Weakfish

IN JUNE 1987, Norm Bartlett caught a 14-pound, 2-ounce weakfish, or gray trout, and he caught it on 4-pound tippet.

"That was during the height of the weakfish population's cycle, and I was trying to break the 2-pound record. We went over to Delaware Bay and had planned to fish Brandywine Light. But a shop owner told us it would be a zoo out there with all the boats. He gave us the compass heading for a couple of other lights, and we found the biggest school of gray trout I've ever seen, daisy-chaining around 14-Foot Light like tarpon. I broke several big fish off on 2-pound tippet, then switched to 4-pound. Every cast brought a long chain of fish after the fly, and all you had to do was twitch it like a jig to make them strike. In fact, I tied the fly on a jig hook, and it looked like a jig."

The fish ran like hell, so they released anchor and followed it all the way back around the lighthouse to where it first struck. The fish ensconced itself under a ledge, and Norm thought the fish was gone and that he was hung up. Rod straight, he pulled on the fly line as if he were hung on a branch, which pulled the fish to the surface. After 45 minutes, he lifted the record fish into the boat.

Striped Bass

JOE BROOKS'S account of the capture of his record striper came out more than 35 years ago. Yet if records are made to be broken, consider the irony in Beryl Bliss catching the current world-beater on what else — a Brooks Blonde bucktail. While the application states that the 64-pound, 8-ounce monster was taken in July of 1973 on the Smith River on a 12-pound tippet, it simply refers to the fly as a "white streamer." Fact is, the fly is a Brooks Blonde, tied with genuine embossed tinsel, which is not even manufactured anymore.

Many readers who received their introduction to saltwater fly fishing through Joe Brooks's writing will have no difficulty recognizing the pedigree of this fly.

It's also ironic that the striper record was caught on the West Coast, where some government agencies consider them an invasive species, during the era when East Coast striped-bass stocks collapsed. Now that the Right Coast is producing bountiful "year-classes," and with larger fish being taken each season, one wonders how long Left Coast saltwater fly fishers will keep the striper-record bragging rights.

Bonefish

JOE PATORNO enjoyed a great year in 1997. He went to work for Jimmy Buffet, who was then working on the play Don't Stop the Carnival. Joe was hired to set up and run the nightclub in the playhouse. The day Pantorno closed the deal with the building owners, he decided to celebrate with an afternoon of fishing with Capt. Joel Kalman in Biscayne Bay.

"It was terribly windy, I mean blowing like hell. But Joel's a real fishy captain. We found a school of huge fish right away." Due to the wind and churned up water, Joel was fishing with a bright, heavy, size 4 Gotcha.

"There were much bigger fish in the school than the one that took my fly," he said. "In fact, those fish were so big, they looked like stripers schooled up on the flats."

The fish ran off into the channel and headed straight for Mercy Hospital. It nearly spooled Joe. Almost an hour later, the fish was in the livewell. They took it to the nearest marina, weighed it, and released it. The bone weighed a whopping 15 pounds, 8 ounces.

Tarpon

ON MAY 11, 2001, Jim Holland Jr. and his father hired Steve Kilpatrick with the explicit intent of catching a record tarpon.

After several days of tough weather and poor fishing, the weather cleared, and a run of fish appeared fresh from the ocean.

"A school of fish came down the beach. Jim Jr. tossed a Lemon Drop at them. He got three straight refusals. I told them to try that crazy hair bug we tied last night," said Kilpatrick.

Jim Jr. made a nice long cast, and a big fish took it immediately. It tried to jump but it was so big, it got only about halfway out of the water. An hour later, it dragged them into a channel.

"A couple of bait fishermen warned us about a big shark they'd seen, and sure enough, dunuh dunuh, here comes a dorsal. I cranked up the big engine and put the boat on top of the tarpon. Every time the shark made an aggressive move, I put the Merc in neutral and revved it. Eventually the shark gave up.

"When I tried to pull the fish in the boat and couldn't budge him, I knew this was a special fish. I can't say why he took that crazy fly and not a traditional pattern except that when they examined the stomach contents, it was full of stuff you find offshore."

Snook

ON APRIL 23, 1993, fishing out of Chokoloskee, Florida, Rex Garret landed a 30-pound, 4-ounce snook on 20-pound class tippet. The fly that caught the record snook is a relatively obscure pattern called a MirrOlure, after the famous 52 mm plug that has been a favorite snook bait for years.

Capt. Pete Villani and Rex were poling down a muddy tidal creek just after sunup when Pete spotted the telltale yellow dorsal and tail of a finning snook. "It had been unusually cold for April," Captain Pete said. "The sun was shining on the shallow mud flats, and I think the fish was in there trying to warm up." According to Captain Pete, "The fish ignored the first three presentations. It sunk out of sight after the third toss, and I thought that was it. But after a little while, it popped back up." The fourth cast landed right in front of the fish and sank with its deer hair and hackles breathing. The cold, hungry snook took the fly, and Garret took the record.