Flats Fishing

Flats fishing is unique among all the angling sports.
You’re talking about very skinny water and casting to
skittish fish you can see---which means they can see you,
as well. Fishing the flats is more like hunting than regular fishing. But the satisfaction of doing it successfully,
especially if you’re lucky (or skillful) enough to take
a grand slam consisting of tarpon, bonefish, and
permit, is unequaled.

When it comes to fishing, my home state of Kentucky almost has it all.

Name your angling pleasure, and you can probably find it in the Bluegrass State. Bass? Pick a body of water, and you’ll more than likely find black bass in it. Trout? We have three major species swimming somewhere in our waters. Catfish? Striped and hybrid white bass? Musky? Panfish? You name it, and we pretty much have it here.

What we don’t have, however, is salt water. For that you have to travel.

While there are many experiences waiting for you on the briny, one of the more exciting of them is flats fishing in the Florida Keys.

The flats are shallow-water shoals found edging much of south Florida. At high tide the flats may be covered with as much as six or eight feet of water. During low tide they may be bare, or have one to three feet of water over them. Deep water fishes migrate across the flats, feeding as they go.

Flats fishing means you are sight fishing to spooky fish, with fly rods or lightweight spinning outfits. Presentations have to be exact, or the fish take off like frightened rockets. The flats separate the serious anglers from the wannabes.

Even so, beginners---with a little instruction from their guides---can be quite successful at flats fishing. I know that firsthand, based on my own first time out.

It was several years back that Friend Wife and I first tried flats fishing. We’d chosen Marathon, about halfway down the Keys, for our introduction. Unlike those on some other keys, we felt that the guides (always called “captains,” in Florida) were anxious to have us come down and experience their fishing.

Marathon guides are different in another way. By and large, they trailer their flats skiffs instead of mooring them. This lets them launch where the fish are. “We’ve taken sportsmen as fart down as Key West,” one of them pointed out, “and as far up as the Everglades. Wherever the fish are, we go.”

We would, by preference, be flyfishing. No surprise to regular readers.

Now there’s flyfishing, and there’s flyfishing. Using #12 outfits and casting to spooky fish you can see while the wind is blowing has little in common with tossing bits of feathers and fluff from a #5 trout rod. Double hauling and accurate casting 50-70 or more feet are a must. But with a little practice, you get it down. Or, at least, you come close enough to feel confident about covering fish.

And cover fish we did, that first day of flats fishing. Lots of them. Tarpon running 60 pounds and up. Pods of bonefish. Single fish and fish in groups. But if you list everything a flyfisherman can do wrong casting to such fish, put my name beside every one of them. Short casts. And stepping on the line. And putting wind knots in the leader. And spooking fish with bad presentations. But what the heck, this was supposed to be a learning day.

Day two and we’re fishing the ocean side of Marathon, with Captain Karl Wagner. Like most good captains, even when fly fishing Karl carries a rigged spinning rod, just in case. Turns out it was a good thing, because he’d barely started polling us over the flats when he saw a permit flash nearby.

There was no way I could present my fly properly to that fish. Using a crab-baited spinning rod, Wagner presented the bait, then handed me the rod. “When he picks it up,” he instructed, “set the hook hard!”

The permit wanted no part of me, the hook, or anything except trying to get back into deep water. All I could no was hold on as he stripped more than 100 yards of line from the singing reel. Then he started slugging it out. For a while, I would recover three feet of line, and he’d strip off five. There was just no quit in that fish.

It took 22 minutes before Karl tailed him. After some quick photos, we tagged the 25 pounder and released him.

Talk about happy! Permit are considered the most difficult of the big three flats fish. Even taking a small one is considered an accomplishment when flats fishing. So here it was, barely 7:30 in the Aunt Emma, and we’ve already boated a trophy class fish. I’d call that a great introduction to flats fishing.

The rest of the day we cast to tarpon. And I do mean “cast.” They all had lockjaw. I mean to say, I was doing everything right (itself an accomplishment after the errors of the previous day). But they still wanted nothing to do with us. A fish would be approaching. I’d cast out, putting the fly directly in its path, at the right depth. And the fish would swim around it.

Understand, they weren’t being spooked. They’d continue on their path, see the fly, and merely curve around it and continue on their way. Very frustrating.

After covering several hundred fish with flies, lures, and live bait we hadn’t even a follow-up. Karl kept apologizing for the lack of action (as if it was somehow his fault---which it certainly wasn’t). But I was still all aglow from the permit, so wasn’t all that disappointed. As I kept telling him; “Hey! A 25 pound permit at 7:30 this morning. We could have gone back to the dock at 7:35 and it wouldn’t have bothered me at all.”

Karl is a great captain, though, and isn’t happy unless he’s producing for his sports. Can’t find fault with that kind of professionalism.

Our third day we again fished the ocean side. But the wind had really come up, and both casting and boat handling was difficult. “We can beat ourselves up,” our guide said. “Or we can head to a boat channel, out of the wind, and intercept fish returning off the flats.”

Calmer waters made sense to us, so that’s what we did. It was an interesting situation – a different sort of flats fishing from what we had experienced so far. We tied off the boat and waded the flats to the edge of the channel. There we are, standing in ankle-deep water, throwing baits into water that dropped off to 20 feet.

Casting live shrimp, we were into a cross section of salt-water fish, like snappers and small sharks. And we got to see some truly exceptional critters, such as the lemon ray with a wingspan of at least four feet.

Then I had a hit that felt different. The fish took off on a hard run, neither surfacing nor sounding. A couple of more such runs, and he was in the boat. A small bonefish, about three pounds.

Among flats fishermen there’s a grand slam. It consists of catching a tarpon, a bonefish, and a permit on the same trip.

Well I’m here to tell you the old saying is true. Two out of three ain’t bad!