The Fumble
February in the Northwest can be a challenging month, both on the weather and the fishing side of things. Add to that an underfunded Skagit steelhead fishery that would remain closed through the spring wild steelhead catch and release season and you can imagine it was not entirely unnatural to want to be someplace else. Add a little sunshine, some tropical flair and a host of turbo injected flats species you can sight fish for and it's pretty much a done deal. Belize is one of my favorite travel destinations. It's fairly direct to get to from western Washington, folks are friendly, food is pretty decent and warm shallow flats abound, as do the bonefish, permit, tarpon and variety of other species that call them home much of the time. So we put together a group and headed south to visit Rocky Point Permit Camp on the northern end of Ambergris Cay in early February.
The trip started out like any other, flies tied feverishly in the late night hours leading up to departure, bags hastily packed and re-packed, enough rods and reels crammed into a travel case to fish your way around the globe if you had to (or were lucky enough to get to). Three of the five of us flew out a day early to do a guide day for permit out of San Pedro. When the Cessna Grand Caravan touched down on the island after a short fifteen minute flight from Belize City, we stepped outside, not into the warm embrace of tropical air we were expecting but instead something more akin to a mid-spring evening in Bellingham. The 50's aren't terrible but my somewhat reptilian penchant for heat likes the 80's much better. We gathered our bags and walked a few blocks from the airport to our hotel, grabbed some dinner and spent the remainder of the evening watching tarpon cruise the docks in the San Pedro Lagoon before calling it a night.
The next morning we met our guides Hilian and Axel at dawn and promptly set out for a day's fishing. It was even colder than the day before and as Axel and I motored towards the first flat I huddled in the bow shivering in a winter parka which I had thankfully stuffed into my luggage back in Seattle. I left the parka on for the next few hours, casting at bulges in the water that revealed groups of permit, the odd tarpon and a sizeable school of jack crevalle. I put my fly on the breakfast plate of more fish than not but nothing seemed terribly interested in eating. Unseasonably cold water often has that effect on warm water fish. By the time we elected to look for fish back near Ambergris Cay, the sun was finally high enough in the sky that I could remove my jacket and the atmosphere was beginning to feel more typical of this place.
Axel poled the boat through a series of channels south of San Pedro. Off in the distance, I could see Matt and Evan fishing with Hilian. At one point, Evan connected to a nice fish which he later told me was a big permit that unfortunately came unbuttoned. Axel and I didn't see a whole lot of anything until he promptly declared "Permit! Nine o'clock, long cast!" as I was busy scanning the horizon for fins and tails closer to three o'clock off the bow. I dropped a long backcast behind me as I was turning to see what Axel was pointing at and much to my amazement, the Strong Arm Crab pattern landed softly about a foot from the lead fish. Strip, strip, strip and the line came tight to what both of us figured was a good permit. My line whizzed out in a blur and then backing and more backing. Axel started the motor and slowly drove the boat in the direction of the fish to help me recover some line. Once on a shorter leash, we got a good glimpse of the fish's long sickle tail glinting in the sunlight. It looked more yellow than black. I don't know why excitement so often fades to disappointment amongst permit anglers when they become aware that they've hooked something other than a permit. By all accounts, a big jack crevalle fights every bit as hard as a permit and with its similarly shaped body, possesses equal parts speed and power. If anything, jacks might be a little more tenacious, refusing to give up and struggling tirelessly for their freedom. We landed the big jack, searched for permit for another hour and eventually made our way back to the marina.
Nick and Sam would be arriving in a few hours. We decided to rest up before meeting them at the airport while Matt nursed one of the most epic raccoon-eyed face sun burns I've ever laid eyes on. We met Nick and Sam in town, got settled at the hotel and enjoyed another fantastic dinner, rich with various fruits of the sea, including conch, shrimp and snapper. Then Evan decided he was going to try and hook a tarpon off the dock. Tarpon frequently hang out around the lighted docks at night and cruise for food. These particular ones get pretty well fed eating scraps at the fish processing shack just a few docks down, so mostly show little interest in pursuing a fly, which is probably for the best. The rest of us wandered from dock to dock, looking for fish, Belikin beers in hand, and discussing the plans for heading north in the morning. At one point Evan shouts, incredulously, "Oh my gosh! I hooked one!" and a large silvery shape explodes repeatedly out there in the darkness. We gather round, phones in hand, recording video, offering moral support, celebrating the moment and taking care not to trip over the empty bottles of Rude Boy someone had left on the dock before us. It was exciting and frenzied all at once, and in that moment of chaos it happened. I stepped headlong into the one missing plank on the dock, buried my left leg up to the hip in rickety wood and slammed my left forearm hard on the edge of the dock. When my arm hit with all the force of Chuck Norris breaking a cinderblock, my phone fumbled end over end into the dark waters of the San Pedro Lagoon and I watched in disbelief like an NFL QB getting hopelessly strip-sacked.
I pulled myself out of the hole, bloodied and bruised, and watched as Evan landed the tarpon. It was an incredible fish indeed! Once the tarpon swam off to quietly recover, we spotlighted the area around where my phone had landed but could see no sign of it. I found an old dilapidated paddleboard that was really more of a decaying block of dense foam and proceeded to paddle around on my belly and probe the foot and a half of fine sediment on the bottom with part of an old broken fishing rod I found. All to no avail. Once the water got too murky and several pairs of orange-glowing eyes from curious saltwater crocodiles began appearing along the far edge of the lagoon I gave up and we retired to get ready for our adventure up north, where I would spend the rest of the week with a grapefruit-sized hematoma on my upper thigh and huge dark bruises radiating down my left side.
Game Time
Rocky Point Permit Camp is a small DIY-focused fishing lodge situated about as far north on Ambergris Cay as one can go without crossing the channel into Mexico. It borders endless productive flats and one can fish both the front side of the island inside the world’s second largest barrier reef or venture into the maze of creeks, lagoons and flats that make up the backside. Owner Jeff Spiegel also built Cayo France Farm & Fly, where we'd taken trips in previous years. He sold Cayo a couple of years ago and focuses solely on RPPC these days. Having been to both locations, RPPC offers a lot more variety as well as a hard wadable bottom on most flats. Several of us visited this place last year and were beyond excited to get back. Sunday morning we met Jeff in front of our hotel and split the five of us and our gear between two vehicles to depart for camp. Within little over an hour we were getting settled, talking strategy, safety and this year, Super Bowl. While we had several fishable hours left in the day, a few of us were hoping to watch the Super Bowl and elected to come in a little earlier.
Even as a pretty ardent football fan, fishing takes precedence for me over sports the majority of the time, but it's not every day that the Seahawks make a Super Bowl appearance and we thought it would be fun to catch the game...of course, after catching a few fish. Matt, Sam and I walked the beach south from camp and Evan and Nick headed to the back. The water remained unusually chilly for this tropical climate but we managed to catch a few small bonefish and spot a couple of permit patrolling inside the reef. Fortunately, the weather outlook looked to be improving with the next several days portending hot sun along with light and variable wind. We all eventually ended up back at camp to compare note and prep for the game over a delicious plate of chicken salbutes from Albert, the young and gifted camp chef. We piled into Jeff's Toyota Tacoma and made the short drive south to Tranquility Bay lodge to watch the game.
Tranquility Bay Lodge has a great little bar built out over the water in a peaceful little cove protected by the reef. Between the cold Belikins, tropical fruity beverages and refreshing ocean breeze, we had found about as idyllic a setting in which to watch the Super Bowl as one could possibly dream up. We almost didn't get to see the game, but the lodge owner's daughter saved the day, for which we were extremely thankful. Were it not for the savoir faire of youth in muddling through the necessary streaming, casting and nuanced technical ingenuity required to get Sam Darnold and crew up on the big screen, we'd have missed all the glory of watching the Seahawks mop the turf with the Patriots. There was even another group of visitors from Whidbey Island at Tranquility Bay to celebrate the victory with. We did miss many of the clever Super Bowl commercials and some of the half time show, choosing instead to watch giant tarpon and the occasional permit glide in and out of the rays beaming up from an underwater light installed off the dock.
Highlight Reel
With the water heating up and the weather improving, most of the successive days proved too fruitful to capture in a detailed play by play. We went different places each day, often fishing with different people from the group as we like to do, reaffirming my thoughts that there are few better ways to get to know somebody than sharing a day on the water. We poled canoes into skinny water, sometimes dragging them across the narrow mangrove lined strips of sand that separated lagoons. We quietly maneuvered paddleboards over dark green limestone bottoms looking for the revealing nervous water created by permit schools. Sometimes we trudged through the mosquito infested jungle towards a distant point to emerge on a jagged coastline where we hoped to find jacks, barracuda and triggerfish. As some of my favorite trips tend to be, this one was largely a day by day choose your own adventure. Rather than break it all down, I'll focus on some of the most memorable times that I experienced or were shared within the group.
I won't say that catching permit is the singular focus of this place. There are simply too many other wonderful species to explore for us to make it all about one fish. Nonetheless, this is not Rocky Point bonefish camp or Rocky Point triggerfish camp. Permit are a special fish and in many ways, can prove to be unbelievably difficult to hook and land on a fly. It doesn't matter if it's a respectable slab weighing 10 pounds or better or if it's scarcely the size of a Fazon Lake crappie. If you catch a permit, you earn bragging rights in a sense. You accomplished something that isn't easy to do. And if you get a permit at RPPC, you get the honor of writing your name on a permit sticker that goes up on main lodge bathroom wall for all to see.
Early afternoon, a few days into the trip, Evan and I are fishing south of the camp. There is a nice deeper channel that funnels in from the reef onto turtle grass flats and I hear Evan scream, a kind of yelpy, urgent and very excited screen. We all have that one fishing buddy that bellows out loudly every time they hook a fish, broadcasting to the world that they've hooked up whether it's a rampaging wild winter steelhead or a mere minnow-sized perch. Evan is not that guy. Most of the time he makes little to no sound when fishing, so when I heard the ruckus I knew exactly what was going on. I worked my way towards him fully expecting that I wouldn't find him cradling a half pound bonefish or a wriggling schoolmaster snapper...and I didn't. Evan landed a permit. Not the biggest permit, but a respectable fish and 100% on his own. He'd seen a good school of them moving along the edge of the grass and light colored sand, put a cast in front of them and then the most curious thing happened...one of them actually ate! I was super excited for him as this was his first permit landed and all done on his own. On the last day of the trip, Nick also got a nice permit. He had set out early and was fishing solo north of a point. The wind had picked up that day and the water was a little milky with some floating rafts of sargasso drifting in and out with the waves. I won't divulge the exact details of how Nick caught it or what fly he was using. I'll let him reveal those details for himself or keep them safely guarded under lock and key. I'll share simply that the circumstances surrounding how this permit was hooked are an affront to any respectable permit angler that's been repeatedly shunned by permit after the most ideal of presentations delivering the likeliest of fly patterns. Congratulations to both Evan and Nick for getting it done!
Much of the week featured random sightings of permit, some of them very large, but they remained as elusive as their reputation suggests. We did, however, experience probably some of the best bonefish fishing I've had in Belize, with both numbers and size. One day I decided to fish alone by paddleboard and explore some familiar territory in the camp's backyard. Still without a phone, I had no means of monitoring my location or telling the time, so choose to stick to an area I knew decently well. I shared my loose plan with Andress, a longtime fixture in Jeff's camps, the night before and he gave some insights as to where I might best focus my time and spot some fish along the way. He mentioned I should probably peer into a particular lagoon along the way just to see if there were fish in it. We'd not seen really anything in there up to this point, but I could survey it easily enough from the channel entrance and not waste much time if there was nobody home. After an easy paddle on the mostly windless morning I popped into the channel and staked my paddleboard in the soft sand. I made one casual glance to the left and there they were, a huge school of bonefish happily making rounds along the lagoon perimeter. I proceeded to catch several of them and to my surprise, most were a bit better than the average Belizean bonefish and fought valiantly. Multiple big schools of bones remained in this area for the duration of the week and we paid a visit most days when we fished the back. Despite their great numbers, these fish proved maddeningly picky and it wasn't uncommon to cycle through a dozen flies before you'd eventually get one to take. I'd select the sparsest patterns out of my box, chop half the material off with scissor clamps, remove all the flash, hack off any bead chain eyes and be left with a drab, spartan, amorphous fly that looked like nothing. When they wanted anything at all, this seemed to be it. On the last day, Sam jokingly threw a Columbia River carp fly with a long bright red double worm tail at them just to see what would happen. After initially freaking out, a big bonefish turned around and ate like it was the meal it had been searching for all of its life. Go figure.
On most of my trips to Belize, tarpon are a bit of an oddity. You can often hear them rolling and slurping way back in the black water mangrove channels, well beyond where you could ever reach them with your finest trick cast, let alone have any chance of landing one. Snook are often even harder to come by in the winter months when we go most years. They are there but we don't typically see them so we tend to focus much of our time on the open flats looking for bonefish and permit. One night, Jeff gave us a tip on a spot way up the back lagoon. A place we'd have to locate a narrow opening and drag a canoe a short distance through the muck to get into. Matt and I decided to check it out the next day. Rarely is there no wind on the flats, but that morning not a ripple appeared as we paddled our canoe into the main lagoon and towards the point. The few thin clouds high overhead reflected in the mirror glass surface and we stopped briefly to take advantage of the endless visibility and scan for nervous water. While slowly wading out around the point we suddenly heard a raucous noise that sounded like a giant flock of geese taking off from the water. It was thunderously loud and approaching and then we saw it, a massive tornado of jack crevalle tearing up the flat. It reminded me of watching piranha B-movies where the ravenous little fish annihilate every living thing in their path in one vicious, bubbling swarm. It was an awesome sight to behold. And then they were gone. We looked for them again as we paddled further north but only periodically picked up the sounds of fury as they ate their way up and down the flat before the sound grew faint again.
We eventually found the opening we were looking for and dragged the canoe through a short patch of shin-deep muck before arriving at the shore of another lagoon. Almost immediately we spotted a big juvenile tarpon casually swimming along the edge of the mangroves, but it eventually made its way back into the labyrinth of vegetation and was soon out of reach. Then we found snook, enormous ones, finning in and out of the openings in the mangroves. Each one followed our flies and would take a swipe at them now and then but wouldn't stick. Blind casting into the many dark tunnels deep in the mangroves, our stripped flies were often met with a solid tug and expectant tightening of the line, only to produce a portly Mayan cichlid. While these fish are absolutely beautiful, with their iridescent bluish bodies and brilliant red throats, they weren't what we were after. I switched up my retrieve and then finally connected with a small snook. Then Matt got a small tarpon shortly thereafter and we began to develop a sense of what the fish liked for a retrieve. Numerous snook ate our flies that afternoon, but most of what we landed was smaller. Then, with little more than an hour before we needed to begin our 2 hour paddle home, a huge snook around 15 pounds came out of the vast network of mangrove roots into the open and I dropped a red and yellow baitfish pattern near it. I slowly stripped the fly and paused with the snook taking notice and inching closer and closer. When the fly was just off the tip of the fish's nose I gave another short darting strip and the snook furiously clamped down on it with vise grip jaws. As it shook its head from side to side I strip set the hook about as hard as I've ever hit a fish. The snook barreled towards the mangroves and then just as quickly as everything began, it simply opened its mouth and the fly dropped out. We had the same experience with a few larger tarpon and landed another handful of smaller snook. While it can be heartbreaking to lose a big fish, the mental video of watching an alpha predator wolf a fly 10' in front of you sticks with you forever.
Post Game
As they always seem to do, the week drew to a close all too quickly and we found ourselves rambling back to San Pedro. The town was bustling with tourists over Presidents Day Weekend and our normal quiet and always friendly hotel had been booked up months in advance. One of the last remaining hotels that had availability gave us a place to lay our heads for the night but was noisy and in a busy part of town. For some reason, San Pedro is always more fun on the way in than the way out, but I've found that true of most places I've travelled to and while going home is inevitable, I certainly would have gladly fished for another couple of weeks. Nick was lucky enough to take the water taxi over to Cay Caulker to spend an extra week in Belize with his family. The rest of us made the most of our last evening and enjoyed one of our better Belizean meals at El Fogon. The following morning we rose before day break and walked a few short blocks down now quiet streets to the airport. The stranger next to me on the Maya Island Air regional flight turned out to be from Bellingham as well, and soon back on the mainland we'd step onto a crowded Boeing 737 full of ecstatic Seahawks fans celebrating the Superbowl in sequined jerseys and low slung ball caps.
While it's sometimes nice to stand on the bow of a skiff and attentively await instruction from a skilled saltwater guide, I really enjoy these DIY trips and Rocky Point Permit Camp is incredibly well set up for an adventure like this. Between all the access to water, the small fleet of various watercraft to get you into seldom fished places and the unparalleled cuisine, accommodations and hospitality from Jeff and his staff, it's hard to not want to go back every year, which is why we typically do. While these trips generally fill up immediately with repeat guests, we occasionally get an opening or two. If this type of DIY saltwater trip sounds like your jam, let us know and we'll keep you posted as opportunities come up.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but since my phone breathed its last breath at the bottom of a muddy Caribbean Bay on night one, you'll have to settle for the handful of photos I managed to capture on an old back up digital camera along with an extra few thousand words.
