Steve Walburn photo

"Right there! Right there!"

The fish is right there, lolling at eleven o'clock off the bow, a couple of decades' worth of tarpon flesh laid up regally on the shallow center of a gulfside basin in the Key West National Wildlife Refuge, where giant tarpon come to snooze.

Although the fish is as big around as a telephone pole, I cannot see him through the stained water until he materializes nose-to-bow, floating there above the waving aquatic grasses like a giant helium pig at a Floyd concert. He is suspended, transcendent. And in that split second I am vapor locked with adrenaline.

"Get it in the water!" Marshall says. Yet, my first reaction is to freeze every muscle for fear of blowing out the fish. Turns out, big tarpon aren't so likely to spook from a deftly waved fly rod as they are from your prolonged, if statuesque, presence in their bedroom. If you suddenly see a fish that close, you don't wait for a better angle or a quieter approach. You snap roll the fly out and get the damn thing in the water or the fish will be gone, rocking the boat with his Learjet tail fin.

This instinct to stay motionless at first sight was a reaction I found remarkably difficult to overcome, and until the second day, nearly every close encounter suffered from that momentary pause, as if I had spotted a deer in close quarters rather than a fish. But one hallmark of great guides is that they let you make mistakes, and by the end of the first day, I had screwed up enough sudden shots to capitalize on those that unfolded more casually.

We'd been bouncing between the Refuge to hunt for laid-up fish and the oceanside flats to intercept cruisers. Twenty or so casts on the day had earned several follows, and by three o'clock we were staked out over some sand patches within knee-walking distance of Duval Street. Until that point, many of my casts had been behind the fish, or across their back, or intersecting their line of travel with an in-your-face retrieve.

"Prey doesn't usually swim toward the predator," Marshall kept telling me, and when we spotted a trio of fifty-pounders milling the flat, I'd finally put the fly in a tarpon's proper field of view, stripped it smartly away, and provoked a strike. The fight lasted perhaps five minutes, until the fish tired of my ineffectual winching, hammered out a third long run, jumped, and spit good-bye at me. But by then I had decided that tarpon fishing is a bit like rodeo: You don't have to ride the bull into the ground to call the day a success.

....

Yellow, Orange and Grizzly

Hook: 2/0 Gamakatsu SC15 or 3/0 Mustad AC3406B.
Wing: One yellow, one orange, and one grizzly neck-hackle feather per side.
Collar: Marabou, one feather each in yellow, orange, and gray tied one in front of the other.
Hackle: Grizzly or yellow.

David Klausmeyer photo

Back in the 1890s, when Key West was still the county seat of practically all of south Florida, Marshall Cutchin's great- great-grandfather was its mayor. Having grown up hearing tales about his storied elder in this Garden of Eden, where "there wasn't a tree with fruit that you couldn't eat," Cutchin began traveling to the south end of the country in his late teens. During a sojourn in 1979, he booked a fishing trip with local guide Jan Isley, and that day watched up to 1,200 tarpon swim past the boat. It was this "spectacle of nature" that lured him back repeatedly until, in 1985, he decided to take a year off from his job in publishing just to fish. He bought a used Action Craft, hauled it down to Key West, and started fishing by himself.

When Cutchin humbly asked Isley how to find fish, his first mentor replied, "Go pick a flat, sit on it all day long, and don't move." "I did that a lot. In those days, no one would tell anyone a thing. You had to figure it out yourself," recalls Cutchin, whose first saltwater fish on a fly rod was a 100-pound tarpon. He soon started taking on Isley's overflow clients, and in 1986 was a guide on the winning four-man team during Key West's first fly-only tournament. The team included West Coast fly-fishing pioneer Dan Blanton, and Cutchin was almost instantly in demand as a guide.

"That annealed me. I got to fish with so many good anglers in such a concentrated period. It showed me what guiding could be as a profession," he says.
In 1988, Cutchin declared fly fishing as his sole method of angling, and during the next decade forged a reputation as "one of the best guides in the world," according to SFF contributor Chico Fernandez.

Coker Smoker

Hook: 2/0 Gamakatsu SC15 or 3/0 Mustad AC3406B.
Tail: Red fox squirreL (This is optional. Cutchin leaves it off on the theory that
less is more.)
Wing: One dyed-yellow grizzly neck hackle and two Cree neck-hackle feath-ers per side. Tie the yellow hackle inside and the two Cree hackles outside, concave side out.
Collar: Cream or light-ginger marabou. It normally takes two feathers, sometimes three, depending on the size and how each person likes them to look.
Hackle: Cree neck hackle.

David Klausmeyer photo

"Every year the [tarpon] got tougher to feed and every year you had to change strategy," remembers Cutchin. "The traditional way to fish was to stake out over a white patch. Then the Tarpon Wear boom hit in the late eighties, and to catch fish you had to go where there were no other boats. That's how I found a lot of my laid-up spots." Like many veteran guides, Cutchin prefers to hunt for laid-up fish. "It's just more challenging. The fish are more sensitive because they are isolated rather than in a school. It demands more accurate casting, more subtle movement of the fly, and more of a feel for when to strike," he says.

Key West newcomers, on the other hand, are often partial to the oceanside fishing, where there can be an almost video-game predictability to wave after wave of gray torpedoes skimming along ancient paths in crystalline water, each group following the other from mysterious points of origin in southerly oceans. These days, the fish seem to hang farther off the flats, but on our second day we had at least 500 fish swim past our skiff in singles, pairs, and scores. No one knows quite how tarpon track each other as they move like aquatic caribou up toward the migratory dividing wedge that is Key West. Perhaps they use ocean topography, currents, water temperatures, or some form of "snail trail" to mark their way, but each spring they move along the same general paths, pausing to rest and feed in the same inlets, channels, and backcountry boudoirs.

Though Cutchin seems to know them all, by midmorning on day two we are staked out over the same sand patches as the day before. It's been a proven producer, revealing string after string of fish. I have recovered my balance after our losing bout with the big school at first light, and I have in fact jumped another two fish up to eighty pounds. Feeding them hasn't been all that hard. Making them keep their food down is proving more difficult.

"Here they come. Three fish. Straight at you, pretty fast at about one-hundred yards." Although I have 20/20 vision, Cutchin is still seeing them three times farther up the road than I am. But by midday, we've cast to enough tarpon to have achieved a kind of synergy, a chain of angling events that begins with the guide announcing distant fish, anticipating my rhythm, calmly winding up my casting clock for fish that he knows I have not yet seen.

"Cast whenever you think you can reach them, " he says.

I make a false cast and in mid-stroke pick up their shadowy forms cruising head-on. Cast abruptly checked, my fly drops fifty feet yonder and is already pulsing away when the second shadow veers toward it. The fish pumps, pumps, yawns... and then wags his head in slow-motion fury.

This one is a "catchable" fifty-pounder that, after a solid fifteen minutes, succumbs to nothing more than brute force and well-tied knots. Hauling him toward the boat, I am thinking about my camera. The hero shot. As a big-tarpon novice, it is impossible not to. But at the last moment, with Cutchin's grip firmly on the fish's lower jaw, an abraded leader suddenly snaps, and the fish defiantly swims away. My second landing of the trip on the following day ends the same way: the weak link now a jiggered shock tippet with flawed strength or perfect timing, depending on how you look at it.

Although we had planned for a fourth day, the wind finally got the better of us, and by the final dawn it is "humpin' a woofer." Cutchin still gets a kick out of hearing younger guides hipply tossing around his old phrase whenever it is so windy down in the Keys that "you might as well go home and screw the dog."

Woofer winds or not, the truth is that after nine hours a day as the sole angler on the bow, my broken back had just about fused to my fallen arches. By the third day, I was happy to have a photographer along to share the pain because, up until that point, I had not been able to convince Cutchin to pick up the fly rod. "It's a lot easier to guide," he demurs. "You can choose to remain calm."

But that's a gentle lie.

It is the wind. The tide. The vector of boat and intersecting fish. The approaching clouds and attitude of the sun. A mismanaged fly line unwittingly coiled around an ankle. The customer's skill and his luck. From the platform, it's the variables in constant flux that make the guide as much the angler as the client.

However, in twelve years of guiding and another decade of annual pilgrimages to Key West, Cutchin says one thing never seems to change. "People who catch their first big tarpon always tell me they wish they had gotten started earlier." Of course, later is better than never, and when you finally do make it to the buzzer, nothing else really matters. The ride is over. Your scores are in, and the bull is back in the pen.