by Bradley Parsons
Staff Writer
Jefferson Morrow narrowed his eyes to a squint and fixed his gaze on the big fish. He leaned forward slowly in his chair, the deliberate movement of a seasoned angler. After a moment’s pause, he lurched back, jerking his hands to his chest. The fish danced in the air, a full three feet above Morrow’s head.
It’s a scene set for the South Pacific, but today the action was unfolding in Morrow’s Riverplace Tower law office overlooking Jacksonville’s Southbank. Morrow had interrupted an interview to give an impromptu demonstration of deep sea fly fishing technique.
The evidence of his ability hangs on his wall. Where other attorneys hang their law school diplomas, Morrow displays a pair of six-foot-long, 150-pound tarpon caught off the coast of Key West. A look around his 26th-floor office gives the impression of a place where the legal advice costs but the fishing lessons come free of charge.
His shelves hold the requisite legal volumes, but they’re bookended by pictures of Morrow hanging off the back of boats in Central American waters. His blue striped buttondown shirt and khaki slacks look like the standard attorney uniform, but, as the blue marlins stitched into his belt indicate, fly fishing is never far from his mind.
But the style of fly fishing favors Morrow isn’t the serene pastime depicted by the Sunday morning shows and movies like “A River Runs Through It.” Morrow casts his fly into water thousands of feet deep and the end result is often a hundred-pound fish with a three-foot stiletto attached thrashing around inside the boat.
Billfish like blue marlin, striped marlin, swordfish and sailfish are relatively new targets for fly fishermen like Morrow. But the deep water sport is increasing in popularity because it’s viewed as the ultimate test of fly fishing ability and equipment.
Pulling in a two-hundred pound fish on line designed to break under 20 pounds of strain will test even the most experienced angler, said Morrow. The fish have to be coaxed back to the boat and given plenty of room to run to tire themselves out. The typical billfish rod carries a mile and a half of line on a $1,000 reel, which is the size of a snare drum. It’s not uncommon to wrestle with a single fish for several hours.
“You feel like you’ve been lifting weights all day,” said Morrow. “But it’s a fun exhaustion, the kind you feel when you’re doing something you love.”
Morrow is part of a growing legion of devotees that gather every year off the coast of Guatemala, the current billfishing hot spot. Nobody knows why the fish cluster 10 miles off the coast of the Central American country but the ample supply and the still, clear waters offer ideal conditions.
The glassy offshore waters allow the anglers to see the fish. Morrow’s eyes widen when he talks about his first trip into Guatemalan waters. He looked out to see hundreds of the fish basking near the surface, their sail fins breaking the surface of the clear, blue water.
As word has spread about sights like those, more and more fishermen are packing up their tackle for Central America. Local interest has reached the point where Morrow can fill an entire fishing lodge with his friends. He’s booked the Fins and Feathers Lodge in Ixtapa for a week in February and expects to fill it up entirely with local judges, lawyers and doctors.
The price of admission into his annual tournament includes an extra suitcase to be left behind for the local Indian population. At the end of their days on the water, Morrow and the other competitors offer their services to the locals. Morrow goes out of his way to invite dentists and doctors.
“It’s not hard to convince them to come down. Then I tell them ‘By the way, we’re going to be doing a little mission work’,” he said. “Everybody likes the chance to do a little good while we’re down there.”
Morrow was first lured to the area by tales from his friends. When he heard one friend was on a boat that reeled in 52 billfish in a day, it didn’t take long for him to book his own trip.
“That’s catching a fish on every cast for about eight hours,” he said, shaking his head. “On a good day in Key West you might catch two or three.”
On Morrow’s first trip, his boat reeled in 173 fish in four days; 65 of them on fly rod. Morrow was also hooked. He said he now does about 99 percent of his fishing in Guatemala with a fly rod.
Morrow’s tournaments are the centerpiece of his efforts to preserve the ideal conditions off Guatemala’s coast. Past fly fishing havens have had their populations decimated my overfishing. By raising awareness of those dangers, Morrow hopes he can help Guatemala avoid that fate.
He started the non-profit Southern Sailfish Association to raise awareness of the environmental and economic issues facing many of the locales that serve as the premier fly fishing grounds. Membership information is available at southernsailfish.org.
The country has already taken some positive steps to preserve its billfish population, instituting catch-and-release laws and banning industrial long-line fishing boats within 24 miles of its shores.