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DRY TORTUGAS: Stronghold of Nature
An immersive journey into the stunning beauty, rich biodiversity, and fragile ecosystems of Dry Tortugas National Park, this book combines captivating photographs with insightful narratives to highlight a remote archipelago that has profound ecological significance. Purchase a hardback copy of DRY TORTUGAS: Stronghold of Nature signed by the author Ian Wilson-Navarro.
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One Lucky Fisherman’s Heart
I had been feeling listless and napping for many months. I thought it was because of my type two diabetes and because I was getting older; and then I ran into three separate walls of angina. The most worrisome occurred while wading across an estuarial river in Maine on my way to fly fish the surf for striped bass where I felt paralyzed midstream and almost swept away and barely made it across but after a few minutes rest, I made it and then on across the quarter mile of sands to the surf where I hooked a striped bass of 40 inches or more and in the brief fight before spitting the hook I learned that the tug truly is a drug. If I could no longer cross the river then no more fishing for me and that was unacceptable so the day I returned to Key Largo I talked to my ARVN Jami Horvat at Advanced Primary Care where she made me submit to an EKG exam on Tuesday the 16th of July. The irregularities in my EKG had her refer me to adjacent cardiologists Drs. Bruce Boros & Richard Berger and where ARPN Taylor Menendez sent me…
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Surfing: The art of learning from your mistakes
The surf-break at Molasses reef: He launched the Lucky Roller about three in the afternoon from the Port Largo homeowners park in Key Largo. The weather had been downright nasty even for late March. Though not hurricane season, he felt one was coming as for many days a hard cold-front had been blowing 25 knots or better out of the southeast and then that morning a stronger cold front began to blow down from the north. The wind slowed from a gallop, to a canter, a trot, to a crawl. The feathered clouds above seemed to want to form their own disturbingly calm vortex, like when the eye of Hurricane Irma when it went through the Keys and sucked all the water out of Florida Bay. He could feel the air temperature begin to drop. He floated the Lucky Roller, fired her up, backed her around off the ramp and headed out. He wanted to see if the abrupt wind shift from SE to NE coupled with the surf buildup of a week’s worth of heavy winds out of the southeast might create a surf break five miles offshore at the edge of local Molasses reef. He considered that surfing…
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Trouting the Beaverkill
Along the far bank is a ledge of New York granite that runs the length of the pool. At first and last light the darkened granite looks like the silhouette of a prehistoric bear standing up to his belly in the stream, fishing. The branches of a Douglas fur hang over the bear’s massive shoulders and reach out over the head of the pool. Upstream the leaves of dainty poplar and beach wave in the light over the riffle water on the long flat channel into the deep pool that begins under the bear’s snout.On hot summer days, wading in jeans and felt soled wading shoes and keeping your casts quick and short and just beneath the overhang, you can take trout after trout in the slick nipple of water that peaks behind each rounded stone in the riffle water above the big fishing bear granite. Small grizzly hackle flies tied with a white deer hair tuft for visibility and buoyancy work best.One sunny, breezy June day. you wade into center stream and settle yourself on a long, wide flat rock. Small trout sip gnats in the deep hole beneath the bear’s head. Excited you tie on a tiny black…
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Hooray for Turtle Turds!
On New Year’s Day we were anchored south of the Ocean Reef Club off Key Largo and chumming hard. We had caught several nice mangrove, mutton, yellowtail, lane snapper and porgies on the shallow patches inside of Hawk’s channel, when a scene out of Caddy Shack occurred where what appeared to be a solid human turd floated slowly through our chum-slick on the tide. The boat owner suggested we take our lines out of the water until it passed. None of us required urging to comply. Thereafter we continued fishing for another hour when yet another, slightly smaller turd floated by. For the last three weeks we have seen strong west winds blow dirty water out of the Gulf of Mexico. Also, the Key Largo sewer authority has been connecting Ocean Reef Club’s sewer system to the relatively new Key Largo tertiary sewage treatment center. For many years going back and many years to come a sewer pipe off Key Biscayne otherwise known as the shit hole, has and will release billions of gallons of partially treated sewage from Miami into the Gulf Stream. I wondered if any could have been responsible for what I was seeing. Either way it…
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Center of the Universe Pond
At Center Pond, native brook trout is what’s for supper. After a 5 mile hike up the mountain we put up our camp and took to the lake in the two canoes. If Center Pond was out West in the dessert canyon country it would be considered a box canyon covered by a large shallow lake. The lake ranges from 15 to five feet deep. At the stream entry end of the lake it is deeper and full of rocks. At the drainage end it’s shallow and the bottom is silted in. The mountain tops rise up on three sides and the wind swirls up the center of the lake, making it tricky sometimes to throw and see a dry fly. Dry fly fishing is best in the still of the morning and when it calms in the afternoon. Native brook trout feed on dry flies like a size 16 Hornberg or Adams or on nymphs and leaches like the famous bead head nymph or black woolly bugger leach fly that we purchased along with our fishing licenses at Two Rivers Canoe and Tackle in Millinocket. The water in Center Pond is the color of old dried blood from cedar…
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Tournament Dreams
Summer days during dolphin tournament season in Key Largo have everything to do with how hard you’ve worked at your day job and how well you have provided for your family; for if you have done these things well, you can feel good with yourself about running deep for the money-fish. Each day before, during, and after work you review and fulfill your tournament list: fill out your application and send in your entry fee to qualify for the early entry discount, rise early and run the Lucky Roller to the patch reefs and throw net ballyhoo, fill your freezer with twenty pound bags of ice, take the boat in to your mechanic to service the engine, re-spool all your spinners and conventional reels with tournament monofilament, rig and brine ballyhoo so they won’t go soft on the last day of fishing. On and on, there are new lures and teasers to purchase and everything from last year’s tournament season has rusted or frayed and is in need of repair or replacement. Each and every hook needs to be sharpened, new or old. All week long, through the tedium of work, out there on the horizon of your mind, schools of…
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Another Fish Story
“Don’t worry, Dad. We’ll make it.” I looked at my 11-year-old son, sitting beside me. “And if we don’t?” I asked. “We’ll make it, Dad.” We had a 40-minute drive from the Auburn Colony in South Harpswell, Maine, to Popham Beach. The car radio clock read 3:58 p.m. “Be back by the dinner bell,” my wife had said as we drove away. The dinner bell at the “Colony“ would be rung, as it had summer evenings for the last century, at 7 p.m. His buddies would all be at dinner on time, dressed by their mothers as if to head out for a day at the office. Some mothers tied their son’s bowties for them. Texan moms used string ties that their father’s had worn. Men bowed equally to Auburn Colony tradition, wearing blue blazers and white slacks; and conservative neckties. Ladies wore summer print dresses, and light cardigans for the walk back to their cottages in the Maine night air. The Auburn Colony in South Harpswell, Maine, had remained an eddy of gentility since my great-grandfather bought one of the ten cottages about the turn of the century. I recall summer evenings as a young man when we’d build…
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The Great Shot
He started out in the morning, early. Sounds glared out in the pre-dawn: spoon in the coffee mug, twang of the egg skillet, running water; and then those few minutes of silence while he stared into the coffee mug because it was blacker than the night outside the window. He put the coffee mug down and stood and picked his pack off the other chair. He took up his old 16-guage pump by the case handle and tucked it under his arm so he had a hand free to lock the door. He put on his cowboy hat and went outside. The rain muffled everything, even the closing of the car door. The car started with a cough and he backed her out and put her in forward. It was a twenty-mile drive to the new place and he drove slowly, thinking that the rain would keep the birds on their roosts. He found an old sweet song on the radio and let his mind wander. No other cars on the road. In the fringe of the headlights the desert began. The sun wasn’t rising. He flicked the radio off. You never can rely on the weather, he thought, not…
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Town Dock Fishing
All my guests grew up in places far away from Maine. All my guests had advanced degrees and were almost successful or famous or leaning forward toward success or fame at some point in their future. The noted guest was a well-known novelist and outdoor writer. I’d become friends with him at graduate school where we’d met on the tennis court long before he became one of my writing instructors. Their successes had led my guests to know the finer things in life, though they all had a fascination with the primitive. Fishing from the town dock may have been disdained by others; for my guests it would be an adventure, like traveling in a third world country. My guests had arrived two days before Clambake. At the time we stayed in a cottage at one of the Colonies on the Maine Coast. This colony had been established by Maine’s wealthy families during the 1800’s as a place to go in the summertime to avoid the great polio epidemic. My great-grandfather, a well-known Unitarian Universalist minister from New York had purchased a cottage there around the turn of the century. His family grew and continues enjoying the Maine coast today.…
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The adventure of light, and nature
Alone with his camera, he stopped at another bend on the path around the moat. He’d left his friend rigging fishing poles to catch their supper back at their campsite. Here, he thought, would be a good place for a sunset shot. The sea-rock and limestone path he walked around defined the moat at old Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas. Fifteen paces back along the moat wall, he set up his camera on the tripod. He set the exposure for fifteen seconds and walked back to where the path turned into the sea and posed with his back to the camera, his face to the setting sun. He focused across the flat, steel-blue sea. A long grey cloud edged the horizon. As the sun set, sunlight patterned the sky and the sea, darker at his feet and above and orange and blue and white just above the cloud. He stood in the quiet lee of the fort. The sea lay flat, blocked from the wind by the fort’s high masonry wall; sixteen million bricks, and still unfinished. Above the rampart, the wind gusted twenty knots or better. The wind hummed out across the gulf. The sea changed hues as…
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The Buddy System
The two American boys did not think a whole bunch about beautiful Nicaraguan girls. Neither did they yet know that the best way to get to the heart of a Nicaraguan beauty was to memorize a line or two from the Nicaraguan poet laureate Ruben Dario. They did not care about Nicaraguan politics or ruthless rise of the Sandanista General Danial Ortega. Maybe they did notice that machine gun armed guards sat at the gated entrance of more than one of the many gated homes they passed on their way from Spanish lessons to the surf. Perhaps they also noticed that the streets were clean and that there were many fat chickens running free for San Juan Del Sur is a prosperous, clean, Catholic, town. All the two boys could think about was getting through their Spanish lessons in the morning so they could surf all afternoon. They were so excited to surf that they would stare at their teachers moving lips and hear nothing. They would skip lunch and jog with their surf boards from the rental shop down the cobblestone street to the long protected inlet of San Juan Del Sur. They both were mature and tall for…
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The Evening Star
We left at dawn after loading Bobby’s 24 foot Mako with my fishing gear. He had a boat, a little tackle, some fish sense, and less experience. I had all the tackle in the world, too much fish sense, and no boat. The day was blustery but seemed to be warming calmer; the bay side water was wind-blown a milky aqua green. Bobby pointed out bird life to his three son-in-laws as we sped south toward Snake Creek. Bobby spent many years as Chief administrator for the US Fish & Wildlife service. He’d learned a great deal about the different species of birds and fish and took a more scientific approach to fishing than most of the adventure seekers and adrenaline junkies who I wound up mating for. I felt a little awkward aboard the boat with Bobby and his three son-in-laws for no other reason than that I knew Bobby as a man’s man. He’s the kind of man who’d ask a future son-in-law if he was sure he knew what he was getting into before he got into it. But I didn’t want to assume too much and I didn’t know how Bobby felt about each of his…
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Too Many People
One day after a summer storm I discovered what I believed to be an unknown species of bird flying around the tree in the overgrown lot next to our home. Red bellied, blue backed birds flew through the rain clean air. The shock of recent lightning and thunder were touchable in the ozone heavy air. The leaves of the enormous banyan tree that stood in the field lot were heavy with rainwater. Walking upstairs for lunch I saw the birds veering through the low branches. If I was a bird I would have played in that tree. I would flown in close to the leaves as I was circling down and hit them with my wing tip to see the water drops shower my pals below. That’s what the birds seemed to be doing. I grew up in and around New England and have had some experience with trees and wood. I know the northern hardwoods that burn well and those that don’t. I know the rare woods that are used in furniture making and in gun stocks. I don’t know tropical woods as well; except that tropical hardwoods good for making ship masts are still more highly prized for their…
