When a sharp color change sets up off Key West, it's possible to sight-cast to sailfish.

If you want to catch a sailfish on a fly, it’s easy. Hop on a jet and head to the Pacific side of Central America, and book a competent crew out of Guatemala, Panama, Costa Rica or Mexico. Can it really be that easy? Yes it is, now that fly fishing is no longer an oddity in those parts.

Want to raise the bar and do that deal close to home? Well, you can, though taking an Atlantic sailfish on fly off Florida is still considered an extraordinary feat, for a number of reasons.

Atlantic sails are smaller, but infinitely smarter. They can be teased up with a hookless bait, but usually only stay on the scene long enough to make one pass at the fly. In other words, everything has to go perfectly. Pacifics, on the other hand, will sit behind the boat and chew on a rubber squid forever.

Billy Pate moved to the Keys in the late ’60s primarily due to his love of tarpon. During his second year there, he realized that tarpon were few and far between in winter, so eventually he headed offshore of Islamorada for sails. It wasn’t too long before he decided to try to catch one on a fly rod—a feat that had only been accomplished by three anglers, J. Lee Cuddy, Ray Simon and Gil Drake, prior to 1970.

Ballyhoo patterned pilchard flies

Pate eventually rigged out a 22-foot Mako with a tower that worked pretty well as long as the seas were calm. He used a hookless dead mullet as a teaser and eventually caught a fair number of sails on a fly off Islamorada, but he was the only one willing to put in the time to hook one fish every six trips. Then, everyone discovered Cozumel, Mexico, and to say the least, the development of fly fishing for sails in Florida came to a halt. Nobody bothered with Florida, where you might get two shots a day. In Cozumel, you could expect 15 to 20 fly shots on a good day.

I fished a lot with Miami Rod and Reel Club member Frank Inscho in those days. He was a big-boat enthusiast and my specialty was small boats and light tackle so we taught each other. Frank kept his boat in Stuart during the winter and we would hop up there every so often to try to catch a sail on fly. We hooked a few over the years, but didn’t land any. It was pretty frustrating to stand around with a fly rod in hand while other boats were fighting fish right next to you.

The same holds true today, but techniques have been developed to match Florida’s unique sailfishing conditions.

A reefline ruckus.

If you want to try to catch a sail on fly in Florida you have several options. Out of Stuart or Fort Pierce you can still troll a dead ballyhoo and tease up several fish a day. Actually, for a few days each year, sailfishing off Fort Pierce gets as good as Cozumel, but there’s just no way to predict when those days will occur. You have to have a lot of time to kill or be very lucky. The trolling/teasing technique is the same as in Costa Rica or Guatamala, but again, Atlantic sails lose interest very quickly. The guy doing the teasing is far more important than the guy holding the fly rod. The more excited the fish, the better the angler’s chances of a solid hookup. In addition, it’s easier to entice a sail from a dead bait to a fly than it is from a live bait to a fly.

However, the Palm Beach to Fort Pierce stretch can host pods of sails “balling” schools of migrating baitfish. I eventually hooked up with Rod and Reel Club member Ron Hamlin, who was running a private boat out of Palm Beach. He’d call when the sailfishing was hot and I would drop whatever I was doing and get up there the very next morning. Well, it worked. Hamlin called on February 3rd when sailfish were balling bait like no one’s business. The next morning I was at his dock at daylight but by 1 p.m. we hadn’t seen a fish. Then Hamlin spotted some birds and we hit the jackpot. I hooked four sails on fly that day and boated a 51 1⁄2-pound fish that still stands as the Florida state record. But, in spite of the ideal conditions that day, getting bites was not easy. The sails would circle the bait until it was bunched up in a giant ball. Then a fish would crash through the ball, stunning any number of the minnows with its bill. The ball would then disintegrate and the pod of sails would swim around leisurely eating the stunned baitfish. Right after the sails crashed the bait, I cast a fly that matched the size and shape of the bait into the melee and did not move it at all. The four fish that I hooked just swam up and ate the dead-drifting baitfish fly. I only managed to keep one of those beauties on the hook, but I haven’t had that kind of success since in Florida waters.