South Florida flyfishing guide Jack Allen is ‘King of Pops’
Jack with client in the Everglades.
Miami Herald’s Sue Cocking crafts a beautiful tribute to a guy who is known to Florida Keys legends and regulars Joe’s from around the state and country.
Jack Allen fishes, and always has, out of an an everyday aluminum Jonboat that plies the waters of the Everglades and canals all the way to Miami. Along with other flies, he ties some wicked poppers that always induce a bite. Below, there are comments as told to the Angling Report back in 1992. But first read Sue’s profile of Jack here […]
” . . . I know that you have in past issues of The Angling Report written about local guide Jack Allen, but this report is truly newsworthy because now is the prime time of the year for the kind of fishing this guide offers. Moreover, what I am going to tell you about just happened.
My wife Jing and I have fished for bass in the Florida Everglades three times in the last two months. On the first two occasions, we caught and released over 100 scrappy bass with our fly rods. At the conclusion of the second trip, Jack mentioned a new, mysterious and secret place where the fishing was far superior to anywhere else we had fished. Jack is not the sort of person to make claims which he cannot back up, so we checked our calendar and called him that very evening to schedule a third day of fishing with him.
At five a.m. we met at our regular meeting place, Lester’s Diner on SR 84 in Fort Lauderdale. After a reasonably short ride, we put his aluminum bass boat in the water. We were fishing within 15 minutes of getting on the water. Using one of Jack’s hand tied, weedless foam poppers, we had a day of fishing that I will remember forever. The fishing was so fantastic that I decided to try to keep some kind of count of the number of fish we were hooking. I decided to focus on fish that were actually hooked and bent our rods. I kept score for one 15 minute period during a random time of the day.
The results were as follows: 15 hookups in 15 minutes. That translates to 60 an hour. Since we fished seven hours, that means we hooked an estimated 420 fish! Could that be? . . .”
