nearshore waters rarely exceed two or three feet. On our first day on the water the wind was light, the sun hot. We saw tarpon. Beautiful fish with broad backs and big, skeletal mouths. Eric would spot them first from the poling platform. He'd call out, "Tarpon, 2 o'clock. 80 feet." "Buck fever" had followed us from Maine to the bow of Eric's boat. It took hours, but eventually we settled down and began throwing flies in front of the fish, where there was some hope they might eat them. We had three tarpon turn and follow; once, Matt had one almost eat his fly. The three of us -- Eric on the poling platform, I behind the console and Matt on the bow -- held our breath as we watched the big fish pursue the twitching fly in the ultimate game of cat and mouse. Each time, the tarpon would turn off and swim away. According to Eric, these fish were resident tarpon -- not the migratory fish that show up in April and May ravenous from a long passage through the Gulf of Mexico. Those few tarpon would be as close as we would come to success. Overnight, the winds gusted to 30 knots and swept salt air through the island palms. The tarpon disappeared beneath the foaming sea. We entertained ourselves with small barracuda in the lee shallows instead. On Sunday, we pointed our rental car north and struck off for Miami. At each bridge, we gazed out over turquoise waters, intent on spotting one last school of tarpon. We stopped at marinas. We walked the docks. We inquired at tackle shops. Yes, we knew catching a tarpon would be difficult, and unlikely this early in the season. But did anyone have a cure for "tarpon fever?" Dave Sherwood -- 621-5648 dsherwood@centralmaine.com |
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