Tarpon fishing in the Florida Keys does not happen at a civilized hour. It happens on the tide, and the tide does not consult anybody. Ours turned at ten forty at night, which is how four grown adults ended up idling out of a Marathon canal in the dark, past houses where sensible people were watching television, toward a bridge that has been quietly ruining sleep schedules since before any of us were born.
A bridge on a running tide is the most honest piece of water in the Keys. The current pours through the pilings like somebody left a tap open, the lights lay a hard yellow edge across the surface, and everything alive lines up on the dark side of that edge waiting for dinner to be delivered by the ocean. You do not have to find the fish. The fish have already found the place. What you have to do is not ruin it.
Our captain that night was a woman who has run these bridges for two decades and gives instructions the way an air traffic controller does, calmly and only once. Anchor up-current. Let the bait swim back into the shadow. Do not, under any circumstances, set the hook when you see the fish, because the fish you see is not the fish that has your bait. And then, quietly: "When it eats, bow."
They started rolling at eleven, big slow silver wheels turning over in the light line, gulping air like a room full of people sighing. Then the rod went from a bend to a scream, and out in the dark something the size of a canoe left the water entirely. The Keys are famous for this. Nothing prepares you for it. There was a sound of a hundred pounds of tarpon coming back down, my brother yelling a word we cannot print in a catalog, and the captain saying "bow" in exactly the same tone she had used ten minutes earlier.
We fought it out from under the bridge and got it boatside forty minutes later, that armor-plate silver going lavender and green in the lights, an eye the size of a lime looking at all of us with total indifference. She held the leader, popped the hook, and the whole thing simply dissolved back into the black water. Nobody said anything for a minute. Then somebody asked what time the next tide was. That is how they get you.