Fly Fishing Video Review: Jamie Howard's "Location X"

If you are just getting into fly fishing now, you might think that we’re all a bunch of handycam-toting, YouTube-surfing Emmy-award-winner wannabes. There’s little doubt that digital media has moved the focus from away from still images — just ask the folks who have been making a quasi-living selling fly fishing photos.
But it wasn’t always that way. Twenty years ago you couldn’t find a film that touched the subject of fly fishing for tarpon. Scientific Anglers tried to remedy that with their “Challenge of Giant Tarpon” series in the late 1980s. But to be honest, the techniques it portrayed seem dated now, and Billy Pate’s fanaticism has spread to thousands of anglers, all with different opinions about how to best big tarpon. The sport has matured, and we look wistfully at ninth-generation copies of “Tarpon” — the Key West film funded by Guy de la Valdene that never made it to market — and wish someone could translate that magic into a modern setting. The best we have, for that purpose, is Jamie Howard, who is succeeding in finding new ways to capture the essence of the sport.
This week on MidCurrent, David Dalu, who won last spring’s Don Hawley Tarpon Tournament in Islamorada, reviews Howard’s new “Location X.”