This article appeared in the January 2001 Edition of The Modern Fishing Yearbook Magazine.
Steve Starling
There are moments in our fishing lives when it's reasonable to question the notion that this is a relaxing, contemplative pursuit. The trigger for these doubts can come in many forms: The explosive detonation of a big bass thumping a surface lure in the dead of night. The wild slashing of a marlin bill behind a skipping bait. That electric jolt on the line as a big yellowfin tune inhales a drifting pilchard in the berley trail. Such moments are guaranteed to increase the pulse rate, dampen the palms and weaken the knees of even a hardened angler. Truth be told, they are about anything other than relaxation!
For me, the ultimate in self-induced piscatorial stress is the pressure I inevitably put on myself while sight-casting a fly to a big and highly desirable target. The first time I prepared to throw a flashy profile at a lit-up billfish in the teaser spread, I almost wet myself. I can't imagine that the next time will be much different.
Why do we do it? Why do we set ourselves difficult goals, and run such an obviously high risk of failure in the pursuit of our sport? I guess the motives are similar to those urges that motivate a punter to gamble everything on a last race long shot, or the mountaineer to tackle an impossible rock face. In their purest and most distilled form, these urges may well be the very key that separates us from other animals, and the reason that men have been able to stand upon the crated surface of the moon and gaze back at our blue home across the silent void of space.
Catching a snub-nosed dart or Indo-Pacific Permit on fly might not rate up there alongside the efforts of Neil Armstrong in the overall scheme of things, but for a while in the mid and late 1990s, I'd started to think I had more chance of completing a successful moon walk than nailing a "pumpkinhead" on fur and feathers!
When I finally cracked one of these enigmatic and challenging critters, it was something of an anti-climax. At about half a kilo, the fish in question would have been right at home in a decent living room aquarium. Ah well, at least it was a start.
My mini-permit
My mini-Permit came from Eco Beach, south of Broome, and while I was there on that April visit in 1999, resident guide Dan O'Sullivan showed me scores more of these fish - including a few clearly in the six and seven kilo range. As usual, however, seeing Permit in the shallows and catching them with a fly rod proved to be two very different matters. My hair's falling out fast enough as it is without such extra incentives.
I had a hunch that if I was going to crack the Permit thing in a more impressive manner, it'd be in my favourite tropical stomping ground; on the western side of Cape York Peninsula, between Weipa and the Tip. My annual visits to this region on the live-aboard charter vessel "Capricorn Mist" had already given me dozens of fly rod shots at Permit, and I'd even hooked a reasonable specimen, only to watch in stunned amazement as it rubbed its jaw on the sand and rid itself of my fly just 30 seconds after eating it!
Words of Wisdom
Each season for the past five years, "Capricorn Mist" skipper, Greg Bethune, has been able to jiggle a few more pieces into the slowly unfolding Permit puzzle. Since nailing a beautiful eight kilo oyster cracker on a Clouser fly fished "blind" in a Cape river mouth in the mid-1990s, Greg has gone on to sight-fish another nine or ten of these wonderful fish in the six to eight kilo range - and all this despite being lucky to grab an hour or tow of personal fishing time a week for himself between his various duties attending to clients.
Greg Bethune - The Australian Permit "expert"
Along the way, Greg's also guided another dozen or so lucky anglers to their first Permit. The total tally on this difficult target for Greg's Carpentaria Seafaris' operation is therefore in excess of 20 fish landed (and mostly released), with about the same number again hooked and lost in various ways. While 40 fish mightn't sound like a heck of a lot, it unquestionably makes Greg Bethune the closed thing we have to an Australian Permit "expert", much as he'd hate that description himself!
So, I listened carefully to Greg's advice, and foremost amongst it was his suggestion that I get myself up to the Cape during late August, September or October and choose a set of tides that saw fairly significant lows occurring mid-morning, with a run-in through the middle of the day and early afternoon. Most of Greg's productive Permit contacts had taken place on dead low water and during the first hour of two of the making tide, and he was definitely seeing more and more of these fish as September rolled on, despite having caught them as early as April and as late as November. I optimised my chances and picked the second week in September, with exactly the tides he'd nominated during the early part of my visit.
The Plan
I love it when a plan comes together, and this one certainly did - on just the second morning of my trip! Our first cruise past the sandbank on the northern side of the river mouth an hour before low water revealed a scattering of hefty golden trevally already feeding hard. I resisted the urge to make a cast and we kept looking. Eventually, we were rewarded with the tell-tale silver-and-pewter flash of a broad, flat flank turning in the sun. Permit!
Soon there were other flashes, then a dark smudge in the water - a whole school of Permit, working upstream along the sand bank edge against the last gasp of the dying run-out. This looked good!
Beaching the skiff, we climbed out onto the sand and got ourselves into position for an ambush. As the school approached, it appeared to grow larger and larger. At a conservative estimate there were well over 100 big dart in that rippling shoal, and I could barely stop my hands shaking long enough to unhook the crab fly from my rod and begin pulling line off for a cast.
Of course, it was never going to be that easy, and my first dozen casts - including a few that seemed right on the money - were totally ignored. It was hair-pulling time again!
Permit
Over the next 20 Minutes or so, the large school of Permit broke into at least three of four separate pods, several of them working circuits or "beats" that brought them back within casting range from time to time.
Greg and I continued to get the odd good cast in, and we were now joined by fellow crew members, Lou Swfit, Milton Stockmyer, Martin Sher, Dave Ellen and Michael Huelin, who spread out along the extended sand bar as the tide finally began to make.
Suddenly, I was faced with one of those goldplated opportunities that come along all too infrequently in most forms of fishing. A loose V-formation of 15 or 20 Permit were working their way through a newly formed bay in the sand bar, on a curving track that led them in my direction. They were in water so shallow that yellowish sickle fins and tail tips were occasionally scything the surface and the frequent flashes of turning fish seemed like bright signal mirrors in the late morning sun.
Taking a deep breath, I made a measuring cast of maybe 25 metres, stripped in the line and waited. Within 30 seconds, the fish closed toward my measured mark. I swallowed, false cast twice, hauled and shot the weighted crab fly at them. It plinked into the water maybe two to three metres ahead of the lead fish, which continued at walking pace right over the fly. I stripped once to move the fly and paused. Nothing. At least three of the lead Permit had now passed the artificial crab without so much as a sideways glance. I pulled again - a measured, steady strip of maybe half a metre. I'm pretty sure I was holding my breath. Certainly, I could hear my own pulse pounding loudly in my ears.
"GOT HIM ON!"
"Got him!" I cried. "Got him on! Got a Permit! Yee-haa!"
Greg let out an even louder yahoo than me and began cranking in his loose line, passing up an easy shot at the same pod, which still hadn't spooked. I could see my fish in the middle of them, flashing, twisting and shaking its head. Gradually, they all began to swim a little quicker and came out of the bay into the open, slightly deeper water of the channel edge
I still had colour on my fish and could see the dark smudge of the others around it. I was back on the reel and losing line slowly against the drag, still with a few metres of fly line wrapped over the backing load on my Felty reel.
"I thought you said these things could go?" I jokingly called to Greg as he waded over to join me. At that point the fly-line-to-backing connection rattled through the snakes and I lost sight of the fish, but a minute or so later I pumped the tail of the line onto the spool again and was rewarded with a dull blink of mustard and silver from the slugging fish, which still seemed to be swimming with at least three or four of its school mates.
"How long have I had it on?" I nervously asked Greg, pumping smoothly on the deeply plugging fish,
"Ah, just on eight minutes," he replied, consulting his watch. "Hope you haven't got anything planned for the next half hour or so."
"C'mon." I laughed, "I reckon I'll have it on the beach inside 12 minutes. Fourteen at most."
At the ten-minute mark in the fight, the fly line clicked up through the guides again and disappeared smoothly into the water. Then the fish bucked once, twice, three times…. And lit the blue touch paper.
I've certainly experienced faster runs, but few from a fish that size which were so powerful and determined. At the end of it, I figure I had at least 150 metres of fluorescent pink backing outside the rod tip, plus, the full 35 metres of fly line, a metre or so of leader butt and that one other little bit I was so concerned about - the two metres of four kilo fluorocarbon tippet!
We considered going after the fish in the dinghy, but in the end I opted to stay on the slowly flooding sand bar and work it back with the making tide. It was a long slow job.
Pulling in a permit
At the 42-minute mark in the encounter, with a sense of relief bordering on euphoria, I finally swum the tiring fish up onto the edge of the flat and tailed it. I was so emotionally drained, I could barely raise a "whoopee" for Greg's video camera, and as I lifted the fish it twisted and slipped from my grip back into the river. Exhausted as it was, it took me another six agonising minutes to get that Permit back and tail it again. Those were not enjoyable minutes!
We shot a full roll of still film, and despite frequent dips back into the fast flooding tide, it was pretty obvious the fish was unlikely to survive release. Only a little reluctantly, I opted to keep it and have a fiberglass mount made. Weighed an hour or two later, my first decent Permit went just over fourteen and a quarter pounds on the old scale, or about six point five kilos. I was ecstatic!
Over the next two days, we would go on to hook another eight Permit at that same spot, landing three more between six and seven kilos, including an exciting double header that saw two anglers hook-up within a short cast of each other. Several other fish broke off on long runs. I dropped another myself and had several more good shots and one possible bump, but failed to add to my tally. All the same, it was some of the most exciting fly-fishing I've been involved in.
A Hot Bite
As we moved out to continue our trek north to other rivers and further adventures, the Weipa-based charter vessel, "Eclipse" cruised into the same location. I heard on the grapevine that they landed as many as eight more fly rod Permit in the next day or two and also enjoyed a couple of memorable multiple hookups. Clearly, we had lobbed into the Permit equivalent of a hot bite, and had been able to add a few more important pieces to that complex puzzle.
A week or two later, on less ideal tides and under overcast skies that made sight fishing difficult, we returned to the same region and plucked another pair of six kilo fly rod Permit from a different river mouth, both of them falling to experienced South African fly-rodder, Mark Yelland. We were finally starting to get some sort of a feel for these fish.
In the end, however, far more questions remain than have been answered. For example, what were the fish doing as they milled, circled and daisy-chained in-groups, pods and sometimes-large schools? Were they feeding? Or were they waiting to gain access to feeding grounds with the rising tide? Could they even have been spawning?
The contents of a Permit's stomach
We did a thorough autopsy on one of the few Permit we killed and its stomach contents revealed a double handful of well crushed shellfish, including various forms of cockle and pipi. Some of these had shells several millimetres thick and would have required a solid blow from a hammer to be broken up as thoroughly as they were. Not that the oyster cracker needs a hammer. In the back of its long, soft throat are a set of bone-hard crushers that would make short work of a finger!
Greg Bethune has now examined some half a dozen Permit stomachs, and shellfish have always dominated their contents, although occasionally there will be a tiny crab or pieces of a slightly larger one. Clearly, all this tucker is obtained on the seabed or even by rooting under it and sucking up tid-bits with that strange, down-turned mouth. But how are buried food items detected? What sensory organs are contained in the bulbous head of the Permit? Super smell receptors? Echo location gear? Organs for detecting tiny electrical discharges? And is their eyesight brilliantly sharp or myopically inadequate? Are they ignoring and rejecting our flies on so many occasions because they don't pass the sight/smell/taste/sonar/electrical test, or simply because they can't see them? Who knows?
What We Do Know
What we do know is that there are just a handful of places around the Australian coastline where these amazing fish occur regularly in significant numbers over shallow flats, and where they can therefore be sight-fished with fly gear. Those places include Hinchinbrook Channel and western Cape York in Queensland, Croker Island in the Top End, Eco Beach south of Broome and Watering Cove near Karratha in WA.
New spots continue to be added. I've seen them in the Wessel Islands, north of Gove, and some very exciting reports are now filtering in from the southern Kimberley, north of Broome. We know they're also on the eastern side of Cape York all the way down past Cairns to Magnetic Island and beyond, as well as much closer to major cities in places like Fraser and Moreton Islands, but they are rarely, if ever, viable sight fishing targets in these places.
We also know that the majority so far landed have succumbed to crab flies, imitative shrimp and prawn patterns and less frequently, plain old Clouser Minnows. It also seems that placement and retrieve are critical, with the fly needing to be presented at or below the level of the fish's eyes, moved once, then paused and preferably not moved again until it's eaten or ignored. Greg Bethune is a great believer in getting the fly straight out there if it's passed up and quickly re-presenting it - sometimes up to a dozen times on an individual fish or pod.
American fly rodder Del Brown is the acknowledged world leader in catching the "original" Atlantic Permit on fly with over 400 of these fish to his credit, including several world records. Del Brown is also the originator of the Merkin Crab fly (although he reputedly hates that name!) - a pattern that is proving at least occasionally effective on our local version of the Permit.
It would certainly be great to get someone like Del Brown onto our fish; to pass on his knowledge and reveal any major differences in their behaviour patterns and responses. American anglers I've spoken to who've now caught both types say that they are very similar, but that our local version is, if anything, tougher to fool and a more dogged opponent on the line once hooked. Clearly, that is really saying something!
Two anglers with a Permit each - once a rare sight
We have a heck of a long way to go in truly coming to grips with the Indo-Pacific Permit or snub-nosed dart as a regular fly rod target. Some exciting pioneering work remains to be done to follow up on the wonderful early advances already made by Greg Bethune, Alan "Fish" Philiskirk, Peter Morse, Dan O'Sullivan, Garry Frayne, Peter Haynes, Steve Jeston, Dean Butler and the many others who've added their important pieces to the jigsaw.
I confidently predict that in five years time we'll at least know what the finished puzzle is supposed to look like, even if there are still lots of blank areas left to be filled in. It's going to be a challenging, frustrating and occasionally very rewarding process. Personally, I'm looking forward to the ride!
A Permit By Any Other Name
Snub-nosed dart, oyster cracker, pumpkinhead, pompano, Permit….. The marine species known scientifically as Trachinotus blochii is definitely on its way to becoming the fish of a thousand names! In fact, there's even conjecture these days about the possible existence of two closely related "Permit" species in Indo-Pacific waters, with African literature referring to both T. blochii and a larger, more robust fish with shorter second dorsal and anal fins called T. africanus or the African pompano.
Nonetheless, most respected Australian authorities accept the presence of just four "dart" species (genus Trachinotus) in our waters. Those four are the swallowtail dart (T. coppingeri), the common dart (T. botia), the black spotted dart (T. bailloni) and the largest local member of the clan; the snub-nosed dart (T.blochii).
The swallowtail dart is a relatively small fish that's common in the surf along the north coast of NSW and in southern and central Queensland. It grows to a maximum size of around a kilogram but is usually about half that weight. In northern waters, the swallowtail tends to be replaced by the rather similar-looking black spotted dart, which attains a similar or slightly larger size. The third local member of the genus, the so-called common dart, is actually a much less frequently encountered species said to range from the Northern Territory to southern WA and to occasionally reach weight of three or even three point five kilos. All three of these darts have distinct spots or regular blotches on their flanks, deeply forked tails and quite long, sickle-shaped second dorsal and anal fins. None of them are apparently capable of reaching four kilos in weight.
The local giant of the family, and the only Australian dart without distinct spots or regular blotches on its flanks, is T.blochii; the snub-nosed dart, oyster cracker or pumpkinhead (referred to in some African books as a long finned pompano). T.blochii is known to reach weights of at least nine kilos in our waters, and probably quite a bit more. It is thought to range right around the northern half of the country, from far northern NSW to about Shark Bay in WA. It also occurs around Pacific island groups such as Fiji, and Indian Ocean archipelagos including the Seychelles, as well As in parts of Asia and East Africa.
Okay, so where does the "Permit" bit come in, and how can people like myself justify calling T. blochii a Permit?
The fish accepted by the International Game Fish Association (IGFA) for record-keeping purposes as a Permit is yet another Trachinotus family member; T. falcatus. This "true" Permit is confined to Atlantic, Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico waters; from about Massachusetts on the US east coast, south to Brazil and eastward through Cuba and the West Indies. It's unclear from my research whether it also occurs on the Atlantic coast of West Africa or around any mid-Atlantic islands beyond the Lesser Antilles (such as Cape Verde, the Canary Islands or Maderia). The all-tackle world record for this Atlantic species stands in excess of 25 kilos, and they are reasonably common in some areas at weights of eight to fifteen kilos.
Physically, the Atlantic Permit (T. falcatus) is almost identical in appearance to its Indo-Pacific cousin (T. blochii). The only discernible external differences I can find are the marginally narrower (more sickle-shaped) second dorsal and anal fin of the Atlantic fish and the slightly more bulbous head of the Indo-Pacific fish. There may be minor colour differences too, but these vary almost as much between individuals of the same species as they do between the two different types. As a rough rule of thumb however, the Indo-Pacific Permit has more yellow and less black in its fins and is less likely to exhibit the large dark, irregular blotch on each flank that is often (but not always) seen in the Atlantic fish.
The crux of my argument for adopting the title of Indo-Pacific Permit for our local fish is simply this: The taxonomic and genetic relationships between T. blochii and T. falcatus are almost certainly similar to the relationships that exists between geographically separated members of the world-wide bonefish (Albula) clan, and also the tarpon (Megalops) family. Therefore, if it's fair and reasonable to call the "bonefish" found in Australian waters (probably A. neoguinaica) by the same name as the Atlantic and Caribbean bonefish (A. vulpes), and to call the local ox-eye herring (M. cyprinoides) a "tarpon", just like its much larger Atlantic cousin (M. atlanticus), then surely it's also fair to call our local Permit by that internationally-recognisable name?
In the end, so-called common names are incredibly elastic, anyway. If people wish to call T. blochii a snub nosed dart, an oyster cracker or even a pumpkinhead, they are well within their rights to do so. For me, however, this magnificent fish will always be the Indo-Pacific Permit….. At least until the next one eats my crab fly. Then I'll simply call it "you bloody ripper!"
