The city of Arles in the south of France dates to pre-Roman times. Built at the mouth of the Rhône, three millennia of silt deposition has left the city ~50 km inland of its original situation on the Mediterranean.
Romans took control of the city and built an arena to entertain their new subjects with gladiator fights. The arena has been partially restored. Incongruous metal bleachers with safety rails were added to accommodate modern audiences in the highest places where the original stone seating could not be supported. Ascending and descending the steep stone stairways in the strong Mistral wind of the Rhône valley, we appreciated the new iron hand rails.
Not wishing to restrict entertainment to the martial arts, the Romans followed up their arena with an elegant semicircular amphitheater next door. It has been partially reconstructed as well. While we sat in the top row, one of a group of Japanese tourists stepped up to the stage at the coaxing of his friends. Here’s a snippet of what happened next:
Wherever I go, I seek out nature the way a beagle hunts a dropped slice of pepperoni. Accordingly, I spotted wild things on the periphery of the urban hardscape. High atop the rim of the ancient arena, I watched White Storks catching thermals to assist their migration southward to sub-Saharan Africa.
In the marsh of a finely landscaped park next to Frank Gehry’s shiny LUMA tower, I found happy frogs of Arles celebrating the departure of the hungry storks.
Does a tiny Fiat Topolino (“little mouse”) EV count as animal, vegetable, or mineral?
Vincent van Gogh, during his 16 month stay in Arles, produced 300 paintings. Gray, sketchbook and watercolor set in hand, cooed in ecstasy our entire week in Arles.
Gray’s excitement over the painting possibilities was contagious. As sun angles dropped each day, my eye was increasingly drawn to the glow and shadow of buildings along narrow streets of the old city.
I finish with a progression of photos showing the changing light through the afternoon and into the night. I promise I did not enhance the colors.
The Camargue is the floodplain delta of the Rhône, situated between the city of Arles, where we are staying, and the Mediterranean Sea. The terrain is flat and marshy, checkered with rice fields, brackish pools, small canals, salt ponds, and tidal estuaries. On the advice of my cousin Judy, we rented a car to visit the Camargue.
DAY 1
Our first afternoon with wheels we headed down the west side of the Camargue to the Parc Ornithologique.
Enroute, we picked up a sweet young couple who were hitch-hiking, and drove them a bit beyond our turn-off to a better spot where they could find their next ride.
The Parc Ornithologique is much like Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge on Assateague Island, Virginia, but better in important ways. Impoundments are well-maintained and are teaming with water birds. The maze of trails is for walking only. Observation benches and blinds are situated close to the birds.
Greater Flamingos are everywhere.
The multilingual signage is informative, even for an old pro like me. For instance, banding results show the flamingoes roam the Mediterranean, but particular individuals return to this park year after year.
I learned that Cetti’s Warbler is one of the few polygynous passerines. My bird book told me that Cetti’s Warbler sings from concealed spots, moving quickly from spot-to-spot. My Merlin phone app played me the song. Ah ha!
I had been hearing the beautiful liquid song of Cetti’s Warblers everywhere and getting only the odd peak at its sources (nondescript brown-backed jobs with a faint white eye-line) hiding in the dense vegetation. Cetti’s Warbler, and the handsome European Dipper I encountered while trout fishing, were my new birds for the trip.
In contrast to the solid orange-pink of the American Flamingos, the Greater Flamingos are pinkish white, with their crimson wing coverts and axillaries visible mainly in flight.
Photo by Gray Read
Hearing whinnies from across the thick reed beds, we finally saw the sources. As on Assateague Island, wild horses roam the marshy terrain of Camargue, accompanied by faithful Cattle Egrets, which sometimes rode on their backs.
Nutria, introduced from South America, don’t seem to be doing so much damage to embankments as they did in the southeastern US.
Park staff told us we could remain after the park closed for the evening, letting ourselves out via the revolving gate. It’s been very dry of late – we saw just one mosquito and one no-see-um – so we stayed until dusk, watching the day birds put themselves away for the night.
As night herons emerged against a pink and purpling sky, we enjoyed a picnic supper of Brillat-Savarin cheese and guacamole on gluten-free toast accompanied by fresh plums and figs. Pas mal.
DAY 2
Having parked the car overnight near our apartment in Arles for half a Euro, we spent the next morning exploring the east side of the Camargue.
We drove into the Reserve Nationale Camargue where sea salt has been evaporated and harvested from salt ponds at least since Roman times. Now it’s done with big machines instead of slaves.
Sel de Camargue is found in all the local salt shakers. It’s good on fried potatoes and would go well with rice, if you could find rice.
White dots in front of the salt mesa are flamingoes.
We finally made it to the Mediterranean, where gleeful children splashed in the warm water and sweaty young Frenchmen enjoyed the manly art of hitting each other in the face.
Wandering the city of Arles, France, near the mouth of the Rhône, we keep seeing posters for the Fête du Riz (festival of the rice), featuring the 22eme Ambassadrice du Riz, Maëlys Carlotti, on horseback, holding a corsage of rice blossoms. She’s adorable:
Yesterday, Gray and I took a rental car to Camargue, the marshy delta where the Rhône meets the Mediterranean. We saw tall rice plants growing in and around the small villages. More on that trip to follow.
Back in Arles, returning from our dinner in the old city, we heard New Orleans jazz coming from across the river. We figured we’d walk over the bridge to hear the band close up, but the music came to us. The band was aboard a decorated wagon being drawn over the bridge by a farm tractor.
Behind the float were three women on horseback:
In the lead was Maëlys Carlotti, le Ambassadrice du Riz herself on her beautiful white horse!
Her entourage gave us a pack of organic brown rice from the Camargue, where we’d been earlier in the day.
You’d imagine rice would be on the menu in all the fine restaurants of Arles. Au contraire. Rice noodles at a Vietnamese restaurant were as close to rice as we’d come until now. This being the 42nd rice festival, rice must be an impossible sell to the wheat-loving French.
But the magic was not over. Floats were lined up across the river to pass over the bridge and into the city, each with its own music and theme, and each followed by an entourage of costumed adults and kids, on foot. Here’s a sample:
A dozen floats in all rolled past, each with a team of marchers trailing behind on foot. Then we were treated to a parade of old tractors, some real antiques.
This was the last one. C’est finis.
p.s. I finally found a Senegalese restaurant that serves a rice dish, on Sunday nights only.
We have spent an enchanted week-plus in the medieval town of Lagrasse, in the south of France.
After the Catholic Church successfully eradicated the heretical Cathars in the 14th Century, they established an abbey to preserve the Church’s grip on the populace. The town of Lagrasse grew up beside the abbey.
The abbey today is inhabited by Jesuits who grow olives and wine grapes. In their long brown robes they play soccer with the local kids.
The abbey’s bell rings on the half hour, followed exactly two minutes later by the bell of the local Catholic church.
We stayed in the apartment of our old (but younger than us) friends Michael and Nan. A couple of days after we arrived, they drove the 12 hours from their residence in Delft, Netherlands, to join us for the week.
The outer wall of their apartment is stone, a full meter thick, forming part of the outer wall of the town, properly defensible from whoever might attempt to take by force the local resources: wine, olive oil, and violet ice cream.
Just a random bit of the cobblestone street.
Every inch of the town begs for a watercolor painter. If only we knew one.
The only times Gray was without her sketchbook in hand were sleeping, swimming, and meals.
Ok, scratch “and meals”.
Lagrasse sits on the d’Orbieu River, a clear-running creek this time of year, which can rise 30 feet in flood, filling basements and first floors in the town. In late summer, it’s more of a creek.
The only grocer in town keeps random shop hours and stocks a random selection of wares to match.
On Saturday morning, though, a market is held in the open square outside the apartment.
On first glance, it doesn’t look like much, but step inside and look again…
We stocked up on peaches, plums, vegetables, beef, poultry, sausage, salami, paté, cheeses, wine, and gluten-free bread. It’s France.
For dessert we could wander down the lane along the river to an ice cream shop. Gray had mint chip in a cup. I had violet ice cream in a cone. It’s a thing.
Michael and Nan, basking in the glow of ice cream.
The river is home to herons, ducks, wagtails, astoundingly beautiful kingfishers, and Great Gray Herons that look like our Great Blue Heron but say “snirk!” instead of “snork!”. And fish.
The d’Orbeau looks like a trout stream and is stocked with trout in the spring, but this time of year the visible fish are Chevesne aka Chevaine (Squalius cephalus) up to 18” in length and Mediterranean Barbel (Barbus meridionalis) up to 24”.
I had planned a fishing-free vacation for my right hand to recover after a summer of excessive fly casting. But Michael discovered that I fly fished, disappeared into their store room, and emerged with four fly rods, reels to match, and assorted fly tackle, left over from his days fishing trout in the Colorado Rockies.
The water was cool, but warm enough for me to wade in my sandals. I found the little Chevesne would pick at dry flies all day and the bigger ones would take a dry fly in the late afternoon.
Chevesne caught on dry fly
Barbels, however, preferred a slice of salami.
Mediterranean Barbel, caught on salami.
The Barbel looks like a bonefish and fights even harder than a wet rag. They try. I took a special liking to Barbels when I read they are considered a biological indicator of high water quality. Both species are eaten by the French, though the Barbel has poisonous roe. I let mine go back in the “river” to enjoy life and make more.
Michael and Nan are former bike racers, and took regular bike rides on their featherweight carbon fiber bicycles.
Nan, petite and svelte, remains a cycling beast, riding a fast 35 km through the foothills of the nearby Pyrenees one morning.
Their apartment was briefly visible to television viewers of the Tour de France. Michael watched the Tour de Spain at night on his computer.
Afternoons included a swim in the river.
At 1:30 am I woke to soft rustling and crunching noises. Had a rat had gotten in to nibble my chocolate bar? I slipped out of bed to investigate and found the sounds were coming from outside. I stood in the cool breeze of the open window and strained to see and hear in the moonless night.
From the rustling noises and footsteps I could localize two large beings roaming around in the dark directly below. The one on the left was concealed by the stirring bushes. My view of the one on the right was blocked by a balcony one floor below. That one was making loud hollow crunches, like bones being crushed in the teeth of a bear or large dog. CRACK! A Scops Owl tooted intermittently in the distance. CRUNCH!
My best guess was that I was listening to a pair wild boars that had descended from the forested hills above the abbey and waded across the river, but what was the crunching? In the morning, the ground by the patio was covered with large, cloven footprints, in the shade of a pair of bearing walnut trees.
The next evening we wandered up the street for dessert but found the ice cream shop had closed. The owner, who puts trout in the river every spring, was gone for a week of boar hunting. Filling the larder and making Lagrasse safer for walnuts.
Some pics from Gray’s sketchbook:
We are off to the town of Arles on the Rhône, close to the Mediterranean.
recent question from a friend upon learning we have spent a week in Paris.
First impression: Paris has changed for the better since I was here last in the summer of 2004. Protected bike lanes line the major streets, and the streets now have far more bikes than cars. The bikes make no sound, so watch where you step. Lots of electric bikes are available for rent. The Metro, never more than a 10 minute walk from anywhere, is still fast, clean, quiet, and comes every 4 or 5 minutes. I cannot fathom why Miami’s Metro service is so noisy – it doesn’t have to be that way.
My cousin Judy still has her atelier where she makes baroque stringed instruments. Her website is http://judithkraft.net – you’ll get a warning that the site is not secure because the web protocol is not https, but it is safe to visit.
Our Home Exchange apartment in the 7th arrondissement is on a narrow, one lane street, just wide enough to squeeze one car down it without knocking down the sidewalk dining. People walk in the street, including parents with strollers, so no drivers go fast.
Courtyard and apartment entrance at 25 Rue de Cotte, Paris. Watercolor by Gray Read.
Our apartment itself is curious – narrow and vertical, spread over 4 levels. I manage to strike my head on the ceiling of the staircase entrances, while Gray has no problem. Otherwise it’s comfortable. It has a courtyard where I water the plants. A mouse ventured into the apartment, saw us and left promptly, not to be seen again.
Nextdoor on one side is an excellent Vietnamese restaurant where the waitress wears a black tee-shirt that reads “Purdue Mom”, while nextdoor on the other side is a preschool “Petite Académie. The sign is particularly sweet.
Up the street is the Troll Café where people hang out on the street drinking beer but leave no trash. Down the street is a covered market with excellent cheeses and meats at superb prices. Next to the covered market is an open air market. Peaches are ripe and aromatic. We ate a lot of peaches.
The neighborhood compost container, airtight, is around the corner. A short walk on the main street nearby takes us to a cash machine, a supermarket, pharmacy, a gluten-free bakery, and a park.
At the lunch hour, the neighborhood park fills with groups of tweens from the nearby school, but you may not bring your rhinodoodle.
Every evening, dining out is a new delightful experience. Good wine is inexpensive, so I have to be careful.
Moules frites, with beer. Particularly good.
One night we joined my cousin and her husband for a concert on a barge in a wide canal. An Armenian jazz pianist, Lucy Kahnyan, played her own compositions, accompanied by a fabulous percussionist whose name I cannot relocate (he was really good).
French pleasure boaters weave erratically on the canal, so rental boats are enshrouded in fenders for the general welfare.
We visited a new neighborhood of high-rises in the 17th arrondissement, each different and interesting, adorned with terrace gardens, green walls, solar panels, and paintings. At the ground level is an extensive park of trees, small playing fields, walking paths, cleverly designed playgrounds, a skateboard park, benches of course, and an extensive array of shallow ponds comprising an artificial wetland where we saw assorted waterbirds and carp.
Children were everywhere, having fun with balls, climbing the innovative play equipment, watching the fish, and zooming around the kid-scale skateboard ramps and half-pipes on small scooters. As it came on 6 pm, children thinned out, replaced by joggers, home from work.
Our last day we visited the National Picasso Museum, which houses Picasso’s private collection – his works that he wouldn’t or couldn’t sell and his own collection of works by Matisse and others.
Now we have relocated to Lagrasse, a tiny medieval town in the south of France, staying with friends, former FIU colleagues, in their beautiful apartment with fortified stone walls four feet thick.
Since I took up fly fishing four years ago, I have caught 42 species of fish on fly. Conspicuously missing from this assortment is the redfish, aka Red Drum, even though redfish frequent the flats and lagoons I fish in Everglades National Park.
It’s not like I can’t catch redfish at all. I have caught dozens of redfish using spinning gear and soft plastic lures, and several more on natural bait.
Most times, redfish are easily sight-fished by offering them an imitation baitfish or shrimp. If you make the lure appear from elsewhere, then make it try to hide like a scared shrimp or escape like a panicked or injured baitfish, a redfish can’t resist pouncing on it. Sometimes, when sharks are feeding nearby, I’ve tempted redfish with a lure that has no hook, just for the fun of watching them dive on it like a beagle on a fallen French fry.
If the light is bad for spotting redfish beneath the water’s surface, one can cast a lure towards “nervous water”, whereupon the redfish roiling the water’s surface from below is likely to grab it. Throw a lure up a dark, mangrove-lined creek and the unseen redfish hunting crabs in that creek will probably chase it down. Pitch a lure under the mangrove trees where a redfish is hiding in the cool shade, and the redfish will snatch that lure before it touches the bottom. Once a redfish has hold of your lure, it will tug like a bulldog. I have mistaken a big redfish for a small shark.
My total failure to catch redfish on a fly is not for lack of trying. I’ve worked at it with obsessive dedication. Day after day I venture forth on the flats before dawn, saying “This will be the day I catch a redfish on fly.” The sun rises, redfish reveal themselves on the flat, but for one odd reason or another, it just doesn’t happen. Here’s a sampling of the redfish I have NOT caught on fly:
I was surrounded by 50 redfish, noses in the mud and tails in the air. They completely ignored every single fly I dropped next to them or pulled past their noses in the muddy water. I guess stirred up mud makes it hard to see.
Again I was surrounded by redfish feeding on all sides, but each one stayed just out of fly casting range. Was it a redfish conspiracy or do I need to change my deodorant?
I arrived early, waited patiently by a particular oyster bar until the moment in the incoming tide when redfish came to feed on the bar. I placed my fly directly in front of that feeding redfish only to have a puffer swim in, grab the fly, chew off the fur, get hooked, and then flap about, scaring off the redfish. The redfish was not seen again at that bar. Ever.
I have stalked schools of redfish feeding in the shallows near a bank in a saltwater lagoon, approaching ever so slowly for 20 minutes, then watched them zoom away, spooked by a Little Blue Heron or a tern passing overhead. Redfish can’t be too careful.
A redfish swam right past my stationary fly. Didn’t see it. I recast the same fly in front of the same redfish, moved it a tiny bit to get the redfish’s attention, and the redfish spooked like it had seen a ghost. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
I designed and tied a special sparkly redfish attractor fly, cast it into high-tide redfish haunts under mangrove branches, and caught some nice snook instead. I’d hate to complain about catching snook.
I watched a redfish follow my fly for 10 feet then turn away. I think it liked the fly, but then remembered it wasn’t hungry.
A redfish bit my fly but did not get hooked. Am I getting warmer?
I drove 3 hours each way and stayed overnight with my friend Herman, who took me fishing at all his secret redfish spots around Pine Island. I just saw one redfish, a baby “rat red”, and Herman saw none. We blamed the almost-full moon and the slow daytime tides, but we both knew in our hearts it was the Curse of the Redfish.
I’m sure that as soon as I catch one redfish on fly, the next one will come quickly, and then they’ll become easy enough that I’ll wonder why they eluded me for so long. When I was a teenager, that’s how it was with birds. I’d knock myself out to spot a new species in the wild, then, after I’d found my first one, they’d pop up like mushrooms everywhere I went.
Gray and I will spend most of September in France, where red wine will make up for lack of redfish. I will resume my quest upon our return to Florida. I have tied a new crab fly that catches every redfish I see in my dreams.
Fly fishing for Permit on the flats of Espiritu Santo Bay in the Sian Ka’an Biosphere Preserve
Day 2.
Today I am sharing a boat with another fisherman. Our morning is spent deep in a network of steamy mangrove creeks and coves where we see lots of juvenile tarpon and six hefty snook. The tarpon do not want to eat flies and the snook stay out of our way in the tight mangrove creeks. I catch one small tarpon and my partner refuses my offer to loan him a fly in the successful pattern. To his immense chagrin, he catches nothing but mangrove branches, usually on his backcast, each snag followed by a barrage of Spanish curses. Just outside the mangroves my partner hooks a hefty barracuda on one of the many tarpon flies that the tarpon had refused. Remarkably, the cuda does not sever the tarpon bite-tippet.
Guide Chepo with the barracuda.
Back on the flats again after lunch, it’s my turn to be up front casting. Our guide Chepo takes us to a shallow stretch of green water edged by a beach. Just as we arrive, a school of ~20 Permit rips past us going the other direction. Chepo stows his push pole and fires up the outboard. We roar out a quarter mile from the shore then head back up the beach to get around the Permit school and wait for their approach.
Poling slowly off the beach we come upon the Permit school tailing in shallow water over a patch reef. Their black tails and dorsal fins extend from the water, swishing back and forth like so many knife blades.
Chepo suggests that rather than cast from the boat, I should hop out and wade to fish for them. I love wade fishing, but more importantly, a slow-wading human pushes less of a bow wave than a boat. Chepo and I work our way carefully forward and I began casting to the closest Permit. It follows the fly briefly two times but turns back each time.
As I prepare to cast again, the other fisherman, who will not be named, has worked his way up the beach. I assume he wants to watch, or maybe wait his turn to cast after I hook up. Instead he flanks me and starts casting into the middle of the Permit school. He lines a Permit (i.e., throws his fly line over a fish). That Permit spooks, and the whole school takes off for the middle of the bay. He does not apologize. Even though it was my turn to be on the bow and I was working the school first, he insists he’s allowed to wade fish the same school at the same time. A small black cloud settles in over my head.
While my boat partner is on the bow, I become aware of the inevitable, creeping dehydration and reach for my water bottle, which has rolled deep behind the seats. While retrieving the bottle, I accidentally scrape it lightly on the hull. Unbeknownst to me, my boat partner is working a group of permit and they turn away from his fly following the audible scrape. I apologize profusely. Despite my annoyance, I did not consciously scrape the hull with the bottle. After chewing me out, my boat partner says, “Well, I guess we’re even.”
* * *
DAY 3
Before getting back on the water here in the Yucatan, I’ll back up a month. Gearing up to fly fish for Permit, I went out every day to an open lake or salt flat near my home to practice casting heavy crab flies in the wind using my moderately fast Sage 9wt fly rod.
People usually fly fish for permit using a beefier 10wt fly rod because the heavier line penetrates the wind better. In fact, my friend Juan offered to loan me his ultra-fast 10wt rod for the trip.
Experience has taught me that my two enemies in a fly rod setup are fast and heavy. Even my moderately fast 9wt setup tends to overload my light bone structure and aggravate old injuries. That’s why I’d built a 8/9wt fly rod around a softer rod blank. My hand, wrist, and elbow get progressively grumpier with every step up in weight. My preferred flats rod is a 7wt – anything heavier is asking for trouble.
And trouble I got. Two weeks before the trip, I sprained my casting hand through the repetitive motion of a home carpentry project and daily casting practice with the 9wt. Ice reduced the pain, but healing was slow and I had to lay off casting practice to aid the recovery. The day I left for the Yucatan, my hand felt 95% better.
My wise spouse, who does not fish, nonetheless integrates information well and has a history of dispensing good fly fishing advice. She suggested I bring, as a backup, my two-handed “Spey” rod. Because it doesn’t load the same joints as a one-handed fly rod, if or when my right hand gives out again, I could continue to fish.
I’d never heard of anyone fishing for Permit with a two-handed rod, so I sought a second opinion from Anthropic’s “Claude” AI chatbot (Sonnet 5 medium LLM):
“Does anyone fly fish for Permit with a two-handed fly rod (Spey rod)?”
Claude returned a five paragraph treatise, the gist of which was that Spey rods are designed for distance, not accuracy, and that I’m a sacrilegious twit for considering such a crude instrument in the noble pursuit of Permit. Claude did throw me a small bone in the last paragraph:
That said, “almost never” isn’t “never” — some experimental or novelty anglers have tried switch rods or short two-handers for permit, mostly out of curiosity rather than because it offers any real advantage. It’s not a recognized or recommended technique in the permit-fishing community.
Being a scientist, I necessarily qualify as an experimental angler. My two-handed fly rod is 13 feet long, though, not a short two-hander or a switch rod. But what the heck, maybe I’ll be the first person to catch a Permit on a proper Spey rod.
OK, fat chance. Still, an extra checked item in my baggage would only cost $60 each way – not a bad price for trip insurance given the recent injury to my right hand.
Sure enough, after my first two days of fishing for fussy Permit with one-handed 9wt rods (“Cast again, same place!”), my right hand is trashed. I have four more days of fishing ahead of me here in the Yucatan. Casting left-handed, I’m quite accurate at close range but I can’t reach the full distance needed to hit every Permit shot the guide calls. So, on DAY 3, out comes the two-hander.
* * *
Yesterday’s boat partner has hired a guided boat all to himself for the rest of the week. Good idea. This day I share guide Chepo’s boat with Tim.
As Claude had explained, the two-handed fly rod won’t let me place a fly as precisely as I can with a single-handed rod, but contrary to Claude’s pronouncements, it excels at every other demand. Without hurting my hand, the two-hander tosses heavy permit flies 60 feet in a wind. Plenty of times a permit ignores a fly, so repeated casts are needed, even with a one-handed rod. When the guide calls out “Cast again, same distance, more left!” the two-handed rod can pick up 40-50 feet of fly line and recast it “more left” 60 or 70 feet with no time-wasting false casts.
From my collection of Permit flies, Chepo selects a white tie of Dave Skok’s Strong Arm Merkin. I always fish with the tip of the hook barb depressed. Saltwater fly fishing pioneer, Chico Fernandez, insists that by pressing just the tip of the barb down to make a hump out of the barb, you get the best of both worlds: the hook penetrates better but also comes out when you want it to. That’s helpful when you hook your clothes, or worse, your cheek. If a precious fish breaks off with my fly in its mouth, I want it to shed the hook easily.
Back at the same spot mid-afternoon, a Permit follows my fly twenty feet before pouncing on it. I set the hook and the Permit takes off. That 20 foot follow has left me with a bit over twenty feet of loose fly line, piled in random curls on the deck behind me. As the fish starts its run, a strong gust blows a loop of that loose line up over my head and around my neck. Gripping the rod in one hand, I flail frantically with the other to get the line off my neck but in an instant it comes tight around the back of my head and the 16 pound tippet snaps. Rats!
Lesson learned: no matter the excitement of a permit chasing the fly, I must do what it takes to throw the retrieved line back and DOWN so the extra loops land inside the cockpit and not on the deck.
The break-off aside (beginner’s mistake), the two-handed rod had proven it could hook a permit. Even better, I have not been strangled nor my carotid artery severed by a fly line attached to a powerful fish.
But I have not spooked the school, so it’s Tim’s turn to try. He and Chepo hop out of the boat to wade, while I stay behind and make a point of not spooking his fish.
Tim lands a nice one.
A boy and his fish. I’m in the back, trying again. Photo by Chepo..
The Permit school is still there, so I climb out and try again. During my first retrieve, a big barracuda slashes through the school, probably in pursuit of Bonefish. The water explodes in a sparkle of silver flashes, Permit and Bonefish bound for deep water. The fishing day is over.
DAY 4
My partner today is Chris. I am heeding the lesson of yesterday’s error. After casting from the foredeck in the stiff wind, I bend down or kneel for the retrieve so I can carefully pitch each curl of loose fly line back and down into the cockpit behind me where the wind can’t make mischief of it. I am using a new fly of the same pattern as yesterday, but in cream instead of white.
Strong Arm Merkin, missing part of a leg, nipped off by a baby Blue Runner.
Chris gets out to wade fish our magic afternoon spot and casts repeatedly to a Permit, but each time a succession of small Bonefish zoom in to snatch away his fly. After a catching and releasing a bunch of little squirts, he hooks into a decent Bonefish.
Here Chris wrangles a pesky 4 lb Bonefish that snatched his fly from in front of the Permit.
It does not please him. Only a missed Permit could turn a nice Bonefish into a disappointment.
Using the two-hander, I hook up on another Permit and get it “on the reel”, meaning the line slack safely is taken up and the reel’s drag is engaged.
The fish runs down the beach, so I hop from the boat and wade after it to recover some line and make the fish quicker to land when it tires. Chepo wades in behind me while Chris stays with the boat and takes video.
Permit on the two-hander. Notice how little the two-hander bends compared to a single-handed rod. Photo by Chris Webb.
I mostly keep my eye on the fish but glance down to avoid stepping on a sting rays in the shallows. Shuffling one’s feet is a safe practice but it stirs up the sediments.
I try not to step on one of these dudes, which are common in the shallows.
Though I landed my first Permit myself, Chepo wants to land this one, and I let him – he likely knows something I don’t. Holding his cellphone-camera aloft in one hand, Chepo tries twice to grab the permit by its tail with his other hand, but each time the fish bolts back to deep water, forcing Chepo to duck the whizzing fly line.
Chepo has good reflexes. A guide doesn’t want to break off his client’s Permit.
Third time’s a charm and we have the fish to hand.
That’s a proper Permit, not a monster, but solid. When I remove the fly from its mouth, the tippet breaks in my hand.
This Permit has not only chewed my fly to a pulp, it has shredded the tippet most of the way through, probably by rubbing it against corals. I really don’t know how this fish didn’t break off before we landed it. That risk is probably why Chepo was so eager to grab the Permit as soon as possible.
After quick photos, I release this Permit, perhaps the first caught on a Spey rod. It hurries off to rejoin its school in the green waters of Bahia del Espiritu Santo.
Breakfast at Playa Blanca Lodge is whatever you want. I had coffee, OJ, fresh tropical fruits, an omelette, and two strips of bacon. We packed our lunches from an equally splendid spread of ceviche, fried fish, leftover roast beef or BBQ ribs, fruits, sandwich fixings, French cheeses, you name it. You want bottles of water, limeade, beer? How many?
At 07:10, fly fishing guests assembled at the truck for the 20 minute ride south to the dock. Skiffs departed the dock each day at 07:30 and returned by 16:00.
The flats of Espiritu Santo Bay (Bahia del Espiritu Santo) are accessed by a fleet of small Dolphin skiffs. The ride south is bouncy in the waves driven by the prevailing SE trade winds, but the small craft are dry and easy for guides to pole. The guides are all local fellows from the Yucatan. My guide the first four days was a short, stocky fellow named Chepo, pronounced “Chay-Poe”. The first day on the water, I had Chepo and his boat to myself.
Chepo looked in my box of permit flies and picked out a crab fly, my favorite by chance, that I’d crafted from a coconut fibre scrubbing pad and some “ultra chenille”.
Up on the poling platform, Chepo deployed his magic flats vision, spotting fish invisible to me under the shimmering waves.
In addition to Spanish, Chepo speaks a dialect of fly fishing English, enhanced with his own units of measure:
“Eleven o’clock, forty feet” means “Cast 45° left of center, sixty feet”.
“White, white…” means “Wait, wait…”
“Cast again! More longer!” means “Throw the fly in the same direction, but seventy feet.”
Once I learned to follow Chepo’s directions (“white” took the longest), I began to catch fish.
A baby Bonefish, my smallest ever on fly, somehow managed to stuff most of that crab fly in its mouth.
Some juvenile Mutton Snappers likewise gulped down the crab fly, my first ones on a fly rod.
An uncounted mess of small Blue Runners and Mangrove Snappers did their best to rip the fly to pieces, yanking loose bits of coconut fiber, and chewing the fuzz off the leading claw so it flopped pitifully.
Finally a permit appeared, using my new rod, I cast what little remained of the fly: a small disk of coconut fiber, two eyes, and a trailing claw.
The Permit connected with my bedraggled fly. I cleared the line and the reel drag sang the happy buzzing song that flats fishers so love to hear as the fly line sliced water in two.
My first Permit on fly, not huge, but just dandy, on my first day fishing the flats of Bahia del Espiritu Santo, on the tattered remnants of a file that I tied, cast with a rod that I built. What’s better than that?
Thank you Andy, Juan, and Chepo.
Two ways to eat a scorpion
Playa Blanca Lodge has one sacred tradition: when an angler catches his or her first Permit, he or she must eat a scorpion.
Accordingly, after dinner that night, young Calvin and I were each served a scorpion, pickled in mescal.
Florida Bark Scorpion, Centruroides gracilis
I recognized my dessert topping as a Florida Bark Scorpion, common in the Florida Keys. For years I kept one in a jar of alcohol on my desk at work. They’re big and scary when they skitter across the floor, and their sting hurts like a wasp if you are unfortunate enough to contact one, but their venom is not lethal. The terminal segment of the tail that holds the venom had already been removed.
I took my scorpion apart leg-by-leg, squeezing the meat out of each segment with my teeth like one does with the legs of a fried tarantula, a tasty Cambodian delicacy.
Glancing back and forth between his own intact scorpion and me, actively nibbling my prize, Calvin looked worried. Finally, he picked up the 8-legged horror and tossed it down the hatch in one gulp, aided by the double shot of tequila.
The chitin exoskeleton of arthropods is indigestible, so you can guess what happens, or rather, what doesn’t happen, if one swallows said arthropod without chewing. Not wanting my scorpion to reappear as a scorpion, ever, I channeled my inner squirrel monkey and thoughtfully munched it down.
After its soak in mescal, the scorpion tasted more like mescal than the assorted terrestrial arthropods I’ve eaten on prior tropical adventures. I gave it a rating of meh-minus, but the fruit was good. I’ll happily take a deep-fried tarantula over a mescal-soaked scorpion any day.
Flying over the sea from Miami to Cancún, I looked down on blobs and bands of sargassum “seaweed” floating towards the shore.
This massive sargassum outbreak is a new phenomenon, postulated to result from fertilizer run-off in the Amazon areas that have been converted to agriculture.
The resort cities across the Caribbean, including Miami, Cancún, and Tulum have been hit hard by sargassum washing up on the beaches, rotting and stinking. In Mexico, resorts are being protected by floating barriers designed to keep sargassum away. They do their best to intercept it at sea and haul it away before it can wash ashore. In the US sargassum has rights.
I had one night in Cancún before taking a puddle-jumper south to Punta Pajaros in the Sian Ka’an Biosphere. The outfitter that organized the trip, Yellow Dog Fly Fishing, recommended the Marriott Courtyard Hotel as clean, inexpensive, and close to the airport. What the outfitter didn’t mention is that the coconut-ginger ice cream served in the hotel restaurant is over-the-moon good, the garden is full of birds, and a resident coatimundi snuffles around the garden by the pool. It’s a truly dandy place to stay overnight.
From Cancún, we took a chartered single engine plane southward 45 minutes to an airstrip at Punta Pajaros.
From the airstrip, we were ferried across a lagoon in a panga, like an oversized dorry, and rode in the back of a truck 40 minutes down a dirt track to Playa Blanca Lodge. That’s four means of transport to get to the lodge.
The instant we arrived at the lodge, a margarita appeared in my hand.
The lodge recently upgraded to solar+battery power so the mini-split AC units kept humidity low in our cottages around the clock.
More than nice enough for me. Comfortable beds too.
Water from the well is noticeably salty, but we had fresh drinking water available in our rooms, and hot, brackish water for showering.
You put your rods in the rack and they get spirited to the boats before you get there, and washed down with brackish water when you return to the lodge. I removed my reels at night and cleaned the lines and reels with a cup of fresh water.
The normally white sand beach sported a thick band of sargassum, with more rolling in from the surf. The water remained clear along most shorelines, but on the shallower sections, sargassum rotted in the water, consuming dissolved oxygen, and tainting the water with stinky and toxic sulfur dioxide.
Tarpon can breath air and so hunted baitfish disabled by the anoxic water. Frigatebirds did likewise.
Gray Foxes are common on the grounds and surrounding woodland. In addition to the usual foxy fare of lizards, bugs, and baby birds, they munch on the assorted terrestrial crabs that wander the sandy grounds.
Our first night at the lodge, a fox stole one of two flip-flops off a cottage porch. The flip-flops belonged to Nate, a small animal vet from Idaho, who, in addition to flip-flops, had brought along his 20 year old son Calvin.
The next six days, quite a lot of fishing happened, some of which I’ll describe in subsequent posts. But for now, we’ll stick to the Lodge and its surrounds.
This hermit crab is so well armored no fox is going to make a dent, and might get his nose pinched if it tried. The ubiquitous Great-tailed Grackle marches across the upper left corner of the photo.
Ruins of a Mayan temple are a short walk down a mosquitoey trail through the woods.
A fox trotted down the trail ahead of me before darting into the thick woods to check on his collection of kiped footwear. A member of the staff was lucky enough to spot a jaguar on the road one night. Seeing a jaguar would have upstaged catching a Permit.
Our final evening we had a hermit crab race. The guests bet $20 each on which numbered crab of 30 would make it out of the sand ring first. My crab, #20, lost in the first elimination round. The ultimate winnings were contributed to the deserving staff who took such good care of us.
On the morning of 3 October 2025, I spotted a woman alone in the park across the street from our house. A pair of binoculars hung from her neck and she cradled a camera with a long lens. I always say ‘hi’ to birders in the park. Andrea Diamond, bubbling with excitement, told me she’d just spotted a Golden-winged Warbler, the first rare bird she had discovered on her own.
I came to know this elegant songbird during my childhood summers at a wildlife camp in West Virginia, but I had never seen one in Florida. Andrea relocated it quickly and I renewed my acquaintance with an old friend.
Golden-winged Warbler in All American Park, South Miami. Photo by local birder Himanshu Gupta.
For the next three days, South Florida’s birders flocked to the park and I became the Golden-winged Warbler Ambassador. Juan Valdez, one of the many birders who came to look for the warbler, also turned out to know the native plants. I learned that he works as an art museum curator and…wait… he fly fishes Biscayne Bay. Clearly my kind of guy.
Since then I have entertained Juan through The Eye of the Cormorant and he has delighted me with photos and texts when his fly fishing skills produce a particularly splendid result.
Juan with a bonefish caught on fly in Biscayne Bay.
Fast forward to late June of this year. Juan phones me one evening to say that his friend Andy had booked a week at a fancy fly fishing lodge in the Yucatan, but cannot go. Andy offered the trip to Juan, but Juan can’t go either. In the unlikely event that I am free the second week of August the trip is mine.
Playa Blanca Lodge is the sort of place I read about online in the outfitter catalogs. I drool longingly over the descriptions, check the cost, then exhale and close the webpage. With this gifted package I just had to get myself from Miami to Cancún, cover one night in a hotel, and tip the lodge staff and fishing guides.
I am definitely free the second week in August.
Wow.
Thanks Andy! Thanks Juan!
Playa Blanca Lodge is situated in the Sian Ka’an Biosphere Preserve on the Atlantic coast of the Yucatan Peninsula, located here on Google Maps.
My family visited Sian Ka’an twelve years ago while on vacation in Tulum. The Biosphere Preserve is a cross between the Everglades and the Lower Florida Keys before people made such a mess of things here in Florida. The Mayans, likewise, tried their best to screw up the hydrology of Sian Ka’an, but equipped only with stone tools and manual labor for chipping canals out of the limestone bedrock, and no artificial fertilizer to aid their agriculture, the harms they wrought were far less extensive than here in Florida.
The lower reaches of Sian Ka’an Biosphere include Espiritu Santo Bay, home to a healthy population of Permit(Trachinotus falcatus), a game fish in the jack family. Permit are wary, strong, and fast. The Permit is infamous among fly fishers for its capricious behavior, often rejecting a perfectly delivered fly and, on rare occasion, grabbing a fly from a botched cast. Permit fight hard, and have a large repertoire of escape tactics: scraping off a fly on a coral, crushing or straightening a fly’s hook, or grinding through the nylon leader on the floor of the bay.
A local attorney friend has been trying to catch a Permit for years with no success.
The most accomplished fisherman in my local fishing club writes: “I have presented over 1000 flies to Permit… caught one (winning a tournament in 1988) and been skunked ever since!!! There is no way I haven’t found to lose a hooked Permit!”
Juan recently caught a nice Permit in Biscayne Bay. He is amazing.
With only four years of fly fishing under my belt, I consider Permit to be out of my league. I’ve seen Permit in Biscayne Bay and the Keys, but I’ve never caught one on fly or even set my mind to trying. Last spring I followed a massive Permit in my kayak for half an hour, but despite my advancing as slowly as possible, the Permit would never let me approach closer than 125 feet.
My benefactor, Andy, who gave me his trip reservation, sent me a brief note:
“Catch a permit for me.”
Uh oh.
I ordered materials to tie Permit flies, producing an assortment of weighted crabby and shrimpy things in proven patterns recommended by the trip outfitter.
My ties of the Raghead Crab fly.
The weighted crab flies that Permit favor are hard to cast, so I would need serious practice.
In the vain hope of not trashing my right hand by excessively casting my fast-action 9wt fly rod, I sought a rod of similar weight but with a softer action. The company I picked had 8/9wt rod blanks available, but none assembled in the size I wanted. I had never built out a rod blank before, but I figured why would Al Gore invent the internet if not for instructing a novice such as myself?
Here’s the newly built rod, getting its epoxy coating on a rotating machine that prevents drips.
I left for the airport a few hours after the epoxy dried.
