Tamiami Tarpon

Like some sort of inanimate object come to life, a carved chunk of chrome or ice, a tarpon's head breached the surface. He was only a little one, one of the many silver princes that use the Everglades as their nursery before they grow large enough to join the cyclical migration. The tarpon, Megalops atlanticus, has the power to captivate anglers at any and all stages of it's life cycle. It's beauty, like a wildly oversized shiner, prone to going airborne in spectacular fashion, has a profound effect. I don't like to play favorites, and I routinely find the popularity of some fish overblown. Not so with tarpon... that an almost inedible fish managed to rapidly gain such a devoted following shows just how earned it was. They are the inshore sport fish, the ultimate, the worthiest of the praise they've so often been given. There is nothing disappointing about tarpon. Not one thing. Even these little jewels I was watching gulp air in the fading light of an Everglades spring eve made my heart beat a little bit faster and my breath become shallow.

When you've been fly fishing for different species as much as I have, you know how random a lifer can find it's way to you or how much time and effort builds up to it. Tarpon will forever be an outlier for me. I'd struggled many times to even get a look from one, had hooked and lost a couple and missed others incidentally, but that didn't feel like a buildup. My first tarpon ever came a mere handful of missed takes into our evening session. Though there was tenseness (there always is when I'm after a species I've wanted for years) I also had this sensation that this time it was going to happen, without question. I've never had that before, and it was a strange feeling. But when I finally connected and that little baby silver prince went airborne, I smiled and new I was about to hold my first ever tarpon. That feeling can't really be earned; these fish, even little, have an exceptional knack for parting ways with a fly. But somehow I just knew. And there I was, smiling down at one of the very few popular game fish that I actually considered one of my most wanted lifers. Caught on a gurgler at sunset in an Everglades backwater... to quote Jose Wejebe, referring to baby tarpon in his own way, "Nice, happy goodness". This little fish had no idea what it meant to me.

Atlantic tarpon, Megalops atlanticus. Life list fish #163. Rank: species.

Then, as if Florida wanted to give us exactly what we wanted on our final fishing evening, Noah and I started getting hit by tarpon left and right. He got his lifer shortly after I did then we both proceeded to miss, hook, lose and land a bunch more while darkness settled in and the mosquitoes started to take the stage. Topwater blasts left right and center. Silver princes going airborne. It was worth the wait to experience proper good juvenile tarpon fishing.

Like the small snook we'd been catching all day, I was deeply aware that these little tarpon were the fish of the future. In a day and age where my hope for the future is beat down left and right, these fish give me a glimmer of optimism. In 40 years who knows what the world will look like. I can't conceive of anything less than apocalyptic. Yet, just maybe, one of the very tarpon we released will make it's annual migration as a big adult, and maybe I'll be there to meet it.

A lot of people have called species like American shad "poor man's tarpon" or called tarpon giant shiners. I've grown to hate these sort of analogies with time. Each fish species is distinct, distinct enough to warrant a different a different last name, and though we fisherman may try to describe different species by alluding to others, it falls short. Having now caught tarpon, shad, and a variety of shiner species... tarpon are tarpon, shad are shad, and shiners are shiners. You have to catch each one to really get it. Tarpon had their hooks in me before I ever had a hook in one, and I'll be back after these fish that simply cannot disappoint.

Until next time,

Fish for the love of fish.

Fish for the love of places fish live.

Fish for you.

And stay safe and healthy.

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, John, Elizabeth, Brandon, Christopher, Shawn, Mike, Sara, Leo, and Franky for supporting this blog on Patreon. 

Everglades Backwater Snook

The Everglades is the mother of all Florida snook and tarpon nurseries. The number of individuals of these species that use the shallow, often freshwater back channels of this incredible estuary is huge. Without the Glades, we may as we say goodbye to the best snook and tarpon fisheries in the U.S. 

The River of Grass, life force of south Florida and beyond. We lose this, we may as well give up completely. And folks... we are losing this.

Our finale full day in Florida dawned much like many others had: misty, vaguely cool, and calm. I went about my morning routine with the melancholy sense that time was limited. We'd been in Florida for literally weeks. We'd had our failures and our successes. We'd seen so, so much. And now it was just a day and a morning before we pointed the van north and said goodbye. I looked through the mist in the tree line, wishing I'd catch a glimpse of a panther, then breathed deeply and decided to pretend I was just going to stay here forever. As I sit here writing this, I wish I had. I wish could've found some dilapidated shack away from any prying eyes and let Noah go home without me. I might have gotten myself killed at some point in the time between then and now... hit by a car trying to save snakes or turtles in the road, dehydrating away on some distant island of trees, or maybe wrapped around a tree by a skunk ape... I might have ended up dying but I would have been the happiest I'd ever been I think. It took very little time in the Everglades for the pull to overwhelm me completely.

We headed west instead of east this day, aiming for waters with higher abundances of snook and tarpon than those we'd fished the day before. I'd gotten some tips from some friends on areas we might find juvenile tarpon but we'd already gotten well past dawn so the likelihood of finding them active was diminishing. We did see some roll in the first place we checked out but didn't move any. We then free-styled, hopping spot to spot as we had the day before, but this time the snook were the headliner.

It took some time for me to hit my stride and get into the snook, and it also took us a bit to get used to the fact that most times we saw fish rolling en mass from the van, it was gar not tarpon. Once you've seen enough rolls it's easy to discern the difference while standing on the bank, but not so from a moving vehicle. 

At one of our western most stops, I watched snook popping over and over on the other side of a fenced in dam. Eventually I could resist no longer, I skirted around the fence and made my way out the wall as unassumingly as possible. Yes, I am indeed admitting to trespassing... please don't follow my example. But there's only so much of listening to those loud pops that I could take and it looked safe enough. There was water coming over the dam at more than a drip in only one spot and that's where all these snook were stacked up. Casting a Clouser into the foam and letting it fall resulted in jarring takes, and I caught five snook in very quick succession before sneaking back to the bank and tying not to look too guilty. 

We continued to bounce around hoping to suddenly luck into a pile of juvenile tarpon. In one spot I had a definite take from one, but again the rollers were predominately Florida gar. 

Them we stumbled into quite the snook nursery. Noah caught the first, and we were both blown away by just how tiny it was. We proceeded to catch a bunch of tiny baby snook out of this spot and it was an absolute joy. 

We hit some midday doldrums after that. I hooked and lost some tilapia, I'm not sure what species, potentially something new, then managed to coax a Nile tilapia off a bed. That was a new species for me.

Nile tilapia, Oreochromis niloticus. Life list fish #162. Rank: species.

We messed around aimlessly for a while, back tracking and hitting spots we already had, not really getting onto anything significant, until later when the tides and light began to change things and we found willing snook again. 

(note: DO NOT hold snook even a little bit larger than these vertically as Noah and I are in this photo, their jaws don't support their body weight well.)

None of the snook we caught in the Everglades were big, and they didn't satiate my need for a giant snook on the fly. But they filled another need. These are Florida's future big snook. They're a sign that we haven't completely ruined this place yet. The Tamiami, despite our best efforts, continues to produce good light tackle snook fishing. Is it anything like it must have been years ago, days when Flip Palot, Chico Fernandez and other drove these same canals before the road along them was paved, sight casting to snook from a pickup? No. And it will never be that way again. But it isn't dead yet. And I needed to know that.
As the sun dropped even more we new we had to find some tarpon. We headed to some known water, then something really special transpired. 

Until next time,

Fish for the love of fish.

Fish for the love of places fish live.

Fish for you.

And stay safe and healthy.

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, John, Elizabeth, Brandon, Christopher, Shawn, Mike, Sara, Leo, and Franky for supporting this blog on Patreon. 

Everglades After Dark (pt. 2)

As the sun set on another muggy day, Noah and I were eager to road cruise again and look for whatever this primordial land was willing to reveal. In a short time we were looking at a gorgeous cottonmouth. These snakes are known for their dramatics, posturing in a coil and gaping their white mouths, but the first cottonmouth on the second night was the closest we got to one doing that.  probably could have gotten this one to gape had I antagonized it, but I don't enjoy antagonizing venomous snakes. I'll annoy a non-venomous species to try to get it in a good posture to photograph, but with any venomous species I'll do no more than the bare minimum. With most of these cottonmouths I was happy with their calm but weary poses and had no need to get them gaping. They looked great in a low-stress stance.

The next one was by far the smallest and also the most pretty. It was a gorgeous snake.

After ushering the second cottonmouth out of the road, we decided to take a moment and shut everything off and let the darkness truly envelope us. Without the noise of the van running or any of our lights on, the Everglades consumed us entirely. These was no noticeable light pollution, road noise, or even air traffic. All we could see, because of cloud cover, was the faint outline of the tree line on each side of the road. And all we could here were the insects, frogs, and nocturnal birds that own the 'glades after the sun sets. It as one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life, on par with going dark in Mammoth Caves and seeing a mountain lion up close in the wild. It genuinely took my breath away.

Down the road a it I photographed the first night bird I'd have a chance to on this trip, a black crowned night heron. They are a really cool bird an this was only the second I'd ever seen, so I was plenty happy just to get a mediocre reference shot.

The next snake we found crossing the road was a juvenile corn snake, a little larger than the one we'd found the day before but still a little fella.

Perhaps the coolest wildlife encounter of the night, to me, was a relatively common species but something I'd wanted to see in the wild since I was very young. It was a bark scorpion, species Centruroides gracilis. I'd for some reason expected the scorpions in Florida to be small but this was a large enough arachnid to be quite impressive in person. As someone who has a tendency to fall in love with some of the most widely disliked an often feared animals, I was thrilled to be looking at me first wild scorpion. It wasn't what we'd expected to find but, in retrospect it wasn't at all surprising. It was odd that we only saw one other.

Though the snake diversity remained unexceptional the overall species count had improved on our second night cruising. We'd be out again the next night doing the same thing. But first, we had a fish we wanted to catch. 

Until next time,

Fish for the love of fish.

Fish for the love of places fish live.

Fish for you.

And stay safe and healthy.

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, John, Elizabeth, Brandon, Christopher, Shawn, Mike, Sara, Leo, and Franky for supporting this blog on Patreon. 

Spot Hopping Tamiami & Big Cypress Loop

My morning ritual while we camped in Florida consisted of putting some clean clothes on, exiting our tent, stretching, then going to relieve myself. And I have to say; though this may be one of the stranger ways I've ever started a blog post; relieving myself while looking at some of the prettiest scenes I've yet gazed over each morning became such a wonderful routine that I've been disappointed each morning since returning home that I can't simply get up in the early morning, step outside barefoot, walk some distance from the house, and pee with no worries at all of human on-lookers seeing something they don't want to and a hell of a great view to look at while I go about my business. It's those simple little things in life that keep me from falling too deeply into depression. I'm a simple man, I like to watch the sun sparkle off dew and warblers flit around while I take my morning pee.

Noah is less of a morning person, so I usually had a bit of me time each morning. I enjoyed that time especially in the Everglades, because I was just so happy to finally get to see more of one of the most amazing places on the planet.

We decided our first full day would be a spot hopping day. Actually, every day ended up being that, and such is the name of the game on the Tamiami trail. Drive, look, see something fishy, fish it, move on. Or... drive, see big turtle, stop, chill with said turtle, move on.

Apalone ferox, Florida softshell turtle

We headed back East along the Tamiami, bouncing spot to spot without much of note for a white. There were a lot of gar and a lot of alligators, but that is to be expected.

Lepisosteus platyrhincus, Florida gar

Alligator mississippiensis, American alligator

Eventually though we found some more interesting fishing in a place we'd hit on our first trip here. There was a lot of construction going on at some of the spillways, and at those where there wasn't there wasn't much flow, but we managed to find some willing fish at one of the spillways. It wasn't lights out oscar fishing and blitzing peacocks like our first visit but it wasn't bad.

Lepomis gulosus, warmouth

Cichla ocellaris, butterfly peacock bass

Astronotus ocellatus, oscar

I was most hoping for a jaguar guapote, and I saw more than one and I think I missed some takes from them too, but I just couldn't seal the deal. We bounced to a place we'd not been before pretty far east and found loads of small gar and Mayan cichlids before heading back the way we came to get to the Big Cypress loop road. We hoped that we'd find more native fish than invasives there.

Cichlasoma urophthalmus, Mayan cichlid

It turned out that most of the spots along the loop road were still just loaded with Mayan cichlids, oscars, jewel cichlids, and some pike killifish that we saw but could not catch. There were native sunfish species too but just not what we expected. We'd thought there'd be a lot of bass there, that's what we'd heard at least. Moreover, the gators there were especially fixated on us. At one point we moved from one side of a culvert to the other to get away from a gator, but when I hooked on oscar that started splashing on the surface we could hear that gator turn on the thrusters and accelerate through the culvert. I pulled the oscar out just feet ahead of the hungry gator. It's pretty clear just how insistent these gators were from the photos below. This is the problem with tourists feeding the wildlife... it gets dangerous for everybody. 

We managed to spot hop all day without catching any new species, which in the Everglades is a little bit impressive. But the day was not lacking in quality of experience. There are some places that grab my soul and demand I explore every inch. Maine is one of those places. The Everglades is another. I feel an absolute need to experience as much of it as I can and this day had fulfilled a little more of that. One last stop on the Tamiami before heading to camp for dinner yielded my first Everglades bowfin. It wasn't big, but it was my first 'fin of the year, and it was awesome.

Soon the sky was darkening, and it was time once again for us to set out seeking snakes crossing the road. But that is the subject of a future post.

Until next time,

Fish for the love of fish.

Fish for the love of places fish live.

Fish for you.

And stay safe and healthy.

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, John, Elizabeth, Brandon, Christopher, Shawn, Mike, Sara, Leo, and Franky for supporting this blog on Patreon. 

Everglades After Dark (pt. 1)

Millions of unseen insects provided a soundscape fitting for the environment Noah and I were now venturing into. high clouds interrupted what little remaining sunlight was left and night in the Everglades was about to begin. It was still hot out but cooling down quickly, and it was time for reptiles to move. After dark in the swamps, grasslands, and forests of Florida, snakes leave their hiding places to hunt and travel. Driving slowly down back roads we hoped to encounter reptiles simply crossing on there way somewhere or using the remnant heat of the road to maintain their body temperature as the air cooled. Cruising at a snails pace, I hung out the passenger side window, holding onto the roof rack for stability and trying to get a clearer view unimpeded by the windshield.

It wasn't very long before I spotted a snake, a long skinny yellowish one, just on the right edge of the road. We hopped out to check it out. It was a yellow rat snake, which, though visually exceptionally different from our CT black rat snakes, is actually the same species,  Pantherophis alleghaniensis or the Eastern rat snake. This individual, like our black rats at home, was a pleasure to handle but a pain to photograph. It never stopped moving and climbed all over me, which is fun, but makes nighttime photography essentially impossible. I got some voucher shots but nothing especially artistic.

We continued down the road expecting to find more snakes fairly quickly given how fast we found the first, and we did find frogs without covering too much more ground but it was a while before we saw another snake. The first frog we found was somewhat ambiguous but may be either a squirrel tree frog or an American green tree frog. I'd lean towards squirrel tree frog but I really don't know for sure.

The next snake we found, Noah spotted. It was a quite small one and had it not been moving it would have been very hard to spot. It was another more common species, but a colorful one and this time something I'd never seen in the wild, a corn snake.

Pantherophis guttatus

This little juvenile cornsnake was equivalent to stumbling upon a gemstone... and I've done that too so I know exactly how both moments feel. I've been around a lot of snakes throughout my life and I understand the latent genetic response of fear that the sight of a slithering snake elicits in the human brain, and I at times still get very nervous around venomous snakes under certain circumstances. But what I don't get is that some of the same people that would want to pet a rabbit would have nothing to do with that beautiful little non-venomous corn snake. It makes no sense to me. I've been bit be rabbits, squirrels, cats, dogs, and many other animals far more widely liked, and it's a much less pleasant experience than being bit by a small colubrid snake. These irrational fears come from ignorance and lack of experience... spend two minutes holding one of these corn snakes and it's impossible for it not to charm you just a little bit.

That anyone could be afraid of this adorable little guy is beyond me. 

After ushering that stunning little corn snake off the road we ran into toadville. Southern toads have a handful of distinguishing characteristics from American toads but don't look different enough to for the untrained eye to see much unique about them. Whereas the same species of snake I'd been seeing my whole life turned up earlier in a form I'd never seen, now a new species of toad was in front of me that looked superficially like every other toad I'd ever found. 

Anaxyrus terrestris

Weirdly, people manage to find ways to be disgusted and scared of toads too, but soon we found the most unfairly maligned species of the night. The bulky body and head raised stance were tell tail, we had found our first cottonmouth, or water moccasin. I already wrote a post to dispel some of the myths about this species, find that here: The Myth of Agressive Snakes. But even I, having already been around lots of timber rattlesnakes an even handling copperheads, was a bit surprised by how generally relaxed and well behaved these were, the third species of pit viper I'd encountered in the wild. The first cottonmouth Noah and I found was not polite enough to stick around but didn't want anything more than to get away from us quickly. I failed to get any high quality images of this flighty snake....

We went a good many miles then without success. We found a roadkill ribbon snake and missed what was almost certainly another yellow rat snake, but it wasn't until a while later, when we happened to meet two more cars of herpers and an adult corn snake at the same moment that our luck again improved. We chatted for a bit, photographed the snake, then continued our separate ways. It was a fun little chance encounter in the middle of the Everglades at night.

I really wanted to find a colorful cottonmouth that was willing to sit still for me to get some great shots of it, and that's exactly what our final snake of the night turned out to be. It didn't posture, it didn't gape, it didn't strike... this gorgeous little moccasin just sat still with its head raised and let me shoot away until it was time to leave and usher him out of the road. It was perfect, and common though these snakes may be in the area I was thrilled.

Agkistrodon piscivorus

Fish aren't all that I live for, and though they were probably the biggest draw of the Everglades the snakes were a close second. Unfortunately, years of development, indiscriminate killing, and collecting have diminished Florida's snake populations so much it's just a shadow of what it used to be. I was so thankful to have gotten to see the snakes we had on that firs night, and was excited for the days and nights to come.

Until next time,

Fish for the love of fish.

Fish for the love of places fish live.

Fish for you.

And stay safe and healthy.

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, John, Elizabeth, Brandon, Christopher, Shawn, Mike, Sara, Leo, and Franky for supporting this blog on Patreon.