Florida Ditch Fishers: The Original Brownliners

Fishing Jones‘s Pete McDonald offers an excellent “Brief History of Ditch Fishing,” noting that unglamorous fly fishing was probably pioneered by south Floridians Flip Pallot, Chico Fernandez, Norman Duncan and others who liked to cast lines in drainage ditches and Everglades potholes, long before carp ever appeared on the fly fisher’s radar. McDonald includes some excellent links, including one to a Sports Illustrated story about Rocky Weinstein, who turned to ditch fishing because he couldn’t read a map. “‘He used to take Chico and Bill Curtis and he had this little short fly rod he used and his big thing was he could tell where to fish by looking on the road for squashed leopard frogs.'”