Gus Morriss has had the foredeck for the last couple of days. Yesterday we searched for rollers at daylight, had some shots at moving fish and one perfect chance at a giant sleeper, well over a hundred pounds. In the afternoon we went to the Black Lagoon to fish for snook. Pushing into a narrow throat between two ponds we fell upon a frenzy of feeding tarpon. They were feeding on nearly invisible things. Maybe glass minnow larvae, maybe they were cannibalizing megalops leptocephali, it is the full moon. Using our smallest flies we struck five, jumped two that spit the hook, and finally landed one, in the boat, tarpon on fly, Everglades Style. She was eight and a half inches long and taped out at, by the square root standard, to 6.8 ounces.
Today we fished down south. We poled through the secret spot on a low moon tide, riding the last of the outgoing current through the swashes and casting to the fishy spots. We reached the mouth at the bottom of the incoming tide and spent probably two and a half hours on that big flat, where it enters the Gulf, just poling really slowly up onto it with the tide. We tried to stay in about ten inches of water. When this place is cooking it’s amazing, at one point we were surrounded by numerous sawfish, all sizes, there were various sharks swimming by, sting rays, stingrays with redfish on their backs, stingrays with snook on their backs, lots of wandering, solo, red’s and snook. Every fish we got a close look at had remoras on it, even some of the mullet. Gus finished up with a half dozen snook and a red but, at the end of the day, we felt that the catch was incidental to the show we saw. Manatees, dolphin, alligators, swallow tailed kites, eagle rays, one white butterfly.
