There’s a draw to the near impossible. Bowhunting for elk, hitting a 4-iron straight, and fooling a permit with a fly rod. Those success rates in the single digits make us dig deeper, fail harder, spend more money, and ultimately sign up to suffer.
"Buried somewhere in all of that struggle is about as much fun as you can have."
Growing up on the trout streams of Colorado, the shaky feeling on the front of a flats skiff was foreign to me. It only took a couple of encounters with big fish in shallow water to get hooked.
Fortunately for me in my career as a photographer, I’ve been able to spend a lot of time in the salt. Often in the back of the boat shooting others making the cast, but getting the same surge of anticipation as fish roll past the bow. I’ve been incredibly lucky to travel around the world with like-minded fish junkies and witness some crazy things go down. It’s never lost on me the other-worldly places you can find yourself with a fly rod and a collection of feathers on a hook.
My fiancé, Maddie, and I often dedicate our vacations to fishing and the small island of Roatan north of mainland Honduras has been a favorite for years. It’s an expat hideout with restaurants and bars littering the beach and beautiful flats a short boat ride away. Only a couple-hour flight from Houston, it’s an easy place to escape for a saltwater fix. Our friend and guide Greg Baldwin is always waiting with his trusty German shorthaired pointer, Colt, with a look on both of their faces that reads “what took you so long.”
Permit days can be all over the map. With good weather, you can have shots all day or spend countless hours searching for a single black tail. Once you do find them, you can do everything right (rarely) and the fish will maybe give your crab pattern a look, a swirl, a follow, all before swimming away into the expanse of the ocean. They will send you back to the fly box, cutting leaders and changing flies in search of something that works. As more experienced anglers than I will tell you, it seems to be more about doing everything right in front of the right fish.
For our latest Roatan mission, we got lucky with some great weather and plenty of chances. A few days in, I watched anxiously as Maddie hooked a great fish before it ran, breaking the leader and sending the boat into a red-faced, hat-throwing fury. The very next day, everything went right again for Maddie as she admired her first permit with the unmistakable look of relief that quickly faded into looking for the next shot.
