Beavertail Skiff's Free Test Ride

Technical Poling Skiffs are the latest trend in the ever-expanding flats boat market. These are skiffs no more than eighteen-feet in length with hulls weighing under 700 pounds and drafting less than six inches of water. These impressive numbers require equally impressive materials more commonly found in stealth aircraft. Six hundred pounds of carbon fiber isn’t cheap, and one of these little skiffs can cost as much as a new BMW sports car. For my money, the best technical poling skiffs on the market are made by the Avon, Minnesota based company called Beavertail.

Beavertail’s main competitors are boats like the Maverick HPX or the Hell’s Bay Whipray. These skiffs all have hulls that weigh in around the 500 pound mark. The B-2 that I purchased two years ago came with a new Yamaha 50hp outboard and a Blue Rock aluminum trailer. This boat cost me exactly half the price of the other two competitor’s skiffs. That price included the delivery from Minnesota to San Juan, Puerto Rico. I did get this boat at a slight guide’s discount, which is common in the industry, but the competitors offered the same deal and their costs still came at twice the price of the Beavertail.

I’ve fished on those other skiffs extensively and I still own a very early model Maverick Mirage. These competing hulls are pure quality and should you choose to buy one, you’ll definitely get your money’s worth. But buying a Beavertail and saving nearly $16,000 was a no-brainer for me.

The only thing I sacrificed by upgrading to a B-2 was top speed. My 1993 Maverick Mirage with its 90 HP outboard runs at least 10 mph faster but burns twice the fuel. It competitors can also mount higher powered engines but for the areas that I fish, extra long runs aren’t necessary. Now that gas is heading back towards $3 per gallon, that’s a fair trade.

Beavertail does not have a dealer network, and having a factory located 2500 miles from the nearest bonefish isn’t too convenient for many hard core flats anglers. The way they demo their boats is through the owners of their skiffs. I recently shipped my B-2 skiff back to Florida from Vieques, so if you’re anywhere in the Ft. Myers area and want to take a test ride just call or shoot me an e-mail. Give me a day’s notice and I’ll have no problem setting aside an hour to show you my 2006 Beavertail and take a spin on the waters of Matlacha Pass.

My B-2 has been replaced by a newer model called the Vengeance, but a ride in my 2006 skiff will still give you an idea of the quality of their products. On a final note, Beavertail does not pay me anything to do this. If you do wind up buying one of their skiffs the company will give me a nice gift certificate to a couple different tackle companies for my effort but that’s it. I have no plans of ordering a new boat from them anytime in the near future. I’m not sponsored by Beavertail and they have no paid ads on this site. They’re just a great company making a great boat. You can spend a lot more money but you won’t be any happier than dealing with these guys.

McLaughlin Boys In Vieques

New Jersey angler Roger McLaughlin and his family were one of my last charters of the season on Vieques. Here are a few of the great photos that they sent me from our trip back in April.

Both boys, Brendan and Owen, scored on strong pulling bar jacks and teamed up on a nice baby tarpon. Dad won the hard luck prize by loosing a couple of mid-size tarpon and breaking my same spinning reel two years in a row.

Fishing with kids is always a great experience, especially when they get to land something special like a tarpon. It's even better when they get a chance to show dad how it's done.

But seriously, Brendan and Owen's dad is actually a very good angler and breaking gear is not uncommon when we're tarpon fishing, especially when we're using light tackle.

The company who's reel Roger broke twice just sent me two brand new models and an admission that their earlier graphite had some flaws. I suspected as much but to hear it from the source was really remarkable and encouraging at the same time. I'll have a full report on this tackle company and their new reels in a few days.

Clouser Minnow 2.0: The Supreme Clouser

The Clouser Minnow is by far the best all-around fly ever invented. Originally created for the smallmouth bass of my old homewaters on Pennsylvania's Susquehanna River, Bob Clouser's simple little streamer has landed more different species in both fresh and salt water than any other pattern.

The Clouser has traditionally been tied using bucktail which gives the fly just enough bouyancy to slow the sink rate of the dumbell eyes. This combination of materials is what gives the fly its highly effective, bouncing retrieve. The only problem with the bucktail Clouser is that it's not especially durable. It only takes a couple of whacks by hard mouthed species like tarpon or snook to mess up the natural hairs and make the fly unusable.

If you tie your own flies this isn't much of a problem. The Clouser is one of the easiest patterns and can be tied properly in about two minutes. You can spend an hour at the vice and have all you'll need for a trip to Vieques or anywhere else. Even if you're not a tyer, Clousers are usually one of the least expensive patterns at your local fly shop and you can find them online for as little as $2 a piece.

One thing I like to do is tie several Clousers using synthetic Supreme Hair instead of the natural bucktail. This material is inexpensive, easy to work with, and makes the fly very durable. Their action is nearly the same but they sink quicker, which makes them a great choice for blind casting over the reefs and deeper flats. I've had Supreme Clousers stand up to multiple barracuda hits in the Keys and all over the Caribbean. When I'm up in Southwest Florida I use this fly as soon as I find a big school of ladyfish or small sea trout. When the strikes are coming one after the other, a Supreme Clouser will keep you in the action much longer than a natural version.

Beginners

When I was guiding in Key West our local fly shop used to send me a lot of customers who never touched a fly rod before but wanted to learn the sport. This wasn’t because I was the best instructor available. In fact, I’m a self-taught caster and have no fly fishing certifications whatsoever. I simply had a reputation with the shop’s owner for not yelling at my anglers, even when they’d lobotomize me with a heavily weighted crab pattern or drive a 2/0 Owner hook deep into my calf muscle. Plus I always needed the money so I‘d take anyone they sent my way.

Getting so many unskilled anglers was sometimes tough on the ego, especially during tarpon season. We’d often come back to the dock at the end of the day and see most of the other guides and their customers high-fiving or clinking long-necks together in celebration. They’d be telling and retelling their tarpon stories while I’d look at my anglers and say something like, “Well, you learned a lot today and you‘ll be much better next time.” Then I’d try to not pick at the scabs on my right temple or the back of my calf.

Actually, I really like having beginners on my boat. Most of them are more than willing to listen and they also haven’t taught themselves any bad habits that can be really difficult to break. Just setting the hook on a tarpon with a fly rod is an act of real violence that doesn’t exist anywhere in freshwater fishing. Gently lifting the rod after the fish eats is a serious hurdle for a lot of folks who’ve started out on a trout stream. It can take several missed shots until they stop doing it. In fact, comparing trout fishing to tarpon fishing is like comparing the Tour-de-France to the Daytona 500. They’re both wheeled racing but there’s a bit of difference in horsepower.

I did actually have two different anglers manage to land tarpon without ever casting a fly before. The first beginner simply had a fish that really wanted to be caught. It was a dead calm July morning and the tarpon were rolling everywhere. I had just put the rod in my angler’s hands, explained the basics, and watched him flail away spastically like a typical first-timer. It didn’t matter. The tarpon were swimming right up to us and his fly fell in the middle of the first big school, no more than ten feet from the bow. A seventy pounder inhaled it and made a hard turn, solidly driving the hook right into the corner of its own mouth. All the jumping in the world wasn’t going to dislodge it and I had the rod rigged with a heavy 30# leader. The ninety degree water wasn’t holding a lot of oxygen and the fish wore itself out quickly. It was a miracle tarpon that we wouldn’t duplicate again that day, and my angler’s casting never got any better. At the very least I was convinced he’d become a lifetime client but I didn’t hear from him again. Maybe he figured that fly fishing couldn’t get any better than that so why not quit on a high note.

The other beginner who landed a tarpon with me was a PGA golfer who’s name I didn’t recognize. I remember that he was ranked number sixty-two on the money list at the time. After an hour on the bow he was throwing a very decent fifty foot cast, which is all you need in most situations. I started poling him down the brightest flat in the area and he was getting good shots every fifteen minutes or so. He missed a few takes but two hours later he finally struck one hard enough, cleared his line, and landed the tarpon shortly after that. By the time our trip was over he jumped two more fish and was casting almost as well as I could. It was very impressive to watch but not all that surprising coming from a professional golfer. An ESPN producer once told me that he watched Tiger Woods learn to cast flawlessly in less than five minutes.

So why was I the world’s worst golfer the one time I tried it? Golf and fly fishing are actually very similar disciplines. A good swing or cast both require coordination, timing, and finesse. But the similarities don’t stop there. Golf and fly fishing both give you the opportunity to spend lots of money on some really overpriced gear and experience all the hassles of traveling with it to some very expensive locations. Both sports give you a decent chance of getting struck by lightning. Golfers and fly fishermen also get to spend hours watching their sports on TV while boring the hell out of their non-golfing/fishing spouses. But best of all, you can become completely obsessed with both and still be lousy at them. In this case they provide you with a great excuse to throw your expensive gear down in disgust and start drinking while outdoors.

That’s probably why I never gave golf another try. I’d be dead from liver failure by now.

A Vieques Houseguest

A few months ago I posted a story about finding a tarantula in my Jeep while I was driving to the beach one morning. Dozens of people have told me that it was their favorite article I’ve written so far, and judging from all the e-mail I got there seems to be a big interest in the creepy-crawly things here on Vieques.

Well, since I don’t have a great Vieques fishing story right now, let's meet another charming resident, the giant brown centipede. The handsome fellow pictured here was a mere six inches long. They get twice that size and those black things near its head in the close-up photo are fangs. Oh yeah, the giant brown centipede, which can grow over a foot long, is also highly venomous. Hooray!

Most websites will tell you that the giant brown centipede’s bite is painful but not dangerous to humans. That’s a load of bull. I personally know two people on Vieques who were sent to the hospital with centipede bites. Our veterinarian even told me he once had to amputate a puppy’s leg after it was bit by one. That’s right, the giant brown centipede also kills puppies! If that’s not proof of how evil these things are just Google “centipede eats bat” and watch the video, but only if you don’t need much sleep tonight.

Unlike my tarantula encounter, there’s nothing really funny about finding a giant brown centipede on the floor of your bedroom. I woke up one morning and there it was, a few feet away from where I was peacefully sleeping. It made the tarantula seem about as threatening as finding a baby panda in my Jeep.

After killing the centipede with two cans of Raid and half a clip of .45 caliber hollow-points, I did what any reasonable homeowner would do and decided to burn my house to the ground. Unfortunately, I live in a typical Vieques home built out of cement block and poured concrete which doesn’t light easily. So I did the next best thing and moved out the following day. I’m writing this from the safety of Pine Island, Florida, where the sharks, cottonmouths, and alligators make me feel like I’m in a petting zoo.

In all serious, and before I cause everyone reading this to cancel their vacation plans to the island, this was the first and only giant centipede I’ve ever found inside my house, and my moving to Florida happens every year at this time. It had nothing to do with the centipede. Our friend Art from AA Exterminators has done a great job of keeping centipedes out over the past five years, but Vieques is in the tropics and these things are part of the landscape. Fortunately, the giant brown centipede is a nocturnal hunter and prefers dark and very moist places. Flip over a bunch of rocks or rotting logs in the jungle down here and you’ll definitely find a few. They rarely come inside occupied homes. If this were an everyday occurrence I wouldn’t be writing about it. In fact I wouldn’t even be living here.

It’s not that I’m squeamish about things that creep and crawl. I adore lizards and snakes and have had dozens as pets over the years. Handling slimy fish is what I get paid to do and just about any wild animal fascinates me. But I draw the line at the giant brown centipede. I mean, it’s not only the most horrifying thing on Earth, but it’s also a venomous, bat eating, puppy killer. Where did this thing possibly come from?

For years now the debate between believers in evolution and believers in creation has focused on the great apes. Did we or didn’t we evolve from them? I think that both sides are looking in the wrong direction and need to focus instead on the existence of the giant brown centipede. There’s plenty to debate here.

How did this thing possibly evolve? Nothing eats it and it doesn’t control the population of anything. It doesn’t even pollinate any plant. So what possible purpose does it serve other than to freak people out? There’s no scientific explanation for its existence that I can possibly think of. At the same time, I believe that God loves us and would never create such a thing as the giant brown centipede on purpose.

So I have a couple theories of my own. Either God stepped out for a few minutes to admire His handiwork and Satan snuck in and came up with it, or it evolved on another planet and a group of aliens dropped it off here since they couldn’t stand having them around either. Both theories make sense to me. If we had the technology we’d beam every giant brown centipede straight to Alpha Centauri tomorrow, and that bat eating video was clearly filmed in Hell. So that’s the giant brown centipede, a trick by the devil or a nasty gift from aliens. Take your pick.