S3, Ep 18: All Things Salt with Capt. Jake Jordan Pt II

**Marvin Cash (00:04):**
Hey folks, it's Marvin Cash, the host of The Articulate Fly. On this episode, we return for part two of our conversation with 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. In part two, we take a deep dive into tackle, fighting billfish on the fly and Jake's billfish schools.

I think you're really going to enjoy this one. 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 rating and review in the podcatcher of your choice. It really helps us out. And a shout out to this episode's sponsor. This episode's sponsored by our friends at Steelhead Alley Outfitters. If you're going to chase steelhead or pike in the Lake Erie Tribs, you need to do it with the guys at Steelhead Alley Outfitters. Remember, go with SAO. So head on over to steelheadalleyoutfitters.com and get set up today.

Now, on to our interview. So Jake, I know that early on when you first started fishing for billfish on the fly, you were using basically heavy tarpon rides. And I think they were literally blowing up in your hands. And I know you've been instrumental in making the tackle better. Can you tell us a little bit about how you finally got to the rods today that you like to fish with? And you can even tell us a little bit about the reels too.

**Jake Jordan (01:30):**
Sure, I'll be happy to say about that. Basically, when I started this stuff in the old days when we were fishing out of the Keys, the biggest fly rods made were really a 12-13 Mega, which was a Fenwick Adam and Lama Glass Adam and the 12-weights. And then eventually we went to Sage and G. Loomis. In the meantime, my old friend Cam Sigler came up with a rod that was like a 15, 16-weight. It was a fiberglass rod that had a lot of lifting power and you couldn't break it. I put a really long foregrip on it so you could actually lean back on it. And that became the rod that a lot of people used. It would bend like a tuna rod, so it would actually shorten up the length because it would bend so much the fiberglass tip. However, it did have a strong butt for lifting.

And when we're fishing for billfish, we're not really casting that far, so it didn't need to be a great long casting rod. Well over a period of time I worked with Gary Loomis and both with Don Green and they developed some pretty heavy rods. J Kennedy Fisher came up with a 16-weight and I think Thomas and Thomas had one. A couple different companies built 16-weight rods or 14-weight rods and then different people played around with them. They made them stiff. The problem was the carbon fiber rods were that they were too stiff.

I guess around late 1990s or early 2000s, when I started working with Rick Pope and Lefty at TFO, actually they brought me in to try to come up with a blue water rod that would work well and compete. And we built a short rod. It was an eight and a half foot rod that was built with a combination of carbon fiber and fiberglass. It had a really strong lifting butt and the tip was soft enough that you could cast a big fly with it and get it where you wanted. We built the foregrip on it, which gave you some lifting power. And at that time, the IGFA had made a ruling that your fighting butt on the rod had to be six inches or less. We made it so it's actually from the center of the reel when it's mounted on the reel foot when it's mounted on the rod. But it's like five and three quarter inches, that fighting butt. And I made it in a three-piece rod. And we used that for a long time.

We made a light-duty, a medium-duty and a heavy-duty in the beginning. And the heavy-duty rod was like a 15, 16-weight. And it was just perfect because it would throw that big fly. And then when you hooked the fish, it had enough power to lift the fish up to land the fish. They were great rods. And then as time went on, we upgraded them two or three times. We changed materials. The one thing that I did that we do in all of our big game rods is we did away with snake guides. It seems that snake guides was traditional, and they're great for casting, for throwing long distance and stuff. But when you're fighting a big fish with a lot of drag and you're pulling it across them snake eyes, it's like pulling your fly line across a butter knife, and it'll peel the coating off. So we build all of our big game rods with standard guides without the snake guides. And then obviously it doesn't ruin our fly lines when we're fighting big fish. They just work a lot better.

And then after a while, we wound up doing two things. Number one is that carrying the fly rod in a tube on a plane, they changed the length that you could stick up into an airplane. And I wanted something that you could take on no matter how small the airplane was. So we built a four-piece strut. We changed it from three-piece to four-piece. And then I changed the foregrip on it so it was all one piece. So you had your double well, and then you had an opening in between, and then another foregrip that was a cigar grip. So we just closed in that hole and made it all one long piece. So when you're fighting that fish, depending on the length of your arms, your height, the size of your hands, you can slide your hand up and down on that grip when you're fighting the fish, and it makes it a lot easier. So that's one of the upgrades. The other one, of course, was to make them a four-piece so it'll fit into a 28-inch suitcase.

And that is amazing because every place you go to catch billfish, you've got to get on a plane and go somewhere. So the rods today with the furrows that were designed in the 1970s, early 1980s, are actually stronger. The multi-piece rods are stronger than a one-piece rod. And they've got it down to the science now. We actually have a unique thing on our Blue Water Heavy duty where we have the second section of the rod has two male ferrules. And the handle has a female ferrule. It's the only rod in the world that has that. It makes it shaped like a smaller fly rod. It's not bulky. It's not heavy. Yet it's stronger than it would be if I had a female over the male handle. So it's a pretty unique tool, and that's called the TFO Blue Water Heavy Duty Ride.

I would say in this day and age, the Blue Water Rides on most charter boats and most big game boats throughout the world, I would say 80% to 90% of them are using the TFO blue water rods that I designed. And they are really, you know, basically you can use them as a casting rod to fish the tarpon with. If you want, they can make an all carbon fiber stiff rod like the 12-weights that we make for tarpon fishing that are probably more accurate and cast further. But the blue water rods are mainly made to fight fish that go deep, and then you're going to pull them back to the surface. They're stronger, and they almost never break. They're just really powerful rods. So that's kind of where we are with the rods.

As far as reels are concerned, when we started, you know, we were using basically Billy Pate tarpon reels and Fin-Nor tarpon reels. They were four-inch reels, and you could only get about 200 yards of 30-pound backer iron, that weight-forward-12 floating line on there. That's when I found out, when I started really seriously bill fishing, that the reels didn't have a good enough drag, and they didn't hold enough line. So Ted Jurassic built a reel that was called the Bluefin, which was a great big reel. It was a whole 700 yards of backing and a fly line, and that worked really good. He made it in an anti-reverse reel and a direct drive. Unfortunately, the drag systems were made out of cork. Eventually, you know, they're just not strong enough for the techniques that we're using today, but they were great reels in their day.

Abel built a number five, which now I think they called their, I don't know, 15 or something. There was a few companies that built a bigger reel, but my friend Jack Charlton had come out with these Charlton reels, and he built the first really big reel with a carbon fiber drag that was sealed. And there was nothing else like it. It was repeatable. And it was by far the best fishing reel built in the world, period. And then, oh God, in the early 2000s, we lost that company in a business deal and waited a while. And around 2005, we came out with a new reel called the Mako Reel. And I worked with Jack on that.

The Mako Reels are still built. And they have a repeatable drag. It's made out of carbon fiber to steel that is by far, you know, on a, when you're right, all big game reels. This reel is probably on a one to 10. This is a 10 and the second best reel would be maybe a five or a six. It's so, so much superior. The drag never fades. They last forever. They don't ever break. And the breaking system is just, it's an overkill that was designed to stop a jet airplane, and it certainly stopped to fish on a 5 1⁄2-inch reel.

So between the Mako reel, the Charlton reel, and that's a Mako reel, I basically designed my whole fishing technique for these marlins using the reel where I can put marks at certain settings. And now I know exactly what the power is when a fish pulls line off of there. You know that it's taken one pound or three pounds or five pounds or six pounds, whatever the drag setting you want, you can mark that on your reel. And that will never fade. It'll never get stronger. It'll never get weaker. It'll stay like that every time you turn it to that mark forever. I mean, you could catch 10,000 fish. There's never any fade. And it's always repeatable.

So consequently, once you know how much is too much pressure to put on a blue marlin, you just never put that much on. And you can just, you know, it just changed the whole game from catching, you know, one out of 20 to catching 50% or 60% of your bites. It's an amazing tool. So between the Mako Reel and the TFO Blue Water Rides, my whole system is built around fighting fish using those tools. And then we designed the fly lines and I worked with Rio to design them. But today, Cortland makes a great fly line. Scientific Anglers makes one. And they're all really good billfish lines. The one that I use is a 550 grain Rio, they call it a Leviathan. And that with a running line made out of my film, the system is just foolproof. And it's pretty much accepted worldwide now. Everybody use it for fly fishing, for billfish.

**Marvin Cash (13:12):**
Yeah, I got it. And kind of one follow-up question. So my understanding is those lines are basically super heavy shooting head systems, right?

**Jake Jordan (13:21):**
Yeah, basically the line that I'm talking about is a 550 grain, 30-foot shooting head. We use an 80-foot, 50-pound test monofilament running line out of a bright fluorescent green mono. And that running line that's 80 feet long, 50-pound test will stretch 20 feet before it breaks. So when we make loop systems out of 80-pound Dacron, my whole system basically, you have your 20 pound tippet you have your bike tippet and your 20 pound flash tippet that's 16 inches long and after that everything builds up to 60 pounds and then everything else in that system is at least 50 pounds plus braking strength so you got a 20 pound tippet and the next the the fly line itself is 65 pounds the running line is 50 pounds that the the backing is 65 pounds so nothing on that system should ever break when you turn the drag up except the 20 pound class tip two reasons for the idea i think one is if you just use straight 30 or 40 or 50 or 60 pound line and you hook a big marlin and he takes off you get it wrapped around your finger or your toe or your neck.

It's going to cut your head off or your finger off because you can't break the fish off. So that 20-pound class or 16-pound class or 12, the reason that those classes were put into the rules of fly fishing and you're not supposed to use anything heavier is a safety factor. If you get it wrapped around your reel, it's not going to pull the rod and reel out of your hand. If you get it wrapped around your wrist, the back is not going to cut your wrist off. So that's the reason. I've never actually had anybody on any boat with me ever catch a fish on a fly rod that did not have a minimum, I mean a maximum of 20-pound IGFA class line. A lot of people say, well, I'm not fishing for record, so I don't need that.

Well, first of all, there is nobody in the world that can put 60-pound test line on a fly rod, and I'll use 20 pounds, and I can catch the same marlins faster than they can. That's number one, because it's really almost impossible to break 20 pounds if you know what you're doing. Secondly, you have that safety factor. And I have had people do the heavy leader on there and just run straight to the fly line. And when they break something, the fly line breaks. Or they're not break. Or they're backing break. Something always is going to break if you put too much pressure or if you get it wrapped around something. So consequently, we use the 20-pound class tippet with that. And therefore, that whole system works.

Then with the marlin, the idea is that that sinking line, that 550 grain line, actually comes out of the mouth of the marlin and the leader. And then that line starts sinking the minute he takes off. And you're fighting that fish with less than one pound of pressure. So when the fish is running, you're not applying any pressure at all. So he can't get the line tight and snap the 20-pound tip. But however, as he gets out a little ways, the line starts to sink. So then he feels the hook, which has the big fly in his mouth, going down on it. So the marlin then and the sailfish do the same thing. They come to the surface and they jump and they wear themselves out jumping on the surface.

And they can't make that line tight enough to snap it off because you've got one pound of drag. After they jump for 5 or 10 or 15 minutes and you just follow them around, they take the line off, you put it on. They take it off, you put it back on. And when you finally get up close enough, you get the backing on, and you're all the way up to the running line, which means you're 45 feet from the fish. At that point, you turn the drag from one pound to three pounds. Now, every time that fish takes off, now he's tired from jumping, and he's not going to go deep and break you off. But when he runs, he's not going to run as far. And you gain it back. He takes it off. And eventually, you get up to the fly line. Now you're 45 feet from the fish.

At that point, when you get up that close, you turn the drag up to six pounds. And then when he tries to jump, he only does like half-hearted jumps because he's so tired. And gradually, you just work him back towards you until you get up close. And when I get the leader in, which is a technical catch on a catch and release field, then I turn it back up to 10 pounds, 20 pounds, but the fish is too tired to break it. And then you just back them up right to the boat. We grab the fish by the bill, take the hook out and let them go.

**Marvin Cash (18:31):**
Yeah, it's interesting too. And my understanding too is that you also don't have a raised rod while you're doing this. That one of the things you do since you've got the drag system so dialed in on the reel is you're able to keep the rod flat, which helps you also tire the fish out a little bit faster.

**Jake Jordan (18:49):**
That's correct. You still need that rod to lift the fish at the very end. But most of my instruction is for clients that are fighting these fish, that after you cast and when you get the hook set, the object is keep the rod pointing at the fish and do not bend the rod. What I tell my clients is if you don't remember anything, no matter what trick that fish uses on you when you're running away, don't ever let him trick you into bending that rod. Keep the rod straight. Let him run against the reel. The reason that you're spending all that money for a reel with a drag like this, and this is what a lot of the reel manufacturers don't know, is that that permanent steady drag that's smooth, the fish just can't top that leader. It just can't be done.

But over a period of time with other drag materials and other reels, to drag after one or two or five or ten fish starts to get jerky and as soon as it gets jerky that's going to break that 20 down so we fight them with with the real rod actually pointing to them and when we back up on the fish you basically stick your rod tip underwater and turn the handle as fast as you can and they back up towards the fish and then when the fish takes off you just take your hand off the handle and let the fish pull the rod tip up out of the water and straight toward him and then you let him run as long as he's gone away from you just let him pull it off that reel and and there's no way that he can get tip wrapped if you got it up in the air or off to the side you try to wind down a lot of times you get tip wrapped and then when he takes off he breaks you off so the secret is keep the rod pointing right up to it these are all things that I learned you know 40 some years doing this stuff.

And if you read some of the old books written about catching billfish on a fly, none of this stuff is mentioned in there because nobody really knew about it. You know, I didn't know about it. I mean, for up until the late 90s, I still was using the old down and dirty and palming the spool and stuff until I found out that, you know, when you're bending a rod and you're pulling on it, I tested with a lot of different rods and stuff. Hooking a fly to a scale and then standing with the line straight and then pulling to the side or pulling up and it's almost impossible for a human being to be strong enough to while you bend in that fly rod to pull up to four pounds of pressure.

But I can put six or eight pounds of pressure on there with a straight rod and hold two fingers and pull that scale all the way up. I could pull it up 10 pounds with two fingers as long as the rod is pointing straight and there's there's nothing but the drag coming on. So when you're palming the spool which is what we always did you used to wear cotton gloves palm the spool well if you're doing that you're applying uneven pressure there is no pressure that you could possibly add that the smooth is what we do with the with the drag on those Mako wrists.

**Marvin Cash (22:03):**
Yeah and I guess too you mean you were it kind of the evolution of figuring all this tackle stuff out took so long when you started you probably couldn't manufacture anything that you really could today to solve those problems.

**Jake Jordan (22:13):**
That's correct. It took a long long long time. You know we we built what we thought would work the best and you know when Ted built that silly that Bluefin reel man that was to catch me out but today if I get it out and I use it it's kind of awful compared to. I still have half a dozen of them and I love them they're great reels but but if you're going to catch blue marlin and the reason that nobody was catching blue marlin up until the last you know 20 years in any numbers last 10 years really was because nobody understood the the braking systems on the reels.

We didn't have back then we were we were using 30 pound back line. Today I use 65 pound gel spun. You know our our connections were knots and the knots used to break. Now we're using 80 pound Dacron sleeve to sleeve everything together with loop to loop so everything the connections are all stronger than the lines between the connections never fail. But you know the monofilament when a fish surges and runs away if you got your hand on that handle when you're winding look at the rod bent you got kind of a spring in there to protect it a little bit.

But the marlin are so fast when they take off if you just had a straight line with no stretch in it like the fly line going directly to the backing and you're winding in the fish takes off you would have like three tenths of a second to get your hand off the handle before the fish breaks the 20 pounds. But with that 80 foot of Suffix Superior mono in there, as that fish takes off and you're winding the other way, you have almost two seconds because that mono and fly line combined will stretch. It's 50-pound fish, but it'll stretch up to 20 feet before your 20-pound class tippet breaks. So it's like having a rubber band in the line so the fish can't get tight on it and snap you off. If that makes any sense, I mean, that's how I picture it. Like having a rubber band in there, that takes up all of the spring action that you would have if you had a big fly rod bent. Because the fly rod bent also has that springing action, which is the reason you can't put enough pressure to put more than three or four pounds of pressure on the fish.

**Marvin Cash (24:45):**
Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense, and that's a really great history lesson and probably what close to— Well, physics.

**Jake Jordan (24:54):**
Yeah, absolutely. It's mathematics, and it's just over years. I mean, I just got weaker. Then I realized that the only way that I could stay on these fish and fight them was not to bend the line. If you're holding a rod loose in your hand, then you're not using any muscles. But as soon as you squeeze that rod, even just squeezing it and not bending it, it hurts. But if you squeeze it and then try to bend it, every muscle in your arm and your back and your neck and your legs is going into bending that ride. The fish isn't bending. The fish is just going away either way. It's the angler that's bending the ride that's using up all that strength. And I've found that, you know, I'd fight a fish for 10 minutes and I'd be worn out using my old techniques. Using this technique here, I can catch a blue marlin, take an hour, and catch another one. It doesn't matter. You don't get fired. I can teach children and weaker people, old people, women, to fight these things and fight them as good or better than big muscle guys that try to muscle the fish in.

**Marvin Cash (26:03):**
That's amazing. And, you know, most of my listeners, I suspect, have not been on the stern of a boat and had the pleasure of hooking into a billfish. Can you kind of talk us through that experience of teasing the fish to the boat and hooking it and landing it?

**Jake Jordan (26:20):**
Oh, sure. That's an easy story for me. I can see it as I sit there. It's like in technicolor. Realistically, what we're doing is we're fishing in a standard sport fishing boat with a flying bridge. And instead of trolling four or six lines out the back, we have two, maybe three. Normally, we'll have two mates and a captain, and each one of them will work one seizure line. The captain's up top driving the boat, and he has a line on an electric reel up there with a short teaser. And then there'll be each mate has a one rod, sometimes an extra one. And we run teasers. And teasers are basically a lure or a rig bait that doesn't have any hooks in them.

And we run what's called a pattern. We run one close, then one behind it, and then another one and another one. And you're basically trolling just like you would be trolling for any other saltwater species, except there's no hooks. And the billfish are swimming around in this beautiful, clean, clear ocean, and they're looking for food all the time. They're down somewhere under the surface normally. Well, they hear a noise or they feel the vibration of the noise. And it's like they look up and it's like whitewater up there. Well, that could be like a school feeding tuna or a school of porpoises feeding, something chasing bait and feeding.

And the sound, the harmonic of that fish, that bait feeding has a tendency to turn them on. The fish hears or feels that sound. They look up and they start coming up. And as they come up, they see the school of fish swimming along making the whitewater, which is the propellers and the wake of the boat. And then they see a couple straggler baits out the back, which is the teaser. Normally, if you've got hooks in there, they come up and they eat one of them things, and they hook themselves. In our case, we just got these things trailing along, and we'll run along anywhere from six to ten knots and watch in the teasers.

They'll come up and they'll swat at it with their bill. Well, the angler, assuming that the angler is right-handed and caster is right-handed, you would reverse this for a left-handed caster. So you'll have all the teasers running on the aft starboard side of the vessel or looking back to your left. All the teasers will be on one side. On the right side of the boat or the port side of the vessel, you've got a fly line with 25 feet of line stripped out. You have a 550 grain shooting head that's got this 80-foot monofilament running line and then 700 yards of gel spun backing and about a 12-foot leader with a big pink poppin' fly that looked like a feather duster with a foam head. Got one or two razor-sharp hooks and a tube fly.

And it's sitting there all rigged up, and you've got the drag on the reel is set at a standard six-pound test for most sailfish and small marlins. You set the drag at six pounds. You have the line stripped in, the fly is there. So you're just trolling along, sipping on your water and watching the teasers and looking at the beautiful ocean. And the next thing you know, up pops a bill behind that one of them teasers, and he swats at it with his bill and tries to slow it down. Starts chasing it. The mates will get the other teasers out of the way. It continues ahead. They bring the teasers in, and that one teaser, if it's a sailfish, they'll kind of drop the bait into his mouth and let him taste it and pull it out of his mouth. Because inside of that lure will have a ballyhoo or a piece of belly bait or something, some kind of something for him to take. So then you start bringing them in.

In the meantime, as soon as the fish pops up, the angler walks to the aft port corner, picks up the fly, drops it in the water, in the white water behind the boat, lets the line goes out. So the fly is coming. You're holding the rod, pointing it straight back. The line is going straight back to the fly, which is 25 feet from the rod tip. And the fly is dragging along in the wake in the whitewater so the fish can't see it. As they bring that fish in, you're now just standing there in the corner of the vessel watching, holding the rod down low, letting that fly drag. And they bring the fish up 40 feet from the transom. And now you are 25 the the fly is 25 feet back when the fish is 50 to 40 feet from the transom.

The captain will turn the boat hard to the starboard or to the right creating clear blue water behind the boat and bring that fish across that clear water and help pull the boat out of gear. Now once the boat comes out of gear the boat's no longer underway according to the rules of fly fishing. It's legal to cast. So you water load your fly and you pick it up do it you do like an elliptical cast and you do a big wide open loop and you throw that fly down and it plops in that clear water on the left side of the boat looking back. It plops right where the bait where the teaser is and as the fly is coming down the teaser man yanks that teaser out of the water. The fly flops. The billfish circles at once. Comes up and grabs it and takes off. It so you're watching a 100 pound fish you're seeing everything that happens and then you watch them see the fly turn on the fly and you basically you bend at the waist and you reach out as far as you can with your rod tip pointing the rod right at the fly and 25 feet back the fly the boat's still drifting so it's holding the fly away from you.

You're not stripping. You're not doing anything. It's laying there. He thinks he wounded it when he whacked it with his bill and he better eat it because it's going to get away. He'll turn come around and eat that sucker going away and you got the line stretched out so when he hits it it's in his mouth and that hook is driving into his mouth and you got six pounds of drag on the reel coming straight off the reel. So you don't swing the rod. You don't do anything. You hold it in your hand and you do a short strike like you would if you had a hand line and as soon as you strike him in and out that fish is jumping and going crazy and now you're just watching the fish jumping.

We watch them jumping and let them run. You don't try to stop them because they'll break the 20 pounds and they'll run and jump. They might jump 20 30 times in the next three or three minutes and when they take off the boat backs up and you try to keep up with them. You gain line when you can but you're never really pulling on the fish. You're just keeping the slack up. Anytime you're slacking there, you put it on the reel. And when he takes it off, he's pulling off against the six pounds. And you put it on, then he takes it off. And each time he takes it off, he's pulling against the six pounds.

After on a sailfish, after 10 minutes, if they stay on the surface, generally, it gets a lot easier. Then you start pumping them in and bring them up. We bring them right up next to the boat, grab the bill. We've got nowadays so we never take the fish out of the water but we've got a GoPros that we're using on the end of these long sticks and and you just stand there with your rod you take the fly out you hold the rod and fly in the reel and and grab the fish by the bill and you take a picture of you with your fish see the name on the back of the boat and everything and and then we let them go and start all over again.

That's the experience and since I've been fishing in Guatemala at my sailfish schools just to be you know since 93 so 03 13 with close 28 years I guess 27 28 years we have average catching seven sailfish on fly on 20 pound for both per day. That's an average over almost 30 years.

**Marvin Cash (36:20):**
Yeah, that's amazing. And so, you know, you've got a school in Guatemala, but I know you've got other schools too. Can you tell folks where your various billfish schools are located?

**Jake Jordan (36:30):**
Well, yeah, basically I have a kind of created at almost 79 years old, I've created this job for myself for the rest of my life, which is basically coaching people into catching billfish on a fly rod. And the IGFA, the International Game Fish Association, has an award that they give. They have a lot of awards for different accomplishments. One of the hardest one there is is a thing that they call the billfish royal slam and that's basically for an angler to catch nine different species of billfish in their lifetime. If you document that you get a certificate and you become one of a few hundred people that have done that. But with a fly rod with 20-pound classification. Up until five years ago, it had never been done by anybody.

The nine species are Atlantic and Pacific sailfish, Atlantic and Pacific blue marlin, white marlin in the Atlantic, stripe and black marlin in the Pacific, spearfish and swordfish. When nobody had ever caught them on. So I have been chasing all these different kinds of fish in different places in the world and working with crews and teaching my techniques. And I found that certain places at certain times give the ability to catch a certain species. Some of these species are very rare. But it's there. And now, after all these years, I've got boats, captains, mates that I have worked with and basically mentored a lot of them, but really just shared the knowledge. And they have become really good at it.

And I searched for people that really wanted to do it with a fly rod. You walk down a dock in a big marina and every charter boat in there say, yeah, I'll take the fly fishing. But they don't know what they're doing and they really don't want to be fly fishing. They get you out there and say, well, let's try babies, do windiers. You know, they're not really fly fishing. And I have teams of people all over the world that would rather go fly fishing than anything else and rather fly fish or billfish than any other species. So I started these schools based upon teaching people to catch different so that they could try to get this Royal slam.

Today, in 2021, there are now eight Royal Billfish slams on fly. All eight of them were people that I worked with and coached and supplied tackle and stuff that have caught them. Actually, my friend Roy Croninger, who's one of my best customers, has figured out how to catch the swordfish, which is the hardest. And it's really hard. I'm talking about for each swordfish caught on fly, we put in 46 days of fly fishing for swordfish. Or I should say 46 nights. We're averaging one out of every 46 nights catch. It's not an easy game, but it's for crazy people that want to make a goal. And Roy now has three of them.

Make a long story short, I have a guy, a boat, a team that I work with, and I run a school in Kona, Hawaii, which is the place in the world where Spearfish, which is the rarest of all the billfish, gather on the full moon, or on the new moon, I should say, over a period of a couple of weeks in February and March every year. And it's the only place where you go and target them. I've sent probably a couple of dozen people taken and fished with them over there with my team and crew over there. In what I call the spearfish school. And everybody that wanted to catch one has gotten one. And I think you might have... Did you interview Wanda Taylor?

**Marvin Cash (41:29):**
I haven't yet, but she's definitely on my list. I was thinking about her when you were talking because I can remember seeing the pictures.

**Jake Jordan (41:35):**
Yeah, last year I took her over there. I told her, you want to catch a world record? I took her over and she caught the world record spearfish on the fly. It was my team. I have a guy and a team in Dominican Republic, which now that Venezuela is not a good place to fish because, you know, Americans just can't go there. We fish out of Dominican and we've got a really, really great fishery for Atlantic blue marlin and Atlantic white marlin. So I have a team there that's there six months out of the year, and I have certain times of the year that I go there and I run marlin schools up there.

Then I run sailfish schools in Guatemala. I do straight marlin schools. I used to do them in the Galapagos. I still do some, but I also do them in the best place, I guess, to catch straight marlin in the world by far is Magdalena Bay, Mexico. The logistics are incredible to get there. However, I have an old client, a friend of mine that has his own boats. He's basically way surpassed me. He's caught over 5,000 billfish on a fly. And I think last year he averaged a crazy number like 27 striped marlin a day for 10 days of fishing on flyer on 20 pound fish.

So I do that. I do a straight Marlin thing. I do the white Marlin. I do Atlantic sailfish. I've done it here and I've done it a lot in the Florida Keys and I do it off of Isla Maris and Cozumel, Mexico where we can catch Atlantic sailfish. And then my favorite fish in the world is the blue marlin. Well, in Australia, I've got a place where I send people to catch their blacks. And they're juvenile blacks, but you can catch them on the flat site and do them in my school. And then in that, for the blue marlin is the ultimate fish.

And we found the place, I guess it's been 10, 11 years ago now. It's a canyon. It's 100 and some miles off tour from Costa Rica. I put together a team, a boat owner, and I formed a relationship, and I worked with the crew. This will be, I guess, my 10th year out there now, from 1st of June to the end of August. We run out every Monday. When we come back in on Friday, we live out there for four days. Basically, we fish from sunup to sundown on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday every week in the summertime. Last year, we averaged catching nine blue marlins per trip on 20-pound tippets. That's more than I caught in the first 20 years I fished for them. We do it three days. And I'm talking about men, women and children and people that have never done it.

Basically, the technique, the equipment and everything that we have developed, along with people like Nick Smith and Chip Schaefer and guys that are just the best there are. We have some of the best captains and crews in the world from Guatemala and different places around the globe. It's now I can pretty much say to you if you want to catch a blue marlin on fly it's not going to be inexpensive but I can pretty much guarantee if you follow instructions. I've taken 56 trips out there and only one of them did my anglers not catch a blue marlin on fly on 20 pound tippet and that's like unheard of.

You know, my anglers in the last 10 years fishing on a dragonfly boat with me at my marlin school and caught more blue marlins than everybody else in the world put together prior to 1990. Prior to 2000. More than everybody combined. The numbers are just phenomenal and we can pretty much just do it. There's other people that are doing it now. But the technique and stuff is things that we developed. And I just love talking about it. I love doing it. I can't wait to get back there.

**Marvin Cash (46:45):**
Yeah. And the neat thing too is doing the research for the interview. I mean, it's a really intimate experience. I mean, it's, you know, I guess kind of at a high level, it looks like most of these trips, you've got to run a pretty good distance. So you're on a pretty good sized boat and you fly in and then basically, you know, you're going to run at night to get to where you need to be. And you're going to stay there and fish for several days and then come back. But, you know, there are not a lot of folks on the boat. I mean, it sounds like it's you and the crew and two or three anglers and that's about it. And you're really at their kind of, you know, whispering in their ear, coaching them every step of the way.

**Jake Jordan (47:22):**
Oh, yeah. I'm the coach. The Blue Marlin thing that I do in Guatemala is, I mean, in Costa Rica is generally one or two clients and me. Basically, one client buys the trip and then he can bring somebody with him if he wants. Or she can bring somebody with her if she wants. In Hawaii, usually it's one person or one angler or two anglers on the boat. Any more than that, unless you've got really sheer numbers of fish, I want all my anglers to experience the best experience and actually wind up catching the fish. And if you have half a dozen people or three or four people, they get into different things and they're not concentrating. It's hard for me to deal with three or four people at the same time coaching them changing things out for people.

On the other hand like in a place like Guatemala where I run my sailfish schools and I run them really pretty much year round the sailfish schools in Guatemala I can take up to four people on a boat because it's a day thing. We go down for the school is basically you arrive on day one, and we fish day two, day three and day four. We go out at seven in the morning, and we're back at the lodge at five, swim in a swimming pool. We eat your hors d'oeuvres, have a cocktail and talk about the great fishing. And there's so many fish that I can take four people, and everybody's going to catch three or four sailfish. So I can do that, and I can even bring larger groups there because a lot can carry more. I can take 12 people and have them spread out over three or four boats, and still everybody's going to have a good time.

But my game is to make sure they're having a good time. I'm their host. I plan the menus. I make sure that everything is customized. The trips are customized. And I try to make it so that theoretically you could get off work in your office and get a ride to the airport, jump on a plane, get there. And I'll have a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and sunscreen and feed you and give you plenty to drink. Have all the tackle there, spray you with the sunscreen, and let you catch your fish and have your suit laundered and get on the plane on Monday morning and be back to work at noon. And you don't have to carry a toothbrush with you.

Everything is designed to make it as easy for the clients. In Guatemala, I have a condo, and you stay in my condo when you're there. In Hawaii, we stay at an oceanfront hotel, and we got the boat just not far from the hotel. Each place I have, it's different. Each situation is different. The stuff in Mag Bay, we're going for five days on a big boat, 180 miles from anything. But each one is different. Over in Dominican Republic, we've got a condo or a house that you stay in. And then just go to the boat in a golf cart every day. Each one is unique, but each one is five-star first class.

**Marvin Cash (51:15):**
Yeah. And if that wasn't enough, you're still running your charters for tarpon and you guide false albacore in the fall.

**Jake Jordan (51:25):**
Yeah, well, I'm trying to do this for another five or six years. I'm going to be 79 next week or next month. I just love it. I can't wait to do it. I'm constantly sitting here rigging and buying equipment and tying flies and making tackles ready to go and rigging other people's tackle. I've got people that hire me to put their stuff together and plan their trips and everything. But the reality is that I still can't leave the Florida Keys. I have a very unique fishery there. I fly fish for tarpon with people that normally would not be able to catch a tarpon on fly because they're not good enough cast.

It's very difficult catching a sight cast and catching tarpon on fly. In the old days, when I was pulling that boat every day, I could pretty much tell you that if you never picked up a fly rod, if you give me four days with you, I can teach you the calf good enough, take you out there, and you will catch a 100-pound fly up and I'm going to fly. I can't do that anymore, and I don't know anybody that can do that anymore. But what I can do is I can take anybody, and I can say, if you come down and you fish with me now in Florida Keys, I don't fish in the daytime. I fish at night when the fish are feeding. It's a complete different fishery than what you see on TV. But every one of my clients hooks and fights two or 300 pounds arpit every night. So nobody ever comes down and doesn't catch any. And I teach you to hook them and fight them. Now, once you got that down, then you just got to become a really, really, really good caster. And then you go out with the great fly fishing guides on the flats and chase them all week. And hopefully you hook one.

**Marvin Cash (53:27):**
Yeah. And the false albacore game in the fall in North Carolina is awesome.

**Jake Jordan (53:31):**
Oh, yeah. That's why I moved back here. I mean, I came back here in 2006. And I thought at that time I was going to retire and just do my traveling. And I had Donnie Jones build me a boat here, a Cape fisherman, and got into it. I had been fishing here with Brian Horsley and Sarah Gardner for about six or seven years as a customer. I used to come up when I got back. I always went to Alaska for the month of September. And then when I got home, I just kind of hang around the Keys. When I found out about what they were doing up here in 2000, I asked Sarah about it. She called me up. I said, if you ever get an opening, call me. She did. And I started coming up and fishing with her and Brian.

After six years of that, fell in love with the area. And I was getting burned out on living in the Florida Keys. It just got too crowded for me. They moved up here. I think they have better fishing up here year-round for just day in and day out for fly fishing. I think eastern North Carolina. Well, North Carolina overall is one of the great places that I have been where I can fish for so many different species. And it's really good. But fall sabacore and the big drum here are a special thing in the fall. So, you know, from the first of October to almost Christmas time, we have got just an incredible fly fishery here for light tackle fly fishing for Little Tunny or false albacore and for the big 30, 40, 50-pound redfish drum. And the scenery is spectacular. The weather is beautiful. It's just a wonderful fishery.

And then by the time I'm done that, getting beat up in that little boat, and I'm ready to jump on an airplane because it's starting to get cold here and go down to Guatemala and do a couple sailfish schools or go to Hawaii and get in the sun. So I used to always try to spend my winter someplace in the tropics where I catch fish. And then surprisingly, the season for these blue marlin in Costa Rica is the summertime. These are migrating fish, and they start coming in in late May, and they're gone by the middle of September. So we just do June, July and August. Like I said, I've been out there 56 times. I've had one client that actually didn't land the Blue Marlin on fly out of 56 trips. And he hooked 14 and broke them all off because he couldn't listen to me. We got Blue Marlin.

**Marvin Cash (56:40):**
Yeah, so you really basically start the year, and it's cold, so you want to go down to Central America. You're running schools there and then about the time that winds down right you head down to the Keys to guide probably for tarpon.

**Jake Jordan (56:53):**
For what about three months April and May. I do. I used to do June but but then the you know if I had to choose between tarpon and blue marlin you know I'd choose blue marlin over everything. That's the that's the most ultimate crazy best fish in the world on a fly rod. I mean it's you know we used to think it was permit. You know there's all different kinds of fish to turn people on. GPS caught them all. It's got a lot of everything. And you know there really isn't anything like a blue marlin. They're just there's there's everything else in their blue marlin. Yeah but and that's and that happens to be a summertime thing.

But you know what after living in the Keys and living here in eastern North Carolina you go to Guatemala. I mean to go to Costa Rica I got a nice pool and a nice condo fishing out there. The weather is less humidity and overall being out there 150 miles out the ocean it's nicer out there in the summertime than it is in the Keys or here. Yeah usually usually flat calm and just beautiful. And then I do that in the summer. When I can, I go to Alaska for two, three weeks or a month, hang out up there. I don't work up there. I just go catch giant rainbows. Again, another big fish that jumps. I try to go catch a 30-inch rainbow every year if I can. And then when that's over, I'm back here and it's albacore season again.

**Marvin Cash (58:26):**
Yeah. So how many days a year do you think you spend on the water, Jake?

**Jake Jordan (58:35):**
You know this last year has kind of messed things up but I would I would say over the last 10 years I would spend a minimum of of 230 240 days on the water. Yeah that's a lot of days. That's awesome. You know I'm single. My wife passed in 1991 so you know I made a decision not to remarry specifically because it wouldn't be fair to somebody for a guy like me. If I get a phone call and they say the tigerfish are biting in the Euphrates, I can just walk out my door, lock the door, leave the lights on, leave the TV on, jump on a plane, go to Africa, fish for six months and come back and everything's the same as it was. I designed my life that way that I can travel and come home and everything's good. So that's how my life works.

**Marvin Cash (59:34):**
Yeah, that's really neat. And, you know, before we go tonight, why don't you let folks know where they can find you on the Internet so they can learn more about your schools and your charter business. And I know you're on Instagram. I think you're on Facebook. They can follow your fishing adventures too.

**Jake Jordan (59:49):**
Yeah. I think it's Jake Jordan's Fishing Adventures. I think it is on YouTube there's an underscore or something there just do Jake Jordan Fishing Adventures you'll find me I have a website it's called jakedordan.com and that kind of is not a booking place but if you want to see it goes back up to 15 or 20 years it has pictures of different places and describes some of the different stuff, fishing reports from all over the world, different fisheries that I fish. It talks a lot about them. It'll give you an idea about what I do. I have a telephone number that is my cell phone that works all over the world, and that's my main communication is my cell phone. It's just 305-872-6060.

And then my email address is keysjake.aol.com. That's keys like in Florida Keys, K-E-Y-S-J-A-K-E at A-O-L.com. Or you can look at my website. I'm on Instagram. I guess you search Jake Jordan, Jake Jordan Fishing Adventure, Jake Jordan Fishing or something. It pops up. If you look at marlin fishing or Mako reels, TFO rods, probably albacore fishing, sailfish with a fly rod, blue marlin with a fly rod, my name's going to pop up.

**Marvin Cash (01:01:38):**
Yeah, and I'll drop all of those in the show notes to make it easy for folks to find them too.

**Jake Jordan (01:01:44):**
Yeah, that would be nice. Anybody has any interest in this stuff, I do the rigging for a lot of people. They want to do this stuff and most of the fly shops don't know how to put the rigging together or they connect the fly lines and the leaders and everything. I do have here I have a little business where I sell the rods and the reels and the fly lines and the backing and rig them up for everybody. I sell the fly. I actually make these flies that are built fish flies. I'm three different sizes and bright colors and do the rigging and I can teach anybody how to do it if they want to learn. I'm happy to share all the knowledge that I have with people.

**Marvin Cash (01:02:33):**
Yeah absolutely and you know when show season comes back and we're on the other side of COVID you've been known to hang out in TFO booths around the country too.

**Jake Jordan (01:02:43):**
Yeah well for years you know I did you know that when when Chuck had the first started the fly fishing shows I you know I I was a presenter at his shows for years. I used to do tarp and stuff and Atlantic salmon stuff. I was one of the first people to fish behind the iron curtain over on the Ponoi River for Atlantic salmon. We did that in 87. You know I I used to have all these different shows bonefish shows and stuff. I don't do much anymore but I still do go to the shows. I still hang out when the shows are going on. Once in a while, Ben will ask me to do something on the billfish. I have some great presentations on the different billfish stuff. And I still do some of that. So, I enjoy it.

**Marvin Cash (01:03:35):**
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, Jake, I really appreciate you spending some time with me this evening.

**Jake Jordan (01:03:41):**
Oh, it's my pleasure. I'm glad that I got the opportunity to do this. I hope you people listening enjoy it. If you got that bug and you really think you want to catch something with a real long nose on the front of it that jumps, that weighs twice as much as you do, I'm the guy.

**Marvin Cash (01:04:01):**
Absolutely. I learned a ton tonight and I'm sure everyone else did. Take care, Jake. Well, thank you very much. Have a great night. You too. Well, folks, I hope you enjoyed that as much as we enjoyed bringing it to you. Again, if you like the podcast, please subscribe and leave us a rating and review and the podcatcher of your choice. And don't forget to head on over to www.steelheadalleyoutfitters.com and get set up to fish with the guys at SAO. Tight lines, everybody.