Equipment may have changed, but the guides on the flats sure haven't gotten better looking.
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Tarpon Fishing - Tarpon History 4
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“The fight didn’t last long,” Albright says. “Charlie had the tarpon whipped in maybe 30 minutes at the most. Now that they had heavy tippets, good anglers no longer had to baby their tarpon like they’d been doing before; they started putting the same kind of pressure on them as they were used to doing with their plug tackle.”
Clowe’s catch weighed 101 pounds and was the first hundred-pounder ever to be taken on regulation fly tackle—and officially recorded. Of course, there may have been others that did not quite meet regulation or were not officially registered—maybe because the angler was not a club member, or because the Met (which I ran only four months a year and closed just as the annual tarpon “season” began to heat up) did not happen to be open.
Albright knows about one “unofficial” 100-pounder because he and Keith were the guides on that occasion, too. He tells a strange tale of a catch that has missed a deserving place in saltwater flyfishing annals:
“One of our regular customers was Cliff Fitzgerald, who headed a prominent New York advertising agency. He liked to flyfish and was one of those who caught plenty of tarpon up to 50 pounds or so, but could never seem to do any better in the days of light tippet only.
“A couple of years before heavy tippet was allowed, Cliff came down with his son Cliff, Jr., who I think was in his late teens or early 20s. A New York brewery was running a fishing contest at the time to promote its beer in Florida. Miami Herald fishing columnist Allen Corson helped set up the contest rules, and he patterned a lot of them after those of the Met Tournament. One rule he changed, though, for some reason: He upped the maximum leader test for the fly division to 15-pounds, not 12-pounds, the latter being the heaviest allowed in the Met and the Rod and Reel Club.
“Young Cliff fished with Cecil and he landed a 115-pound tarpon—with his fly tied straight to 15-pound leader.”
