Jeff and I had not fished together for about a year and a half and I never made it to any flats in 2012 so we decided to put together a short trip to South Florida to get together and escape the Seattle and DC winters.   The plan was to fish Biscayne Bay and the Everglades since they offered the best bet in the winter months for finding fish.    Of course I was keeping an eye on the Miami weather weeks in advance and things were looking great until a few days before the trip when a cold front was suddenly scheduled to hit mid-week.   Well, the weather gods had other plans is store which is typical of most of my trips to Florida.

Monday, February 25

We both arrived on Sunday evening and did the short drive from MIA to the Mayfair hotel in Coconut Grove, our base for the first few days when we’d be fishing the north end of Biscayne Bay.   We had dinner at El Jaguar and then organized gear and got some rest before getting up to start our first day.

The day dawned beautiful, mostly clear skies and warm already at 6:00 a.m.   After a quick breakfast at Starbucks we headed out for Key Biscayne to meet our guide Capt. Steve Horowitz for the day.   We got gear on board and headed down to the bridge where a school of big tarpon had recently moved in.   Soon we found ourselves surrounded by rolling tarpon and our hopes were high.  We fished these tarpon for a few hours, setting up drifts and moving through the school casting at rollers and blindly since the fish were milling all about.   Nada.   We moved on to South Beach hoping to find hungrier tarpon there but instead found nothing at all.  Back to the lee behind the bridge for a bit but even the rollers had slowed down and all the fish we saw were laid up deep and not interested in anything.

So, off to the bonefish flats we went.  It was still mostly sunny with a few clouds beginning to build up but overall the wind was light and things were looking pretty good.  At the first flat with me up we poled a short distance and saw a group of three 10 lbs. plus bones with a decent setup.  I overcast a bit and as I was trying to move the fly into position the lead fish went under my line and off they went.  That turned out to be the best shot of the day.  I had one other decent shot at a pair of bones and cast perfectly had the fish not turned as my line was in mid-air, argh.   After that it was an afternoon of semi-frustration.  We only saw a few other bonefish and the clouds had built enough that we saw them as we ran them over instead of far enough out to get a cast.  We had a few hail-Mary type shots but nothing that great.   We even staked out at a few spots where fish would enter the flats and Capt. Steve tried chumming them up with live shrimp which was something I’d never seen before on a bonefish trip.  He claimed it sometimes worked but not this time.   We probably only saw a dozen bonefish all afternoon and had 3-4 actual shots at them, tough day but there is always tomorrow.

We got back to the hotel and went for a run up the Commodore Trail along the bay which was a nice place to run aside from a few stretches that were just the shoulder of the road.   I got to grab a geocache along  the way for my new eastern-most and southern-most cache.  After the run we hit the roof-top pool to cool off before walking to dinner.

Tuesday, February 26

We woke up to wind this morning, much more that had been forecast the day before.   On top of it being high wind, it was blowing right out of the south so straight up Biscayne.  Our plan was to fish the bridge lee for tarpon early then hope the wind died down to hit a few flats in the afternoon.   We pulled on gore-tex and headed out for an early morning shower on the short boat ride from the launch to the bridge.

The tarpon were still there but not as active as yesterday.   A few other boats were employing the same drift and cast strategy, several fly fishers and one boat with bait guys.   We hit this area hard for a few hours, throwing a few different flies at the fish.  Each drift had a bit of excitement as we’d see a fish break bait or roll but nobody wanted to eat flies.  The bait guys hooked up and were into a long, drawn out fight with a 100+ lbs fish that we watched for close to an hour and they still hadn’t landed.

We decided to go to a somewhat sheltered flat close by and see what it was like.  We arrived to find the flat already milky from the wind stirring everything up and the clouds had moved in so visibility was pretty poor.  We covered the flat then staked out near the channel where the bottom was light and we might have a chance of seeing a fish or two moving up onto the flat.  Capt. Steve  tried chumming up bonefish again with live shrimp but all we ever saw were two boxfish that would reappear every so often and get us to look at them.   No bones came up on the flat, or if they did we couldn’t see them.

Back to the tarpon hole we went, it was the only place that wasn’t blowing and we knew there were fish there.  We were trapped by the wind to this one lee.  After a few passes Jeff finally had a grab and set the hook hard like it was a 100 lbs tarpon but it turned out to be a 1 lbs mutton snapper instead.   At least we had a fish in the boat.   Then he had another grab, this time a small jack.   We decided to make lemonade from the lemons we’d been dealt and put a small Clouser on the 9-weight and began casting to the fish that were feeding in the area, keeping the tarpon rod ready should a tarpon roll.

For the next hour or so we caught fish or at least had a grab on almost every cast.   I got my first ever Bluefish, I didn’t even know blues got that far south.  We caught a lot of Spanish Mackerel, some of them pretty nice sized.  We caught jacks.  I even caught a lizard fish.   Not what we came for but we did get quite a few fish into the boat.  I hooked up one larger fish that came off before I ever got a look at it, no idea what that was.

We finally bagged it when the bite stopped.  Still no tarpon and we had a wet boat ride back to the launch as the wind was still ripping.   Oh well, at least we had more time for a run along the Commodore Trail when we got back to the hotel.   The weather wasn’t looking great for Wednesday at all, rain and clouds all day in the Miami area.  We played phone tag with Capt. Raul Motoro of Biscayne Bay Fishing, our guide for the next few days, before settling on a back-up plan of fishing out of Islamorada where we might escape the weather a bit better than south Biscayne or Flamingo.

Wednesday, February 27

We got up early, packed up, grabbed breakfast at Starbucks and headed south.  Soon we were off the turnpike and onto US1 heading out of Florida City and the mainland into the Keys.   We passed all the Florida landmarks familiar to readers of Tim Dorsey’s Serge Storms books – the giant lobster, the giant conch, the Caribbean Club, the Hurricane Monument, … and headed into La Siesta Marina to meet Raul.

We rigged up for tarpon, bonefish, redfish and permit having no idea of what were were going to find during the day, the plan just being to try and outrun the weather and fish where we could.   First stop, a basin out of Islamorada to look for tarpon.  We poled the area a bit and only saw one laid up fish, not enough to stick around for so off we went to the north-east in search of rojos.

At the first stop we had decent light and were soon spotting a few scattered reds.   After missing a few fish I got off a good cast and had a fish come up and grab the Everglades Special like a trout sipping a #18 Comparadun but the strip strike didn’t connect and I never actually felt the fish at all, we think he grabbed and spit it out before I could even set the hook.

We hit another spot full of reds but the visibility was poor due to clouds and we were mostly running fish over and spooking them out.    We’d get the occasional shot at them, had a few follows and Jeff had another one eat but spit it out quickly so no hookup.   I was up and got a good cast to a fish in a pothole and had a grab and missed the hookup.  I cast again, he ate again and again I missed.  Next cast he ate a third time and this time I connected.  It wasn’t a redfish but a big gator trout that ate so the fight was pretty tame but it was definitely the largest seatrout I’d ever hooked weighing in at 4-5 lbs.

In the late afternoon we decided to go look for tarpon in one more spot as the water was pretty flat and the reds just were not moving much so we kept running over them.  We got to the spot we wanted to fish and there was a boat staked up and working fish so we moved a bit to the incoming channel.   There we immediately saw fins coming up the channel and we got set up.  Jeff was up and hit the first fish on the head putting him down.  Within a few minutes another fish rolled up in the channel close by and Jeff had a perfect setup to it.  The fish turned on the fly, began to follow, ate and the game was on.   For the next half hour Jeff did a great job playing the fish which Raul estimated at 85-90 lbs.   He got it close a few times before finally getting the leader into the guides which constitutes a landed fish when it comes to tarpon.   Jeff kept trying to get the fish up to the boat and was close a few times and then the tarpon ran down current, gave one last jump and broke the leader off under a ton of pressure.   It was a caught fish even though we had no fish at the boat photos.

We gave one more pass through the area and saw one laid up fish that I had a great cast to until we realized it was lying in the other direction and I’d cast the tail instead of the head.  That was it for the day but it was a success, we finally got what we came for – a big tarpon and I got a trophy sized trout to boot.

Capt. Raul had made the right decision for a Plan B, or maybe it was Plan C, going out of Islamorada instead of south Biscayne where it had been rainy and nasty all day.  Though we had tough conditions much of the day but it was better than any other location around and had hopes for our last day since it would be the day before the real front moved through the area and temps got down into the 40s.   We all hit the bar at Loreli to watch the sunset before Jeff and I went to the Green Turtle for dinner then drove back to Florida City.  There we were greeted with a note from the hotel that we’d be losing power in the evening so to turn the AC on max before going to bed so it wouldn’t get too hot after the power was shut down.   The Holiday Inn Express was already a huge letdown after the Mayfair, not only would we have no rooftop pool overlooking Biscayne Bay and real glasses in the room, we wouldn’t even have electricity.

Thursday, February 28

We drove back down to Islamorada from Florida City in a light drizzle in the morning, launching again from La Siesta in hopes of the reds getting a bit more active today.   When we stopped at the Key Largo Starbucks though we noticed flags flapping hard in the wind and the leaden skies looked more like Puget Sound than South Florida.   The temp had also dropped quite a bit, I wished I’d grabbed my insulated jacket to put under the gore-tex for the ride out, it was downright cold.

We took off for redfish flats hoping to find some lees with fish.   It was a pretty rough ride into the north wind before we finally arrived at a key with a bit of lee to fish in.  Visibility was horrible due to the clouds and we’d only occasionally get a bit of light and could see.  We spent the whole morning with conditions like this, hitting small pieces of flats where we could tuck out of the wind and maybe find a fish or two.   We saw the majority of fish in one small corner but unfortunately had pretty much run into them and had the entire group of reds, trout and snook completely riled up by the time we saw them and I never got off a decent shot.  We found a few fish here and there, had a few follows but got nothing to eat.   Conditions deteriorated as the day wore on as the clouds thickened and the water got milkier from the wind.

After lunch we headed back towards Islamorada to see if we could find tarpon in the channel again.  We stopped first at a channel where there had been jacks roaming around.  We staked out at a few spots and tossed a popper and Clouser in hopes of getting a bend in the rod but even the jacks had evidently headed for Havana and warmer waters.   We took off for the tarpon basin and ran over one laid up fish just as we hit the area.  We spent some time casting into the channel and waiting to see if some fish began moving through but only saw one tarpon the whole time.   Finally we called it a day early and headed into the launch.  The weather totally killed us today and the way our luck went I wondered if we’d even be able to buy fish for dinner in the Keys.

In need of at least seeing tarpon eat we hit the bar at Worldwide Sportsman and watched people throw bait in the pool to be attacked instantly by big tarpon.   Then we stopped at the Hurricane Monument so I could be like Serge and take in some Florida history and grab a quick new southern-most geocache from the coral head at the monument.   We drove up to Key Largo for dinner at Hobos before continuing to Florida City where we at least had power for the night.

All in all a pretty typical winter Florida trip where we got hit by fronts and had to work hard for fish.  As a tarpon trip it was a success, Jeff got a very nice fish and the first fly caught fish of the season for Capt. Raul.   We saw a lot of tarpon, saw a few bonefish, saw a lot of surly redfish and managed to catch one very nice trout and an assortment of ‘junk’ fish.  I got to add a new species to my list and overall we caught seven different species of fish.

Catching is only part of fishing though in any trip.  It was great to catch up with Jeff again after a pretty long time.  It was good to get out of the cold and gray of Seattle and actually get a bit of color in the sun we did have.    Coconut Grove was an interesting area to stay in since there was easy access to the bike/running trail and great restaurants within a few blocks walk each night.    We had good conversation on the boat each day, saw manatees, tons of birds, sharks, rays and other life on the flats.