Keep up with Garden and Gun. By Monte Burke. A stiff wind luffs his camouflage fishing pants like a sail and threatens to whitecap the water even in this relatively protected inner basin in the Florida Keys. Ten other tarpon boats are within view, everyone, it seems, seeking the lee. No one has caught a fish yet. A few tarpon are rolling in the distance, but nothing is happening near us. I decide to take advantage of that fact to ask Mill a question. Nicky just nods in agreement. Off the stern.
Nicky turns, spots the fish, and throws a backhanded cast. He makes one strip, his line comes tight, and the sea explodes in white froth as the fish makes the first of five miraculous, head-shaking jumps.
Nicky fights the tarpon hard from the start, pinching his fly line against the butt of the rod and pulling with his entire body. Mill coaches from the stern. Turn it…Good, good. As the fish nears the boat, Nicky pulls even harder and the fish flips, its tail over its head—the finishing blow.
Anglers in the other boats have stopped casting to watch. Moments later, after just a twenty-minute fight, the one-hundred-pound fish is alongside the boat. Andy Mill is a former member of the U. Ski Team, one of the best American racers of his era. He has covered some of the biggest events in sports as a broadcaster for all of the major television networks. He had a high-profile marriage to the tennis player Chris Evert, which ended in an even more high-profile—and painful—divorce.
But to those in a certain smallish but fanatical subset of this vast world, Mill is known primarily as one of the best tarpon fly anglers—if not the best—who ever lived. He has come up with game-changing innovations in the sport and improved on the work of others who came before him. In his best year, he landed in just over fifty days of fishing. He wrote the must-have coffee-table book A Passion for Tarpon in He made it look so easy and cool that everyone wanted to try it.
