#Andy mill tarpon fly rod driver#
Why? He had never been on a motorcycle in his life, but he had been a cab driver in New York City. Dad had been a motorcycle messenger in World War I. My parents came down from New York to Miami in 1926 just in time for the hurricane of 1926. My dad and his brothers had a fruit and vegetable company called Apte Brothers Wholesale Produce. I am going to guess probably 10,000 population, maybe 20,000 at the most. Miami was a very, very safe place back then.Īpte: Oh, yeah. That is the only fishing my brother ever did. We had a hook and a nut from a bolt nut as our sinker and if we got lucky on a fairly soft tide we would catch some grunts and things like that.
We did not have any money for bait, so we would walk up and down the sidewalk looking for pieces of fish or little pieces of shrimp or whatever. We did not have pennies to spare, so we would find transfers and we would take the streetcar then from there, downtown, to the county crossway where we’d get off. We wanted to go to the county causeway and the transfer cost a penny.
But you know to go farther back than that, to 1935, when I was five years old and my brother was ten, we would walk about three blocks from where the street car ran from where we lived out in the northwest to downtown Miami behind what was Red Cross and Burdines on Southeast First Street and look around for a transfer. Mill: What was it like for you growing up in Miami during the 1940s?Īpte: I was in my teens then. He wanted to take me but my mother would not let me go-too dangerous. Bud and his wife used to do a lot of duck hunting on Lake Okeechobee. He gave me my first plug-casting outfit, which was a split-bamboo custom-made rod, five and a half feet, with a Shakespeare Superior reel. He was the racing secretary at Tropical Park and he used to take me fishing to the 10,000 Islands. He was a good person, but not an outdoors person… When I was 12 years old my next-door neighbor was a retired Texas Ranger. The horses cost him a business, but even after that he was away from the horses he played cards. Mill: Who was the greatest influence on you as an angler?Īpte: Nobody in my family ever fished at all. Nowadays if you came close to the school with an outboard, you can forget them-that school is gone for the next hour or two! I had a 40-horsepower motor, shut it down, grabbed a spinning rod with a Bill Smith lure, which was a fly-like lure, cast right to that school and the fish ate it right away. I remember one time, back in the late 1950s, running over a school of fish back behind Bahia Honda in shallow water just off the flats. And they had probably never been harassed. The leaders ate well because they had never been hooked. Back in the old days it didn’t make any difference. If you cast to that leader and she turns away because she has been there and done that carrying the rest of the school away from your fly. I do not know how they communicate but they have leaders-you and I have seen it-that direct the school.
Anyway, you are here now-that is what is important-and this is a whole new, more difficult era for tarpon fishing. That airplane shot down more Japanese airplanes than all of the rest of the Allied airplanes combined and had a 19-to-1 kill ratio. As an advanced cadet in the Navy, I flew an F6F Grumman Hellcat, one of the great airplanes of the war. How old are you?Īpte: So I am 20 odd years older, and I was born at the right time, although I wish I had been born 10 years before so I could have gone to World War II. None of the others can carry your jockstrap when it comes to fly fishing for tarpon. You are very humble, my friend, and there is nothing wrong with that, but you are the tarpon angler right now. Photo Stu ApteĪndy Mill: I have been around and have caught a few fish but it is a real honor and privilege to be here with you, Stu. Joe Brooks’ new world record tarpon on a fly after a two-hour fight.
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