An Ocean Runs Through It

Key Largo, Florida, 3 PM

"Don't screw this one up," Paul Dixon counsels in what passes for sensitive encouragement from a Florida Keys fly-fishing guide. "There must be at least 25 fish heading for you at one o'clock. They're 80 feet out. Be ready!"

From my perch on the bow of Dixon's 20-foot skiff, all I can see is a dark spot in the translucent water, moving swiftly across the flat, sandy bottom. Instantly, the spot becomes two dozen tarpon, each full of muscular movement and running up to seven feet long.

The tarpon rise to the surface like porpoises, their backs glistening in the late afternoon light. They make a whooshing sound as they break water. My adrenaline kicks in, as it always does when I'm in the presence of big fish.

"They're 70 feet out, moving to 12 o'clock. Start casting," Dixon commands.

The wind is blowing across my right shoulder. A difficult cast, but not impossible. I fling the fly line into the air.

I try to keep the cast low and under the wind. I try to lead the fish, to get an angle that will drop the fly into the school. I try not to tangle the line around my feet. I try to hold down my excitement, to let the fly sink to the level of the fish, to retrieve the fly at the same speed that a live shrimp would flee the area. In a word, I try just about everything.

The fish aren't feeding.

I lift my rod for one more shot at the school. Just as I've done a thousand times during the past four days, I reflexively flick the rod to set the line in motion. WHAM! I'm tight to a tarpon, not more than 10 feet from the boat. I'm not ready for it, and I don't react well. With a percussive shake of its head, the fish pulls the rod from my hand and sends it clattering to the deck. It spits the hook before I have a chance to recover and continues across the flat along with its brothers and sisters, bound for the Lower Keys and a few days of feasting on the tiny Palolo worms that hatch from the coral on the big moon tides of late spring.

Dixon doesn't say a word. He wears the look of a disaster survivor. He did his job, though -- he put me onto fish. With luck, we'll get another shot. If not today, then tomorrow or the next day. The tarpon will keep moving until early July, making their return trip to the Keys in October from who knows where. When the fishing resumes in the fall, a few thousand sports will make the journey to the Keys to try for the biggest of fly-rod trophies. Although fishing for big brutes in the trackless ocean doesn't correspond to the tweedy image of the fly-rodder as a pipe-smoking wuss found on a country brook, the fact remains that saltwater fly-fishing has arrived on the sporting scene. And Dixon's specialty, sight fishing in shallow water, is generally regarded as its highest expression.

Saltwater fly-fishing takes flight.

Sight fishing is really voyeuristic fly-fishing. Standing on a four-foot poling platform in the stern of his Hewes Light Tackle 20, Dixon spots our quarry. He stalks it. I cast to it. I get one shot -- maybe two if I'm lucky. As seeing your quarry rise to the fly is to trout fishing, so sight casting is to this rapidly developing sport.

It's not as if sight fishing were just invented. A fair number of fly-fishing cognoscenti have pursued bonefish, tarpon, and permit on the tidal flats of the Keys and the Bahamas since World War II. Then came the fly-rod boom, engendered in part by Robert Redford's film version of A River Runs Through It. The deep lore and mystique of fly-fishing were commonly associated with salmon and trout, and blue-ribbon streams were soon overrun with legions of neophytes.

Savvy fly-rodders are forsaking the long treks to crowded streams full of fly-wary trout. While fly-fishing is generally conceded to have peaked at something like 8 million anglers, saltwater fly-fishing has been growing at a double-digit rate for the past half-dozen years -- with no indications of plateauing. In-the-know fly-anglers are spending more time on salt water. And as Dixon observes, "Time on the water teaches you about fish and new ways to take them."

Know your guide.

Paul Dixon, 43, grew up in Southern California, where the fly-rod pickings are rather slim. Even so, he fished for everything that swam, from Newport Beach clear down the Baja. There was something about the big rods, the long-distance casting, and the sheer size of ocean fish that turned him on and eventually turned him east, where he took a job at the Orvis store in New York. There he developed a clientele that still includes Rip Torn, Tom Brokaw, Henry Kravis, Robert Rubin, and Jimmy Buffett (whose fly, the Striper Viper, is highly rated by Dixon). In the winter he fished the Keys and refined his knowledge of the behavior of game fish in shallow water.