Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/554642
S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S 1 3 2 bonefish and tarpon preserve. It's a flats-fishing paradise." He let me take the bait, then set the hook: "They've caught five hundred permit there in the last five years." That did it. Five hundred permit. Are you kidding me? Nuclear annihilation? Ha. I laugh at nuclear annihilation. To see numbers like that for permit, I'd march into North Korea and kiss Kim Jong Un on the lips. Permit! I've been trying to get one of those willful, picky, uncooperative bastards to eat a fly since 1996. I have cast to them in Ascension Bay, up and down the barrier reef off Belize, on Abaco Island, the Cayman Islands, the southern Yucatán Peninsula, and maybe a couple other places I've thankfully forgotten. And each time one of them approached the fly I'd offered, it opened its mouth to bite, then suddenly turned away. You've heard of a gaggle of geese and a murder of crows? A group of Trachinotus falcatus is called a refusal of permits. Or it should be. In 2011, after 15 permitless years, I nearly quit flats fishing altogether. How much humiliation can a man take? In the last five years I agreed to a single trip, Christmas Island, and only because there are no permit in that part of the Pacific. So why would I possibly, after all those nerve- wracking failures, agree to go to Cuba and face my finny nemeses once more? Why? The Avalon fly. That's why. I'm one of those guys who believes there exists one magical fly pattern that will not merely catch whatever species of fish I am currently pursuing, but will haul them in like a pollock seiner. Every time I clamp a hook in a vise, I'm convinced I am about to tie such a fly. So the rumor of a whole new and putatively deadly permit pattern obliterated 50 years of Cold War paranoia like a direct hit from a MRBM warhead. The Avalon fly was designed by Cayo Largo lodge manager Mauro Ginervi and his super flats guide, William Guanche, to imitate the local, just a kid when Nikita Khrushchev, leader of the fearsome Soviet Empire, America's sworn enemy, installed a bristling thicket of Soviet nuclear missiles on his pal Fidel's island 90 miles south of Florida in October of 1962. It looked like Khrushchev really did intend to bury us, as he had promised. Or, more accurately, cremate us in an atomic firestorm. I was 14 years old. I didn't want to be buried or cremated anytime soon. Still don't. Although our country called Khruschev's bluff and he moved the warheads back to Russia, Cuba remained a vaguely ominous presence to me for the next half-century. Sort of like living down the road from a guy who sits on his porch cleaning his rifle every time you drive by. So early this year, when my long-time pal Will Rice called to ask if I wanted to fish that once-forbidden island, I might have hesitated a little. A lot, actually. I mean, the Iron Curtain may be folded up and packed in mothballs, but Russia and Cuba are still pretty chummy. And the guy in the big chair in the Kremlin today is clearly at least as crazy as Khrushchev ever was. Will said, "Listen, about forty miles off the south coast of Cuba there's a place called Cayo Largo, an island in the heart of more than four-hundred square miles of carefully managed I was A fter many years and failures, the author landed his first permit. Below: The Avalon fly is deadly on bonefish. Opposite: Guide William Guanche poles near the muds where a tarpon takes to the skies. pale-colored shrimp that are a major item on the Cuban permits' menu. As of the day Will and I arrived on Cayo Largo, the fly had landed 566 permit since its inception in 2009. It has also caught innumerable bonefish, snook, and even tarpon, not to mention untargeted species: mutton snappers, jacks, barracuda. Basically, anything that eats shrimp is a sucker for this fly. Still, the question lingered: What