I have a few good friends that live down here in Florida. Another, and the one that hired me to come down here and teach the seminar yesterday for the Backcountry Fly Fishing Club, is Frank Catino. Frank is a native Floridian and longtime guide down here. Today Frank took me out to try for alligator gar on the fly.
Frank took me to the Turkey Creek Sanctuary. It’s a beautiful piece of water where not much has changed over time other than there can be heaps of canoers and kayakers. The winding waterway is a bird viewers dream with the occasional alligator and turtles sunning on every log.
Alligator gar is not the usual target of Franks. In fact, he’s never woke up and specifically targeted them on fly. He’s the man for snook, tarpon and redfish to name a few. So the quest for gar something neither of us knew much about which is was what made today especially fun.
Though frank doesn’t fish for gar he has some places where he sees them a lot. And each of these places was loaded with monsters. Some of these alligator gar were over 5ft long and bigger around in girth than my thigh! But most paid no attention to my flies. There was one that followed and nipped at. This got me incredibly excited and I was possessed the rest of the day but no luck.
I wish I had more success to report on the gar but there’s a ton to learn here. If I could go out with Frank every day for a week I think between the two of us we’d figure it out. Perhaps even Mr. Bruun would wander up here and fish with us. No doubt between the three of us we’d figure it out. But for today the only fish landed were a couple of jack crevalle on the 6-weight.
Todays blog is shorter than it probably should be. We had blast out there. Unfortunately I’ve picked up the crud. It was only a matter of time with all this traveling and shows and the stressful January with dad passing. Tomorrow I’ll fly back to Idaho and I’ll have only Tuesday to recover. Wednesday its off to the Great Northwoods of Wisconsin for a weekend of ice fishing. I need to get better!
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