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 5 you'll catch lots of fish but that's about as enjoyable as having dinner with a strange woman who wants to talk about her food allergies. William moved us along the perimeter of the huge mud, keeping the boat far enough away to see fish darting out into the clear water in pursuit of escaping bait. Within minutes, he said, "Permit. Eleven o'clock, thirty meters. Wait!" He jammed the pole into the bottom to turn the boat, and I peered into the sunny glare, not seeing anything but water. "Where?" I said. "I can't see them." And then I could. Maybe 50 feet off the port beam, there was a small "refusal" of permit unmistakably flashing gold highlights off their sickle fins and scissor-like tails as they zig-zagged through some kind of panicked bait. "Cast," William said, "Twenty meters." For once, the gods of permit fishing smiled. The fly landed just short of the fish. I stripped two, maybe three times, and saw the permit—now five or six of them, at least—turn and race after the fly. I kept stripping, the fish following behind it toward the boat. Miraculously, the fly was not ambushed by a snapper, a jack, or even a pesky bonefish. (On Cayo Largo the bonefish are so big and fat they make Christmas Island and Ascension Bay bones look like lawn darts. Yet they are also so plentiful that five-pounders stealing your fly out from under the noses of permit actually seem like a nuisance.) Two strips more, and the fastest or hungriest of the permit pounced. The line went tight and started flying off the screaming reel. My two-decade slump ended 15 minutes later when Will took a photo of Cayo Largo permit number 567 caught on the Avalon fly. I figure I'll stop grinning in another month or so. It was 2:30 in the afternoon. What was I supposed to do with the rest of the day? With the rest of my life? Besting your nemesis has its downside. "Still enough time for a grand slam," William said. "Let's go find some tarpon." He started the Yamaha four-stroke. A grand slam. Another reason to live. Thank God. boxfish, and every other imaginable kind of inshore species congregating to feed on the shrimp and baitfish dislodged by the bottom feeders. Sharks and barracuda moved in to prey on anything smaller than themselves. The result was a maelstrom of feeding fish. And, most importantly, it included permit. Lots of them. If you cast just about any fly into the mud cloud itself, you will almost certainly hook something—usually a bonefish, because they are probably the most numerous species in the frenzied feeding zone, and among the fastest and first to get to the fly. But blind- casting is like blind dating. I mean yes, soup on the surface. They looked like nothing more than cloud shadows at first. But as we approached one, William cut the engine and we rocked to a halt, and I could see that we were near the edge of maybe five acres of muddied water. It was my turn on deck. William climbed the poling platform and poled the boat to within a hundred yards of an enormous mud cloud created by stingrays and hundreds, maybe thousands, of bonefish rooting in the soft bottom for clams and sea worms. The mud they stirred drifted downwind, carried by tide and ocean currents. The whole area swirled with uncountable bonefish, snappers, jacks, needlefish, A Cold War beauty enjoys Cuba's most-famous export. Below: A tattoo fit for a serious flats angler. Opposite: Most automobiles in Cuba predate 1960, which is when the US began a series of embargos that are still in effect.