Fishing With Joe

Every month I write a column for our excellent local paper The Nautical Mile and here's my November article:




It was just before sunrise when I met up with Capt. Joe Harley at his dock on Matlacha. We were heading out to hunt some of the big Pine Island redfish which were finally showing up in serious numbers. I was traveling light that morning. All I had with me was a single 9-weight Sage rod and exactly half a dozen new flies that arrived in the mail the day before.

Joe fired up his Mercury outboard and idled out of the canal. He quickly put the skiff on plane and aimed us north towards Burnt Store. It was 75 degrees and the entire eastern sky was turning the amazing shade of crimson that only duck hunters and fishermen ever get used to seeing. If you’ve never experienced a ride on a flats boat from Matlacha at sunrise, do yourself a favor and book a trip right now.

One of the things I like most about fishing with Capt. Joe Harley is his boat. Joe runs a custom wooden skiff made right here on Pine Island by a former mullet boat builder. At seventeen feet long and painted a very distinct mangrove green, it really stands out on the water. It’s also the very definition of the word basic. It has no GPS, fish finder or trolling motors. All these technological crutches are totally absent. It does have a big casting deck and poling platform, it's exceptionally quiet, and it floats in six inches of water. In other words it’s a perfect fly fishing rig even though it looks like it was built several decades ago. Floating next to a new carbon-fiber skiff like a $40,000 Maverick HPX, Joe’s boat is positively retro; like a 1967 Stingray parked next to a 2010 ZR-1. That makes it a good fit in a lot of ways because Joe is kind of retro himself.



For those who don’t know him, by day he’s Capt. Joe Harley, Matlacha fly fishing guide. But by night he’s Joe Bomba, guitar player and front man for the great rock and roll trio The Bombaleros. In a local music scene dominated by country, blues, and Buffett, The Bombaleros really stand out. Heavy on The Stones and The Beatles, their main ingredient is the instrumental surf rock sound of folks like The Ventures and Dick Dale. Hearing these guys at a waterfront tiki bar is one of the best things about life on Matlacha. Throw in Joe’s trademark plaid pants and twangy Gretsch guitar and the retro image is complete. Fishing with Capt. Joe is a little like fishing with Buddy Holly at the same time.

We came off plane after a twenty minute run and quickly killed the outboard. Joe gave me the first shot on the bow so I pulled out my 9-weight and tied on one of the new crab patterns. These flies came from one of my regular anglers out in Idaho. Eric is a great fly tyer who builds log homes all year but still has enough free time on his hands to come up with new patterns. He’s also obsessed with catching a permit on a fly. After coming so close for two years in a row with me down in Puerto Rico, Eric has been trying to perfect a crab for these notoriously difficult fish. Sometimes he’ll call me twice a day with questions about which color of thread or feathers to use, he’s that kind of angler. We have very few permit on the flats here around Pine Island but we do have plenty of redfish, and they love crabs, too. Getting a big red on one of his flies would be a total thumbs-up for Eric’s efforts.

The water was especially flat this morning and the mullet were everywhere. After only a few minutes of poling Joe noticed an unmistakable push of water to our north. The birds began diving over top of it and the smaller bait fish started jumping from the surface. It was a tennis court size school of big redfish. As Joe pushed me closer I could clearly make out the copper colored backs of these fish. More bait started busting from the water and we even watched several small flounder skipping across the surface trying to escape the feeding frenzy. This one would be a no-brainer.

I started casting the crab fly toward the leading edge of the school. It was a heavy pattern but a big improvement on the first batch Eric sent me last month. It plopped down and was immediately inhaled by a big red but in all honesty I could have tossed a Barbie Doll into this school and triggered a strike. Two hundred redfish in three feet of water aren’t the most sophisticated diners. They’re more like hogs at the trough. But that didn’t matter to me and in a few minutes I had a 24 inch redfish in the boat.



It was 6:55 AM in Idaho but I decided to call Eric with the news. He’d called me a few days earlier at close to 11 PM my time with a question about rabbit fur, so I was hoping to return the favor and wake him up for a change. Unfortunately Eric’s also an elk hunter so he’d been awake for several hours. He was thrilled with the news but that also meant he’d only become more obsessive at the tying vise and I’d be getting more phone calls at wacky hours.

The school was still cruising up and down the Burnt Store Bar so Joe made a quick run to put us in front of them again. He took the bow this time with his new Powell fly rod and I pushed him back into the shallows where the reds started tailing with a vengeance. The crab fly worked again and Joe was hooked up with a serious redfish. This one was taking all his fly line and I had to pole hard after it. This was the one we were looking for, easily thirty inches and a colored a brilliant copper and white. Ir was one of the nicest redfish I’ve ever seen. After a dozen pictures we sent it back to rejoin the school.



I finished the morning a short time later by landing another redfish that was right under the slot limit at 26 and ¾ inches, a real tournament winner. I brought that one home for the grill. We’d finally harassed them enough and headed back to Matlacha. It was only 11 AM, we boated three big redfish and proved that a new fly from Idaho works here in Florida. Joe headed off to rehearse with his band and I headed to the post office to mail some of the crab flies to my buddies in Key West. Not a bad start to any day.