Everglades Fishing – Captain Ned Small

All these photo’s are by Matt Gifford.

This day was an exquisite exercise in the zen of tarpon fishing. We discovered these fish late in the morning, yesterday. They were all giant and active, chasing mullet and just flying wildly out of the water, hence the new name, “Free Jumper’s.” Or maybe, “Free Jumpah’s.”

So we decided to go there this morning. To ‘Cowboy Up,’ and go for the big one, even though, less than a mile away, you knew there were wandering herds of sixty pounders eager to take a fly.

Four and a half hours of creeping up and stakeing, moving slowly across this flat and firing diagonally at rolling fish, we finally got the perfect shot, a giant, rolling and coming toward us, Jeff Wyman made the perfect cast ……

There’s really no way to describe the take of a giant. A car crash is the closest thing that comes to mind.

There’s a lot of whitewater, and that’s mixed against blooms of mud and the chromium flash of scales, your fly line is flowing out the rod tip properly, but the fish is jumping on the opposite side of the boat.

It’s chaos.

Megalops, a fish so huge that it couldn’t even get airborn, a head as big as a bushell basket,  we used a fly six inches long.

A fish that weighs a lot,  long past a hundred. I don’t know how you judge those things. We fought the fish for two hours and twenty seven minutes. And we were in the process of landing it, I had the gloves on and we were rehearsing who was going for the DNA swab, who was going to measure and how,  and how we’d remove the hook and revive it after that. Hopefully with some photo documentation.

Photo by Matt Gifford, Jeff Wyman at the wheel.

Matt Gifford at the wheel.

High winds and strong tides made for a difficult afternoon but we did have a few perfect moments in the morning casting to reds and snook in water so shallow none of us belonged there.

At one point we had to look for water that wasn’t so clear, the walking on air thing wasn’t paying any dividends this morning and we needed to find a place where we could walk on fog. Here’s Brian with a fish from the fog zone.

I thought it was supposed to be May! Aren’t we supposed to have perfectly calm conditions, high barometer, waxing crescent moons and tidal waves of suicidal fish?

Brian Beck held down the foredeck today. There was a brief window in the morning at first light, it didn’t last very long though, before the wind came up and we had to dash to plan B.

That’s where this fish is from, it’s our best fish today, we managed to eek out a few more in the backcountry, stinging, hooking, jumping, and sometimes landing over a dozen snook, this was the largest we landed but we lost another that was,  …

  …well you know the story.

It was windy and tough, you had to work hard.