This is about a fellow named Chester Marion who caught a tarpon on a fly rod in the Florida Keys. Other people have done this, and many of their tarpon have been bigger than this one, but there are some special things about it.

Marion lives in Montana where there are hardly any tarpon at all and until the day he caught his fish it would have seemed he was snake-bit where the silver king was concerned. Marion, you see, is a trout fisherman of awesome credentials, who throws a fly from here to there with great accuracy--and distance, too, where needed.

It was more than 10 years ago when Chester first fished for tarpon on Florida's southwest coast and I was there when some big fish in Shark River rolled lazily past all sorts of streamer flies fastened to big lines and heavy rods. And some years later I expectantly rowed a skiff among scattered fish that surfaced gently and apparently returned to the bottom for extended naps--if tarpon really sleep. They, too, ignored an assortment of streamers.

Between the first tarpon that snubbed Chester and the one he caught there were steelhead, bonefish, snook, jack crevalle, channel bass, and other things that put deep bends in fly rods.

"I'd just like to see one jump," he said. "I don't have to catch one."

As he mentioned that, I rested on the oars and stared unhappily at a lone tarpon that showed a fin off a distant mangrove point near Chokoloskee Island and then disappeared. I'd leave it to Ray Donnersberger of Michigan and the Florida Keys, an old friend to both of us. Donnersberger knows about tarpon.

The Donnersbergers live next to the tarpon there on Summerland Key. You sit on their balcony-deck when the sun goes down and you can see tarpon skiffs coming back to port. That's when the mosquito planes hiss and roar in over the mangrove tops, trailing white clouds of spray, startlingly large at such close range and looking for all the world like fatally hit bombers about to plow into the coral.

If it's low tide there will be a row of cormorants silhouetted on a strand of coral rock doing their wing drying formalities, not too alarmed at the familiar spray planes. Generally there will be a motionless great blue heron, and if the sunset is especially red the whole thing is a little overdone as if Ray and his painter wife, Dorothy, had made the watery front yard just a little too gaudy. When the planes have gone there are formations of roost-bound wading birds and you'll hear the cooing hoots of white-crowned pigeons over on the little island.

The evening before Chester caught his tarpon there were two big waterspouts off Summerland and over there toward Loggerhead, one of them towering unbelievably high, a grim cloud churning water like God's swizzle stick. Subject to technical explanations as are other tornadic events, waterspouts nevertheless aren't fully understood and when they grope about the shallows they make everything smaller and you are aware that the Florida Keys are just a string of little islands trailing off into a very large ocean.

But it was the second day before Chester caught his tarpon, and on the evening we arrived, before we had fished, Chester and Ray and I made preparations in Ray's ground-floor workshop. The main Donnersberger house, like most Keys homes, is elevated in defense against hurricane tides. On the ground floor, Ray has a long bench with his labeled fly-tying materials and the big fly rods racked beneath the ceiling. Which one for Chester?

I dug out my own heavy stick, which obviously wasn't the one. I hadn't expected it would be.

"No," Ray said, "we aren't after a record. If we expected a 200-pounder that would be fine--but we don't want that much."

And the boron marvel I exhibited--the one that would fire a shooting head until the running line was all picked up and the reel buzzed. A great rod, Ray said, but not for big tarpon.

"Of course it would break right here," he indicated, and I nodded sagely and said of course it would.

Chester maintained the discreet silence of a true expert away from home.

There were the 85-pound monofilament shock tippets that Ray tied to 15-pound mono with the new knot. There have been several new knots, some of them unnamed but most of them involving the preliminary Bimini Twist, followed by certain sleight-of-hand that sounds simple but never looks quite right when I perform it. So Ray had the 15-pound class tippets spliced to the big stuff and a Bimini in the other ends for quick attachment in case of a breakoff.

We rigged with my reel because it worked from the right side and Chester cranks that way. Ray uses his left and we had our ancient discussion as to which side the right-handed angler should crank from. The left hand is more convenient when he casts but generally he can wind faster with his right, and I smugly mentioned that I had used the left side for the first 25 and then gone to the right--the only chance I had to argue with Ray during the whole trip, and he ignored it.

There was no question about the streamer, the red and orange one, smaller than those of a few years ago, and tied well back on the hook so it wouldn't foul. What, Chester wanted to know, was the name of that pattern?

Ray stammered a little and confessed that it is called the Ray D., modesty giving way to accuracy in the case of a man who has won all those tournaments and developed all sorts of tarpon tactics. That's funny. I'd used his streamer for years and never had a name for it.

"There have been a few tarpon around," Ray said, "but there were more earlier. It isn't bad."

"I'd just like to see one jump," Marion mumbled softly.

The tide book. The weather from Key West less than 30 miles away. The visual check of the rocks out in front of the house. No hurry on the first morning but the quick little aluminum skiff, one-of-a-kind and reinforced for Keys' adversities, slipped daintily down from the davits on the canal behind the Donnersberger house and we went to a spot Ray seemed to feel showed plainly to anyone, but was found by mystic landmarks and occult computations. The tide was still just a little high, and he staked out twice with his pushpole before he was satisfied.

"The fish come along the edge of that bank and turn into that notch and then they swing past here--right over there."

The canvas cover went neatly over the boat's console and steering wheel, secured by grommets and leaving hardly anything to catch a fly line. Chester got up there high enough to see an extra 25 yards, maybe more, and although there seemed hardly room for him, Donnersberger got up there too, all six-feet-and-considerable of him. Things quieted down and Chester made three or four tentative casts at the area where the fish were to appear, the running line dropped carefully on the deck. Then he looked gravely efficient, the big rod and reel ready. He had that golf glove on his casting hand--always does.

The moving tarpon in that water do not roll much. They are sliding shadows and sometimes you are not sure you are seeing a fish at all, or if you are, you think it may be a shark. Any wakes are gentle for the most part. Usually the fish are seen piecemeal--the glint from a dorsal fin or tail--a shadow on the bottom--and then an entire fish may appear in minute detail, often too close to cast to and startling to someone who has been studying real and imaginary shadows.

The two or three fish we saw at that first stakeout were uncertain ghosts, and Marion had only one minor mishap--my fault when I set a camera case where his running line slipped under it. We regrouped. Ray tactfully moved me and my case.

Not all tarpon are sliding uncertainties on the flats. There is the laid-up fish who rests on the bottom with his tail tipped at an angle and his undershot jaw flat against the marl or mud. I think his jaw is meant for a bottom rest but biologists stare at me when I say so.

And there is the nervous water that is hardly a wake in the distance but shows something is beneath a surface disturbance. Some can read such things. And there is the shiver, an indication that a big tarpon is barely covered but sends tiny waves out from his location, waves that could be mistaken for those of a large drowning insect.

Once we changed locations and accidentally ran over a single loafer who squirted away. Ray said he had made a mistake. Should have started poling that flat sooner instead of running so far into it. Dependent upon tides, we staked out or poled over a wide area on both sides of the Keys Highway. Once we crossed a low-tide flat that demonstrated the skimming qualities of Ray's boat. He said he'd shown off and gotten away with it.

When the fly and fish are right there are several takes--the great turning boil, the leisurely one when the fly simply disappears in the fish's mouth, and that strange thing when you cast to an indistinct fish or pod of fish and see a dark spot appear behind your fly--a dark spot that does not blend with more subtle shadows and is the fish's open mouth coming up behind it.

You do not strike too quickly and there is the rule to wait until the fish turns with the fly and you feel the tightened leader. Then you hit him hard, more than once, before you hear your loose line rip to the reel, that agonizing moment when everything that could catch a line seems to leap from forgotten crannies of the boat, and even Ray's grommeted canvas cover cannot hide everything. But then some say you shouldn't strike the fish at all--just tighten up.

Chester's first take was a simple case of a passing fish taking the fly gently and when the Ray D. disappeared the real Ray D. told Chester to strike. When he did the fly came out without so much as a tug. For a moment I thought Chester was going to say he just wanted to see one jump, but he didn't.

"That wasn't your fault, Chesser," said Ray, coining a nickname Marion may hear from time to time from now on.

Chester caught his fish the next day when rain clouds circled us and sometimes blocked the essential sun. A big cloud was shading Key West when the fish took, but we had sun. There were three fish together, unmistakably tarpon and pulling wakes. One took without hesitation on what appeared a perfect cast--but when they take, any cast is perfect. The fish ran some 60 yards before jumping high against a backdrop of open sea and merging haze. Then the outboard muttered reassuringly and Ray told Chester that everything was fine. He said we'd get some line, slipped the rope from his staked pole to leave it standing there and idled after the fish at just the right speed while Marion whirled the reel urgently. Ray cut the engine.

"Now work him hard!" he said.

That hoary plan of just keeping a tight line until the fish tires himself has long been history on the flats.

"Tell me if he's going to jump," I grunted, the camera's finder plastered against my eye.

"I don't think he has any more jumps," Ray said.

The fish's run shortened and all of the backing was gathered.

"Play him on the line," Ray said. "We won't give him the backing again."

He used the motor for brief periods. It was a little more than 15 minutes before one of the short runs seemed to bog down and that time the fish came sluggishly to the surface, showing a gleaming side to the camera.

"Now you're in charge," Ray said. "Never let him get a moment's rest from now on."

That reminded me of many years ago when I thought such a surfaced fish was already whipped, relaxed a little, and then lost him after an hour of fumbling.

Along toward the last, Ray got in a hurry and he swiveled his head almost constantly. Of course he was looking for sharks but he seemed more nervous about them than usual, especially when the tired tarpon occasionally seemed to regain power. We'd seen no sharks at all.

"That's right. You're doing fine, Chesser."

Then he had a whispered comment to me, not wanting to add pressure on an already busy fisherman.

"There's a big hammerhead, an old acquaintance that would make deadly trips to the shallows following the supernatural indicators of the world's sharks, leading to fish in trouble."

It was exactly 30 minutes from the strike when Ray slipped a gaff through the fish's lip, pulled him up three feet and let him go. Ray talked soothingly to the fish and patted it when he turned it loose. That would be corny stuff from some fishermen but when Ray Donnersberger does it things come out different.

Chester said he thought he'd keep the fly, maybe hang it in his office.

"I wish he'd jumped closer so I could hear his gills rattle," he said--"but I'm not complaining."

He'd landed the first tarpon he'd ever hooked, but he'd paid his dues with a long wait.

The fish would go 80 pounds or a little better. It had taken exactly 30 minutes and bigger fish have been landed faster--but smaller ones have gotten away. If we must have morals they are that a good fisherman is a good fisherman whether he's catching a 10-inch trout or a 100-pound tarpon, and that a good fisherman can follow a good fisherman's instruction.

Anyway, a fish of that size on a fly rod comes a long way from the days a hundred years ago when cash prizes were offered for anyone who could catch a good-sized tarpon on any tackle, and developments were toward huge hooks and two-handed poles.

Now I know how such stories are supposed to end. We were supposed to retire to a local bar and toast Chesser's catch with strong drink and fat cigars, but it was mid-afternoon and we postponed our homecoming a little.

So we went over by the Bongos (spotty shoals that seem appropriate to their name for no definable reason) and I climbed on the console, just a little wobbly up there for the first few minutes. I measured my line for a cast to where the fish would edge the bank and looped the leader carefully in my hand.

Then the big rain cloud that had been working out from Key West seemed to break up a little and sections of cloud moved at random over the Keys shallows, some of them streaming gray drapes of rain. One cloud moved over us and seemed settled for the rest of the day. My view of the sandy bank, only slightly broken by a breezy ripple, then became nothing but a general blotchiness and even my polarized glasses brought me some opaque reflections. I couldn't see anything and said so. It had been really hot earlier and it was still muggy with our cloud cover.

"Let's go and get us an ice cream soda," Ray said, and so we did. But Chester bought a couple of cigars and I guess he deserved them. There is only one first tarpon.