TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/042291/0422270.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 8.7 KB | 188 lines

                                                                                TRAVEL, Page 92

Blissing Out in Balmy Belize


Pyramids and coral reefs beckon, but the chief attraction of
this angler's paradise is stalking the wily tarpon with fly
rod and reel

By ROBERT HUGHES/SAN PEDRO


    Belize, formerly British Honduras, enjoys the distinction
of being the most obscure country in Latin America. It is tiny: a
nibble between the borders of Mexico to the north, Honduras to
the south and Guatemala to the west. In the 16th and 17th
centuries it was the haunt of Spanish bucaneros and English
slavers, of logwood cutters and warm-sea riffraff. In 1981 it
achieved independence, and today it is the last fragment of the
British Commonwealth on Central American soil, the smallest
sovereign state on the whole continent (pop. about 200,000) and
politically the least eventful.

    Belize has rain forest, jaguars, waterfalls, toucans and,
after Australia's, the largest coral barrier reef in the world.
It was also one of the great centers of Mayan civilization.
Ruins -- still largely unre stored, insufficiently studied and
besieged by tomb robbers -- dot the lowland forests: the
pyramids of Xunantunich and Altun Ha and the vast complex of
Caracol, which in the 6th to 7th centuries was the rival of
Tikal, across the Guatemalan border.

    For fishermen, Belize is a paradise and always has been.
Its big holiday, after Christmas, is Baron Bliss Day on March
9. The festival commemorates an eccentric English nobleman who
went there for the fishing, died in 1926 on his yacht in Belize
harbor and left a part of his fortune to the colony -- a
grateful sportsman if ever there was one. But in its obscurity,
Belize gets only 1% of the tourist traffic to Central America,
although word about it has begun to get out.

    Nobody wants to stay in Belize City, which every guidebook
dismisses as a noisy dump full of intrusive hustlers. Instead,
one heads for the outer islands, such as the Turneffe Islands,
that are geared up for sporting tourism, mainly scuba diving,
snorkeling and line fishing; or a small plane whisks you north
to San Pedro on Ambergris Cay, a thin digit of land that
protrudes south from the Mexican border. To the east is the
barrier reef, which runs parallel to the coast, less than a mile
offshore. To the west are mangroves and shallow flats, and then
the low featureless Mosquito Coast. San Pedro, in between, is
a pleasant town of ramshackle wooden buildings on stilts or
cinder blocks, with a few new condos.

    It is supremely laid back here. The aggression level is
zero; nobody bothers you. The favorite late-night game in San
Pedro is called Chicken Drop: Mother Nature's own organic form
of roulette. A pit is marked out in 100 numbered squares, 10 by
10. One bets on the numbers. The croupier takes a live chicken
by the legs, blows sharply up its behind and throws it into the
ring. The first number the chicken defecates on wins. The
winning number takes all. It will be a while before the Mob
moves in on Belizean gambling.

    Mainly, you fish.

    It is probably impossible to go fishing in Belize and not
catch something. If you don't care what, hire a skiff and go
trolling off the reef with a heavy spinning rod and deep-running
lure. That will produce anything from an overambitious
triggerfish (beautiful colors but sluggish: let it go) to a
large black snapper or a larger wahoo. Or, if you are unlucky,
an enormous barracuda. The latter will either break your leader
in the water or do its best to bite your foot off if you get it
in the boat.

    This kind of fishing is fun but coarse. You have to make
things difficult for yourself. The next step up is to go after
bonefish with a fly rod. Bones here are small, no more than 3
lbs., but they are sizzlers on light tackle.

    Or you can try a fly on the tarpon flats.

    The right base for such ventures is a handsome and
well-run lodge on Ambergris Cay called El Pescador, which has
all the best guides -- and a welcoming committee of two ospreys
that have built their nest above its pier and greet the
arriving angler with shrill wheep-wheep-wheeps of alarm. El
Pescador was built by a German, Juergen Krueger, and his
Wisconsin-born wife. They started it about 18 years ago, when
no sober carpenter could be hired on the cay. Much of the work,
from laying cinder blocks to routing the panels in the heavy
mahogany doors, was done by visiting Mennonites. The lodge is
friendly, unpretentious and full of tropical Gemutlichkeit. Its
barracuda seviche and fried grouper are delicious.

    The flats between Ambergris Cay and the mainland of Belize
are one of the wonders of the fishing world. They extend for
miles: a limestone plain covered by a blue-green, seemingly
endless mirror of gin-clear salt water, traversed by bluer
channels and punctuated by small mangrove islands. This is the
home of Megalops atlanticus, the tarpon.

    Essentially, tarpon are huge archaic herring. In Florida
they regularly grow to 150 lbs. (the world record on fly is 188
lbs.), but in Belize they are smaller, up to about 100 lbs. They
are beautiful creatures, sheathed in scales the size of silver
dollars, glittering, pugnacious, spooky and inedible: the only
thing you can do with a tarpon, in the unlikely event that you
catch it, is let it go. But as a rule you have no choice about
letting a tarpon go. It just goes.

    This is probably the only kind of fly-rod fishing that
causes more distress in the angler than in the fish. No other
angling contains such extremes of frustration and exhilaration.
One hears middle-aged enthusiasts declare it to be "better than
sex." Perhaps not, but the two activities have something in
common: the first try is an embarrassment; everything goes
wrong. With tarpon, however, it keeps going wrong.

    The ideal day for flat fishing is cloudless, calm and
roasting hot. The guide poles the skiff along the flats in a
predatory silence, and you stand on the bow platform, with line
stripped out, sweating through the sunblock lotion, ready to
cast. Tarpon fishing is stalking. You must see the fish and cast
to it. Hence its peculiar excitement, which far exceeds trout
or even salmon fishing. "Look, look, out there, about a hundred
feet, in the white spot, a big one, he's coming, ooh, thrreee
of them!" You peer and scan and peer again, and see nothing.
Then you do: a dark gray bar under the green ripples, ghosting
along.

    What the guide expects you to do is shoot the line out 60
ft. or 70 ft., drop the fly (a vulgar tuft of feathers and
Mylar) some 5 ft. in front of the tarpon's snoot and start
stripping it in. The fish will then charge the fly, you will
strike, and it's showtime! So much for utopia.

    This being the real world, one of several things will
happen. Flustered by the sight of the fish, which is so much
larger than anything you imagined catching on a fly before, you
bungle your cast and land the line in a tangled hurrah's nest
far short of the fish, which glides away. Or you drop the fly
on its nose, so that it spooks and heads for Cozumel. Or you get
it right, and the fish takes no notice. Or the creature inhales
the fly and takes off like a drag racer, at which point you find
you were standing on a loop of the fly line, and it is knotted
around your ankle.

    But, at last, when you have run out of spare leaders and
foul language and are cooked by the sun, you hook one. The
sight is amazing. The fish looks, a friend of mine said after
striking his first one, like a silver man rising straight out
of the water: an apparition.

    Now your troubles have only started. Tarpon are
inordinately strong. To subdue a big one on a one-hand,
10-weight fly rod takes an hour and a half and teaches you what
a sore arm can be. It is like cutting mahogany, but with the
additional likelihood that the tree will escape. The tarpon has
a mouth like a cinder block, in which the hook seldom holds:
generally, only one fish is brought to boat for every 10 that
are hooked.

    While other anglers lie about the size of their fish,
tarponers lie about the number of minutes they had it on before
it threw the hook. The fish makes long reel-burning runs, and
jumps repeatedly, a thick column of mercury twisting in the
spray. It lands with a smacking splash that can be heard a mile
away. "Bow to the fish!" cries the guide, wanting you to drop
your rod tip. Bow? You feel like prostrating yourself. And then
it is gone. In five days I saw perhaps 150 fish, hooked four and
boated one -- 25 lbs., a mere minnow.

    No matter. The 90-pounders will still be there next year.