![\"blacktarpermit\"](\"http:\/\/www.itinerantangler.com\/blog\/podcasts\/files\/2015\/05\/blacktarpermit.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
T<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n They do tell you that permit fishing is hard.\u00a0 By \u201cthey\u201d I mostly mean all the anglers who come home without one\u2014a legion of pro bono PR reps for the most difficult of marquee gamefish. Anglers who figure out how to catch them\u2014not one, but many\u2014leave a wake of whispers behind them.\u00a0 Usually the whisperers simply state a number, then give each other a knowing glance.<\/p>\n \u201cNinety-three,\u201d they said of one grizzled septuagenarian at our lodge, in the tone you\u2019d use to tell your buddy that Jeter was sitting in the booth behind him. Thirty-seven enemy planes downed.\u00a0 Twelve hostages extracted.\u00a0 A million dollars in twelve minutes on the exchange. All said with the same reverence.<\/p>\n My life permit count was zero.\u00a0 I could see the numeral floating over my head like an LED sign.\u00a0 I\u2019m pretty sure my guide, Tomas Hernandez, could see it too.\u00a0 I made a point of learning Tomas\u2019s last name.\u00a0 A lot of anglers don\u2019t; they know their guide the same way they know the babysitter their wife hired: \u201cHolly\u201d is a sixteen year old scratching up money for her first car payment.\u00a0 Tomas Hernandez is a thirty year veteran of the permit wars; a time-tested master sergeant who\u2019s pulled more than one green-as-grass lieutenant out of the fire.\u00a0 It seems like a guy like that ought to be known by his last name, too.<\/p>\n Tomas may have been a quality guide, but he wasn\u2019t a weather god.\u00a0 For the fifth day in a row, the wind threatened to stay at 15 knots.\u00a0 Worse, the tide was out, draining the flats of the deeper water that tall-bodied permit need to feel comfortable.\u00a0 I\u2019ve actually watched permit feed up close, while snorkeling at a resort not far north of the flats we were drifting across.\u00a0 The most interesting thing about sitting on the bottom in a pod of feeding permit is the racket they make.\u00a0 They pick up crabs and unidentified things off the bottom, then munch munch munch<\/em>, they crush them up in their rubbery, carp-like mouths.\u00a0 Even though they feed much like bonefish, physiologically, they have to stay in deeper water if they want to remain wet.\u00a0 And so, more often than not, a permit flat is four to six feet deep rather than a wadeable two or three like a bonefish flat.\u00a0 Add in turtlegrass, strands of errant sea foam, the persistent wind, and even a quasi-omniscient guide can look a little bewildered.<\/p>\n The day before, we had taken a break from the wind and our fruitless permit quest, deciding to focus on tarpon instead.\u00a0 A lot of guides will take their anglers a short distance into the mangroves to see about putting one leg on a Grand Slam\u2014a high accomplishment for all real saltwater anglers.\u00a0 Ours was a large group, however, and the lodge host decided to mount a special expedition.<\/p>\n An hour of open water followed by two and a half hours of machete-hacking, boat-dragging jungle later, we found ourselves on the promised tarpon lagoon.\u00a0 It was thick with mud from the morning\u2019s rain storms.\u00a0 We spotted no tarpon.\u00a0 Our consolation prize was a Mayan ruin, Punta Tupac, deep on the southern border of the Sian Ka\u2019an natural preserve on Ascension Bay. Inside, it was dark and cool and full of bats.<\/p>\n On the first day of our trip I warned a photographer who had come along with us that I probably wouldn\u2019t catch anything until the last fifteen minutes of the last day.\u00a0 That\u2019s usually how it goes: you have to put in your time, after all\u2014pay the ante.\u00a0 As those closing minutes rolled closer, even that pessimistic assessment was starting to look pretty cocky.\u00a0 Tomas and I finished by scoping out one last cenote<\/em>\u2014a deep blue hole in the flat that leads into a cave system, beloved by permit\u2014but once again we came up empty handed.\u00a0 Tomas grunted out a phrase which was becoming familiar: \u201cHey guy. We move now.\u201d<\/p>\n The sun was taking on color as it fell, and it was time for Tomas to play his ace in the hole.\u00a0 We staked out on a bed of turtlegrass, almost in sight of the lodge.\u00a0 Three small permit the size of softballs flitted by, their backs looking strangely brown against the waving, murky fronds.\u00a0 They were on us and past us before we could react; Tomas just nodded, looking satisfied.\u00a0 Here there be permit, guy. Saddle up.<\/p>\n Sometimes, after a long week on the water, it can be hard to gather the necessary focus to put everything together.\u00a0 The wind was still cracking along, knocking the crest off waves just outside the edge of the turtlegrass.\u00a0 We were slightly sheltered from the gale, but I was still sunburnt, and chafed in unmentionable areas, my eyes burning with sunscreen runoff. \u00a0It was getting late, and I could feel the gravitational pull of the lodge bar over my shoulder. If you\u2019ve ever stumbled onto a deer after a long hike in the deer woods, you\u2019ll understand what happened next.<\/p>\n \u201cEleven o\u2019clock; 70 feet out, guy.\u201d Tomas\u2019s words jolted me awake.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen he gets into range, you make cast.\u201d Sudden, electric, high-definition clarity pulsed through my system as my adrenal gland redlined.\u00a0 I saw the permit, head down in the grass and ambling our way in what was most definitely the non-fiction section of the flat.\u00a0 My line, stretched and carefully wetted and coiled all day, surged off the deck as I made my first cast.<\/p>\n He ignored my shrimp fly, which had been left behind a few days earlier by a famous Italian fly tyer and lovingly bestowed upon me by the lodge host.\u00a0 Tomas\u2019s voice cracked like a baseball bat breaking: \u201cChange flies. Now. Do not hurry. Make good knot.\u00a0 Use this.\u201d He tossed me a standard crab pattern, twin to three I had purchased in faraway Atlanta.\u00a0 It took an act of supreme willpower to still my shaking hands, but I \u201cmade good knot\u201d.<\/p>\n My next cast was probably the best of my life.\u00a0 Backhanded, the fly snaked tight and on point toward the fish, about forty feet upwind. \u201cPerfect,\u201d said Tomas. It landed about three feet short, directly in front of the permit, which was now facing us.\u00a0 \u201cStreep\u201d came the command.\u00a0 I streeped.<\/p>\n Ecstasy is a strange thing. It\u2019s a very powerful emotion; so strong that even as dimly-aware humans we can perceive it in animals, like our pets.\u00a0 I have never seen a fish exhibit any emotion whatsoever until that moment.\u00a0 That permit was so ecstatic, so visibly pumped to be presented with a perfect fleeing crab, it was like his eyes crossed and he did a little shimmy.\u00a0 \u201cOh my God,\u201d the thought bubble over his head would have read. \u201cThat looks delicious.\u201d<\/p>\n And then I understood.\u00a0 I understood why permit fishermen liken their sport to heroin addiction.\u00a0 Why intelligent men will leave behind businesses and families to obsessively pursue a fish that will give them the finger even in perfect circumstances.\u00a0 The permit\u2019s happy dance suddenly turned into pure kinetic force; his tail surged once and he closed the gap on the fly before my synapses could fire and register what was happening.<\/p>\n The fight: the moment of panic when I realized the backing was coming tight to a tangle, then Tomas on the engine, motoring down-flat while I desperately tried to reel in enough line to build a buffer\u2014all these things happened.\u00a0 I even landed the fish and played fashion model for a while.\u00a0 But what mattered was the moment when that permit saw the fly, then surged.\u00a0 That was the needle hitting the main line.\u00a0 That was the start of The Problem.<\/p>\n My little LED-counter rolled over with a ping.\u00a0 From a big fat zero, I now had a one.\u00a0 And one, as they say, is the loneliest number.<\/p>\n T HE INSIDE OF my Buff smells like\u00a0socks.\u00a0Five days into a Mexican flats fishing trip, with only the local graywater to wash clothes in, things start getting a little funky.\u00a0 You notice stuff like this during your seventh hour of standing on a flats boat, like a statue, musing over …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3673,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[9],"class_list":["post-3671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles","tag-the-drake","column","onecol","has-thumbnail"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.itinerantangler.com\/blog\/podcasts\/files\/2015\/05\/blacktarpermit.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itinerantangler.com\/blog\/podcasts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itinerantangler.com\/blog\/podcasts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itinerantangler.com\/blog\/podcasts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itinerantangler.com\/blog\/podcasts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itinerantangler.com\/blog\/podcasts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3671"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.itinerantangler.com\/blog\/podcasts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3671\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3906,"href":"https:\/\/www.itinerantangler.com\/blog\/podcasts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3671\/revisions\/3906"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itinerantangler.com\/blog\/podcasts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3673"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itinerantangler.com\/blog\/podcasts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itinerantangler.com\/blog\/podcasts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itinerantangler.com\/blog\/podcasts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}HE INSIDE OF my Buff smells like\u00a0socks<\/span>.\u00a0<\/em>Five days into a Mexican flats fishing trip, with only the local graywater to wash clothes in, things start getting a little funky.\u00a0 You notice stuff like this during your seventh hour of standing on a flats boat, like a statue, musing over whether the permit your guide says he saw forty-five minutes ago was just polite fiction<\/span>.<\/h2>\n
\n![\"The](\"http:\/\/www.itinerantangler.com\/blog\/podcasts\/files\/2015\/05\/unnamed-1.jpg\")
<\/a><\/a>\u201cStreep\u201d came the command.\u00a0 I streeped.<\/div>\n<\/a>This article originally ran in the January 2015 issue of The Drake<\/em>.<\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"