TR: Keys fishing

My son Glen and I just got back from 5 days in the Keys, intending to fish for
bonefish. A smarter fisherman would have checked the tides and realized that
last week was the worst tide combination for flats fishing. We made the best
of the tides and the incessant wind by fishing for barracuda on various flats
from MP30 to MP80.

I've posted pictures on ABPF of a couple typical fish. We had some bigger ones
swing at the flies, and Glen had a true monster take his fly.

Glen had started to wade out to a flat that looked good, but the water got to
about 3 feet deep on the way out when he saw the shark fin 60 feet in front of
him. Fortunately the fish was lying quietly on the bottom facing away from
him. The dorsal fin poked out about 2 inches in the trough of each wind wave.
The fish looked to be about 18 inched wide in the body where the fin was, he
didn't have an estimate of it's length, but it was yellowish, so we're guessing
it was a Lemon shark. He quietly backed up 100 feet until it was ankle deep,
and stopped to gather his whits. We had seen lots of small sharks, bonnet
heads and nurse sharks, all under 3 feet long, this brute was different. We
moved up the beach a bit and cast about catching a couple small cuda, and then
Glen got the strike. The fish hit hard and jumped. I looked over to see this
fish over 4 feet long, five to six feet in the air, and traveling 10 feet on
that jump. My first reaction was that it was a king salmon, it was fat enough,
but too long and too high in the air. It ripped out all the fly line and 100
yards of backing with the reel making a noise neither of us had ever heard.
When it stopped, Glen started gaining a bit on it, and then it swam right at
us. Actually it had tangled in the weeds and escaped, Glen brought in a wad of
weeds. No pictures of this guy, but neither of us will ever forget it.

Chas
remove fly fish to e mail directly