After
two years of doing nothing but running flawlessly every day, the
Evinrude outboard on my Maverick flats boat finally developed a
problem, a fouled fuel injector in its bottom cylinder. Back in
Key West, where I bought the engine, this would have been a
one-day fix. Of course, Vieques is different. Like all new
computerized wonder-motors, a 2006 E-Tec needs to be plugged
into a laptop by a trained Evinrude technician before any work
can be done. And guess what we don’t have here on Vieques.
To get myself and my boat to the San Juan service center,
something that used to be within shouting distance up in the
Keys, I had to travel an hour and a half by cargo ferry, an hour
by Jeep, and finally back home by a thirty minute airplane
flight. When the repairs, which are still covered by warranty,
are done in a few days, I’ll repeat the process in reverse.
Throw in the lost charters this week and the cost really adds
up.
I’ve written about this situation before, and how the negatives
of being a charter captain on Vieques are always outweighed by
the positives in the end. This experience has been no exception.
So while my beloved Maverick is down for the time being, the
situation has managed to reunite me with an old friend.
Last week I saw an online classified by someone moving back to
the States and selling a canoe. The price was more than right so
I ran over to see it. It was a rugged, seventeen foot Old Town
model, the same kind I once had up in the Keys over a decade
ago. I grabbed it right away and within half an hour had my wife
and dog paddling up and down Gringo Beach. I had forgotten
everything that’s great about canoes and I’m kicking myself for
going so long without one.
I remembered a day several years back, paddling in the shallows
off the Key West airport, when my girlfriend at the time hooked
a monstrous barracuda on a six pound spinning rod. This was a
really big fish and it ran for a solid twenty minutes. She
complained right away that her arms were tired, but I refused to
take the rod since I was convinced she had a world record.
According to the rules, only one angler can handle the tackle
during the fight. If I touched the rod, it wouldn’t count. After
an hour of being dragged around in the canoe, we landed the
nearly five-foot cuda and weighed it on a hand scale. It was
forty-one pounds, huge but not a world record. The girlfriend
was gone a short time later, but I held on to the canoe for
another year. It got me on the water with all my gear, never
needed gas, and was good exercise, too.
The current canoe fits perfectly on top of my Jeep Wrangler and
on the day after I bought it, it filled in perfectly for my
ailing Maverick. Canoes after all, were the original flats
boats.
My charter that day was a great guy who I really didn’t want to
disappoint. Steve Stewart was a fly fisherman from the Florida’s
east coast who was also celebrating his 50th birthday. His
entire vacation was a surprise from his girlfriend and she and I
planned his fishing trip months ago.
|
Click
image to enlarge
Florida angler Steve Stewart
with a
baby tarpon caught on fly
in one of our landlocked salt ponds. |
By paddling a canoe, Steve and I weren’t going to make the eight
mile run to the best bonefish flats on Vieques, but we could
easily float into one of the many salt ponds on the island’s
south side. These serve as a nursery for our local tarpon and
snook population and most are impossible to access with a power
boat. The first one we hit that morning was full of rolling fish
and as I was still messing with the canoe near the Jeep, I
handed Steve a fly rod so he could make a few practice casts
from shore. When his first throw hit the water, the small shrimp
pattern was instantly whacked by a two pound tarpon. One cast,
one fish. Why can’t it always be like that, I thought. We were
clearly in for a good day.
After two hours with Steve casting from the canoe’s front seat,
we landed four tarpon and jumped nearly a dozen more. An avid
birder, Steve also pointed out every species that flew or waded
past us, including a rare warbler that isn’t common to this
area. We would have never seen any of this from my Maverick.
Since that morning, I’ve used the canoe on almost half a dozen
other “No-Motor” charters and have caught baby tarpon and snook
on every one of them. Of course I can’t wait to (hopefully) get
my 90 horsepower flats boat back this week and start running at
40 mph again. Until then, my new/old canoe has been a perfect
connection with the way this sport started. It’s my chance to
pretend I’m an Everglades guide from the early 1900’s down here
in 2007 Vieques. Only I don’t have any alligators to worry
about.
Capt. Gregg McKee,
WildFly Charters
