He poled for miles, into the teeth of twenty-five-knot headwinds. “I didn’t even know what I didn’t know.”īut Huff was determined to figure it out. “I had no clue what I was doing,” Huff says. The day was windy and overcast and fishless. He moved to the Keys, and on November 1, 1968, he took out his first client. ![]() Still, she cosigned a bank loan so Huff could buy his first guide boat. “She told me that fishing guides were a bunch of drunks and bums and that I would never amount to anything,” Huff says. When he graduated, he told his mother of his career plans. While attending the University of Miami, Huff studied marine biology. ![]() He knew then that he would be a guide someday. He cast a lure from a ladder and caught a twenty-seven-pound snook, to this day his largest. One day he sneaked down a manhole in the middle of a causeway bridge. “I was done.” He biked all over the city, fishing in backyards and canals. Huff took the rod, cast into a Miami canal, and caught a two-pound snook. And anyway, with that fishing rod, his father provided him with the first tool for what would become his life’s abiding passion. “I think we grow up to be whatever we were meant to be,” he says. Huff is unsentimental about the impact that his father’s leaving might have had on his life. “He was an alcoholic and a gambler,” Huff says. Huff would neither see nor speak to him again. When he was ten, his father gave him a spinning rod, the first piece of tackle he’d ever owned. ![]() The climax, that final puzzle piece, is the hooking and landing of the guided angler’s targeted fish. Guiding, at its essence, is a selfless endeavor, geared to the happiness and success of the paying customer, the “dream making.” But for Huff, there is the rush-of being on the water nearly every day and trying to figure out the puzzle presented by the tides, the wind, the clouds, the fish, and the angler’s ability. His own dreams are part of the equation, as well. “My job is to make an angler’s dream come true.” “Steve is a really humble guy,” says Sandy Moret, who owns a fly shop in the Keys and has fished with Huff for three decades. This type of talk embarrasses Huff, who prefers to shower accolades on others. In his book, A Passion for Tarpon, Andy Mill calls Huff “bar none, the best tarpon guide alive, the best there was and the best there ever will be.” Marshall Cutchin, a former Keys guide and the editor and publisher of the fly fishing website, goes even further, calling him “the best guide who’s ever lived, period.” Last year he was inducted into the International Game Fish Association’s Hall of Fame, which is the fishing world’s Cooperstown. Huff’s specialty is fishing the skinny saltwater flats for tarpon, bonefish, permit, and snook, and he has guided his clients into countless world-record fish. He has been a fishing guide for forty-three of those years, first in the Florida Keys and now in the Everglades City area, where he moved in 1996 with his bright-eyed wife, Patty.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |