Waiting For Godzilla

The breeze freshens as the morning wears along, and the sun is still too low for good spotting. But the water is clear, as evidenced by the sudden appearance of shallow-lying rocks that could tear the motor out of any unwary skiff that came blasting through. Six other skiffs have joined us, four of them late arrivals that had bypassed Black Rock. "The breakfast eaters," Bob calls the. with a contemptuous sniff. He himself is a juice and coffee man, a fact seemingly at odds with his Falstaffian girth—until you see him polish off his own two sandwiches by 9:30 and then look soulfully at yours, which you're saving for lunch. But sandwiches are a poor substitute for tarpon.

"That's the hell of it up here," Bob says. "In the Keys, at least if there's no tarpon cruising, you see lots of other things—sharks and rays and barracuda, maybe even permit or mutton snapper or bonefish. Here it's big tarpon or nothing. That's why I think this place won't catch on with the amateurs. That plus the fact that most fly-fishermen don't like to tie into really big fish on a regular basis. It's more fun to jump 10 or 20 smaller fish in a day than to spend your life cranking and pumping until your arms are down to your ankles."

We move farther south along the coast to the third and, by this time of day, the best spot, a vast reach of light-bottomed water that the guides call " Oklahoma ." The nickname derives from a bottom of yellow sand studded with stony outcrop-pings, but through Polaroids the water looks lime green. Margaritaville on the rocks. The wind has died altogether now, except for light and vagrant puffs that cat's-paw the slick from time to time. The sun is straight up, and suddenly we are into tarpon. Billy Pate, a laconic, graying tarpon tamer from Greenville , S.C. and Islamorada, gets the first hookup—a good-sized fish that leaps three times so closely together that it might be three separate fish. After each jump it crashes back into the water like a skinned spruce log off a lumbering flume.

Montgomery and I are watching this spectacle, mouths slightly agape like a couple of kindergartners, when I catch a flash of movement out of the corner of my left eye.

"Cripes!"

The five tarpon, boring in from the southwest, are within 20 feet of the skiff before I can cock my arm and send the 11-weight line hissing toward them. Too late. Even as the 5/0 streamer fly hits the water, the tarpon are turning away from us. I twitch it back in anyway. You never know if they will turn again. This time they don't.

"Asleep at the switch, both of us," says Montgomery ruefully. "Those were big fish, too. Maybe 150, maybe better."

Tarpon are working all around us now in pods of two or three or even half a dozen, inshore and out in the deeper water as well. This is nothing to what the action will be when the weather warms and calms down, according to Montgomery , but still it is difficult even for the professionals to decide which way to approach them. Stake out and let them come to you? Or go poling after them? And what do you do when you see a nearby school even bigger than the one you're descending upon?

A few hundred yards inshore we see Gene Montgomery poling madly to the south, leaning into it like a seagoing Mike Tully . His 24-volt electric trolling motor is churning at full blower as he uses it along with his pole to try to catch up with a moving school of fish. Suddenly, unpredictably as ever, the school stops and begins daisy-chaining around a clump of slim, silvery ballyhoo. Gene closes on the feeding tarpon and his client casts to them—once, twice, three times. Finally, he makes a good cast, and we see him lean back and sock the hook into the taker's hard mouth. Bam, bam, bam—and once again bam. The fish takes off to the north in a series of long, high leaps, stripping line so fast we can hear it go from a hundred yards away.

"They got a mouth as hard as a loggerhead's shell," says Bob. "This ain't trout fishing nor even salmon fishing. You really got to sock it to them, the more the merrier. That's not Godzilla, though. Maybe 80 pounds. The great-great grandson of Godzilla."