February 2006

Greeting from Vieques.

Greeting from Vieques. For starters, I’d like to thank Enchanted-Isle’s webmaster Jim Starke for inviting me to write a monthly column about fishing here on the island. For now, Vieques is still flying under the radar as a world class destination, but that will change in the years to come. As a refugee from sport fishing’s hottest hot spot, the Florida Keys, things couldn’t be more perfect for me the way they are in early 2006.

The best thing about Vieques as a fishing destination is that hardly anyone knows it‘s here. I like to describe it as the way my former home of Key West was nearly a century ago. If you looked hard you could find it, and since it was surrounded by water there must be some fish around, but was it really worth the effort to go there? For Key West, that question was answered in the 1930s when a young writer named Hemmingway, stuck on the island waiting for a new car to be delivered, began catching huge billfish less than a dozen miles offshore and soon spread word to the rest of the angling world.

Fast forward several decades and Key West now carried the alias “Margaritaville,” thanks to a fan of Hemmingway who also came to visit and stayed. Ernest wouldn’t recognize the place; lots of traffic, cruise ships, and tourists, tourists, tourists. For ten years I had the second best job in Key West: Flats Guide, (the fighter pilots at NAS Key West still have the top spot.) I got paid good money to push folks around on my small boat and help them catch the most exciting fish of their lives on many occasions. Things were good.

Things were also changing. By 2003, the median house price on the island was around $650,000 and is much higher today. For long time Keys residents, owning the home that grandpa built was nothing less than having a winning lottery ticket. Real estate was exploding and the locals were cashing in like crazy. My problem was, I wasn’t one of them. I arrived on Key West in 1992 with a few hundred dollars and a plan to go fishing. By the time the money started flowing my way, I was too late. A half million dollar mortgage on a fisherman’s salary just won’t cut it. Ten years later my rent was going nowhere but up.

I started hearing the name Vieques more and more about this time. First from a regular fishing client, an F-18 pilot who once dropped practice bombs down here before the Navy left. He told me that the shallow waters of Vieques looked just like Key West’s from the air but no one fished them since they were under the military’s flight paths. That would change with the Navy‘s imminent departure in 2003. Again, this sounded like Key West from way back when. Finally, a friend honeymooned down here and decided he was moving. I visited him a few months later with my future fiancée and fly rods in tow. When our twin engine Islander banked over Mosquito Pier on final approach, I saw what I was looking for, miles of perfect grass flats with no other boats in sight. It was late July, beer at Al’s Bar was $1, and there was only one fishing guide in the phone book, Capt. Franco Gonzales, who would eventually put me on my first Vieques bonefish minutes after stepping onto his favorite flat. That was enough for me. I returned later in the year and spent a month finding the right house, a fixer-upper on a piece of land that would have cost a cool $1million in Key West and selling for a fraction of that. I was more than ready for a change of scenery.

That brings us up to February of 2006. My fixer-upper is mostly finished, my Jeep Wrangler and Maverick flats boat were shipped down last summer, and I’ve spent the past half year exploring some new waters. The results so far have been great. The same species I spent over a decade chasing in Key West are found right here in Vieques. Tarpon, the king of inshore game fish, can be caught year round. This is quite different than the Keys where they’re very common for only a few months in the spring and summer. Vieques tarpon are also completely willing to eat anything thrown in front of them. This is thanks to the absence of thousands of boats and jet skis running them over on a daily basis. The island’s north side flats to the west of Mosquito Pier have been very productive and on calm days I’ve watched thirty pound tarpon throw themselves out of the water chasing glass minnows. These are perfect fly rod size fish, not too big and easy to land on the lighter tackle. I’ve fought 100 pound tarpon for over an hour up in the Keys and it simply becomes an ordeal after that much time. I’ll take these mid-size Vieques fish any day.

In the coming months I’ll have more to say about the other great species we’re catching down here. There are bonefish, permit, snook, and just about everything else you’d want to see on the end of a fly rod. As I’m writing this article, New York, Philly, and D.C. are getting pounded by a major blizzard and it’s 85 degrees here in Vieques. All three of those cities have direct daily flights to Puerto Rico. Start dialing.

Capt. Gregg McKee, WildFly Charters