MC: WHAT WAS THE UNIQUE CHEMISTRY or alignment of the stars that brought everyone together in Key West in the early '70s?

GDLV: What I might do, just because it's easier for me, is to go back even a little bit even further than that. My story is very closely tied, first, to Gil Drake, and then of course McGuane, Harrison, Chatham, and Buffett, that whole group. My first fishing experiences actually started with Gil Drake. We went to school together in the late '50s when his father opened up Deep Water Cay, which is the bonefish lodge situated at the east end of Grand Bahama, in 1957. Gil and I went to a great school called Graham-Eckes School for Young Gentlemen in Palm Beach, Florida. The reason that it was great was that there were 70 girls and 45 boys. And the girls were very pretty.

MC: And if you don't mind going back even a little bit further, you were born in France ...?

GDLV: No, I was born in New York City after the war, in 1944. My father had been in the war and came over to the United States, and worked with the American navy and developed the first miniature submarines for the U.S. Navy. The very first miniature submarines were invented by the Italians, early during the War, and when my dad came over here after being shot down ... I mean, this story could go on forever.

MC: He was a pilot?

GDLV: He was a pilot. An ace in the First World War, shot down in the Second World War, and spent seven or eight months in a French hospital outside of Paris.

MC: ...fighting for the French ...

Gil and I went to a great school called Graham-Eckes School for Young Gentlemen in Palm Beach, Florida. The reason that it was great was that there were 70 girls and 45 boys. And the girls were very pretty.

GDLV: ...fighting for the French. He got out of the hospital in 1942, escaped, and worked his way down to Gibraltar. When he reached Gibraltar, kind of dodging the Germans, who were already in France by then, he and a bunch of guys commandeered a submarine, a German submarine, and drove the damn thing to England, you know, took over the whole crew, dumped the Kraut assholes, and drove the thing over to England. So now he's in Great Britain, and he and Charles de Gaulle do not get along — the two of them had a conflict of egos. My dad, with the help of another admiral, came to the United States as a colonel in the Air Force, but of course there are no such thing as colonels in the American navy, so he was likely the only colonel in the American navy. But he came over here to work on miniature submarines, which he did.

MC: Was he an engineer by training?

GDLV: He was an engineer by training, exactly, an inventor and engineer. The first time they tested his submarine was in Lake Okeechobee, of all places. Why there I don't know, but he said “The next thing you know I was 15 or 20 feet under the water of Lake Okeechobee with zero visibility.” At nights I suppose he drove back into Palm Beach. This was late 1942 or '43 probably, and there he met my mother. I came rolling out in '44 in New York City. I didn't go to France until I was six years old — that would have been 1950. Then I went to boarding school when I was seven or eight years old and got promptly booted out of every one I was put in.

MC: That was in Normandy?

GDLV: Normandy first, and then Switzerland — a couple of places there, one of them kind of a fancy place called Le Rosé, where all the rich kids went. Finally there was a nice teacher who told my parents “Look, he's never going to pass his French baccalaureate — you need to get him to America, where the academics are simpler.” Which they did, and it was good, and I was probably 12 or 13 years old when I got to the famous Graham-Eckes School for Young Gentlemen and met Gilbert Drake. Gil and I somehow or another struck up a friendship and in 1958 — when I would have been 14, I guess, and he would have been 17 — he invited me over to Deep Water Cay. And there was nothing there. And I mean, there was nothing. We slept on a 32-foot Nova Scotia called the 'Magic,' and we helped every summer thereafter. I kept going back in the springs and the winters and helped build the docks and other things and also, of course, went fishing, and went diving — and did a lot of it.

MC: Had bonefishing at that time gotten to the point where you had “destination” fishermen.

GDLV: Yeah. Deep Water Cay was certainly for destination fishermen, and for bonefish — that was the deal. Field & Stream fishing editor Al McClane was there a lot. Of course, he was a very close friend of Gil Drake Sr.. But when I was 13, 14, maybe even 16, there were few paying guests, because Big Gil [Sr.] had to build a dock, he had to put the lodge up. Early on there was little bungalow that housed four anglers, so it was four people, then eight, then 12 .... It was a very slow process. But within about three years they could handle 6 or 8 boats or something like that, which would mean fourteen people. Joe Brooks and then Tom McNally — a really nice, guy — and all those guys would come over to fish and enjoy Gil's dad company over martinis at night.

The fishing was good for bonefish, but in those days it was all shrimp and spinning rods. There was very little fly fishing. Al McClane did. I don't even think Gil's father or Gil did — or me for sure — for a long time. The dudes would come down — all Gil Drake's friends, all from the east coast —and I can remember them well, in their khaki outfits: khaki shorts, khaki shirts, everything was khaki. And all were kind of stodgy but very nice, all very sweet people.

MC: And they were using native guides from the get-go?

GDLV: Right out of McLean's Town. Including the famous David Pinder, whose sons you might or might not have fished with when you were there a couple of weeks ago. There were some great guides at Deep Water Key, but the most famous one in those days — until he quit guiding, and that would have been maybe 30 years later — was David Pinder.

I'd get so nervous I'd pull the fly out of the damn fish's mouth over and over and over again, which was not something you didn't want to do with Stu on the pole, because he would howl at the top of his lungs.And so as kids Gil and I fished, and we fished a lot. But our fishing was potpourri fishing. He would work, and I would help a little, and then about five o'clock in the evening we would pitch everything into a 14-foot Mitchell. We would pitch in the plug rod and we'd pitch in a spinning rod, we'd pitch in the diving gear — we'd throw all that shit in there — and go. We really never had an idea what we were going to do from one day to the next or really from one hour to the next. Gil was already an excellent all-around fisherman by then. He was 18 and I think was just starting at the University of Miami and just fishing his ass off up and down Tamiami Trail with guys like Norman Duncan, little John Emery, you know, that early fly fishing group. Sometime in the early '60s Gil picked up fly fishing, and then he became very good very quickly at it and taught me how to fly fish. That would have been '64 or something, when I was around 20 or so.

MC: In saltwater?

GDLV: All in saltwater. Very little freshwater. Even nowadays I do very little freshwater fly fishing. It was a lot of bonefish, barracudas, sharks and whatnot, and we would do stuff that nowadays is very common: we'd pitch pilchards overboard on an outgoing tide, and things would come up and we'd catch fish, like muttons, on fly. And it was all very intense, like young people do things. We fished hard, every day, or we dove hard, in the blue holes and at night, and chummed sharks and chummed more sharks.

MC: Most of that was on Grand Bahama?

GDLV: Ninety percent of that was at Deep Water Cay. Gil also had a house in Palm Beach, where I lived, and had gotten married. Now we are jumping to about '65 or so, when I was 21 and got married. My wife became close friends with Gil's wife, Linda Drake, who as you know became a flats guide later on. And then we all ended up spending lots of time over at Deep Water Cay. I then bought a house over there, the Booker house, which was the first house up from the lodge, and again I would make my pathetic attempts at helping Gil fix the engines, or maybe helping with the offshore fishing. I did a little bit of guiding, but not very much. Most of the bonefishing was handled by the local guides. Later Gil Drake Sr., who was a great friend of mine — also much older of course — turned over the island to Gil and Linda, and they managed that place for a long time. As I said I would probably spend seventy days a year there, for quite a few years.

Watch the video trailer for "Tarpon."

Buy "Tarpon" on DVD. It was at Deep Water Key, while Gil was managing, that I met Stu Apte. I met him in '66, and Stu said “Well why don't you hire me next year and I'll take you tarpon fishing.” I fished only one year with Stu — 1967 — and we started very early, in March, and we did it all: Loggerhead, the Eccentrics, Monster Point, and all these places, in very rough weather. And I was a terrible, just a terrible tarpon fisherman. I'd get so nervous I'd pull the fly out of the damn fish's mouth over and over and over again, which was not something you wanted to do with Stu on the pole, because he would howl at the top of his lungs. He didn't frighten me physically but he would just get crazy, you know?

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