After telling Tommy I caught that permit yesterday he got all fired up. Just mention permit to him and he gets excited. He called and said lets go back up the creek and look for some more. The weather forecast was very good and I immediately agreed.
We didn’t go to the place I found those yesterday as Tommy wanted to check out a couple places in the far back. It was a full moon last night with a very high tide this morning. He said these were perfect conditions for finding permit. It was picture perfect this morninng and the water was like glass. On the way we slowed down going through this particular deep channel and we couldn’t believe what we saw. There must have been a thousand bonefish in that channel. The bottom was literally covered with them. They were in 6 to 10 feet of water and it was useless to try and cast to them.
From there we kept heading further back to the far reaches of the creek. We started poling and saw nothinng for quite awhile. Then I spotted a big fish come to the surface about 80 feet away. Tommy saw them a second later and we both agreed they had to be tarpon. They were in deep water at the time and we knew they had to be close by. Then Tommy spotted them in a little bay not far. He poled closer and was setting me up for a shot when he gasped and said, mon dose are permits. As they got a little closer I saw what they were and could not believe how big they were. I’m talking nothing less than 40 pounds. They were 3 to 4 times bigger than the one I got yesterday. He set me up for a perfect shot at no more than 40 feet. I laid the fly front of them and the big one in front turned on it. Tommy was frantically saying, strip, strip, he’s on it. He was on it and on it but never ate it. I had on a tarpon fly that he didn’t quite like. There were five of them in that group and all were monsters. We stayed around that area for about an hour but never found them again. Even though we didn’t hook up it was fantastic just to see them.