Like ordering a Budweiser at a wine bar, saltwater fishing seems misplaced in the land of lakes. Yet it goes down easier when a Minnesota fly fisherman is one of the sport's best.
Fly angler Evan Carruthers, far from his Minnesota roots, makes his name on the tarpon fishing circuit
Evan Carruthers grew up in Morris fishing at his family's lake spot. Now he's dominating the tarpon fishing circuit in Florida with a string of tournament wins.
June 29, 2023 at 1:18PM
Close in memory but far removed from his days growing up in Morris, Minn., watching game fish TV shows and tossing a line at a family lake spot, Evan Carruthers is dominating the tarpon fishing circuit. And it's a team sport.
Unlike, say, the bass pros, the pursuit of the fast, powerful "silver king" of the ocean is a two-person affair. Carruthers, of Maple Plain, and his skiff guide Greg Dini, of Florida, have won two of the three major annual tournaments this year, all in the Florida Keys, beginning with the Golden Fly the third week of May. They won again at the Don Hawley Invitational, a tournament entering its 50th year held the first week of June, and just took sixth at the season finale, the Gold Cup.
"We had a good tournament season for sure, and I'm happy with how we did," said the humble Carruthers, who has fished competitively for about nine years.
Next, he'll angle in a few more tournaments for another elusive species, the permit.
In a recent conversation during the Gold Cup, Carruthers (who runs a private equity firm when not on the water) talked about his attachment to the distinctive sport, its difference from other, more familiar fishing disciplines, and the allure of sparring with athletic tarpon. Carruthers' comments were edited for length and clarity.
On the difference from targeting freshwater fish
"It is a team sport. My guide is Miami-based. You don't do as much scouting because you have a guy on the water. They are five-day tournaments. We'll pre-fish for two days but if you do more than that it can really wear you down.
It is very different in that most of it is sight fishing. You are out on tidal flats, so it puts a premium on casting capability, feeding fish in a sight fishing situation, which is quite different than freshwater trout streams and traditional river fishing."
On his Minnesota fishing story
"A big part of my background is the outdoors. I am a passionate angler and a passionate bird hunter. We had a lake place (Lake Minnewaska) growing up so I did a lot of freshwater fishing. Then, say, about 12 to 15 years ago I started getting serious on the fly fishing side and specifically the saltwater, which is a little bit of a different discipline from the fly fishing side. I started traveling to the Caribbean and Florida getting a crash course."
On building his interest
"When I was a kid there were a couple of TV shows, "Spanish Fly" and "The Walker's Cay Chronicles," which were both Florida- or Bahamas-based fishing shows focused on saltwater fly fishing. I was always intrigued by it. One of the unfortunate things is it is an expensive sport. So I didn't really have the capability to do it until I started my professional career."
On the tournaments
"This is the 60th Gold Cup, so they have been around for a long time. They are scheduled in the heart of the migratory tarpon season, which is mid-March until the end of June down in the Keys. It is three tournaments in five weeks."
On the challenge of catching tarpon
"If you know what you are doing, you can subdue them in probably 10 to 15 minutes on average. In our tournaments, you are fishing a 12- or 16-pound class tippet, which is the lightest tippet in your leader. A lot of what you spend your time on is figuring out how much pressure you can put on the fish without breaking your class tippet. You have a 100-plus-pound fish on the line, so you spend a lot of time learning how to fight fish, work angles and put the maximum amount of pressure on a tarpon to ultimately break its spirit and get it to hand. For every fish you get to hand, you break off five or six that will either chew through the bite tippet or break your class tippet. They are good, athletic, fighting fish.
For a lot of amateurs, they might fight a tarpon for an hour or an hour and half because [the tarpon] just don't give up, and the anglers just don't know how much pressure they can apply to a fish. That is a lot of what a guide and angler will work on before fishing these tournaments. The ethical thing to do is fight them hard, but you don't really want to fight a tarpon for an hour and a half, because I think it increases the probability that you kill that fish or it will get sharked after you release it. You want to get them to hand quickly so they have the highest survival rate possible."
On the differing rules
"Part of the challenge with the tarpon is getting them to the skiff and grabbing them. It is a fairly complex and highly orchestrated activity. If you went back 25 to 30 tournaments, they would have been kill tournaments. You would gaff the tarpon and bring it in and throw it on a scale. They were traditionally all weight fish tournaments. You had forward-thinking anglers and guides who said it is not good to kill these fish — some of [the fish] might live to be 70 years old. All [events] migrated to release tournaments.
In the Gold Cup to get weight or release points, you have to fight the fish to the hand and then if you don't think it is 70 pounds, you can still get release points. They are all a little bit of a different scoring system." (Editor's note: The weight point system has anglers zip-tie the girth, do a length measurement, and then take a photo of the fish. Then there is a girth-to-length calculation to determine the weight of the fish.)
On the sizes of some of his winning fish
"In the [Don] Hawley, they have to be longer than 48 inches, which is about a 30-pound fish. In the Hawley, 30 pounds to 110 pounds. In the Golden Fly, where I did actually strap fish, my weight fish were 103 pounds to 124 pounds. In [the Gold Cup], there is an angler and guide that have won it the last two years [angler Dave Preston and guide Luis Cortes, who also won last week]. They caught the largest weight fish in the history of tarpon tournament fishing. It was 163 pounds."
On the teamwork
"For Greg Dini and I, we've been fishing tarpon together for 12 to 13 years. Tournament fishing is a different ballgame then going out and fun fishing. There is a system to doing it. A lot of the successful teams have been doing it for a long time. I think he and I have started to have a lot of success because we have been building toward it the last six years. We had five second-place finishes and two or three third-place finishes. It is a true team sport."
None of the boat’s occupants, two adults and two juveniles, were wearing life jackets, officials said.
