Waiting For Godzilla

"I've seen them spawning often in the shallows," says Tom Evans. "Daisy-chaining in circles, nose to tail, with the males on their sides so that you see that laser light for a long way off. There's milt in the water, too. Maybe the high fresh-water content around here is necessary to the success of the spawn."

Whatever the explanation, the fact of their presence is reason enough to bring the fly-rod fraternity to Homosassa each May with a glint in the eye and all tackle at the ready. "We've kept this place more or less a secret for two years now," said Bob Montgomery . "The first rule a fisherman learns is never to tell where the hot spots are. But all the really serious flyrodders know about it by now anyway. Still, a lot of them feel that by blowing the whistle you'll get all kinds of amateurs down here in their skiffs, bumbling around and blowing through, putting the fish down. They're like as not to go running full tilt over a pod of rolling tarpon without even seeing them. But they'd find it hard fishing here—lots of rocks to rip out your power drive if you don't know the waters, and nothing to fish but big tarpon." He cackled and rubbed his sunburnt hands. "I reckon the amateurs won't hang around for long."

Bob and Gene Montgomery had towed their skiffs—an 18-foot Maverick and a Hewes of equal length, powered by Evinrudes of 140 and 115 hp, respectively—up from Key West early in May. It is a long, grueling drive, a dull 10� hours, but they were booked with clients through the ninth of June, so at up to $175 a day the payoff would be worth it. Only the serious come to Homosassa , and the serious are willing to pay dearly for that one good shot.

But the weather played the fly-fishermen false—at least for the early weeks. The entire eastern half of the country was flinching under a miserably cold spring, one that put everything from asparagus and crab apples to trout and tarpon at least two weeks late. A gusty norther blew what few tarpon were in back out to sea, roiling the inshore waters to opaqueness and making life in a skiff a sea-drenched misery. Then the weather settled as a benign high moved into the northern Florida region, and the fish began reappearing.

The 6�-mile ride downriver from the Riverside Villas to the Gulf is a trip on a time machine. Indeed, no sooner does a visitor leave the fast-food joints and shopping malls that flank Highway 19 north from Tampa - St. Petersburg than he is back in the Florida of the early 1950s. Live oaks, winding two-lane blacktop roads, simple houses of pastel stucco or white clapboard underscore the change to raucous plastic-fantastic that has overtaken so much of Florida in the past generation. The river itself is timeless: porpoises and manatees roll slowly in the dark morning water; thin tendrils of mist rise in the green bankside gloom; a bobwhite whistles as loud and as clear as a boatswain's pipe from a jungly patch behind a red and white bait house ("Shinners [sic] and Mullet").

Once past the rickety fresh-fish shanty and the NO WAKE sign downstream from the motel docks, the guides nail the throttles of their skiffs. It's a riverine slalom through the channel markers at 35 mph, vaulting the wakes of slower commercial boats, blasting past homely fishing cottages and a few big, newer homes. Halfway down to the river's mouth, Bob Montgomery points to a stretch of rock fill on the right bank. "Big development going in there," he yells over the engine roar. "Sugarmill Woods, slick stuff."

A final stern-twitching turn and the skiffs line out into the Gulf. The sun has whitened now from its blood-orange rise, and the shallow vees of the hulls thump loud and hollow on a light southwesterly chop. After a 15-minute run, the boats are throttled back to a slow crawl and angled in toward the distant beach.

"We call this Black Rock," says Bob, "because of the dark bottom. Usually in the early morning it's dead calm out here and you can see the tarpon rolling a long way off. But with a chop like we've got this morning, they won't be showing much on the surface. This low light makes it near impossible to see the fish until you're right on them—and by then they're spooked and splitting. We'll give it a shot anyway." He kills the engine and unseats his 18-foot push pole. "Back to the old grind."

But it proves a bad day at Black Rock, and after an hour we pole back out to deeper water and then run down to the next stop—a place called the Bird Racks. "See those four or five stakes sticking out of the water?" says Bob. "Back during the war, the government built a big platform out here for the birds to, well, sit on. When the droppings got thick enough, they'd scrape off the guano to get chemicals for high explosives. Sets you wondering: How many fish did how many cormorants have to eat in order to sink one Japanese destroyer?"

A man who spends much of his waking life at the business end of a push pole must have something to think about.