S2, Ep 112: Lords of the Fly with Monte Burke

Marvin Cash (00:04-01:06): Hey folks, it's Marvin Cash, the host of The Articulate Fly. On this episode, I'm joined by New York Times bestselling author, Monte Burke. Monte shares his passion for the outdoors and discusses his latest book, Lords of the Fly, which chronicles the hunt for world record tarpon in late 70s Homosassa, Florida. I think you're really going to enjoy this interview.

But before we get to the interview, just a couple of housekeeping items. If you like the podcast, please tell a friend and please subscribe and leave a review in the podcatcher of your choice. It really helps us out. And a shout out to this episode's sponsor. This episode is sponsored by the 21st Virginia Fly Fishing and Wine Festival. This year's event will be held on January 23rd and 24th in Doswell, Virginia and features water aisles and limited classes to promote social distancing. Please visit www.vaflyfishingfestival.com for the latest information on speakers, vendors, and classes. Now, on to our interview.

Well, Monte, welcome to The Articulate Fly.

Monte Burke (01:07-01:08): Thanks for having me on.

Marvin Cash (01:09-01:17): Well, I really appreciate you carving some time out for me this afternoon. And one of the traditions that we have on The Articulate Fly is we always ask all of our guests to share their earliest fishing memory.

Monte Burke (01:19-01:50): Mine is with a spin rod. And I was with my dad in the Adirondacks on a lake back before the lakes got too acidified. And they're not good at fishing. But I hooked a monster pike. And I was probably seven years old. And we fought it and fought it. And it was about to break off. My dad jumped out of the canoe and lifted it up and threw it on the bank. And pretty much from that point, I mean, this thing was monsters, like 30 inches long. And pretty much from that point on, I've been a fisherman, an angler, and just absolutely loved it.

Marvin Cash (01:51-01:54): Yeah very cool when did you get drawn to the dark side of fly fishing

Monte Burke (01:55-03:31): So we moved so my my grandfather was a fly fisherman in fact i still have some of his Orvis bamboo rods which are all warped right now but they're very cool to look at my father was a fly fisherman my uncle was a fly fisherman so it was kind of like that's you know after you've got some of the spin stuff out of your system you went right to a fly rod and we moved to North Carolina when I was in fourth grade, lived on a farm and had a little pond in the back.

And I think we moved there in like March. And I remember April or May going down with a fly rod and a popper and probably about a foot of leader and, you know, popping the thing through there on the bass or on the spawn. And it was about as much fun as you could have. I mean, there's a big four or five pound largemouth crushing the big popper. And so that's sort of when I started to get really into it.

And it's never really ceased. I mean, kind of wherever I've lived, I've gotten totally into the local scene. I lived in D.C. for a little while and got really into the Torr Spring Run in Pennsylvania and some of the Virginia Spring Creeks, really into the trout thing. And then, you know, when I moved to New York City 20 some odd years ago, I thought, oh, my God, I'm going to have to drive all the way to Catskills, which I did. And I love Catskills still.

But I've actually found, surprisingly, that the fishing within the city is incredible. And the fly fishing is incredible. I mean, it's a long season, April to December. We've got stripers. We've got weakfish. We've got bluefish. The albacore, false albacore, are about to come through. The bonito are here right now. It's tremendously fun, really exciting. And I've really gotten into the saltwater game here.

Marvin Cash (03:32-03:39): Very neat. And, you know, you mentioned your family members fly fishing. Who are some of the other folks that have mentored you on your fly fishing journey?

Monte Burke (03:40-04:21): You know I've been lucky because of my job I've been able to fish with incredible anglers. You know Atlantic salmon anglers and tarpon anglers and bonefish, you know bonefish geniuses and all sorts of stuff so i've had a lot of different influences i would say definitely my father and my uncle were the biggest influences but i've been lucky enough to fish with some you know with Steve Huff and Andy Mill and there's nothing quite like being on the front of a boat, seeing a bunch of tarpon come down on the ocean side of the Keys and having Andy Mill over your shoulder being like, tighten up that cast a little bit, get down a little bit. You could shoot that under the wind right there, that one, that one. I've been very, very lucky in that regard for sure.

Marvin Cash (04:22-04:28): Very neat. You mentioned you kind of adapt your fishing to where you live, but do you have a favorite species to chase on the fly?

Monte Burke (04:32-05:13): I kind of feel like that's a little bit like asking which one of my three children is my favorite. I very much love the one you with. You know I enjoy fishing Alabama bass ponds and catching bluegill. You know but if i had to narrow it down i would say that tarpon and Atlantic salmon would be my two favorite there's just something about those two fish their spirit. You know the way they fight the way they take the places that you fish for them. I think I have a lot to do with it as well. So if I had to, if you put a gun to my head, I would have to say those two would be the top ones.

Marvin Cash (05:13-05:24): Yeah, fair enough. And, you know, interesting too, I've been lucky to interview quite a few authors on the podcast and I'm always interested in, you know, what made you become interested in writing? So I was always, always

Monte Burke (05:24-07:46): interested in, my uncle is a novelist. I was always kind of interested in it. I didn't, you know, in college. I wrote a lot. I didn't really, coming out of college, didn't really have the balls to kind of go for it. It was an intimidating thing to kind of just throw yourself into. And actually, I graduated from college and worked in Washington, D.C. for a couple of years at a nonprofit and thought that the respectable and the right thing to do would be to apply to business school. So I did. And I got into business school at Kellogg at Northwestern.

And right at that same time as i mentioned earlier i've been fishing a little Torr quite a bit and the lore kind of got me there i mean wasn't the fishing is good it's not great anymore but it's good enough to keep you interested but it was the lore it was the Vincent Marinaro and all these Charlie Fox and all these anglers of yesteryear who kind of came up with these cool innovations that we use today that really got me and i remember i wrote a story about fishing there was one guy left named Ed Shenk actually just passed away about a year ago kind of the old guard left and i did i just went i said i want to interview and do a story i had no magazine to write for him like that just called him up and he said sure so i fished with him for a day and then wrote a story and i sent it off to Sporting Classics and i swear it was within a week of getting my acceptance at business school i got a letter back from Chuck Wechsler i'll never forget i still have the letter and he said I really liked your story I'd like to buy it for $200 and I made what some people might say is the worst financial decision of my life I decided to forego business school and jump right into writing and I got a job shortly after that I got a job basically as a secretary at Sports Afield which at the time was in New York which is why I came to New York and was a hunting and fishing magazine now it's a big game hunting magazine but

And that's sort of where I earned my chops. That was sort of journalism school. I had a lot of great editors there who sort of took me into the wing and, you know, showed me kind of how it was done. And took a little detour to Forbes for 15 or 16 years. But, you know, they always say the old adage in journalism is write about what you know and about what you love. And, you know, I by no means have a Ph.D. in fishing, but I love it. And so it's been a very fun thing to write about.

Marvin Cash (07:47-08:10): Very neat. And, you know, maybe this is a little bit different because you write more nonfiction, but I'm always interested to talk to authors and writers and hear how they like to write. Like I find some guys, you know, go hold themselves up for a few days and punch out a lot of content. And other people are, you know, they get up at 4:30 in the morning and they drink coffee and they write for two or three hours and they go and do the rest of their day. How do you like to skin the cat?

Monte Burke (08:12-09:28): So it just depends. I mean, I think ideally, so if we're talking about a book, ideally, let's say we break it into a year. I would report for six months and then like hold myself up as much as I can. Hold myself up for six months and just write and write like many, many hours during the day. Corona put a little kink in all of that. I started for some odd reason getting up at like 4:30 or I think it was I had to teach the kids virtual. I had to kind of watch the kids virtual schooling during the day. So I started getting up really early and, you know, mainlining coffee and writing for a couple hours before they woke up.

So I found actually, I always thought that I had to have, I have a little, you know, basically my office here in Brooklyn where I've written all my books and lots of magazine stories. And I always thought, well, it has to be pristine. No one could be in the house. Like I've got to do it this way and I've got to have my quiet time and all that kind of stuff, which is true. I prefer that. But what I found over Corona is that you just kind of have to adapt and adjust sometimes. So, you know, I've got a new puppy in here, three kids coming in all the time. And, you know, you just you just crank it out when you can. So it's changing. I think ideally, though, I'd like to just sit down and crank it up, you know, and really crank and sort of have a pretty strong routine, whether that's for magazine stories or book.

Marvin Cash (09:29-09:33): Got it. And, you know, what are some of the unique challenges to writing nonfiction?

Monte Burke (09:36-11:23): Well, I mean, you know, it doesn't always go the way you think it's going to go. I guess that's one. You know, a novelist can kind of, if something in the arc of the narrative arc is going, they can control that. You can't control that with nonfiction, which is kind of a funny thing. I mean, I think novelists are magicians. I can't imagine, you know, good novelists coming up with all that stuff in your head. It's incredible what the worlds they come up with. But with nonfiction, you kind of have to follow the story. And it doesn't always go the way you think.

In fact, with books, I've always found it really interesting that every – so you write a proposal to sell it to the publisher. And I always look back at the proposal when I'm done with the book and be like, man, I didn't know what the hell I was talking about. So it's about diving in and interviewing people. And then one of the main things I learned, one of the great things I learned when I was at Forbes, when you get there, they make you fact check for like six months. Just pure fact checking. all the bigwigs are writing these big stories about Coca-Cola or Google or whatever, and you have to fact check every line. And that was as painful as it was. That was a really great exercise in learning how to make sure that things are correct.

And so that's, you know, that I wouldn't call that a unique challenge. I think everyone should do that, whether you're writing nonfiction or fiction, really. I mean, if you're talking about stuff that's factual, but, you know, again, that's those the facts sometimes are out of your hands i mean you can have a story that looks perfect if so and so does this you think that person is going to do that then you find out after talking to them they didn't do it you got to kind of change your change the whole thing but that's just the way that's the way it goes so it's super fun super fun yeah got it and you know you love the outdoors you love

Marvin Cash (11:23-11:33): hunting and fishing you know there's some of that content in Forbes but that's not really you know what they're known as. You've been there for a while. How did you create more space for yourself

Monte Burke (11:33-13:40): to write more sporting and outdoor content? You sound like one of my editors sat me down after I've been there for about 11 years and like, how do you get away with this stuff? I mean, it's pretty crazy what the trips are. I mean, I went fishing in Canada with Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia. I got sent to Russia for 10 days to fish with this reclusive millionaire who bought all this water there. I mean, I don't exactly know how I got away with it, but it was damn fun.

So the basic premise was it had to be a profile of a business person or someone in the Forbes 400 or something like that. So it just so happens those people tend to like the fly fish and they fly fish in really cool places. So, you know, if the opportunity ever presented itself, I'd certainly jumped on sort of a fishing-related venture. I gave you one example. It was the CEO of Rich Food Products, which is this buffalo company that basically makes, you know, McDonald's hamburger buns, you know. And they're just everywhere, Rich Food Products. You wouldn't know it, but they're the ones who furnish all the buns for fast food restaurants.

And I was assigned to a profile on him. I called him up and he said, yeah, you know, I've read some of your stuff. Do you like fishing? And he's like, let's go fly fish for marlin out in New Jersey. And I was like, that sounds good to me. So a lot of it was just about, you know, pursuing people who I knew were kind of interested in fishing. And it's a great way to get to know someone, to profile someone. I'll put it that way. You can learn a lot. For instance, I learned a lot about Yvon Chouinard on the trip we took to Labrador together. You just saw kind of how stubborn he was and how inventive he was on the water. He would try different techniques and try, you know, stand in different spots than, you know, the guides would be like, yep, stand here. He said, no, I want to actually go over here. And you could kind of like, it's cool to see sort of someone's personality through, I think fly fishing is a great vector for that. So it worked out.

Marvin Cash (13:41-13:49): Yeah, it's interesting. While you're telling me that, it makes me think about, you know, one of the things I generally see out in the field with people is how they deal with adversity.

Monte Burke (13:50-13:54): Yep. Yep. For sure. Yep. When a sudden rainstorm comes up or something.

Marvin Cash (13:54-14:11): Yeah. Or even worse. Yeah. But, you know, it's interesting, too, because you've been with Forbes for quite a while. But I know that you're, you know, I've seen your work in The Drake and Garden and Gun and lots of other, you know, outdoor oriented publications. You know, how do you juggle having so many masters?

Monte Burke (14:13-15:15): You know I generally i just love the editors i work for i mean Tom Bie at The Drake i think is a great editor David DiBenedetto at Garden and Gun is a great editor and he's become a great friend and you know i mean you just you just every once in a while you have to say no but when someone comes to you and says hey do you have an idea or here here's an idea for you you know i'm pretty much full-time freelance i'm a contributor now at Forbes too so you know you kind of kind of jump at the opportunities when you can do them.

But I think a lot of this journalism game is, if you're on the, you know, if you're a writer is about finding an editor who you like and whose interests are sort of like yours and who, who edits really well. I mean, I think that's, that's kind of the, that's, those are the keys. And I've, I've been very, very lucky to, to find you know, people who are really at the top of the game. And again, you know, I, I think The Drake is fantastic. I think Garden and Gun is absolutely fantastic. So I've just been very lucky there, really.

Marvin Cash (15:15-15:31): Yeah, very neat. And I guess, you know, the biggest news in your writing life is, I guess, about a week ago or so, you released Lords of the Fly. And I was really curious to kind of, you know, we were talking about you write proposals to publishers, kind of what was the genesis for writing the book?

Monte Burke (15:33-20:57): So it was really interesting because I was coming off writing two books about football coaches and my agent. And the editors I work with were very excited about those books because they just have a broader base. I mean, the last one I did was about Nick Saban in Alabama. And obviously, there are a lot of people who are interested in Nick Saban in Alabama, more so than fishing. So when I kind of presented this idea, they were sort of like raised eyebrow, like, really? And then I kind of talked to him about it, told him about it. And I think they saw how passionate I was about it. And they said, sure, let's do it. And I'm damn glad we did because it was super absolute joy to work on.

So that idea came from a magazine story. It started that way, I guess. Back in 2010 or 2011, I can't remember. I was assigned by Garden and Gun to go do a story on a guy named Steve Huff, who's now in Everglades City but has kind of been in the Keys. It was a profile, and they actually titled it The Greatest Fishing Guide Alive. He maybe inarguably is the greatest fishing guide alive right now, just in terms of records and people he's guided and all the innovations he's had.

Steve and I became pretty good friends, and I would return. I went back every year to go to fish with him. On the water and off the water, he would sometimes mention this word Homosassa. I had no idea where Homosassa was. I didn't really know what it was. It turned out to be a town 70 miles north of Tampa. But the word just kind of sounded enchanted, sounded poetic. And he would tell me about this crazy period that he was involved in in the late 70s and early 80s when literally all of the great, the best fly fishermen in the world at the time and the best guys in the world at the time were all there at the same time after the same goal, which was the world record tarpon.

So you had people like Lefty Kreh was there for a little while. Stu Apte was there, Ted Williams, Billy Pate, Chico Fernandez came in and out, Flip Pallot was there for a little while. I mean, the list kind of goes on and on. So it was just, I just loved hearing, it's like, we don't follow up and ask questions about it. Tell me stories, crazy stories about the wild, what happened on the water, the wild stuff that happened on the water, but also the wild stuff that happened off the water. And so that kind of stuck with me.

And then a couple of years later, I was assigned to do a story on Andy Mill and went down to the Keys and fish with Andy and his son, Nicky. And, you know, Andy also, although he'd been a Homosassa, wasn't kind of part of that scene, but he knew all those guys. He said, you know, you've got to write about this era. It's disappearing. These guys are getting older. It was fascinating, all this kind of stuff, too. And I sort of said, yeah, that sounds cool. I wasn't like totally sold.

And then I think it was sometime in 2018, Andy called and said, you've got to do this. And I'm going to put you in touch with this guy, Tom Evans, who's 82 years old. And just interview him and see what you think. So I actually drove up to Vermont, where Tom Evans is now, and sat down with him for a day and just talked about Homosassa and talked about fishing for the world record. And he's owned it seven times. He sort of was unknown to me to a certain degree. I mean, I'd heard the name, but I didn't realize the sort of significance of the name. So he's one of the great big tarpon anglers, fly anglers of all time.

And after that meeting with Tom, I drove home and I said, holy crap, this is amazing. This is an amazing story. And it's, you know, not only if you, not only if you just talk about that little part in Homosassa, but also write about sort of what led up to that moment in time, which is arguably the sort of apex of fly fishing in saltwater, maybe the apex of fly fishing. And, you know, a time that had never been seen before, a time certainly will never be seen again. and then also write about kind of what happened after Homosassa.

And, you know, one of the great blissful things about diving into a subject like this is you realize how connected things are. I didn't realize that, for instance, that Chico Fernandez and Flip Pallot were somehow connected to Homosassa. I didn't realize how, you know, how Chico and Flip were also connected. Tom McGuane and Jim Harrison, those guys who were down the Keys filming that cool movie and making tarpon fishing look so cool. I didn't realize how Billy Pate and Tom Evans were connected to the guides and the anglers of today, like Nathaniel Linville and David Mangum and these incredible, innovative guides now.

So I think it was Chekhov who wrote something like, you know, if you lift one end of the story, the other side shakes, basically. This is kind of this cool narrative arc that went through this whole book. And it was just, you know, it was just really, really cool. So that was sort of the long-winded answer to the genesis of it. but that's kind of how it happened. And then I basically took about a year and a half to do the whole thing. I reported it. We'd go to, went to Homosassa three or four times, went to the Keys, went to the Everglades, did one side trip to Montana to hunt down McGuane and get his story. So it was just so cool. And the reporting was cool. What a great excuse to interview Stu Apte, interview Chico Fernandez and Flip Pallot. And then the writing was really cool. But it's just the whole, I just, you know, it just was so fun. It was so fun.

Marvin Cash (20:58-21:12): Very, very neat. And, you know, for our listeners that aren't, haven't had a chance to go chase tarpon on the fly, can you talk a little bit about, you know, the challenges that probably lead to the addiction to kind of chase world record tarpon?

Monte Burke (21:14-24:28): I mean, I don't know about you, but I think it's the coolest thing you can do with a fly rod. I remember hooking my very first one with Steve Huff. And I'm sure you've seen those awesome videos that are sent around on YouTube sometimes of those little kids hooking their first fish. And that look on their face of complete joy, but also utter astonishment. They can't believe that there's a wriggling live thing at the other end. And I think if you multiply that by a thousand, that's what it's like to hook a tarpon.

I mean, it's just an incredible, incredible experience, totally mind clearing. I mean, I think we all seek in our obsessions that are, you know, something that kind of clears our mind. So we don't think about the election or coronavirus or any of that kind of stuff. Right. I mean, that's why fishing is appealing in a lot of ways. And I think that the tarpon does the best job of clearing the mind. I mean, the hookset is unbelievable. The leaps, the jumps, the fight, you know, you actually have to, unlike a trout or something like that, you actually have to fight back, which I always found really interesting.

And then, you know, for these, so that's just sort of the normal angler experience for these guys who were after this world record. And there's not many world record chasers around anymore. I think people become a little more conservation-minded. Of course, you have to kill a tarpon to enter it. And I think people find that quite, they find it a little more distasteful. But these guys were practicing, you know, at a much higher level. I mean, they're using anywhere from 16-pound to 12-pound or 8-pound tippet, first of all, which is crazy. And catching, I mean, the 12-pound record is almost 195 pounds. So the skill and the art of that is just unreal.

Maybe more than that, the dedication is crazy. I mean, you know, they would go, some of these guys, Tom Evans would go some seasons in Homosassa. and lose every fish he hooked or not see fish for a week. Literally stand in the bow, bob up and down, staring over an empty sea. As Tom Evans put it, he said, for him anyway, it took a toll. It took a physical toll. It took a financial toll because, of course, angling for 30 days in a row for tarpon is not a cheap thing. It took a mental toll. He said that he could handle the physical toll. He had been an ex-football player, so he was ready for that. He could handle the financial toll. He had made some good money in the stock market. But it was the mental thing that was the hardest. It was the concentration. It was the, you know, because you never know which shot, when the shot's going to happen, you never know which one's going to be the world record. He said that was the one that kind of drove him batshit crazy. And that's, I think, what a lot of people who don't like chasing the world record or who did it for a little while and didn't want to, and just begged off where it was because of that sort of mental, just the mental fortitude it took just to stand out there day after day after day after day and, you know, lose fish after fish, break rods, break lines, you know, all that sort of stuff.

Marvin Cash (24:29-24:46): Yeah, it's kind of interesting too, because, you know, I imagine a lot of those guys were pretty type A, right? You know, in terms of how they approached the non-fishing parts of their life. And, you know, I always kind of think about the challenge of, you know, one of the things that fishing teaches you, you have to take what the water is going to give you.

Monte Burke (24:46-25:08): Yep. Yep. Yeah, you're right. So like in their in their other lives, they weren't they were these were particularly in that era were relatively wealthy or successful folks. And, yeah, they were they were used to they're used to having things their way. So they sort of had to bend that part of their personality to the tarpon is going to tell them what to do pretty much.

Marvin Cash (25:09-25:19): yeah and as you mentioned earlier in the interview you know you did a lot of interviews that to to kind of research and prepare for the book do you have any of them that stand out any more than any

Monte Burke (25:19-26:46): of the others i mean not i mean it was just you know it's a thrill to walk into Stu Apte's house in Islamorada but just you know as a light-long you know fishing geek uh fly fishing geek like me that was just kind of a thrilling thing to do but you know they they were all most you know i did probably 80 of them in person the ones on the phone you know sometimes by necessity you have to do that but they they were all cool i mean it's just it's it what you find is it's sort of like a tribe someone might call it a cult but you know this tarpon thing is like you can just tell when it's hooked somebody and and you can tell by their enthusiasm when they when they talk to you

But, you know, it's just that enthusiasm is really infectious. And so it got me kind of even more pumped up. But, I mean, it was fun. I mean, I did some of them on a boat. Like Steve Huff, I interviewed on a boat with Tom Evans. I was on the boat with his crew for, I don't know, 20 days at least. The Flip Pallot and I had a bison burger in his house. I mean, you know, they're memories that I'll always have of, you know, talking to people that I've, you know, been reading about since I was 13 years old, people who, you know, it's just really cool. It's like a baseball fan getting to, you know, interview Derek Jeter and Mike Trout and, you know, it's just cool as a fan. It was very cool.

Marvin Cash (26:46-27:12): Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, so Lords of the Fly set kind of in the Homosassa kind of in the late seventies, early eighties, you know, can you tell us a little bit, about the state of the tarpon fishery there today. And, you know, you mentioned that people are not really chasing world records as much as they used to because they don't want to kill the fish. But it'd be kind of interesting to kind of get in the time machine and come forward and kind of learn a little bit more about what the fishery is like today.

Monte Burke (27:12-31:22): Yeah. So I write about that because it was really interesting. So it got during this period, you know, one fun thing to research was all the attention it got. It got, you know, the New York Times wrote a story about this chase. Sports Illustrated wrote a great story about all these guys down here, down there. ABC did a special on it. 3M, which owned Scientific Anglers at the time, did a whole movie about it. Like, it was just really kind of missing how much attention you received. And of course, with all that attention, more people heard about it. People like Bobby Orr and Jack Nicklaus were like, we're going to go and catch it. So people just started parachuting in. And it's not a huge, I mean, it's 15 to 20 miles of flat, basically, but when you have 200 boats out there, you know it can seem a little bit crowded

so you know one of the reasons i think the tarpon basically Homosassa they biologists think anyway had a certain subset of very very large tarpon they were shorter but they were hugely fat that came to Homosassa and those tarpons started to go away and that part of the reason is the crowd tarpons just don't like boats they just get annoyed and they'll just leave them somewhere else. But the bigger reason for the decline in the fish there is the problems with the fresh water. So that's the Springs Coast, and it has four huge, going into Homosassa Bay, there are four big spring-fed rivers that go in there, but also just hundreds of other springs that feed into it. And that aquifer has just been abused. I mean, there is very little regulation about who can tap into that aquifer. basically like just the big the state and the real estate around has become a huge straw and they drink up all the water and so that doesn't go into the bay

and it sounds funny when you think oh fresh water shouldn't mean that much but it does because it's what keeps the mangroves alive which is very important for species and also that the fresh water is actually what keeps the blue crabs which were once so abundant there that Steve Huff was telling me he would put your he put his pole down you could feel them clicking on the pole they were everywhere and every time Tarpon they caught, you know, would just gorge a bunch of blue crabs all over the boat. And so, you know, once the water quality has just gone down, down, down, starting in the 70s, to the point now where the, you know, the salinity actually goes up into the rivers. And so I think when you put that together with the crowds, you know, the tarpon just left. They didn't have enough food to eat there. They were annoyed when they got there. And so they pretty much left.

Now, it's a big mystery about where they went. I mean, tarpon live to 70, 80 years. So some of those fish, even some of the fish that back in the 70s theoretically could still be around. You know, there's lots of people. Some people think they went to Boca Grande. Some people think they're now in the panhandle. But it's a real shame. You know, that was sort of the cathedral, the sort of Yankee Stadium of saltwater fly fishing. And now it's empty. There's no team that plays there really anymore. it's just been kind of destroyed really through things that could have been avoided really through negligence.

You know, there's still enough big fish that come through every year. There's always one or two really great days when, you know, a lot of big strings of huge fish coming in. And that keeps some people's hopes alive. It makes everyone feel like for at least a day or two things are going to be like they were. But when you talk to these old timers who were there, you know, they would see, you know, Steve Huff says 10,000 fish on the flat, 10,000 fish just happy and, you know, bubbling around. And you certainly don't, you know, in my years there, my two or three years I've been there, you don't see 10,000 fish. You see like a dozen maybe. I mean, so it's pretty sad and a little poignant. And, you know, I think that was one of the things I wanted to really get across in the book was that, you know, we got to take care of this stuff. if we care about it, you know, we should be paying more attention to these kinds of things because I think Homosassa really could be seen as a microcosm for the state of Florida and really maybe a microcosm for the state of the way that we treat our natural resources all over the country and maybe even the world.

Marvin Cash (31:23-31:28): Yeah. It's interesting that you say that. Cause I sometimes think that we have a tendency to love things to death.

Monte Burke (31:29-32:18): Yep. Yep. And also I, you know, you hear this term all the time, recency bias which you know like a lot of other buzzwords can sound a little icky but it it's real it's really true i mean i you know when i went to the when i've been in the keys and tarpon fish you see all the tarpons all by i'm like oh my god this is amazing when i first went to Homosassa and i saw these giant you know 150 pound 180 pound tarpon i saw maybe three or four and i was like oh my god this is just incredible but of course you know my baseline is so different from people who were there even like 20 years before but particularly people who were there in the 70s you know it's just kind of an interesting interesting phenomena that you know our recency bias i think allows us to sort of become accustomed to the fall sort of you know accustomed to the fall of species

Marvin Cash (32:18-32:29): because we don't we don't know any better yeah absolutely and you know so if someone wants to learn more about Homosassa and the fishery there you know where can they find Lords of the Fly Monte

Monte Burke (32:30-32:49): it's on Amazon of course it's on there's a great website called Indie Bound which will help you find it at your local independent bookstore it's in Barnes & Noble and it's pretty much as they say anywhere where books are sold there you go and you know obviously

Marvin Cash (32:50-33:02): COVID has impacted so many things in our life and i'm sure it impacted the your the rollout of the book. Do you have appearances scheduled in 2021 to promote the book and maybe give folks a chance

Monte Burke (33:02-33:54): to spend some time with you and get a copy signed? Not as of yet. And you're right, it is. It's very strange. And what was strange for me is to be home for launch day. Usually, for the Nick Saban book, I was in Alabama, barnstorming the State. For all my other books, I haven't been home for launch day. You're usually out of the bookstore signing and doing all sorts of in-person things. And I haven't at this time, which is really a bummer. It's so much fun to go around and just talk to people. I miss that terribly. So we've supplemented that with podcasts like this and lots of Zoom calls and all that kind of stuff too. But yeah, I mean, so as of right now, you've put everything on hold, so I don't really know. But if there's an opportunity to get on the road and go to some bookstores and go to some fly shops, I'm certainly going to take it.

Marvin Cash (33:54-34:02): Yeah. And for folks that want to track that and kind of, you know, generally follow your adventures, where should they look on social media and on the Internet?

Monte Burke (34:03-34:26): I'm on I'm not. I did my first Instagram post the other day, so I'm not very good at that. But I'm on Instagram. I'm on as a journalist. I use Twitter a lot more. So Twitter is one spot and Facebook as well. And I also have a website, just MonteBurke.com. But I don't usually post much new stuff on that. But that's a good way, you know, to get my email address or whatever. So, yeah, that's the way.

Marvin Cash (34:26-34:32): Well, cool. Well, listen, I'll drop all that stuff in the show notes. And, Monte, I really appreciate you taking some time to chat with me this afternoon.

Monte Burke (34:33-34:36): Awesome. Thank you, Marvin. I really appreciate it. You bet.

Marvin Cash (34:36-34:46): My pleasure. Well, folks, I hope you enjoyed that as much as we enjoyed bringing it to you. Again, a shout out to this episode's sponsor, our friends at the Virginia Fly Fishing and Wine Festival.

Marvin Cash (34:46-34:54): Please remember to check out www.vaflyfishingfestival.com for all of the event details. Tight lines, everybody.