Last Week with John

Last Sunday and Monday, I fished with John O’Hearn for two days. We were supposed to be joined by Dave Dalu for the second day, though this unfortunately did not happen. The first day we were joined by Drew Delashmit, who was to do some fishing as well as help us capture the 4 lb tippet permit record if we came tight to one big enough on the light string.

Our fishing the first day was difficult, and we looked hard for some bigger permit to throw the record rig at. We were interrupted a few times by some tarpon, at which Drew threw more than a few great casts that led nowhere.

We bumped around for a long afternoon, looking for a large permit to throw at. The problem was that the fishing in the places we know hold the larger permit was virtually non existent, and as such we didn’t have much success. We did have a single shot at a small group of mudding fish, though admittedly the fly was never in the proper spot to generate some interest. We continued on our way, still looking and not finding. We drifted around to a different area, where we found what we first thought was a permit but turned out to be a small tarpon. The fly was already airborne, and we got a nice bite from the little pon before I went slack and let the fly fall out. Mostly, this was because rigging a 2kg leader is a pain and I wanted to save it for our target species.

At our next and final destination, we had a small bit of action as the sun fell lower. As we moved along the edge, we found maybe four high quality shots worth of permit (some singles, a few pairs), all of which looked at and none of which took the plunge on our fly. We left the edge and headed home with nothing to show for our efforts.

Our second day of fishing was similar to the first except that we lasted in the permit pursuit until about 1 PM, at which point neither of us was prepared to continue into repetition our lack of success. John made the executive call to leave the permit be, and we headed toward some tarpon fishing.

It didn’t take long for the bet to pay off: we found a number of fish right away (after a brief snotting from the fish that Drew had been shut down by the day before) and had a few bites early on. In an hour we hooked three fish, and after that we moved on to new water and found more still. We were able to coax, from some small fish flashing through bait in clear water, three more bites and two leadered fish.

We finished with the tarpon in the late afternoon and headed on to look one last time for our giant permit on 2 kg. No shots later we headed home.

 

I’d like to thank John and Drew for their time on the water. Day before yesterday I fished with Simon Becker and Sean Morton, and I’ll put the report up before Dave Skok gets here and we start fishing with Simon and John.

 

More to come as always,

 

Nathaniel