Breakfast at Playa Blanca Lodge is whatever you want. I had coffee, OJ, fresh tropical fruits, an omelette, and two strips of bacon. We packed our lunches from an equally splendid spread of ceviche, fried fish, leftover roast beef or BBQ ribs, fruits, sandwich fixings, French cheeses, you name it. You want bottles of water, limeade, beer? How many?
At 07:10, fly fishing guests assembled at the truck for the 20 minute ride south to the dock. Skiffs departed the dock each day at 07:30 and returned by 16:00.
The flats of Espiritu Santo Bay (Bahia del Espiritu Santo) are accessed by a fleet of small Dolphin skiffs. The ride south is bouncy in the waves driven by the prevailing SE trade winds, but the small craft are dry and easy for guides to pole. The guides are all local fellows from the Yucatan. My guide the first four days was a short, stocky fellow named Chepo, pronounced “Chay-Poe”. The first day on the water, I had Chepo and his boat to myself.
Chepo looked in my box of permit flies and picked out a crab fly, my favorite by chance, that I’d crafted from a coconut fibre scrubbing pad and some “ultra chenille”.
Up on the poling platform, Chepo deployed his magic flats vision, spotting fish invisible to me under the shimmering waves.
In addition to Spanish, Chepo speaks a dialect of fly fishing English, enhanced with his own units of measure:
“Eleven o’clock, forty feet” means
“Cast 45° left of center, sixty feet”.
“White, white…” means
“Wait, wait…”
“Cast again! More longer!” means
“Throw the fly in the same direction, but seventy feet.”
Once I learned to follow Chepo’s directions (“white” took the longest), I began to catch fish.
A baby Bonefish, my smallest ever on fly, somehow managed to stuff most of that crab fly in its mouth.
Some juvenile Mutton Snappers likewise gulped down the crab fly, my first ones on a fly rod.
An uncounted mess of small Blue Runners and Mangrove Snappers did their best to rip the fly to pieces, yanking loose bits of coconut fiber, and chewing the fuzz off the leading claw so it flopped pitifully.
Finally a permit appeared, using my new rod, I cast what little remained of the fly: a small disk of coconut fiber, two eyes, and a trailing claw.
“White, white, white…strip…strip…strip…STRIP-STRIP-STRIP!”
The Permit connected with my bedraggled fly. I cleared the line and the reel drag sang the happy buzzing song that flats fishers so love to hear as the fly line sliced water in two.
My first Permit on fly, not huge, but just dandy, on my first day fishing the flats of Bahia del Espiritu Santo, on the tattered remnants of a file that I tied, cast with a rod that I built. What’s better than that?
Thank you Andy, Juan, and Chepo.
Two ways to eat a scorpion
Playa Blanca Lodge has one sacred tradition: when an angler catches his or her first Permit, he or she must eat a scorpion.
Accordingly, after dinner that night, young Calvin and I were each served a scorpion, pickled in mescal.
I recognized my dessert topping as a Florida Bark Scorpion, common in the Florida Keys. For years I kept one in a jar of alcohol on my desk at work. They’re big and scary when they skitter across the floor, and their sting hurts like a wasp if you are unfortunate enough to contact one, but their venom is not lethal. The terminal segment of the tail that holds the venom had already been removed.
I took my scorpion apart leg-by-leg, squeezing the meat out of each segment with my teeth like one does with the legs of a fried tarantula, a tasty Cambodian delicacy.
Glancing back and forth between his own intact scorpion and me, actively nibbling my prize, Calvin looked worried. Finally, he picked up the 8-legged horror and tossed it down the hatch in one gulp, aided by the double shot of tequila.
The chitin exoskeleton of arthropods is indigestible, so you can guess what happens, or rather, what doesn’t happen, if one swallows said arthropod without chewing. Not wanting my scorpion to reappear as a scorpion, ever, I channeled my inner squirrel monkey and thoughtfully munched it down.
After its soak in mescal, the scorpion tasted more like mescal than the assorted terrestrial arthropods I’ve eaten on prior tropical adventures. I gave it a rating of meh-minus, but the fruit was good. I’ll happily take a deep-fried tarantula over a mescal-soaked scorpion any day.
Eye of the Cormorant 