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Archive for April, 2011

Billy Pate Passes The Torch

Tuesday, April 26th, 2011

Billy Pate (81), Islamorada, Florida—Billy Pate, legendary big fish on fly pioneer passed away April 19, at a Homestead, Florida nursing home at the age of 81. Pate first drew notoriety in 1982 for a 188 pound tarpon he caught on 16-pound fly tippet, a class record for 21 years, and a fish that was at the time the largest tarpon ever caught on fly.

His world record tarpon drew instant notoriety that followed Pate throughout life. A regular in Homosassa, Florida during the spring run of giant tarpon, Pate would fish from dawn to dusk for weeks at a time hoping for a shot at giant fish, and forever sought to be the first to catch a tarpon over 200 pounds on fly.

 A true innovator of the sport, Pate was one of the first anglers to expose the “down and dirty” fish fighting technique so popular with tarpon and big fish anglers today. In 1989  he joined Scientific Anglers to produce “Fly Rodding For Tarpon with Billy Pate,” a video on targeting, fighting and catching tarpon on fly that helped popularize the sport as well as the fish fighting technique. In the video, Pate showcased his custom tarpon skiff which featured a forward raised casting platform and surrounding net system to keep the fly line from sweeping off the deck in the wind. 

Pate partnered with Ted Juracsik in 1976 to help design the Billy Pate Fly Reels, a series of fly fishing reels that were among the first to feature an antireverse system. Since then, the Billy Pate Fly Reels have caught 225 world records, and the reels remain among the top tools of the sport.

Financially solvent, Pate’s family made their fortune in the South Carolina carpet business (he was the president of Wunder Weve Carpets), and later in real estate, and Pate was the consummate Southern Gentleman and had three wives who often joined him on his fishing adventures. Unlimited finances allowed Pate to search the world for large gamefish on fly and led to the discovery of the giant tarpon off the coast of Africa along with the catches of the first blue marlin and black marlin on fly. Pate was also the first to catch six billfish species (blue, black, white and striped marlin, and Atlantic and Pacific sailfish) on fly.

A holder of multiple world records on fly including mako shark, jack crevalle, bonefish, redfish and grouper, Pate campaigned tirelessly for the IGFA to change the bite tippet length for flyrod anglers from 12 inches to 30 inches, feeling the shorter bite tippet length created a disadvantage for fly anglers.

He was an original member of Bonefish and Tarpon Trust, the Everglades Protection Association, the Don Hawley Foundation and the Pate Foundation, and partnered with Islamorada fishing guide George Hommell in 1967 to form World Wide Sportsman, a tackle shop dedicated to fly and light tackle anglers and travel agency for booking domestic and international fishing trips.

In 2003, Pate was elected to the IGFA Hall of Fame, an honor he cherished while contributing the honor to having the financial opportunity to pursue gamefish across the globe. While Pate pursued fish on fly in over 40 countries, he maintained residences in the Florida Keys and in Oregon so he could pursue his favorite fish species (tarpon and steelhead).

Posted in The Rest of What's Out There | No Comments »

Island In Their Dreams

Monday, April 25th, 2011

 Twenty years ago, the Pelican Range of islands looked to the average tourist like the perfect place to pull up a boat, find a nice shady spot under a palm tree and catch a bad case of malaria or dengue fever. To a Belizean, it looked like swampland of opportunity whose window could shut at any moment.

  Most of the islands in the Pelican Range were owned by the government, which means they were part of the public domain, just out there to provide habitat for the fish and fodder for the land crabs. And Lincoln Westby knew a little about being a land crab—dig in, make some improvements on the initial design of your home and everything within view becomes your oyster.

 Back then, a Belizean could lease an island from the government, and Westby had his eye on a little six acre mosquito breeding ground on Northeast Cay where the water stretched azure to the horizon and the noseeums tested your sanity. A place where you next meal was at the end of a handline or pole spear, and a man with a fly rod could walk the shores and laugh his way to his dreams.

 Westby and his common law wife Pearline leased a small parcel on the island—a combination of dry land, mangroves and the world’s greatest sand spur population. It was Their dream to own an island, a place where friends and family could gather, where they could run a world class fishing lodge that would bring anglers from around the globe to chase permit, the holy grail of fly fishing. Northeast Cay had all that, along with moon tides that flooded the land mass and turned it into a beautiful oasis of salt marsh.

 The problem was simple: everything about the location was perfect except the fact that the island turned into a sandbar on high tide. Lincoln and his wife saw the island in their dreams on low tide, and then watched it sink daily on high tide. Lacking dry land to build on, barely enough income to provide the next meal and no Fannie Mae to turn to, they did what everyone else would do—fill bags of sand and haul them by boat to Northeast Cay and build an island by hand.

Every day Lincoln would fill five or six bag with sand, put them into his boat, spend half the night handlining for snapper and other reef fish, then head for the island to grow the land mass, sleep until dawn, then head back to the mainland to sell the fish at market. He’d visit the island several times each day in the floating sandbox he called his boat. Many nights he’d camp on the island or sleep in his boat if it was a moon tide, but gradually, the sand began to accumulate and a spit of dry land turned into a mound, which eventually morphed into a beach and finally a real island.

 Much of the sand came from Sand Bores on the flats as well as the mainland. How much sand did Lincoln and his wife bring out to the island, enough that when a hurricane hit the island in 1995 it turned a hill into a beach. At least five or six bags a trip for six months (Lincoln estimates about 10,000 bags of sand), the kind of stuff that you see someone doing and laugh, knowing in a hundred million years times eternity it will never be enough sand to fill a marsh and create an island from mangrove wetlands. Enough that everyone called them “crazy,” and by the late 90’s changed that moniker to “visionary.”

 Eventually, there was enough land that shade became an necessity, so Lincoln planted cocoanut palms and other trees. Then came a building–a real house on what was once the mosquito capital of Central America and now a place to lie in a soft bed and listen to the waves lapping along the shore. As the improvements continued, Lincoln and Pearline were able to purchase the land from the government, and have slowly bought section after section and now own most of the island.

 He and his wife named the lodge-type dwelling Blue Horizon, after the view from the porch, and Lincoln shifted his fishing efforts from commercial reef fish to sportfishing permit, tarpon and snook, eventually becoming the most knowledgeable permit guide in the area. With help from friend Will Bauer, Blue Horizon Lodge is now four cottages, a main house and cook shack, and a short walk from waving tails and the holy grail.

 Blue Horizon Cay is not fancy, but it is cozy, clean and one of the best places to find yourself in a hammock, Belikin beer in hand and casting shoulder sore. It’s a place that shouldn’t be there, couldn’t and never would be inhabitable, but now regularly visits the dreams of anglers around the world, while Lincoln and Pearline rock away on the porch watching the sun set daily behind a blue horizon.

Posted in Belize Expedition | No Comments »

Better Living Through Film

Monday, April 25th, 2011

Some people achieve greatness. Others have it thrust upon them. And then there are those that are born filmmakers.

 If you haven’t seen one of the viewings of The 2011 Drake Magazine Fly Fishing Film Tour then you’re the guy who everyone is talking about, the one who missed the epic show of the season, the OSF (Original Stoke Fest) of the brotherly brethren of longrodders, and you’ve been slacking on the macking. Well boo hoo to you…

 The tour has been mind blowing this year, given the back-to-back sellouts. So the word is out that FFT3 is not all about trout. Or permit. Or redfish. Or any of a host of other players that will tighten the backing on your fly rod.

 Given the preshow ticket sales, you’d better start sucking up to your local fly shop operators and their slave dogs so you can get in on the local sales and don’t get left standing at the ticket counter offering to fix the carburetor on a 17-year old’s Taurus in exchange for a seat in the film room. And don’t think that just because it’s the off season, there will be seats available, because with the weather on the warm, everybody want’s to ride the storm all the way to opening day. So now is the time to blow the dust of your wallet and don you Birkenstocks for a theatrical night on the water.

On top of the Interweb forum buzz, the latest issue of Angling Trade had an article titled “20 Great Things Happening in Fly Fishing Right Now” written by Kirk Deeter, a saddle horse in the world fly fishing blogs, news and literature. Deeter requested input about the best things going in fly fishing today, and received hundreds of responses from readers that put the Fly Fishing Film Tour second on the list.  You can check out the article on page 28. http://www.anglingtrade.com/wp-content/themes/anglingtrade/pdf/AT-issue15-low-res.pdf

If you haven’t been to the show, expect a surf film on steroids and enough amp from the crowd to reshape your hair style. The crowds are loud, buzzing in more ways than one, and consistently interacting with the movies segments from films like GEOFISH, Musky Country and Red Like Winter.

 With stops in most major cities, it was no surprise that the mega metropolis known as Missoula, Montana produced the largest crowd to date as nearly 900 people packed the Wilma Theater for the roller coaster ride of tight loops with the BFF Troops!  After the Missoula show, the theatre put up a plaque awarding the FFT3 the theater record for the most beer cans left on the floor after a show.
 
For those putting on the show, over 12,000 miles of asphalt has slid beneath their butts, as the consumed mass quantities of gas station cuisine from coast to coast. While the road can wear down on the crew, the ability to look at a body of water along the road and say, “That looks fishy,” then react to the comment with a pit stop and a couple of hours of casting has proved the “New Water” stimulus package is the way to go when hiring trout bums to host your film series. Not to mention that road records were broken this year with the biggest steelhead and tarpon caught during the 6 years the film tour has been on the road.

 The Drake Magazine Fly Fishing Film Tour is currently finishing up the Great Lakes leg of the tour before heading west to Rapid City, South Dakota, and then on the final show in Boulder, Colorado this week where the tour wraps up on April 28th. While the road may go on forever, the Fly Fishing Film Tour goes on until the spring thaw and trout waters reopen.

Posted in Fly Fishing Film Tour | No Comments »

Veg Hunt

Tuesday, April 19th, 2011

When you commit to running a vehicle on vegetable oil, you’re changing your normal straightforward life to one of a scavenger. Face it, the oil is free, but you’ve got to scrounge it up, and more importantly, beat the other scroungers to the pot o’ gold.

 We were hoping that we could stockpile enough vegetable oil to fuel our Veg powered F250 diesel to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, but more would be even better, because hunting vegetable oil in a town you didn’t know with no local contact could put you into some sketchy areas pretty quickly, and last I heard, banditos don’t offer up a free pass just because you’re eco-friendly. The truck burns roughly 13 mpg of veg, so to make it to the bottom of Mexico, a 4,500 mile trip, we were looking at having to find 350 gallons of the stuff. That’s a lot of crawling behind restaurants.

 Fortunately Joel was an expert at scrounging waste oil, and was willing to share his secrets with fish headed fools. So we spent the next two days scrounging waste veg oil, which was a lot like playing homeless treasure hunt. We went from one end of town to the other, bailing out, checking the waste veg containers and quickly moving to the next one. Obviously the veg culture was secretive and motivated. Finally we hit the mother lode at the Lucky Dragon, a series of waste barrels behind a movie theatre.

 Our pot o’ veg gold was more a barrel of brown mound with plenty of chunks to go around. It was nasty stuff that needed to be cleaned using coffee filters. We’d siphon the veg oil using a hand pump used for pumping water out of boat bilges, which is why Thad has one skinny arm and one balloon arm. Fortunately, he randomly chose his casting/fighting arm to beef up with the pumping, so he had that going for him later in the trip.  

 One thing about veg hunting, you need to be aggressive and assertive (basically ruthless) at all times. There were occasions when restaurant staff members would take umbrage with the sketchimos digging through their waste behind the building, but we found that by acting like we owned the place, were there for a reason and might have some link to the border patrol, we could get most of the cooks in the Asian restaurants to run, screaming back inside. BTW, what does, “I hope you get carpfinger” mean?

 At the same time we were becoming alley thieves Joel was going through his hit list of Friends of the Veg to see if he could bum us some extra oil. On the top of his list was a guy who runs a driving school with vehicles totally powered by veg, and the guy was a hoarder extraordinaire. He had enough veg stockpiled to manipulate the stock prices of Crisco, and even more amazing was the quality of the stuff. I mean, it was the macking golden artery juice.

 Not only was he extremely generous, giving us 200 gallons of the primo veg, but also mentoring, explaining where the quality stuff could be had. In essence, you wanted to hunt the restaurants where the oil needed to be changed continuously, so sushi bars topped the list because the diners have educated palates, and you didn’t want the crab in a Spider Roll to taste like tempura eel, compared to places like Kentucky Fried Chicken, where it wasn’t a big deal if the chicken wings tasted like, say, chicken thighs or chicken breasts.

 Joel also gave us 75 gallons from his personal stash, which put us at 275 gallons of the oohey gooey kablooey. We put all the oil in five gallon containers (55 in all), and as we started hoarding our own stash, we realized that the truck not only looked like the world’s largest accident waiting to turn into a roadside sliding car comedy, but stacked to the top we could only hold about 30 of the fuel bombs. We needed a trailer.

 Once again, Joel came to the rescue, with a old trailer behind his shop that some nomad had traded him for a heavy duty brush guard and a new pair of blue jeans. We went to work on the trailer, which set us back another day from departure and drained our extra beer money cache, but in the end beat buying diesel fuel.

 At the same time we were leading the scavenger existence, Brian played geek ranger and found a website called freefillup.com- which was a site designed to connect people who veg and people who have excess veg to give away. Brian signed up for an account and was immediately contacted by a guy named Jim (yeah, I really should know his last name since he also hooked us up) who not only filled us up beyond capacity, but also let us borrow four plastic fifty gallon drums so we didn’t have to look like we had a leak in the radiator and were towing a lifetime supply of coolant in the trailer.

 The plastic drums made transporting and filling the veg tank on the go one hundred million times infinity more efficient. We were now stocked, locked and loaded, and ready to make a run for the border.  

Posted in Mexico Expedition | No Comments »

Top Guns On The Moon Clown Circuit

Monday, April 11th, 2011

Costa Del Mar’s involvement in Project Permit began in March of 2010 with the kickoff of the Del Brown/Key West March Merkin Permit Tournament, and in the first year, we’ve seen some incredible results. The majority of taggers in the project are fishing guides, primarily because they’re dependant on the resource for their livelihoods, and thus tend to have a vested interest in the health of the fishery, but also because they’re the ones who are least likely to drop a fish in the boat.

 You’d think that the majority of permit tagging in Florida waters takes place in the Florida Keys, but after the first year of permit tagging, Joe Gonzalez of Miami, Florida was the top tagger with 38 releases. Gonzalez receives a complimentary pair of Costa’s and a hearty “Atta Boy!” as the program’s top tagger.

 Along with Gonzalez’s 38 tagged permit, three others used their first set of 25 tags, with a fourth utilizing 24. The interesting perspective is that none of the top taggers fish in the Florida Keys or have pony tails. The Keys are known throughout the world for their permit populations and fishing guides that never wave back at passing boats.

Gonzalez sight fishes his permit in the waters of Biscayne Bay, Ball sight fishes his fish in Biscayne Bay and off the beaches to the north, Holliday tagged his permit on the reefs and wrecks north of Palm Beach. Capt. Phil Pica of Naples, Florida, stung most of his fish on the offshore wrecks.

 Below are the top five taggers in the first year of the program.

Capt. Joe Gonzalez, Miami, FL – 38 tags
Capt. Carl Ball, Fort Lauderdale, FL – 25 tags (first to complete 25 tags)
Capt. Mike Holliday, Stuart, FL – 25 tags
Dave Sanderson, Miami, FL – 25 tags
Capt. Phil Pica, Naples, FL – 24 tags

 So there’s this weird dichotomy of permit fishing that takes place on the southern half of the Florida peninsula, with fish free-roaming the flats, beaches, and wrecks from Tampa south to Florida Bay on the west coast, and Fort Pierce south to the Florida Keys on the east coast. That information alone shows how widespread the permit population is in Florida waters, as well as the diversity of the fishing pressure.

 Along with the first year taggers comes the first tag return. There’s around 100 people tagging permit in Florida right now, and at this point a few hundred fish have been tagged. The first recapture came from a fish that was tagged in October off the St. Lucie Inlet. That fish was recaptured on January 14th off the Palm Beaches, and had moved about 42 miles.

 That was the first ever recapture of a tagged permit and was a 20 inch fish tagged by Bob Pelosi, who has tagged over 200 bonefish in that area for the Bonefish and Tarpon Trust.  Pelosi caught three permit in three days, with that one being the largest. He caught those fish on the beach while pompano fishing.

Posted in Project Permit | No Comments »

B Double E Double R U-N…Beer Run!

Friday, April 1st, 2011

Any time you put four somewhat young anglers and a handful of video geeks in the same arena, there’s going to be a mandatory allotment of adult beverages needed to quell the sniping and instigate the smack talking, and the Kodiak Expedition was no exception. Fortunately, Kirk Deeter thought of that predicament when planning the expedition and pitching sponsors and approached Alaskan Brewing Company with a great sponsorship opportunity—basically beer for exposure.

Deeter dangled the fly in front of their faces, and the beer manufacturers bit, shipping 15 cases of Alaskan Brewing Company Beer, and a pair of flip flops with a bottle opener built into the soles. When you have two weeks on the water and 15 cases of beer, it’s going to be hard to run out, but when you fly in to your fishing spot on a daily basis, it’s easy not to bring enough for a constant lightheadedness. On top of that the fishing guide eats and drinks a whole lot when you go fishing, and no one wants to piss off the guide, lest they end up working a run called “The Desert” or “Punishment Hole.”

So with the three case daily allotment dwindling and the fish biting, there was only one thing to do…call the bush pilot, offer him a case of beer to drop off two cases, while rationing the video geeks to hourly bottles. It actually took a case of Alaskan IPA and a half pound of moose jerky to convince Jay, the pilot, to wrap up a couple of cases of beer in PFD’s, and strap them to the float and make the drop. Obviously Jay had experience with the dilemma as he already had a proven engineered beer drop contraption where he ran the rope through the door of the plane.

Jay came in at about 15 feet high upriver of where Trent Deeter, Conway Bowman and Kirk Deeter were in the river fishing, pulled the rope without opening the door and made the perfect beer drop midriver, where the beer floated right down to the anglers, they opened a beer and funneled the shaken brew down in one fell shot. The fact that the water was ice cold only made the beer consumption and refrigeration easier, while keeping the guide happy and the anglers into fish.

Posted in Kodiak Island Expedition | No Comments »