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 4 A fter checking in, I was out on the balcony changing a fly line on a reel, nervously anticipating our first day of fishing the next morning. Will was in the hotel room spreading camera gear and fishing tackle across his bed. When a friendly guy from the balcony next to ours called out in vaguely Scandinavian-inflected English, "You are fly fishing?" I admitted I was. He grinned and said, "Then you'll want to see this." He fetched his camera and handed it over the railing separating us. On the digital screen, the man—his name is Eiskert and he is Norwegian—stood on the deck of a flats boat gripping a permit the size of a truck tire. "Holy cow!" I yelped. "Will, get out here and look at the size of this thing!" Eiskert informed us that he had caught it only the day before. Yes, it was permit number 566 caught on the Avalon fly. His guide was the amazing William, who later told us that Eiskert's permit was, in fact, the largest one he'd ever seen in his 14 years guiding there. They estimated it at 30 pounds. Eiskert is a very serious angler. Tattooed in blue ink on his left forearm are line drawings of a bonefish, a tarpon, a permit, and a snook, and the words Super Grand Slam, Cayo Largo, 2011. He also showed us the tattoo of a shark on his right calf. It said, Greenland Shark, 2001, 1100 Kgs (that's about 2,300 pounds). It was the second-largest fish of any kind ever taken on sport-fishing tackle. I have a feeling Eiskert fishes like a Norseman on a pillaging run up the coast of old Normandy. I picture him on the casting deck wearing a horned helmet, fly rod in one hand, double-edged broadax in the other. That first night on the island I had a hard time falling asleep—in spite of several rum drinks and the exhaustion of traveling more than 5,000 miles from Alaska, the trip taking more hours than I care to think about. Thoughts of Eiskert's fishing triumphs success, to keep hooked fish out of the barnacle-studded roots It was a great day, sunny and nearly windless, and having landed a bonefish, a tarpon, and a snook, we joked that I'd caught a quasi-grand slam. Of, course, the permit is the fish that makes or breaks a true slam, and I'd blown every cast to them that day. No surprise there. I'd been doing that for two decades. But the week had just begun. Having caught two new species, I slept soundly that night, though through my dreams I heard that ceiling fan muttering its mantra. If I had landed a marlin, a tuna, and a white whale that day, I'd still have wanted a permit. Compared to me, Melville's Ahab was a poster child for mental health. O n the second morning, the light and the wind weren't right for the open-ocean permit flats, so we spent some time fishing a channel for rolling tarpon and Will caught a nice one that jumped all over the sky before coming in. But after lunch it was time to go out to the muds. Racing across mile upon mile of water as clear as white rum, we began to see nearly opaque ovals of cloudy blue-gray flashed through my brain, but it was not a shark the size of small submarine that haunted me. It was the photo of our strapping Norwegian neighbor straining to hold that 30-pound slab of permit out for the camera. I flopped around on the bed in the warm Cuban air, the AC doing the best it could but not really geared to cool thick-blooded Alaskans. I was thankful for the ceiling fan, but it was out of balance and emitted a repetitive, two-syllable, guttural sound on each grinding revolution. All night long I heard it saying, "permit, permit, permit, permit, permit . . ." M y first day of fishing I caught the first tarpon of my life and also my first snook—a species I'd never even seen before. I hooked the snook up against a log-strewn bank and managed to keep it out of the sticks long enough to get it to the boat. The tarpon showed up while poling the same shoreline, and ate the same fly the snook fell for—a black-and-purple Tarpon Toad. We also sight-fished to tailing bones in ankle-deep water in a mangrove maze, similarly struggling, with mixed