My Mexican guide Antonacio whispered into my ear as if we were spectators at a golf tournament.  "Ees a Snook...Grande!!  Do you haf de Goomee Meeno?" he said, in broken English.  I nodded in affirmation and pointed backwards to the starboard side of the panga.  There a neatly stacked quiver of fly rods laid waiting, mute, slender rapiers patient for a chance to strain and arc in battle.  Antonacio melted silently off the casting deck to the middle of the panga.  

Antonacio returned grinning cat-like with a rigid eight weight.  Our eyes were now dilated, celestial black holes absorbing all ambient light under the mangroves. The snook, a steel gray shadow above the pock-marked mud hovered forward no faster than the movement of tectonic plates.  We calculated the point of ambush.  We waited.  The natural pocket under the tangle of mangroves, our point of interception, would be no larger than a storm drain on a suburban cul-de-sac.  The clouds, giant cotton balls of vapor, stopped moving.  Our bodies petrified with anticipation.  Time was defined by the sound of each decaying mangrove leaf spiraling into the tannic water below.  I could almost hear my four day old beard growing.  

I rechecked the point of the hook on my Gummy Minnow, an already deadly pattern on numerous fresh and salt water species.  Suddenly, with an innate flee response, needlefish angled away from the dark shape approaching the opening into which I  hoped to cast the impostor fly.  The back-cast was short, quick and oddly defined.  The forward cast sufficient though, for the fly line, leader and silverly fly miraculously unfurled and skipped with spastic energy under the web of knuckled limbs.  The fish gods must have been smiling. The Gummy Minnow pulsated, incandescent through the warm water with a crippled motion, accentuated by swift strips of fly line.  The violent inhalation of the Gummy Minnow by this fish with a dramatic underbite was primal.  The brackish water turned into a pale latte’ of foam.  After several minutes of tense, adrenaline pumped reeling and rod play, the snook was subdued.  I turned to Antonacio and said, "Did you see that!" adding after some nervous laughter, "He was on that fly faster than Oprah on a baked ham!"  Antonacio didn't understand.

                                                                                                           -Trapper Rudd

                                                                                                                              Casa Redonda

                                                                                                                              October, 2008