Water Cay Lodge is quickly becoming one of the best spots in the Bahamas to catch a big permit. Visiting anglers are consistently seeing permit and we've had enough of these elusive beasts caught this year that visiting anglers should be "rigged and ready" for permit. The Water Cay Lodge guides have often been the difference between a catch and coming back with a big zero.
All three guides (Sidney Thomas, Ezra Thomas and Greg Rolle) have great eyes and find permit that few other guides would see. Water Cay Lodge guides are amazingly skillful and quiet polers and help anglers with a bad case of "permit fever" to deliver the fly at the proper time. The guides keep everyone calm when approaching one of these fish of a lifetime and do everything they can to avoid the "wrecks" that so often happen when going after permit. Once hooked, their excellent boat handling skills give anglers the best chance of actually putting a hooked permit in the boat. To put it bluntly, these guides are damn good and I'm proud as hell of them!
But back to this trip... Here is the trip report from late October with the Dental Education Adventures group, led by my old friends Drs. Brian Crock and Larry Towning. In Brian's words:
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| Dr. Towning obviously had a good day! |
"The guides worked tirelessly to put us on fish, as an impending cold front likely pushed fish off the flats into deeper water. With that being said, we still saw plenty of fish. The fact that impressed all us was the size of the fish we caught. On any other trip, bonefish of this size would have been noteworthy. At Water Cay, these bruisers were the average, and we boated many of them. More remarkable was when you boated a small fish, as they were very few in number.
We have had many legitimate shots at permit in our fishing travels. Almost every day on this trip, a boat would return to the dock and tell stories of seeing and casting to permit. Inevitably, the heat of the moment leads to a fly in your shirt or the line tangled around your legs. The possibilities of screwing up a permit presentation are endless. Sidney's (head guide Sidney Thomas) calm manner made catching this permit possible. Dan (Dr. Dan Merker) was calm throughout, as he didn't see the sickle tail go down on the fly and wasn't sure what we were fighting 'til Sidney lifted the fish from the water. Nonetheless, the two of them worked as one for over an hour until the 25 lb permit finally tired."
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| Dr. Merker and head guide Sidney Thomas with their catch. |
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Dr. Merker and Dr. Brian Crock celebrate the moment!
Congratulations to Dr. Dan Merker and the members of this year's Dental Education Adventures!
Be looking for the next week's trip report as yet another permit was caught in early November by Franklyn Gorrell's group from the International Angler in Pittsburgh, PA.
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