EARLY FLORIDA KEYS GUIDES  George Hommell, Jack Brothers and Jimmy Albright pioneered many of the big-fish fighting techniques that are used today to subdue fish that to the average onlooker are far too big to be landed with a fly rod. Stu Apte and Lefty Kreh popularized and perfected their techniques. They did it pursuing tarpon with fiberglass fly rods whose design emphasized durability and stiffness over ease of casting, and later with improved tackle on blue water species like sailfish.

By removing the question of gear endurance from the equation — and by bringing leader systems up to par with the size of their quarry — these pioneers were able to bring technique into focus. The methods they popularized had to do with applying the most amount of pressure, most consistently, to the fish. It laid the foundation for thoughts about keeping a fish off-balance, and for the psychological wager an angler could place by using each piece of his equipment to the limits of its ability. Stu Apte carried both to the extreme and was the first to develop the “down and dirty” method to reduce a fish’s will to fight. It made fly fishing a more physical challenge as well, and if you look at some of the early pictures of Lefty and Stu at the time they were setting the tarpon world records, you see Jack LaLanne look-alikes, albeit in sun-worn khaki.

Folks had been testing their gear for as long as anyone had fly fished, of course. But it wasn’t until the arrival of plastics and fiberglass on the outdoors scene after World War II that castable gear had the physical strength to apply what was necessary to land a large fish using something other than attrition as the tactic of choice. Coincidentally — or as a result — saltwater fly fishing emerged as popular sport then. Now much of what is known about landing large fish in general has been applied to more traditional fly fishing arenas and gear (witness the “reverse engineering” of saltwater drag systems to trout reels). Interestingly, the challenges overcome in saltwater have also made their way into improved methods of light-tippet fishing, where fish landing is often a question of an angler’s ability to address the same dynamics.

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