EARLY ON A HOT March morning, we find ourselves standing outside the Miami Dadeland Marriott hotel, waiting for the odyssey to begin.

Our friends had told us we should start this book project with Bill Curtis. They said most of what we would see in the coming months had been, at least in part, created, improvised, explained, or experienced by Curtis. He is, by unanimous account, one of the fathers of saltwater flats fishing, and one of the last living legends of this game. But the best part of the story is that Bill Curtis, now in his late seventies, is still playing it.

He arrives, five minutes early, in a Chevy Astro Minivan, pulling a canary yellow skiff, the “Grasshopper,” straight through the mix of valets and bellhops, who trade confused glances as he wheels up to the front door, occupying both lanes of traffic, and stops. He rolls down his passenger side window, barks at the doorman, then asks us if we’re here to fish. Before we have time to answer, he opens the van’s back doors and is loading equipment. Eventually, we would learn that Bill Curtis does things his way, and the rest of the world can deal with that.

We pack up and head out into traffic toward the Dixie Highway. A half-century ago, when Bill moved here, this neighborhood was on the far, rural edge of Miami, but today, it is consumed with the sprawl of strip malls, shopping centers, office complexes, and car dealerships. If not for the palm trees on the roadside, you might think you were in suburban Detroit or Denver. We are a moving anachronism, pulling Bill’s little yellow boat through six lanes of traffic.

Nobody says much beyond introductions, until he asks where we want to start. We don’t have one answer.

We want him to open his bag of tricks and teach us to fish, anywhere. More importantly, we want him to tell us how the whole story started — poling the Everglades with a long, wooden dowel and a weathered plywood skiff, the enormous schools of tarpon and bonefish that since have disappeared, a day fishing with Ted Williams, what it was like to be the only boat on Biscayne Bay — but where does it really begin?

“I’ll tell you what,” says Bill. “We’ll head down to Flamingo, drop the boat in the water, and see if we can’t see some tarpon rollin’. Your story will begin on the water. They always do.”

WE LAUNCH from the outside ramp and run past Palm and Cormorant Keys into the northern reaches of Florida Bay, then Bill sets up in a channel near a mangrove island swarming with roseate spoonbills. He wants to see if we can fish before he starts talking. It seems we are on the spit to start out, as he begins to interview us with rods, not words. As he eloquently explains, “There’s chicken salad and chicken shit, and you can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit.”

We find a mixed bag of small jacks, spotted seatrout, ladyfish, and pompano, throwing gaudy, rattling “Cajun Thunders” and shrimp-tipped jigs into the channel with spinning rods. In doing so, we extract some of Bill’s basic history. He tells us he is from eastern Oklahoma, and learned to fish in New Mexico in 1934, throwing Adams flies with split-cane rods on the San Juan River under the guidance of his uncle. He even held the world record for rainbow trout on six-pound tippet for a fish he caught up in Alaska, but could care less, when we ask, about its length and weight.

He served in the Army Air Corps during World War II, piloting F-7’s on photoreconnaissance missions over North Africa. Bill says it was when he returned to base with holes in his wings and fuselage large enough for the maintenance crews to climb through that “he knew he was immortal.” After the war, he became a professional photographer in south Florida, shooting assignments for the J. Walter Thompson Agency, but eventually, his passion for fishing led him to the
relatively uncharted realm of the flats. He began guiding in 1958.

There are other guides, contemporaries, who have received more attention and acclaim than Bill over the years. There was a feature in Sports Illustrated back in the 1960s, and a permit show for the original “American Sportsman,” not long after that, but Bill did not enter the profession to become a star. He says he was drawn by the work, the fish, and the experience, and never spent a whole lot of time worrying about getting noticed.

“Maybe the biggest compliment and the most credit I got was when the young guides used to set on the flats and watch me with binoculars,” laughs Bill. “Hell, there’s now more than 100 registered guides in Islamorada alone. Being a fishing guide is no big deal, but I take some pride in being one of the people who was here when this thing took off.”

WELL, I’d better get on the stick,” says Bill, gingerly climbing onto the poling platform. Whoosh, whoosh. The sound of the push pole sliding through Bill’s calloused and worn hands makes a distinct sound, like a dry eraser rubbing up and down a chalkboard. His deftness on the platform almost defies logic, but when we learn he is the inventor of said contraption, his surprising agility begins to make more sense.

“I used to stand on the motor to spot fish, but it wasn’t very steady, so I decided to make a little stand bolted to risers off the deck,” he explains. “I remember at first how some of the other guides laughed at me, and thought I had put a fish cleaning table on the boat. I just told them it was to shade my motor.”

Whether they realize it or not, many of today’s guides have been influenced by Bill Curtis. He has designed and developed shallow water boats like the Hewes Bonefisher, the first production flats boat; tested products for the Ted Williams Tackle Company; introduced and created indispensable fishing knots, including the “Bimini Twist” (which he brought to Florida) and the “Curtis Connection” (his own invention); and made countless other improvements to tackle and technique during his 50 years in the sport. If you look hard enough, you will notice his contributions marking the flats boats of the world like indelible fingerprints.

Watching Bill’s hands tie intricate knots is like watching an old maestro play the piano with fingers slowed by age (but nonetheless, graceful and deliberate as they pass over the keys). Bill says the best anglers have natural grace, and he never has fished with anyone more graceful than the late Ted Williams, the finest hitter in the history of baseball.

“Hell, Williams claimed he could see the stitches on a baseball coming at him, and I believed him,” remembers Bill. “He had perfect coordination, superior vision, and he could transpose his athletic grace to anything, including fishing. He won the first two Gold Cup Tournaments, and then stopped fishing them, just so others could have a chance. He was the first man to make athlete and fisherman fit in the same sentence.”

THE NEXT DAY, we are ripping across Biscayne Bay toward the tarpon, bonefish, and permit flats on the east side. With his white, sunworn knuckles loosely rolled over the wheel and the throttle wide open, Bill Curtis is in his element. He has guided everywhere from the Bahamas to the Dry Tortugas, from Flamingo to the Keys, from the Crystal River to north of Homassasa, but this is his home water, and where he made his name.

“I was the only one guiding here back in the early days,” says Curtis. “There were a few others working down in the Keys, like Jimmy Albright and Al Smith, but this is what I was known for, bonefish and tarpon in Biscayne Bay.”

He also played a significant role in the preservation of these fish and these remarkably productive flats. Bill helped found Bonefish and Tarpon Unlimited, and recounts for our benefit former trips in the early 1960s, scouting and fishing with Stewart Udall, then Secretary of the Interior, and Luther Hodges, the Secretary of Commerce.

“Jack Kennedy was President,” Bill shouts over the whining engine. “And we were laying the groundwork for designating Biscayne Bay a National Park. Of course, back then, this was still a pretty wild place, and you always could find a piece of water without having to fight over it.”

We watch a cigarette boat tear across the horizon. It is one of hundreds of watercraft — party boats, ski boats, WaveRunners, sailboats, even dozens of undaunted anglers — crisscrossing and running through the fragile, mottled green waters of the bay. Bill had told us to expect this as we waited in line to launch his skiff at the public landing. It is still worth seeing, he said, and who knows, we might run into a bonefish or permit if we head far enough south. Anyway, he has a special place he wants to show us.

“This is it,” he says, as he slows the engine, rounding the southern tip of a mangrove island and pointing toward the open Atlantic. “This is Curtis Point.”

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