Fish Story: Why My Guide Prayed For my Permit
I knew I was in trouble when my guide made the sign of the cross and implored God to help us land the fish.
I knew I was in trouble when my guide made the sign of the cross and implored God to help us land the fish.
Me with my guide, Rey, in Jardines de la Reina, Cuba
It was my first day in Jardines de la Reina, an archipelago off the south coast of Cuba. I’m not an experienced saltwater fisherman.
My first time fishing in saltwater was about five years ago, when I went for a couple days to the Grand Bahama, where I managed to catch a bonefish. One. (Caught a wicked sunburn too.) I heard about fish called permit, tarpon, and snook, but I was too timid to ask what they were.
A year ago, I spent a week in Belize with a fellow from Trout Unlimited, Chris Herrman, who educated me about saltwater fishing. Chris told me about bonefish, permit and tarpon: the three species that are called a Grand Slam, if you catch one of each in a single day. I caught some bonefish the first day there. The second day Chris caught a permit, a remarkable looking thing — round from the side, silver and thin like a coin. His wasn’t huge, maybe 10 pounds, but it was fast, strong, and hard to catch. I decided that permit were much more fun than bonefish. So we spent the rest of the trip trying to catch permit.
If I was any good, I’d be showing you a photo of a permit I landed, rather than some image I found on the web. It’s about the same size as the one I caught, but didn’t land…
One thing I learned is that permit are particularly frustrating to catch. First you have to find them. In Belize, in Turneffe Flats, a fishing and diving lodge in an archipelago off the coast of Belize, there are enough permit that you can find them. But we couldn’t find any more permit that week until our last day (of five). Once you find the permit, then you have to catch them, and that’s when it gets particularly tricky. Permit aren’t interested in making you happy; in fact, it’s a bit of a mystery what makes them happy! If they see you, they will immediately leave. So you have to see a permit when it is far enough away not to see you, cast your fly that 60+ feet, land the fly so that it does not annoy the fish, and then strip the fly at about the same speed the fish is moving, often 5–10 knots, so that perhaps the permit will notice it, start to follow it and sometimes actually eat the fly. If you manage all of that, the fish reacts instantly (you better be ready!) and accelerates in the opposite direction to 20+ knots. If you don’t set the hook properly, the fish will accelerate without the fly and you have to start the process over again.
If you do manage to set the hook, the fish will keep going at top speed for 100–200 yards. Most fly rods are equipped with about 200 yards of line, which is about what will fit inside the reel. While the fish is running, you hold your rod and reel and hope (and pray?) that the fish slows down before it runs out of line. Then you have to reel him back in, which nearly brings me back to the beginning of my story. Nearly.
In Belize, Chris caught a couple of permit on that last day, making me a little crazy since I could not get the combination right to get a permit to take the fly. I finally managed to hook a permit at around 3:30pm in the last hour of the last day. The fish started to run and I was just settling down from the excitement of hooking him, when my line shredded. That’s right — equipment failure, and very unusual equipment failure at that. I had borrowed Chris’s permit rod, in which he had just that morning installed a brand new line. And it failed.
It’s a year later and I still haven’t recovered from the psychological and emotional effects of that equipment failure. But here I was in Cuba and on my first day, I had a permit on the line! And my guide was praying to God! I had that fish on the line for 20 minutes, so I had plenty of time to wonder why Rey, the guide, was praying. Rey doesn’t speak English, other than fishing commands, and I don’t speak even fishing Spanish so I couldn’t ask him. I thought he might not have much faith in my fishing skill; it was our first day fishing together. He might be just a very religious guy, which he only reveals when he’s excited — Cuba still is officially and in fact, a Communist country.
Or he might be concerned because we stumbled across the permit while we were stalking bonefish on foot. (Yes, you need a different rod, reel, line combination for each type of fish and I don’t think I’ve mentioned tarpon yet; Yes, for bonefish only, it is sometimes more fun to anchor the boat and walk the saltwater flats, which are often only a couple of feet deep, to make it harder and therefore more fun to catch a bone.) Rey was able to tell me that he thought “It is a good permit, maybe 15, 20 pounds”. A bonefish rod is a lightweight rod designed to catch fish that weigh 2–10 pounds and don’t act like a permit, which — if you’re still with me at this point — fight like madmen not to be caught. So I wasn’t using the right equipment for my very first permit on my first day fishing in Jardines de la Reina (which means Gardens of the Queen and is often mentioned in the same hushed tones you would use in the presence of a real queen), and that would be an excellent reason for Rey to pray for our fish.
But it wasn’t the reason — I learned during the five days I fished in Cuba that permit are so rare and unlikely in that archipelago that you pray if you’re the guide whose customer stumbled across and managed to hook a permit. You pray because you may not get another shot at a permit the whole week. I didn’t get another, as it turned out.
This a big bonefish, about 7 pounds, according to Rey. I caught a bunch of bones, another bunch of tarpon (including the big one I hooked in the video below), but only one permit….
But this was a heck of way to get started. It was after lunch on our first day and I had already caught a couple of bonefish before lunch. So, if I managed to land this permit, I would have a shot at my first ever Grand Slam, if I was able to find, hook and land a tarpon before the day ended. But there’s the question: Did I land this permit or not? I don’t have a photograph of it, which is usually irrefutable evidence, because we we were about 100 feet from the boat, where I had left my camera (actually my iPhone). I did manage to reel the permit in, close enough for Rey to grab it by the tail — twice. But the fish was strong and didn’t like its tail being grabbed so it kept getting away from Rey. And after the second time, I made a stupid mistake — I thought the fish was tired and put too much force on the rod, and he popped off the hook. Technically, if you reel a fish in and are able to touch the fish or the line it is hooked on, you have caught the fish.
That mistake has haunted me since that first day of fishing in Cuba. What if I hadn’t put so much pressure on the line? Would Rey have managed to grab the tail the third time? Perhaps I could have held the fish by the tail, while he went to the boat and got my camera. If I was a better fisherman, I would have had the right instinct to avoid pressure and let the fish come to us. You can see that I take my fishing personally.
The tarpon that jumped in this video was 100 pounds, according to Rey, before it got eaten by a hammerhead shark that just happened to pass by.
We did see the odd permit a few times during the rest of our week, but always too far away or going too fast to get a good cast on one. I’m not complaining — I caught more than 20 fish for the week, including several records (for me), including a 7-pound bonefish, two 50-pound tarpon (among many other smaller tarpon) and one huge 100-pound tarpon, which managed to get eaten by a hammerhead shark while I was doing my damnedest to retrieve it. Oh, and did I mention the 15-pound jack fish that took almost all the line off my reel, but was smart enough to get under a rock and break the line?
If you like the sound of this story and want to go fishing in Cuba, start planning now. Cuba restricts the number of fishing permits per year in its protected marine sanctuaries. And, as everyone knows, Americans can now travel more and more freely to Cuba. It is still not luxury fishing by American standards, but it’s fun. But now it’s hard to get a prime reservation less than a year in advance; we got lucky and scored a week on La Tortuga (the turtle) four months in advance (along with 11 Russian divers; diving in Jardines de la Reina is considered some of the best in the world). If you are interested, read Jon Covich’s blog posts. Jon knows where to fish in Cuba, and arranged our trip.