Just watch where you put your feet!

The Price of Paradise“Fly-fishing Florida’s fun flats, fists full of fighting fury” etc. Well, we’ve read it all before and of course, for some lucky people, the dreams do come true. The Triple. The tarpon, permit and bonefish in one day… the Grand Slam…etc. What the really glossy mags rave on about… Well, you won’t get too much of that in this article. Getting a little more ‘real’ for a moment will soon determine that your quality of fishing experience is all too often in direct proportion to your pocket depth.I recently took a trip out to Mouse-land (sans children, which was quite a trick in itself) and I think discovered a very efficient and economical way of travelling and fishing in the States which doesn’t have to cost the earth. Apart from a cheap flight – try Dial-a-flight, we went with Virgin – the trick is to rent a motorhome; what they call here a ‘recreational vehicle’. What the locals call an ‘R.V.’ Although several companies, including a European one, are also in this business, we took our vehicle from a well advertised US company called Cruise America and we were quite satisfied with our deal.These rented luxury land-craft are not cramped like so many of their UK counterparts. The vehicle we took will accommodate six at a push, four comfortably or two with loads of space spare to swing cats. Ours was 26ft long. This might sound big but on US-sized roads it was no more of a problem to handle than a VW minibus on Euro-sized roads, and was quite small compared to some of the RV’s we encountered. Naturally, designed for the American market, the rental RV comes with a zillion package options at a ‘small extra’ price. I suggest you take the lot, which means you get to travel light with sleeping-bags, pillows etc all included within the package. If you nag the guys at the vehicle collection point to give you extra towels and pillows etc when you collect the RV, you won’t regret it. You can never have enough of those things.We ended up paying about £500 for a seven day hire and, even with a V10 petrol engine sucking away, you’ll have trouble burning £100’s worth of fuel in a week. If you exceed spending this much then you are spending far too much time in the driving seat and not enough time with a fishing rod.An RV allows a small party of anglers to cover a huge amount of ground, and therefor water. I found it to be a very sensible option which thumbs it’s nose at the ‘no-vacancy’ signs that can sometimes turn those US fly-drive holidays into a nightmare. The RV has all the basic amenities you would expect of it, plus little things we might forget to ask about as standard. A generator and air conditioning for example. An RV allows stand-alone camping at prime fishing locations. It also makes fishing in remote areas viable for us tourists; being there when the tides are right, making things easy etc – though none of this ‘roughing it’ stuff is essential. If you want to do as we did and take it easy, a huge network of campgrounds which cater purely for RV’s are established right across America. Many of these are right at the waters edge. Many with adjoining bait-shops, boat or canoe hire and guides available if needed. Let me dispel one myth that the Brits may have straight away – RV parks are NOT places where you will find the ‘trailer-types’ we see on those American TV shows where everyone yells at each other. That is a different world altogether. RV parks are generally inhabited by older or retired people, or by ‘Snowbirds’. These are those people who live in the northern States or Canada who come down to Florida each year to escape the fierce northern winters. These will be amongst the friendliest and nicest people you can ever hope to meet anywhere on the planet. They have nothing to prove and you will find them exceptionally generous and helpful. If, like me, you live and work in a big city, you may at first mistrust their open-handed friendliness. Don’t worry – that will just be you bringing the city with you, it will pass. Our first few days in Florida were the start of a steep learning curve. For the first few nights we rented a car and stayed at motels. These are usually of a very high standard and the big chains, Best Western, Day’s Inn etc will rarely disappoint – unless, as we did, you turn up on the Florida Keys with no pre-booking on a public holiday weekend. Then, look out, because the motels here are not so pocket-friendly and the less expensive ones will sell out pronto. At the slightest excuse, the Americans will celebrate. We were on the Keys for St Patrick’s Day and were lucky to even get a room, let alone an inexpensive one. We eventually paid $160 (£100 ) a night for a place little better than what Billy Butlin offers at Bognor. Even the campsites will rip your arm off at these times. To use a Key West RV park to stay overnight in your own motor-home will set you back close on a cool $100, so don’t say you weren’t warned! Of course the motels on the Keys are bound to be far more expensive than the rest of Florida. Get back on the mainland and reality gets a grip again. The same motel room that cost $200 per night on Key West can cost a mere $40 or $50 elsewhereYou may gather then that I was not impressed with the place. Wrong! I was made only too aware that I was in the world’s premier sport-fishing location. Everywhere we went on the Keys we met the most friendly and helpful people who fell over themselves to assist us. Millionaires and beach-bums alike were smiling and greeting us at every turn. You simply have to give it a whirl. You’ll love it.

Fishing

If you fancy guided fishing on the bonefish flats of the Florida Keys, be prepared to dig deep and shell out bigtime. Your first time out you’ll stand little chance of catching unless you have a guide to point out what to look for, and these guys don’t come cheap (I guess they can’t afford to, living here!). My guide charged $275 for a 4 hour trip. I was told later that this is a common regular price so I was in no way ripped off. The upside is that after just that one trip, you’ll learn enough to be able to know what to look for and so be able to either wade the flats yourself or rent a boat to cut down on the costs.The bonefish on the Islamorada flats are usually solitary fish but they are also big ones. They average eight pounds, monsters in bonefish terms. I only saw one ‘pod’ of perhaps five fish, swimming deep and fast across our bows, the others were solitary swimmers, vanishing in the blink of an eye. No wonder they are called the ‘grey ghosts’. They are fast, gone before you can saw ‘Hey, look there’s a bonefish’. Cloud cover is the enemy on the flats. With bright sunshine, polaroids come into play and reveal all. My guide, Jim, seemed to know his stuff. He told me what to do.Most of the time, bonefishing is about looking. There is no point in continually casting, because it is obvious there are no fish to cast at. You stand and you wait, and you look. The guide poles the boat gently across the flats whilst you, the angler, stands in the prow, fly-rod at the ready. Stalking the fish.My guide instructed me. We were looking for puffs of mud which would change the water colour, indicating feeding bones. Or look for bonefish tails waving above the surface. I saw an area of water the size of a dining table change from azure to turquoise and pointed. “Ray-mud” said the rich man polling the boat.At first I was not too sure if I had mis-heard, that this was perhaps a reference to his chosen brand of sun-glasses. Only when he poled the boat over to show me did I see what he meant. A sting-ray was flying through the shallow water having raised the puff of mud as it lifted from it’s resting place. Wow. This was like a nature programme on TV!So busy was I watching the ray that I almost missed it. “There” said Jim, pointing. Amazing! A huge forked tail was waving at me near a clump of mangrove, a bonefish giving me the ‘V’ sign, poking it’s finny fingers out of the water!Okay. This was it then. That fish was a very long cast away, but the distance was getting shorter by the second as the breeze drifted us ever closer. This was going to be a challenge – accuracy at distance has never been my forte when casting a fly. I aerialised some line, made two false casts and gave it my best shot. The second I shot the line I knew this was probably the best cast I have ever made. The line was flowing out of the rod tip, performing a perfectly straight line towards the target. As the mainline touched the water and began to unroll I could see it all happening in slow-motion. Inside my head, I strutted. Hey! As my teenagers say, “Is this cool or what?” The leader performed the magic trick I can never quite manage on the trout lake at home. Dead straight, it unfurled and dropped the fly right on the nose of the bonefish. Spot on! Never in my life have I ever made a cast so accurate, so straight, so true. So perfect.”Noooo!!” I became aware that my guide was screaming at me at the same time as I was watching a spooked bonefish take off across the flats at 100 mph.Silence returned. “Guess I should have told you, you should always cast 4 or 5 foot away from the fish and let it come to you. Otherwise you’ll spook it”.”Thanks” replied the Limey who had just crossed half a planet and is going to get just one crack at this. (Mental note: Bang goes his bloody tip!)So. That was the closest I came to catching a bonefish that day. And after grilling the guide, it also became apparent that I would stand a much greater chance of hooking one of these creatures if I used a live prawn. Hence, my ‘fly-fishing for bonefish’ swiftly became a ‘fly-rodding’ trip. All to no avail however. They still wouldn’t play.We did see heaps of rays and small sharks that were easy meat, a bit too easy really. The little bonnet shark was one we didn’t ignore. “Chuck a prawn at ’em then watch ’em grab it and go.” And do they go! Wheee…. Still, mustn’t get distracted. Now… where’s dem bones gone?Pass.Back to the bucks for a minute. Elsewhere in Florida the guided trips can be less costly. At Lake Okechobee I saw adverts for guided bass trips that went $200 for 10 hours. This is rather more affordable if you are fishing with a friend but still a bit pricey for the average Brit pockets when going it alone. (Or is it? Just keep reminding yourself that you can’t come back next week, bite the bullet and go for it!) In many places it is possible to hire a boat, even if there is no board advertising that fact. Ask at one of the many bait shops you’ll see. People here will fall over themselves to help you. On the Keys, boats (and they are very good ones, not old buckets) seem to average about $100 day, which again, split between two friends is not so pricey – if you keep reminding yourself where you are. On the mainland things generally cost a lot less. Look in our holiday pages on this site, you will find ads there for guided trips from Islamorada and the Keys, which in retrospect, I can really recommend as being the most sensibly priced fishing you will find anywhere on the Keys.I took a fly-rod with me to Florida and I had a lot of fun with it. And most of that fun was had for free. Almost anywhere on the Everglades you can just pull up on the edge of the roadside and step over the barrier. You’ll have a ‘canal’ draining the mangrove swamps in front of you. Now watch out, look very, very carefully at the near bankside. When you are sure there are no huge alligators to tread on you can start looking for fish. (Do it the other way around and you’ve done it wrong). And yes, there are a lot of them around. You might have to change swims if you are catching a lot of fish as the splashing will attract the ‘gators. At one point I was hooking fish and dragging them over the back of an alligator. Often it was a race to see if I could land the fish before the ‘gator grabbed it – a race I nearly didn’t always win! And a five hundred pound ‘gator takes a while to land on fly tackle, never mind the unhooking problems!I found that casting big fluffy lures with long-shanked hooks gave me some chance of catching just about everything, even the alligator-gar fish which were a target species for me. If you see that it’s one of these things that has grabbed your fly, feed it a little line before striking. I ‘hooked’ at least 10 of these things before I managed to actually stick the hook in one for long enough to land it – the mouths are so toothy they are very difficult to hook. I have wanted to catch one of these things for years, they are so strange looking. The back-end is pike-shaped, the front is a cross between a garfish and a crocodile. The teeth have to be seen to be believed. All the ones I saw in Florida were small but I’m told there are a few secret locations elsewhere in the States where they grow to 150lb. If that really is true, as Arnie said, I’ll be back! Other species I took on the fly included bluegills, which are a pretty little fish that fight completely out of all proportion to their size, crucian-like, and of course, the expected bass. Nothing big but all great fun on a flyrod.

Just watch where you put your feet!