S3, Ep 14: All Things Salt with Capt. Jake Jordan Pt I

**Marvin Cash (00:04):**
Hey folks, it's Marvin Cash, the host of The Articulate Fly. On this episode, I'm joined by Captain Jake Jordan. Jake has been a saltwater guide for his entire career, almost 60 years. While Jake guides for tarpon and false albacore, his passion is chasing billfish on the fly and teaching others to do the same. We've broken the interview into two parts. Please join us as Jake shares part one of his amazing story. 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 us a review and rating 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 our friends at Nor-vise. Their motto is "tie butterflies faster," and they produce the only vise that truly spins. To see for yourself, visit www.nor-vise.com. And be sure to check out their Facebook page to keep up with their weekly online tying events and special events like March Madness. Now, on to our interview. Well, Jake, welcome to The Articulate Fly.

**Jake Jordan (01:12):**
Well, thank you, sir. Nice to be here.

**Marvin Cash (01:14):**
I'm really looking forward to our conversation, and we have a tradition on The Articulate Fly. We always ask all of our guests to share their earliest fishing memory.

**Jake Jordan (01:24):**
Sure, well that's pretty easy for me. I can pick that up pretty good. I was probably—the one that stands out the most—I had fished with my dad, my mom and dad from the time I was old enough to remember anything, but it was during World War II and I can remember my dad had a rowboat down at the Jersey Shore. We lived in Pennsylvania. This was before we moved to New Jersey. We were in a little town called Summer's Point. I can always remember we used to go out on the falling tide and Summer's Point is across the bay from Ocean City, which was the barrier island and then there was an inlet with a bridge there. And we used to leave about two-thirds of the way through the fallen tide and we would row for two hours across the bay and out to the inlet. And when we got there, it was a slack tide, fish around the bridge. And then the current would wash us all the way back over to Summer's Point and we would drift. And this rowboat had two seats. And they had these little cushions that were like, they called it kapok. They were life-saving cushions. But it was just like a little cushion with two handles on it. And you put that up against the gruntle of the boat and you lay in the seat. And we had a hand line. And you run that hand line down and on the bottom of it, you had a spreader bar with a sinker and two hooks and two live minnows. And you run that line through your toes and you cross your legs and sit there with your toes and you lift that thing and you hold on to it with your hand and you could just drift along and you could feel that sinker going bump, bump, bump along the bottom and when a flounder picked it up you just kicked like you were kicking a football straight up in the air that set the hook, you sat up, hand-line this flounder in, put them in the bottom of the boat, put it back down and do the same thing. That was the first thing that I remember was just drifting along out there, the most peaceful thing in the world, and thinking about what that sinker and what those baits were doing on the bottom and how we figured that out. My dad knew, I don't know. But that was the beginning. That's what I remember was just when I was four or five years old.

**Marvin Cash (04:10):**
Yeah, very neat. And so you grew up in Pennsylvania, but was it always saltwater for you?

**Jake Jordan (04:18):**
Well, I can remember as a real little kid, we did have a couple of ponds that we used to get out and catch sunfish on. But it was like before I remember, we actually had a dad worked in Westinghouse in Leicester, Pennsylvania. He ran a milling machine. He was building the big turbines for the aircraft carriers. So he used to send my mom, my sister and brother and I to the Jersey Shore to our house down there. We spent the summers down there. My dad would come down every weekend. He would work double shifts during the week. Even sometimes Saturday during the war, it was pretty busy. But then we would just go out and fish with him on the weekends. I just don't remember not fishing in the salt water. I have a photograph of a trip that he took me on when I was 10. He had a 31-foot lap streak, 1931 Johnson's Brothers skip with a Model A engine. We used to run offshore about, I guess it was 80 miles out to the Wilmington Canyon and go fishing. When I was 10, I caught my first billfish. I caught a little white marlin, about a 60-pound white marlin. And that kind of excited me. That was the first billfish that I ever caught and fish that jumped. I got into this thing that my passion all through my career was chasing big fish that jumped. It doesn't matter if it's a rainbow trout or a carpenter or a sailfish or a marlin. I think that my passion comes from a couple of things, particularly when I'm fly fishing. One is actually feeling the strike and casting the fly, but feeling the strike and setting the hook. The second one is hearing, feeling the speed and power of the fish, hearing the fish as it runs away with a clicker on that reel. And the third thing is the optical thing of actually seeing the fish coming out of the water and jumping. And my heart starts beating and it's never stopped. That passion has always been there. That's what steered me in this direction.

**Marvin Cash (07:11):**
Yeah, that's really neat. When did you know you wanted to become a charter captain?

**Jake Jordan (07:16):**
Oh, God. It was kind of an accident. In 1952, my dad put me on a boat delivery for a rich guy from New Jersey. He had a house in Marathon in the Florida Keys. And he had an old, it was in '52, and he had a 1949 Rybovich 37-footer, which was the Rolls-Royce of sport fishing boats then. And he wanted to boat in Florida for the winter, so my dad said, I'll take it down. So he took me out of school for three weeks in October. And we left New Jersey. Left the marina there beginning of October. Pulled out the inlet. Like that, I always used to say, it's pretty easy to find Florida. You just go out the inlet and turn right. Keep a marriage on your right. So that's how we got there. We got to Florida and it took us, I think, to get all the way to the Keys was like 11 or 12 days. And he had planned on our bus tickets and plane tickets to come home more like in 22 days. So every day, we would go out fishing on this guy's boat, stay in his house, until our bus and trains were ready to go. We were just kind of there. So each day, we'd go fishing. This was the first time I ever saw a freezer on a boat. It had all these frozen clams. Well, up in New Jersey, we used clams and squid for bait for everything. So we go down there. We start drifting in Florida Bay right off behind Marathon. And in 10 days, I have a logbook. I caught 37 species of fish using an old bamboo rod and Ocean City reel with cat gut leaders and everything and using clams for bait. I caught tarpon, permit and bonefish and bluefish and half a dozen kinds of snappers and groupers and cobia and redfish and pretty much everything that swims. I never forgot that. So I didn't really think of it as being a guide. I mean, I worked around the marina when I was going to school in the summertime. I would work on commercial boats. I did commercial long lining for swordfish and tuna. I did some work on charter boats as a mate. I was a wash-down boy at the dock there when people came in. And I did some oystering, and I did a lot of clamming. So, I mean, I worked around the water and worked on boats. I never thought about being a guide. And then I got out of high school and joined the military and I went on CDY and I worked for a coasting geodetic survey for three years traveling the world. And I worked out at Cape Canaveral, Florida, doing some surveying for the missile range. When I was done with that job, when they killed John Kennedy, I wound up losing that job. I came back and I really didn't want to be in New Jersey. And I had made some money, had some savings. And I packed my bags and loaded up my old pickup truck. And I always wanted to go back to the Florida Keys. That trip was always on my mind that I did with my dad. I got there and I walked into a tackle shop. Talked to a guy there at Marathon. I said, you know anybody that's looking for an employee? I'm looking for a job. There was a guy standing in there, and he said, can you drive a boat? And I said, yeah. I said, I grew up driving a boat. That's not a problem. He said, do you know how to fish? And I said, yeah, I'm a fisherman. He said, meet me at 4 o'clock. So I met this man, and we got on his boat with a customer and he had me throw the net and catch the mullet. We went out. He showed me how to catch the tarpon, a live mullet. We were in a 26-foot wooden center console inboard boat with a fighting chair, big heavy bent butt rod, big Ocean City reel. And we caught four tarpon and put him on a stringer. That's done, he paid me 25 bucks and the angler took me 10—that's pretty good. Next day we did two trips and I did that for like a couple of days and then he said, look, he said this time you drive the boat, I'll work at the mate. So we did that for a couple days. He said, you like to work? And I said, yeah. He said, well if you want to work, he said, you can do two today. You drive this boat. I have another boat. I'll pay you $25 a trip. You can keep the tips. You keep the boat up. I did that for two years. While I was doing that, I built a house. I wound up talking a guy into teaching me how to pull the flats and work on a flats boat. Worked for this guy. Worked for two years, two seasons. And while I was doing that, I was learning about fly fishing. And really, at that time, I was studying. Stu Apte had just written a book that was really good. Lefty was down there. There was a half a dozen guys that were my auto. I was like a sponge. So I ran an offshore boat and I ran a flats boat. By 1966, I was a full-time flats guy. And I just did that for fishing in the Keys. I did both the offshore fishing and the flats fishing and the wreck fishing. Tried to do it all. Worked from out of my house. Then in the early '70s, I was married by then, and I wound up getting involved in a resort in Marathon. And I decided that this was a perfect location to put a tackle shop. There was no really good fly shop anywhere except in Islamorada. Billy Pate, George Hummel had the worldwide sportsman, but there was no fly shop anyplace else. So I opened inside of a lighthouse at a place called Faro Blanco in Marathon. I opened a tackle shop that was called the World Class Angler. And we were both a full-blown tackle store and a fly shop. And everybody in the Keys that fly fished had to go to one of those two shops. We were the only ones that sold any fly fishing tackle at all. And I was the first G. Loomis dealer in the United States, first SDH reel dealer in the United States. I had Cortland. George had silly bait reels and Sage rods. And he had Scientific Anglers lines. If you came to go fishing, you had to go to one of us to get your stuff. I just, my whole thing just started there. We just, my wife and I traveled and fished. We traveled the world. And I just got into, the number one, I started doing fishing schools because I wanted to bring more people in and get more customers. I started, as soon as we opened the shop, my first idea was for me to, instead of me just making money taking charters, if I have other guys taking charters and I can book them, I can make a little money off everybody. So we started a booking business and then we started a travel business and booking people to travel all over and that got us traveling. So we just grew that thing and it just went on from there. I didn't actually set out to be a guide, but when people ask me, what'd you do for a living? I've been a fishing guide my whole life, really. I didn't do anything else. I owned other businesses. I had boatyards. I owned a couple of boatyards. I owned a couple of fishing lodges. But there was never a time until 2020 with the COVID that I didn't guide tarpon fishermen in April, May and June. I mean, I've been a tarpon guide this coming year. We'll be my 57th year guiding tarpon fishermen.

**Marvin Cash (17:39):**
Really interesting. And, starting down there, and that's a really phenomenal time because it was kind of pre all the fly fishing gear. And starting down there, and there were only two shops that sold fly gear, you must have had some really interesting characters cross your path. Can you tell us about a couple of them?

**Jake Jordan (18:06):**
Oh, man. Yeah. Well, having a fly shop that was actually located—you had to park a car and walk out a dock and come into a lighthouse to get into my fly shop. My charter boat stocked out front. My dog's laying across the front door. We had to step over them to get in there. And quite frankly, in those days, in the very beginning, before I actually had the shop, my guiding was 95% bait fishing for—when the flats was bonefish, permit and tarpon, and some snappers. And we would catch barracuda and sharks, but really bonefish, permit and tarpon was the key slam. When I started there was probably 12 guides in the Florida Keys. There was less than 15 total and there wasn't enough fly fishermen in the 1960s that as a guide that you could have more than 8 or 10 days a year where you had a fly fisherman. So you couldn't be a fly fishing guide. You had to be a fishing guide and then if you liked the fly fishing then you would try to get people to do that. So it was in the '70s when it really took off and before I could actually turn my business into being just strictly fly fishing, being a fly fishing guide only—I mean, I changed probably in the early 1970s where I just stopped using conventional gear and bait and stuff and I didn't do that because I just wanted to fly. I did that because as a guide the fly fishermen were happy if they just went out there and they cast at the fish and they hooked one. And you didn't have a bunch of bait on your boat. You didn't have a bunch of slime. And the guys tipped that. And when you were taking guys bait fishing, they catch them a half a dozen bonefish, they weren't happy. You catch them a 10-pound bonefish. I looked at another one. And it was great. But the fly fishing thing just seemed people were more excited about what they were doing. And it was more interesting because everybody couldn't do it. It was not an easy job. It took a long time to learn with the tackle that we were using. But I had people come in there. I fished Frank Sinatra. Don Johnson that did the Miami Vice was a customer of mine. I fished Jimmy Carter. I fished George Bush Sr. so I fished some really heavyweight people. But the thing with me was that if you were in the fly fishing industry in the 1970s and 1980s, the most important guys in the world were the guys that were the tarpon fishers. And I was like right in the middle of that. So John Randolph that ran the Fly Fisherman magazine, Leon Chandler that ran Cortland, Don Green from Sage and Gary Loomis—but really I mean just go through the industry and everybody that was anybody got their picture taken into World Class Angler at the lighthouse. You came there during tarpon season, you were going to run into a lot of people that were really big-name fishing people. I mean, Lefty was there all the time. I ran some fishing tournaments there in the early 1980s. The first catch and release tarpon tournament ever was called the Tarpon Wear Classic. And I had bumper stickers made that said, "Save our tarpon, stop kill tournament." And I had people that were famous, famous, famous people come to me and say, "Hey, man, you can't stop killing tarpon. Man, we got to kill them. Got to hang them up so the people are going to keep coming and booking. We need to be able to sell those mouths and keep killing them tarpon." I mean, nobody ever released a tarpon before the late 1970s ever. And we started it and that by the early 1980s it was nobody killed them anymore. And that was, the tarpon were classic. We used to advertise that as the first ever catch and release tarpon tournament, fly fishing only. It was a cool deal. We designed a thing that you could slide over the lip of a tarpon's upper lip and stretch it. And it was made out of this bright colored tarpon material. And there was different colors as you went on. It was like one of those rainbow belts. And when you brought that back to the dorsal fin, we had, we took from three different taxidermists, measurements over like 2,000 tarpon, and we knew that if it was in the green, it was under 50 pounds. If it was between green and red, it was under 75. If it was white and it got bigger and the differences in inches would get shorter, you had to take that fish, bring him to the boat, put that thing on his lip and measure him and take a picture of him with a Polaroid camera with today's newspaper in the picture for the date. It was pretty crazy.

**Marvin Cash (25:01):**
That's really neat. And so when did you become obsessed—you were fishing predominantly gear that started to change. When did you become obsessed with catching billfish on the fly?

**Jake Jordan (25:14):**
Well, there was a couple of people down there. Billy Pate was doing it. Helen and Doc Robinson were out of Key West, and they were the first people actually to catch a sailfish on the fly. And I knew them. I talked to them about it, did some rigging, and I worked very hard in my little charter boat out there. We caught hundreds and hundreds of sailfish, but never got one on a fly rod. And I went out there and I worked and worked and worked. I think I caught my first one probably in 1976, '77. But during that time, after that, we were already in the travel business. So I was fishing. I went to Panama and I caught sailfish there. I went to Costa Rica. I caught sailfish there. I had gone to Mexico, fished down in Mexico and caught white marlin. Then I went to Venezuela. I spent probably between Venezuela, Dominican Republic, Florida Keys, Mexico, probably over a period from the early 1970s to I think it was 1981. I caught my first blue marlin on a fly. And that was in Venezuela. It was a 90-pound fish. And that was after hooking 119 blue marlin and breaking off 119 blue marlin before I caught the first one. And it was probably a 15-year period. And we basically thought it was pretty much not impossible, but very close to it. You had to be crazy and you had to be super rich. I did it not being a rich guy, just taking people fishing and working trips out where I would go someplace and I'd take the fly rod. And from 1980 to the early 1990s, I think I might have caught five altogether. And then all of a sudden, when my wife passed away, we started—I made a conscious decision to seriously chase billfish on a fly rod. Again, I didn't have the money to just go as an angler and chase them all over the world. But I had enough knowledge from catching—I'd caught quite a few sailfish. I'd got some white marlin and a couple of blue marlin that I had the ability to do it. I had run a thing we called the Bonefish School starting in the 1970s. I ran that for 20-some years. Basically, I would take people to Georgetown, Exuma. I had a place down there, and we would take groups of people and I had great casters and great fly tiers, Knott tiers, everything. We'd bring people down but one instructor for four students and one guide for every two students. And we would bring people for a week and when they come down there everybody would catch a dozen bonefish on fly. The secret of running a school is that everybody has to catch fish or you can teach everybody as much as you want to teach them but if they don't catch a fish you still might lose them. They might not become fishermen. But we always, I always felt that you need to catch people fish. So my idea was after running these schools I started the school so I could sell tackle out of my shop and sell fishing trips. Well, it worked good for me so I decided that I was going to do this thing I called the sailfish school. And I was taking small groups of people and I worked out deals in different countries where I had experienced really good fishing and I would advertise and bring one or two or three or four anglers to a place for a period of time and call it a school. They would pay for everything. I'd get down there and I would get to fish them and get to teach them everything that I knew. In about, I guess, the mid-'80s, it got where the schools were doing okay. We were catching some fish. I wound up taking a job in Costa Rica. A lodge had closed down, and they hired me to get down there and reopen this lodge. So I went and stayed there for a period of six months. I had a contract. And every day when the siesta time came, we would work from dawn until noon, and then everybody would eat their lunch and go take a siesta. And in those days, it was so hot, nobody would come out in the afternoon. You just work the morning. So as soon as we ate lunch, we would jump in a boat, go offshore and pull teasers. When I went down there, I took my tarpon reels and my tarpon rods and my fly line, fly tying materials and stuff. We would pull teasers when a fish would pop up. I had my mate and me. One of them would cast a fly and try to hook them and fight them and catch the fish. In six months, I hooked 212 billfish. And I caught 11 of them. And of those 11 fish that we caught, one was a striped marlin, and the rest were sailfish that we landed. We had broken off some blacks and some blues. But I broke every reel I had and every rod that I had, all the fly lines and all the leader materials and the hooks were opening up. We lost fish in every possible way, and I realized one thing, that you can catch these fish on a fly, but the equipment that we have, the tarpon, is no good for chasing billfish. So when I came back to the States, I started working with different people. I worked with Gary Loomis, I'm green, designing bigger, stronger rods with Ford Repton. I started working with Steve Abel on some reels and stuff, but basically the guy that I got hooked up with was a guy by the name of Jack Charleston. Jack was an engineer and still a reel that was just so far superior to everybody else. He didn't really know how good it was, but it was way overbuilt. I worked with him for a while using his reels. I worked with guys developing connections. I fished with a captain by the name of Ron Hamlin, who was one of the more famous big game fishermen. He invented the wind-on leaders. He and I worked together and developed connections for fly lines. I was designed basically a way to build a system where you can take your fly lines and your leaders and your backing and put everything together with no knots. It basically is a hall for loop-to-loop stuff and using background. And that system is used today by pretty much everybody in the world when they put their stuff together. I worked with Rio when Jim Vincent first opened it. I went to him and hired a scientist named Marlon Roosh. I went to Marlon and basically he worked with me designing a line that eventually became known as the Leviathan line. But basically what was happening is we were using teeny lines and Scientific Anglers lines and Cortland lines. And the lines that they were making when they extruded them, the core of the line was supposed to be like 23 or 24-pound test. But when they extruded the vinyl onto the line, it would break down the fibers. A lot of them lines were breaking at the hinge or they were breaking at 15-pound test. You'd have a 20-pound tippet on there fighting the fish, and the fly line would break. So we built a fly line, built a system with a stretched piece of monofilament in the system that gives you like a rubber band in your system to take the shock out of it. And just everything. We got chemically sharpened hooks. We got fluorocarbon. We've got monofilament that is so much better. We've got different ways to rig flies. We came up with tube flies instead of flies that hooked in them. The flies that I'm using now, if you break a fish off, the fish never drags a fly away. When the fly floats to the surface, you get the fly back and the hook falls out of the fish's mouth. Little things that we developed to save the fish, but also to make the fishing a lot better. And all of these little things that we added, the reels—we just didn't know. We used to think that we were palming the spool and putting 18 pounds of pressure on a fish, like bending that rod at the butt and doing the down and dirty and all that stuff. But the reality is that I started playing around with a Lefty with a scale and come to find out with a fly rod that if a human being is holding it, you take a line and you hook it to a scale that's tied to a tree and you back up. You start bending that line and apply all that rod and apply all the pressure you can. It's really difficult to get that scale up to four pounds of pressure on a hook set or something. That's all that you're putting on the point of that hook. On the other hand, if you take that rod and it's straight pointing at the fish and you have to drag on a reel that's consistent, and you can turn that reel up to five or six or seven or eight pounds, and you can hold it with two fingers and just give it a straight line like you would with a hand line, and that hook's going in. It's never coming out. So I developed techniques using equipment. First, we built better equipment. Then we built techniques to use that equipment that functions better. When I started my sailfish schools, when we first moved to Guatemala, it was 1993. When I started my sailfish schools down there, we fished for three years with Bud Grammer and Ron Hamlin, some of the great captains on the Intensity and the Magic and the Classic, the old, really great boats. And after three years of doing that school, I'm talking about probably a few hundred fly fishermen, we finally had a day where we broke a world record and we caught 10 sailfish on fly on 20-pound tippet in one day. Today, there's not a boat in Guatemala that hasn't caught more than 40 in a day on fly. We've actually had days down there where one boat with one angler caught 73 in a day. My tournaments, when we started the tournament, I do a tournament there at Casa Vieja Lodge in Guatemala, the Jake Jordan Invitational. This year will be the 11th annual. When we started, we were catching about one out of every three bites. Over the last couple of years, we not only land about 90% of the bites on 20-pound tippet, but we give 100 points for getting a leader in. And then if you actually bring the fish up and take the hook out of his mouth, you get an extra 50 points each time you do that. And I can tell you that when we started we were getting like maybe 50% of the fly backs without breaking the tippet. Last few years it's like 98, 99% crew teams, mates have gotten so good at it that it's almost automatic. It's incredible. And I watched—I watched this happen and it's not anything that I did. It's a combination of the captains, the mates particularly that do this stuff. They're the guys that do it every day and we just kept trying new stuff and new stuff until we got better and better and better. And Alex, we've caught a lot of sailfish on 200 pounds of it, 100 pounds of it.

**Marvin Cash (41:03):**
Well folks, I hope you enjoyed that as much as we enjoyed bringing it to you. Again, please remember to subscribe in the podcatcher of your choice so you don't miss part two of our interview with Jake. In part two, Jake and I take a deep dive into gear, tactics and Jake's schools. And again, a shout out to this episode sponsor, our friends at Nor-vise. Be sure to check them out at www.nor-vise.com and be sure to take a look at their Facebook page to stay up to date on all of their live events and all of their special events like March Madness. Tight lines, everybody.