I started fishing with Eric back in 2007 when I was guiding on Vieques, Puerto Rico. He and his wife Heather came from Idaho to spend a week on the island and had a blast down there.
In addition to being solid anglers, they were two of the nicest people and our days on my boat went by too quickly. I was thrilled when they started planning to come back the next year.
Eric was a die-hard fly fisherman, like most guys from the Idaho mountains, and he had no problems with the plentiful and cooperative Puerto Rican bonefish.
On his second trip to Vieques we had a rare school of tarpon pop up on the edge of a flat and Eric managed to get one to eat a #4 crab pattern. It was a decent fish, maybe 40 pounds, but the bonefish fly was too small, and it got tossed after the tarpon's second jump.
That fish wasn't hooked very well, but Eric was hooked permanently. He was infected with a bad case of Tarpon Fever, and this was just the beginning of a painful and drawn-out battle with a disease that would affect us both for a long and difficult time.
On Eric and Heather's third trip to Vieques, they brought their kids along and I got to watch his son Cody catch some bonefish, snapper, and a fantastic barracuda on spinning gear.
We also stumbled into another school of small tarpon, not an everyday sight in that part of the Caribbean, and they both hooked into one. Cody got his fish to the boat and Eric's spat the fly again.
"Don't worry about it." I told him. "We only land about half the tarpon that hit flies. You're behind the curve but you'll get the next one."
I was confident about that at the time. My batting average hovers around .500 with tarpon on the fly rod. That would probably translate to a $1billion per year baseball contract these days, but things are financially different for fishing guides.
I was also wrapping up my last year on Vieques and heading back to Florida for the next season. Tarpon are a lot more common around Pine Island and Eric quickly made plans to move his late summer vacation up here.
Their 2010 trip to Southwest Florida started off with his 14-year-old daughter Brooke hooking her first tarpon with a live pinfish on spinning gear 20 minutes into the trip. Eric stood silent on the bow with his fly rod while I helped her land it.
The photo I made him take of us holding that fish has run in this paper and at least a dozen other publications several times since then. I tossed it in with this article once more for old time's sake.
Eric wasn't exactly unsuccessful on that first Pine Island trip. He hooked at least one or more tarpon each day, all of them throwing the flies right back at us. His knots and leaders were holding together fine; the hooks just wouldn't stay put.
I told him about a rule we had down in Key West that said if you were still connected to the tarpon after the third jump, we'd count it as a caught fish. (If you don't know, tarpon are strictly catch and release in Florida, by law.) Eric didn't want to take that shortcut.
He needed to put his hands on one at the boat, which was understandable. And the thought of switching to spinning gear for tarpon was pure communism in his book.
The next year was a case of lather-rinse-repeat, with another handful of fish hooked and then quickly unhooked.
Eric tied his own flies over the long Idaho winters and did a great job. He used the sharpest Owner and Gamakatsu brand hooks and we even started leaving the barbs on them.
The tarpon kept spitting them out. My .500 batting average was in the toilet. We had a pattern emerging here. I could see it developing but didn't want to admit it.
The next year he stuck a solid 50 pounder on a wide-open flat north of Matlacha that stayed hooked through a dozen epic jumps until it ran out of energy. "Oh, dear God, please let this be the one." I kept repeating. It wasn't the one.
The tarpon quickly caught a second wind and made an agonizing b-line towards an abandoned crab trap. It was a slow-motion train wreck with me loudly pleading for him somehow stop the fish and Eric loudly informing me that he was obviously trying to do that.
Our world froze when we saw the trap buoy move slightly and the tarpon rocket out of the water, dragging the leader up the sharp, barnacle encrusted rope and on to freedom. That would be the only one to ever break us off on its own.
“Eric, we’re cursed.” I told him at the end of our trip the following year. At this point we’d lost over two dozen tarpon, all but that one throwing the hooks.
Bad luck like that shouldn’t be possible, but something was stopping us from landing one. “I love you, man, but we need to start seeing other people.”
I strongly encouraged him to skip Pine Island next year and go to Key West to fish with my buddy and fellow writer Capt. Mike Bartlett. Anything to get this horrible monkey off his back. “Nope,” he told me, “I started this with you and I’m going to finish it with you.”
“Fine, I’ll drive you down there myself and sit on Mike’s boat to watch it happen.” I offered. That wasn’t going to work either.
The cycle wouldn’t end, and curse wouldn’t be lifted, but Eric kept coming back. He and Heather really fell in love with Matlacha, renting the same house on Velma Street each year.
I always looked forward to seeing them, but I felt like Bill Murray’s character in “Groundhog Day,” trapped in a prison of the same day on repeat and having no way to escape it. At least I wasn’t stuck in Punxsutawney.
Fast forward to last year. Tarpon Season 2024 was one for the books, the best any of us had ever seen, with acres of bait and fish throwing themselves out of the water some mornings.
I had Eric move his trip to late August when the resident juveniles really come out to play. For the first time in a long time, I felt good about our chances.
Less than an hour into Morning One and Eric stuck a nice 30 pounder, the perfect size on an 8-weight fly rod. Several jumps later we were still buttoned up and the fish started circling the boat.
I was getting ready to grab the leader and make an official “Tournament Rules” catch at that point. but the tarpon surged in a straight line and then nothing except a huge boil. Bull shark.
The water was full of them last year and this shark was sent to enforce the curse. At least it gave us a new story other than the hook just falling out.
For some reason, I still felt pretty good about things and a few hours later, at the mouth of a small creek below Matlacha, Eric fed a 10 pounder that didn’t put up a fight in the 94-degree water. I scooped at it violently with my big landing net and, just
like that, it was done.
Seventeen years later. “See, it’s not so hard.” I think I said to him. He’s not smiling in the photo for some reason, but the curse was lifted, and I lost count of the fish we landed that week.
And this year it was another lather-rinse-repeat, but in a good way. We brought at least a half dozen fish to the boat and lost quite a few more, just like it’s supposed to happen during a week of Tarpon Season on Pine Island. There’s no moral to this story.
That’s just the way things go out on the water sometimes. See you next year, Eric.
Capt. Gregg Mckee
Wildfly Fishing Charters
Matlacha, Florida
