Lords of the Fly: Madness, Obsession, and the Hunt for the World-Record Tarpon

by Monte Burke

Overview

From the bestselling author of Saban, 4th and Goal, and Sowbelly comes the thrilling, untold story of the quest for the world record tarpon on a fly rod—a tale that reveals as much about Man as it does about the fish.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, something unique happened in the quiet little town on the west coast of Florida known as Homosassa. The best fly anglers in the world—Lefty Kreh, Stu Apte, Ted Williams, Tom Evans, Billy Pate and others—all gathered together to chase the same Holy Grail: The world record for the world’s most glamorous and sought-after fly rod species, the tarpon.

The anglers would meet each morning for breakfast. They would compete out on the water during the day, eat dinner together at night, socialize and party. Some harder than others. The world record fell nearly every year. But records weren’t the only things that were broken. Hooks, lines, rods, reels, hearts and marriages didn’t survive, either. The egos involved made the atmosphere electric. The difficulty of the quest made it legitimate. The drugs and romantic entanglements that were swept in with the tide would finally make it all veer out of control.

It was a confluence of people and place that had never happened before in the world of fishing and will never happen again. It was a collision of the top anglers and the top species of fish which would lead to smashed lives for nearly all involved, man and fish alike.

In Lords of the Fly, Burke, an obsessed tarpon fly angler himself, delves into this incredible moment. He examines the growing popularity of the tarpon, an amazing fish has been around for 50 million years, can live to 80 years old and can grow to 300 pounds in weight. It is a massive, leaping, bullet train of a fish. When hooked in shallow water, it produces “immediate unreality,” as the late poet and tarpon obsessive, Richard Brautigan, once described it.

Burke also chronicles the heartbreaking destruction that exists as a result—brought on by greed, environmental degradation and the shenanigans of a notorious Miami gangster—and how all of it has shaped our contemporary fishery.

Filled with larger-than-life characters and vivid prose, Lords of the Fly is not only a must read for anglers of all stripes, but also for those interested in the desperate yearning of the human condition.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781643135588
Publisher:	Pegasus Books
Publication date:	09/01/2020
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	1,164,584
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Monte Burke is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Saban: The Making of a Coach, a biography of Alabama head coach, Nick Saban. He is also the author of 4TH And Goal: One Man's Quest to Recapture His Dream, which won an Axiom Award for biography, and Sowbelly: The Obsessive Quest for the World Record Largemouth Bass, which was named one of the best books of the year by Sports Illustrated and Amazon, and was chosen for Barnes & Noble's "Discover Great New Writers" program. After a 14-year stint as a reporter, staff writer and editor at Forbes, he is now a contributing editor at the magazine. He is also a contributing editor at Garden & Gun and The Drake. Connect with him via Twitter @monteburke, or through monteburke.com.

Table of Contents

Introduction xi

1 The Babe 1

2 God's Great Fish 17

3 The Knights of the Corner Table 32

4 Bone Island 46

5 Hidden in Plain Sight 64

Interlude 1 Moral Exam 88

6 Character Sketches 93

7 Collision at Homosassa 113

Interlude 2 The Glossary 134

8 Homosmasha 141

Interlewd 156

9 Look at Mother Nature on the Run 159

10 The Erra Era 173

Interlude 3 A Brief Discussion About Gear 192

11 Mr. 200 199

12 The Ashes and the Phoenix 213

Interlude 4 The Log Book 231

13 Too Many Motherf^*%ckers 234

Interlude 5 Catch-22 256

14 The Old Man and the Sea 258

Acknowledgments 275

Selected Bibliography 277

Editorial Reviews

★ 07/06/2020

Sportswriter Burke (Saban: The Making of a Coach) takes a fascinating deep-dive look into the world of tarpon fishing and the town famous for it. In the more than 40 years since Tom Evans, a New York City stockbroker, first caught a world-record fish in Homosassa, Fla., in 1977, he has returned to the area and landed six more record tarpons in the surrounding waters. His success made this small town the hub of saltwater fly-fishing in the 1970s and ’80s, and attracted professional anglers (Stu Apte, Lefty Kreh, Billy Pate, Ted Williams) as well as fishing enthusiasts including writers Jim Harrison and Thomas McGuane and landscape painter Russell Chatham. Burke wonderfully captures their stories as well as those of their unsung guides, detailing the alliances and rivalries (local outfitters disliked the growing number of guides coming up from the Keys; and Keys outfitters felt “the manner in which fished the place was rather primitive”). Burke’s writing is vivid and lyrical, as when he describes how “the roots of the mangroves... gripped the river bottom like the fingers of witches.” Told with an angler’s eye for detail, even the glossaries of fishing terminology and fly-fishing techniques will engage readers (a fish is icicled when it “is totally spent from a fight and is motionless in the water, its tail suspended over its head”). Fly-fishing fans will be hooked. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"Monte Burke is a superb researcher with an ear for lyricism that does not degrade into poetic gobbledygook. The story he weaves makes Lords of the Fly the most compelling non-fiction book I’ve read in years."

Randy Wayne White

"This is a story of the obsessed, unhinged, and often brilliant dreamers who chase giant tarpon—a primeval fish with breathtaking glamour and ungodly strength. The thrill of hooking one on a fly rod is impossible to exaggerate, so you can believe every word of Monte Burke’s funny, wistful, wonderful book. He’s clearly as sick as the rest of us."

Carl Hiaasen

"In Monte Burke’s Lords of the Fly we are treated to an exquisitely detailed portrait of tarpon, its mysterious habits, its place in history, in art, in Biblical lore. But it is the fish’s extraordinary fusion of power and speed and its prehistoric majesty and its ferocious fight that attracted a flamboyant cast of characters who shared the obsessive drive to land a world record tarpon or simply to have one of those high-flying monsters on the end of their fly line. In witty and muscular prose, Burke ties together these disparate elements as neatly and beguilingly as a well-crafted tarpon fly."

James W. Hall

"Flashy, brawny, and electrifying, just like the tarpon itself. The angling stories are epic—imagine poling into a daisy chain of two thousand fish—but Burke keeps equal focus on the human element: the rivalries, foibles, and, in some cases, the Ahab-esque pathologies of the anglers themselves."

Garden & Gun

"I distinctly remember the first tarpon I hooked. After about a half-dozen leaps that would leave an audience at Sea World slack-jawed, I looked up at the end of my fly rod bent against the horizon and thought: 'Good God, I've got a dinosaur on a stick!' A tarpon is one of the greatest creatures in the sea. Lords of the Fly gets to the heart of why. You will love this book.

Michael Keaton

Burke paints a vivid picture of the clear water and white sands that madeHomosassa such a nexus of world fishing record holders, drawing in the history of the place, thetarpon, the sport of fly-fishing, and the famous anglers who name their names over a century...This tarpon chroniclewill appeal to all anglers and everyone fascinated by marine life.

Booklist

"What Susan Orlean accomplished for the strange, hermetic world of orchid hunting in her 1998 classic, The Orchid Thief, Monte Burke does for another strange, hermetic world in his wonderful Lords of the Fly. A lush, panoramic book."

The Wall Street Journal - Richard Adams Carey

Finally, a book about tarpon and the obsessed anglers who pursue them that's as spirited and majestic as the fish themselves. Through extensive reporting and writing that shimmers like a Florida flat, Burke puts the reader in the boat, on the fly rod, and at the marina bar with the legends of the fishery. You’ll be hooked from the first sentence.

David DiBenedetto

2020-07-08
A fascinating look at the narrow but wild world of tarpon fishing.

Forbes and Garden & Gun contributing editor Burke indulges in his boundless enthusiasm for fishing, showing how storytelling is an important part of the fishing experience. “In angling, as in life,” writes the author, “it is the ones that get away that haunt our dreams, that push us over the brink into a lustful madness. And Homosassa [Florida] was the first place in these anglers’ lives where, hot damn, those dreams just might come true.” In Sowbelly (2005), Burke chronicled the search for a record largemouth bass. Here, he focuses on the less-known arena of tarpon fishing, discussing its most prominent practitioners as well as the extraordinary fish itself, a behemoth that can weigh more than 250 pounds and live to be 80. The book is also about a specific time and place—late-1970s to early-1980s Homosassa—and the colorful fishing culture that thrived within it. Burke brings readers to this infamous hot spot, where the biggest names in fly-fishing—including baseball star Ted Williams and a cadre of other tough characters—would converge to try and out-angle each other. But it wasn’t only about the purity of fishing. “The egos involved made the atmosphere electric,” writes the author. “The difficulty of the quest made it legitimate. And the drugs and the women that were swept in with the tide made it all veer out of control.” By the mid-1990s, the Homosassa tarpon craze began to peter out. Climate-unfriendly governance in Florida led to an ecological crisis that helped drive the tarpon from Florida’s coastal waters. Burke constructs the rise and fall of this unique fishing tale with impressive narrative control and an obvious reverence for its vivid characters.

Ably captures the swagger, attitudes, and angling derring-do of a golden age of fishing history.

Kirkus Reviews