Tag: Key West

TWO DECADES AGO, Dotty Ballantyne was vacationing with her teenaged sons in Jackson, Wyoming. She and her sister owned a mountain home there. That’s when she decided that her family should all learn to fly fish. What followed now carries Dotty on a whirlwind romp through the rarified heights of competitive angling. A Baltimore native and a graduate of...

Back in the 40’s and 50’s, there was a small lodge in Islamorada, which catered specifically to anglers call the Barothy Lodge. The owner, Vic Barothy, also had several others including the Turneffe Island Lodge in Belize, and a second Barothy Lodge on an island south of Cuba, known then as the Isle of Pines. This island was later renamed the Isle...

Thomas R. Pero: You bring a unique perspective to the tarpon story. As a young man you moved to Key West in the 1960s before there was a single full-time flats guide living there. And you knew and spent time on the water with many of the old-time guides. Thomas McGuane: When I was first down there in the late ’60s a certain amount of the world that had...

Pete McDonald, author/collaborator with Tosh Brown on the new The Blitz: Fly Fishing The Atlantic Migration (excerpt here), captures the quirkiness and superficial insanity of the tourist- and fish-rich lower keys in a short essay on Fishing Jones: "There was a bluegrass duo at the bar and after the 13th request for 'Dueling Banjos' the guitar player...

FISHING GUIDES are fond of sayings, and here is one of their harsher assessments: "The angler is just a weak link between the guide and the fish." On a splendid May morning south of Key West, I am about to test the tensile strength of that maxim, tightly drawn, as it is, along the imaginary line between my guide and about seventy-five tarpon fresh in from...

MC: WHAT WAS THE UNIQUE chemistry or alignment of the stars that brought everyone together in Key West in the early '70s? GDLV: What I might do, just because it's easier for me, is to go back even a little bit even further than that. My story is very closely tied, first, to Gil Drake, and then of course McGuane, Harrison, Chatham, and Buffett, that whole...

MidCurrent editor and former Key West guide Marshall Cutchin discusses the thrill of tarpon fishing and the impact of twenty-five years of angling on some of the sport's most hallowed waters. Podcast Excerpt: "That's the one thing that actually has changed, is how you go out and find tarpon and fish for them. As fishing pressure increased, it became less...