Monte Burke - Lords of the Fly

ALSO BY MONTE BURKE

Saban: The Making of a Coach

4th and Goal: One Mans Quest to Recapture His Dream

Sowbelly: The Obsessive Quest for the World-Record Largemouth Bass

Leaper: The Wonderful World of Atlantic Salmon Fishing (co-editor)

LORDS OF THE FLY

Pegasus Books Ltd.

148 W 37th Street, 13th Floor

New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2020 by Monte Burke

First Pegasus Books edition September 2020

Interior design by Maria Fernandez

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher.

Jacket design: Brock Book Design Co. / Charles Brock

Front photo credit: David Mangum

Author photo credit: Heidi Burke

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN: 978-1-64313-558-8

ISBN-13: 978-1-64313-559-5 (eBook)

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

www.pegasusbooks.com

For Charles Gaines

For there is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.

Herman Melville, Moby Dick

We live and spawn and wantalways there is this ghastly wanting.

Joy Williams

A t daybreak, the cloudless sky was a deep dark blue. The water rippled gently in the light westerly breeze. Tom Evans, a stockbroker from New York City, and Steve Huff, a fishing guide from the Florida Keys, sat side by side in the stern of a sixteen-foot, shallow-water skiff, their shoulders slumped slightly forward. They were embarking on their twenty-fourth straight day together on the water.

Huff manned the tiller, slowly idling the boat out of the mouth of the Homosassa River toward the Gulf of Mexico, keeping the wake to a bare minimum, trying to maintain this fleeting moment in a world that felt reset and peaceful after a few hours of being left undisturbed by the disharmony of humans. Quail whistled in the gathering light. The roots of the mangroves on the shorelines gripped the river bottom like the fingers of witches. On previous mornings, theyd seen a herd of whiskered manatees lying on their backs, sound asleep, and dolphins had playfully swum beside the boat like dogs greeting a car in a driveway.

On this dayMay 24, 1977the little commercial fishing town some seventy miles north of Tampa, known as Homosassa, was little changed from seven decades prior, when Winslow Homer had captured it and its surroundings in some of the most tranquil of his watercolors. Unbeknownst to Evans and Huff at the time, this day would also mark the beginning of the end of that era.

Though Evans and Huff sat just inches apart from each other, they didnt speak. Theyd dispensed with the usual pleasantriesasking after each others families, gossiping about mutual acquaintancesweeks before. Now, they saved their words as if to conserve energy. The suffering, which both men withstood and even seemed to relish as it happened, would begin again soon enough. Today, just like the twenty-three days preceding it and the twenty-one days yet to come, they would be on the boat for more than twelve straight hoursand on their feet for eleven of those hoursin the glare of an oppressive sun, their eyes trained on the water. Their focus was singular, honed in on a dream they believed could become reality. Any wayward thoughts that happened to enter their minds were discarded quickly. They were acutely aware that any one mistake during the daya noisy, errant plunk of the push pole used by Huff to move the boat, a blown cast of the fly or missed hook-set by Evanscould be ruinous. Even while on the water, they spoke to each other only when necessary, when fish were spotted or when the time came to reel up and run the boat to another spot. Otherwise, communication was wordless, transmitted by some familiar sixth sense developed during the 150 days they had spent together on the boat over the years, never more than sixteen feet apart. They were teammates, in a sense, but each had to rise to the occasion when it came to his individual role. And each sought to execute that role without flaw.

The world-record tarpon caught on a fly rod at the time was 170 pounds. In their four weeks of fishing in Homosassaspread over two yearsEvans and Huff had seen hundreds of fish they believed were much bigger than that. Evans had even hooked a few, only to lose them when the fish spat the hook, snapped the line, or shattered the rod. For now, the world-record tarpon, which theyd come to call Rocquetta, was still only potential and not actual.

These tarpon they were seeing in Homosassa, by Evanss reckoning, were 50 percent bigger than any he and Huff had seen anywhere else. This presented the duo with something that had once seemed unimaginable, an explosive new reality that they had to figure out.

Over the course of two seasons, theyd spent countless evenings in the motel, forensically recounting each of the fish theyd lost, talking over the different ways in which they could have changed the outcomes. Theyd found, after considerable research, new, stronger, laser-sharpened hooks from Japan, fly lines that didnt disintegrate after hooking and fighting one fish, and a one-piece fiberglass rod that refused to be broken. Huff had also insisted that Evans fight every tarpon he hooked to the boat to be released, even a Rocky, which was what they called a fish that was well below the record weight. Huff argued that doing so was a way of respecting the tarpon. He also argued that it served as practice for the big show if and when that moment came. Evans balked at this idea at first, not wanting to waste time on lesser fish. But he eventually did as Huff requested, and through the process, he learned exactly how much pressure he could exert on the light tippet, and figured out how to work the leverage and angles during the fight. And, in short order, he was routinely getting a hooked tarpon to the side of the boat in under a half hour, three to four times faster than it took most tarpon anglers to do the same.

By that point in the 1977 season, the duo believed they had finally refined their techniques and tackle to the point where actually landing one of the true Homosassa beasts was a possibility.

Evans and Huff, physically and temperamentally, appeared to be a mismatched pair. Huff, then thirty-one, weighed around 160 pounds, with long arms, taut as cables, hanging from his lean, compact body. He was born and raised outside of Miami, and had lived in the Keys and worked as a fishing guide since his early twenties. He was easy with a smile but quiet and philosophical, moral without being preachy. The then-thirty-eight-year-old Evans, a former collegiate football nose guard and heavyweight wrestler, was all bulk and mass in body and in spirit. He had a growly voice, and was direct and opinionated and lacked any signs of serious introspection, a bull always very pleased to find himself in a china shop.

They did have some similarities, though. Both had serious issues with wretched fathersEvanss father had kicked him out of the house for good when he was fourteen, and Huffs had abandoned his family when the boy was ten. Both men were stubborn to the point of exasperation. Both seemed to enjoy and even welcome pain.