I had a great day on Florida Bay with friend and Grabber Screw magnate Mike Hamilton. While fishing with Captain Eric Herstadt, we had two simple goals: catch a big, laid up poon and capture that on video for placement on this blog. Mission accomplished – almost.

We pulled onto the first, no-name bank of the morning and I proceeded to show Videographer Mike the complexities of my new video camera. It kind of went like this: “Mike, red button is on/off, this button is the zoom, ok, here we go.”

As I sat on the bow with Mike on the cam, I gave a great introduction to winter, laid up tarpon fishing (”here we are, February 5th, winter time in the Everglades, wind is blowing 15 -20 out of the east, but water temperature is still warm at 75 degrees, we’re going to pole this bank looking for big, winter time laid up tarpon, blah, blah blah” I went on). Eric then proceeded to do what he does best – “Tim, ten o’clock, 80 feet, do you see him, faced away?” The poon looked pink as he laid facing the mud stained incoming tide.

I took the over the shoulder shot and the purple bunny fly landed about two feet in front of his face. Two subtle strips and the giant contorted his body about 90 degrees and inhaled the food nonchalantly. Three quick jumps going left to right 50 feet from the bow revealed a nice tarpon of close to 110 lbs. And then the fly fell out, but I was extremely excited – I had just shaken off the winter tarpon rust, and Mike claimed to have captured the whole thing on “Sportsman Adventure like” video.

I summarized what had just happened for Videographer Mike and then proceeded to switch places and give him the next shot. I rested on the console cooler, but really couldn’t wait to watch that video. I hit rewind and then play.

Like the bad luck that comes with catching the first fish you see in a day’s fishing, I guess the same applies to videography. The screen was totally blank – Mike forgot to hit the red button. We a few more laid up shots during the rest of the day, and I did manage to put another nice fish in the air. Of course, somehow, the red button was missed again. We’ll work on our technical skills over the next few months and hope to be able to make some nice additions to this blog. Meanwhile, Eric and I have the Backcountry Fly Championship coming up in less than a week. We’re practicing a couple of days before the tournament, and I’ll be reporting on our successes.

So, until then,
Tim (Flatsheadd@aol.com)

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 16th, 2008 at 7:49 pm and is filed under Tim's Journal Entries. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.