Bonefishing in America

“Hola, senor~. Bien venido de Miami!’

“Thank you, I’d like to rent a car, please.”

“Si senor~. Compact,

midsize or full size?”

“Compact!”

“Sorry, we’re out of compacts.”

“Midsize.”

“Very well. $29.95 per day. Is that all?”

“Yes sir. $29.95 between plus free mileage. I’ll take it.”

“Now, would you like insurance on your ear?”

(If you’re driving in Miami after 10 years of Crested Butte driving, you’d beater get insurance). “How much?”

“$12.99 per day.”

“Okay.

“Do you want insuranee incease you hit someone?”

“How much?

“$6.99 per day.”

“What happens if I hit someone?”

“They will take your business, Mr. Church.”

 

I pondered whether Church Construction Company was worth $6.99. Tough decision.

 

“Okay, I’ll take it.”

“Would you like gas?”

“Of course I want gas”

“Okay, that’s $16.99.”

“Personal injury insurance?”

“How much?”

“$3.99 per day.”

If you’re going in search of the largest game fish in the work with a captain whose residence and office is a bar, $3.99 seamed like a good hedge on disaster. Okay.

“Personal effects insurance?”

“How much?”

“$2.99.”

This was Miami, okay.

“Now surtax - $4.99 per day and state tax - 6.5%.”

This was getting ugly.

“And a slight drop-off charge and thank you viny much, Mr. Church.”

 

I’d been in Miami for three minutes and I was out of money.

 

It was a white car, midsize, with voices to remind you who was in charge, a seat belt that sprung from the dash to pin you to the seat the minute the door closed — a feature that in my opinion has gone a bit far in man’s attempt to protect himself from himself. It’s just a matter of the time before someone’s strangled.

 

I pulled onto the South Florida turnpike and was swept into a 75-mile-per-hour stream of BMWs, the occupants who were either talking on car phones or reloading weapons for the next intersection, and these are the normal commuters.

— those windows that they don’t want to be seen doing nad how are they doing it at 75 miles per hour?

I turned up the rap music station — I like rap music about as much as I like snakes in sleeping bags, but it was the only English-speaking station ... well, not really English as we know it.

 

I came to a turnpike toll booth, “Am I headed to the Keys?” I asked the kindly grandmother type in her plexiglass case.

 

“How the hell do l know where your headed?” she snapped.

 “Move it.”

Welcome to Miami.

I raced south, window down, humidity hanging on me like a cheap suit.

Florida narrowed into the infamous Keys, just wide enough to hold Interstate 1 and every chain of fast food and gas station side by side, dumpster to dumpster. A highway lined with neon palm trees and crabs, bottomless boat tours (shaky at best) and topless dancers (shaking their best).

 

South of Key Largo, there’s the small town of Islamorada. I missed it twice and finally stopped to call my old friend and employer, I Goeff “Big Earnie” Tindell. I hadn’t seen Big E for l0 years and knew he would be excited to see me and catch up on old times, even though it was midnight.

The phone rang 10 times and finally a groggy E answered.

 

“Earnie! It’s your old pal Steve Church!”

Click.

Must have been cut off. I called again.

“Earnie! Remember me?”

“Go away, Church.” Click.

Must have got him at a bad time. I called back.

“Earnie, wait! I’m here to write I a story on you, you’ll be famous. You’ll be rich, you’ll be...”

“Bullshit!”

“Really, I’ve been sent by the Chronicle to find you and write your story.”

“Really?”

 

He fell for it, the big dummy. I was won ensconced on Earnie’s couch, where I assured him I wouldn’t stay over two nights.

 

Big E and myself had frothed much water together fly fishing the streams of Crested Butte. He is one of the best;  the guy can drop a fly into a trout’s mouth at 100 paces. But s getting tired of small fish and big snowdrifts, he retired to the Keys to guide backwater fishing trips after the most exciting game fish in the world: Bonefish Permit, Snook and the King of all Tarpin.

 

Big E, aptly named at 6’4”, 220 lbs., has the enthusiasm of a sm boy and the energy of a nuclear reactor. He’s fun to be with, if you’re fully insured, which I was.

 

His best buddy and another ex-Buttion is Jim Lozar, known many circles as one of the hottest harmonica players in white skin a dangerous hoot owl (the noon siren was his alarm clock), and now a world class fishing guide. Known as “Capt” Jim Lozar, he operates his guide service from a character-reeking bay-front bar called the “Lor-al-li.” The place is tucked into the mangro swamps and frequented by two-legged wharf rats known as “Bubba’s” and their big-haired, scantily-clad girlfriends known as “Bubbetts.”

 

“Capt” Jim has his boat tied within a stumble of a bar stool. He fishes by day, taking clients (called victims) for $300 per day in search of these mighty lunkers. By night, he plays his harp with the resident band,(bear with me fols, I’m only reporting the facts), “Big Dick and the Extenders.”

 

“Big Dick,” being an extremely dangerous-looking Seminol Indian the size of Rhode Island, is the lead singer and abuser of nervous and skittish tourist crowds, ready to bolt for their rental cars at the first sight of bloodshed amongst the local Bubbas! That’s where we located the next morning, swabbing what I’d hoped was fish blood from his decks. He was equally ecstatic to me, especially when informed we were going fishing on his boat for pay, as I was here covering a story. I took what was left from the rental car devastation and bought the two captains 24 cans of breakfast which we put on ice, fueled up and headed out.

 

It was a lovely morning, sea flatter than Olive Oil’s chest, not a breath or sign or gasp of wind. We skimmed over the surface of a crystal Caribbean Sea, pushed by the 115-hp Mercury.

 

Ten miles out we’re on the edge of the Everglades National Park, small mangrove Islands dotting the horizon. Lozar shut lown the engine, we drifted on a silent sea three foot deep. The sea was silent but not so the captains.

 

Captain Tindel: “There! I was in the Congo when all of — Whoa! What’s that! Never mind, just a ray You can call me Ray you can call me Jay. In the Congo when all of a - Church, pass me another Caribbean coffee — sudden, wham! The biggest scum-sucking dirty #*!! Whoa, what’s that, never mind, bait fish, where was I...”    

 

Capt Lozar: “I’ll never forget my first reel, a Mitchell 300, it was            beautiful.” He stared out to sea,“Course all we used were frog guts and doughballs back then ...“ He stared away, eyes a tiny bit misty.

 

It was a beautiful story, shattered by Capt. Tindel: “Whoa, whoa! Ho! Wha.. There! There! There! Nervous water!”

This I had to see. “Where?”

“There! There! There!” he screamed, flailing the fly rod.
I didn’t see a thing.

“Never mind,” he calmed down, “just bally ho.”
 A baIly-ho is a bait fish about eight inches long that travels in schools; they reminded me very little of flying fish of which I had a story.

“Ther we were, me and Sharkbreath out in the Gulf Stream, pitch black night, Sharkbreath asleep below, me at the helm. Couldn’t see the hand in front of your face. I was as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. What with all your oil tankers and all. When suddenly, whap! Something like a wet football hit me right in the kisser, mthen dropped between my bare legs flopping like a biology frog. I don’t have to tell you if my head hadn’t smacked into the boom I’d still be going up.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” says Lozar. “We’re motoring around Chub Key one night, I’m down below cooking dinner, one of these flying fish comes right through the port hole and lands in the frying pan...”

“Bull!” Tindell screams. “It’s true you bilge rat,” yells Lozar.

We drift in silence. “Time to cockroach,” says Lozar.

“Cockroach?” I inquire.
“Change flies.”           
“Oh yeah. I knew that.” Lozar pops the fly on his line, and two seconds later Tindel shrieks!

“There he is! Tarpin! Tarpin! Tarpin!” A six-foot silvery fish swam alongside the boat, practically thumbing his nose.“Oh my God! There’s more!” Captain Tindel was gesturing wildly at some agitated water, “Nervous water!” he squealed.

(Ah-hah I thought to myself). About a half dozen of those monsters were rolling and flipping not 20 feet from our skiff. Lozar was madly fumbling with a fly that looked like a road kill parakeet, trying desperately to get it connected to his line.

“Don’t panic! Don’t panic! Don’t panic!” Tindel screamed at Lozar. “Get that fly on the line, don’t panic!”

 

Capt. Lozar connected the parakeet and deftly tossed it out to a now flat sea.

“Damn*#!!?!!” Lozar muttered and fumed, “always happens when your cockroached.”

 

Suddenly his face went latex white. You’d think he’d seen Moby Dickat his feet. He started to shake and point to the boat’s floor.

 

A green lighter.

 

He shrieked with horror. Tindel joined in wailing, “Throw it over! Throw it over! Throw it! Throw it!

 

Wait a minute, boys...

Tindel pounced on the lighter and heaved it about 10 miles this side of Havana.

 

“Don’t you know that’s bad luck, Church!”

“Don’t you know nothing?”

“I guessed it had slipped my mind, fellas, sorry.”

We drifted in silence, myself and 500 lbs. of fuming fishing guides. Suddenly Tindel pointed and whispered, “There.”

“Where?” I whispered.

“There.”

“I don’t see a thing.”

“Holy mackeral!” whispered Lozar.

“Lookit that!”

“What?” I didn’t see a thing.

“A huge shark and he’s headed right at us!”

“Excuse me?”

“He’s a monster, gimme the rod,” Tindel yelled at Lozar.

Big E backcast and let fly the parakeet. I marked the landing and strained to see this behemoth of the deep.

“Bull! You guys are...”

Suddenly the fly disappeared in a swirl of water that looked like possible volcanic activity.

“He took it!” E yelled.

“Take the rod, Church!”

“Excuse me?” I grabbed the fly rod, a #12 graphite with 15-lb. test; a trout rod.

“Set the hook,” they both yelled.

I jerked on what felt like maybe a submerged Studebaker.

Nothing happened. Then I saw it. A dorsal fin jutted a foot out of the water coming straight at us, cutting a wake like a ski boat. He was 70 feet away and closing fast.

“Reel Reel Reel Reel!”

“He’s a 300-pounder,

maybe 400!” Tindel was spitting and fuming. “He’s headed for us.

Don’t get him mad, Church!”

 

“What?

Why are we doing this? E?” Now I could see his eyes, 14 inches apart if they were an inch, a mouth you could stuff a basketball in ... or someone’s head.

“He’s charging the boat!” yelled Lozar. “Hang on!”

“Not you, Church — you, reel, reel, reel!”

Both captains, now yelling at the top of their lungs, braced themselves against the wheel. They simultaneously shrieking... “Oh, my God, he’s gonna....!!”

 TO BE CONTINUED