Flip's World: A Legendary Fishing Guide's Thoughts on Being a Mentor and Mentee

They took me to a place they named “The Gap,” which is what they still call it, 50 years or better since they first saw it on a set of aerial photographs. It was where the Everglades backcountry opened up to them like an ancient scroll. They still had to translate its hieratic script and calligraphy of mangroves and oyster-armored creek mouths, which would be a years-long undertaking. But that would be the easy part. The fun part. Figuring out the secret passageway was the greater challenge, and one that required a curious convergence of factors: Flip Pallot was growing increasingly agitated by the lack of solitude to be found in the Keys, and Biscayne Bay, and parts of Florida Bay. And Rob Fordyce happened to be dating a woman with a pilot’s license and an airplane.

Rob killed the motor of the poling skiff, and the boat’s bow wake fretted the water, rippling out across a small open Glades bay. “This is it,” he said, with a slight touch of drama. I peered toward a meager aperture between two fingers of dense mangrove island. It looked no different than the 4,000 similar gaps we had passed in the last morning on the skiff.

“For me and Flip, this was the gateway to another world.”

To get there, Rob had run his skiff for a half hour with barely a glance at the GPS screen. Navigating by memory and heart through the Everglades’ labyrinth of lakes, ponds, creeks, and interconnected sloughs, he had run the throttle hard, Fordyce-style, a light chop chattering at the boat hull. Beside him, Flip watched the walls of mangrove rush by, brush strokes of dark green under a blue sky.

I asked Flip how long it had been since he’d been here. At The Gap.

He took a deep breath. “Oh, my God, I don’t know. I don’t know,” he said, softly, his voice a decrescendo of disbelief. “Twenty years, maybe. Maybe more.”

How could that be? he wondered. How could time slip by like that, unnoticed, like water dripping from the end of a paddle?

“And I forgot what this place smells like,” he said, looking toward The Gap. I could see the opening glint on the lenses of his sunglasses, where mangroves and dark water and sunlight swam in a mirrored image of the Everglades wilds. “How could I have forgotten what this place smells like?”

Finding a Pattern

The pair met in the early 1980s, during a few interstitial years between the eras of Flip Pallot the Miami banker and local Florida fishing phenom and Flip Pallot the guide, television host, and a sort of mangrove swami on the burgeoning global stage of saltwater fly fishing. In 1982, Pallot had opened an outfitting store called Wind River Rendezvous in a mall on the outskirts of Miami, and it quickly became the go-to for anyone serious about angling in South Florida. One day, Flip wandered over to the fly-tying section to find a kid pawing through feathers and bucktails, looking for grizzly hackle for a Cockroach tarpon fly.

“He was maybe 11 years old,” he recalled, “but he knew exactly what he wanted. He was saying, no, not this, not this one. He was the tiniest adult I’d ever met.”

Flip introduced himself, and a kindred spirit sparked immediately. In the five decades since, Flip and Rob have moved in and out of each other’s lives like the double helix of DNA, a twisted ladder both connected and discrete. In the 1980s and early 1990s, when they were both full-time guides—in addition to fishing, they spent another 50 days a year guiding duck hunters on Lake Okeechobee and elsewhere—they shared intel nearly daily. In 1992, Rob ran the camera boat when Pallot shot the pilot for The Walker’s Cay Chronicles. Flip introduced Rob to Jose Wejebe, and both men later encouraged Rob to start The Seahunter television show. Even today, they travel together to Texas to hunt big whitetail deer with traditional bows and arrows vaned with wild turkey feathers.

Their discovery of The Gap was one of those moments made possible by their mix of shared interest and individual personality. By the late 1980s, the lower parts of the Everglades were increasingly explored and known to shallow-water anglers. Solitude was becoming a rarer commodity, and word was leaking out that a few pioneering folks—Herman Lucerne, primarily, and his protégé Lloyd Wruble—had broken through to vast areas of untrammeled ’Glades. Flip and Rob knew the only way to crack the code was to study the vast mangrove mosaic by air.

Flip wasn’t a fan of small airplanes, so Rob volunteered to fly. His girlfriend at the time had her pilot’s license and a Cessna single-engine plane, so they crisscrossed the central Everglades at a low elevation as Rob took photographs of the seemingly endless vernal Rorschach blot that scrolled under the landing gear. At Flip’s home in Homestead, he and Rob pieced the photos together like a primordial Google Earth view.

“There were hundreds and thousands of little islands and cricks and watercourses,” Flip recalled, “but you could see from the photographs a kind of pattern to the flow of water.” Somewhere in the tangled wilderness west of Flamingo, a focal point emerged. Distinct when viewed from the air, but nearly indiscernible from ground level, it was a fixed starting point from which everything that lay beyond could be described. They named it “The Gap.” It was the portal to Nirvana. Just getting to The Gap required crossing bays and lakes, and running rivers and channels in a 40-minute run from Flamingo. “But once there,” Flip said, “The Gap was the gateway to hundreds of other places, and in time, hundreds of other adventures.”

From that point they could lead each other to the discoveries that lay beyond. After guide days, they would compare notes:

If you go three creeks north of The Gap and take a right, there’s a big pond there.

If you go four creeks to the south and take a left, you’ll see where I cut a trail to a back bay. Tons of fish.

On days when they weren’t guiding, they would explore the area together. “You could not physically push the boat through those creeks up there,” Rob recalled. “We had to cut our way in, knowing there was a bay on the other end, because we had the aerial photographs. And there weren’t cut marks on any of the trees, so we knew that no one else had ever been in there. Not even Herman.”

Rob marvels at the memory. “It was a new adventure,” he says. “We couldn’t wait to see what was on the other side of the rainbow.”

Such fierce friendships have marked much of Flip’s life. With Chico Fernandez. With Stu Apte and George Hommel. Pete Peacock. Eddie Wightman. Ted Williams. With John Emery and Norman Duncan. With Bill Bishop and Lloyd Wruble and Mitch Howell. And with Lefty Kreh, whose friendship with Pallot was as legendary as it was consequential.

Flip first met Lefty in 1964, when the Maryland native showed up at the Miami Fishing Club for the first time. Lefty had only recently moved to South Florida from Baltimore, to run the beloved Miami Metropolitan Fishing Tournament, and many South Florida anglers were wary of the outsider. Flip recalls that Lefty walked into the meeting with his eyes wide open to the resentment, and with a plan to squelch the criticism. He pulled out a fly rod, stripped all the line from the reel, then threw the rod on the floor and proceeded to cast the entire fly line with nothing but his hands.

“It was like when the Wright brothers flew an airplane,” Flip explained to me earlier. “Nobody knew that was even possible. When I saw Lefty do that, I realized that there was a dynamic to fly casting beyond anything I could comprehend, and I knew I had to find out what the hell that was. Unfortunately for Lefty, he lived very nearby, so I started haunting his every move.”

He wasn’t kidding. Flip would show up at Lefty’s door before work in the mornings with a rod in his hand. Or a camera. Or a question about knots.

But the haunting was welcome, of course, and when Lefty passed away in 2018, the relationship between the two men was nearly as well known as their individual exploits with a fishing rod in hand.

Lefty was a mentor to Flip, and a near-constant source of illumination on all things fishing and far beyond. It was a generosity of spirit that has shaped Flip no less than his youth in the Everglades, and he has been very intentional, he will say, to express a similarly unstinted benevolence as an expression of gratitude to Lefty.

A few months before this trip, Flip tried to explain the evolution of his relationship with Rob over the years. “When you have a mentor,” he said, “or a role model, someone who takes you under their wing and brings you into their world, the relationship starts like this.” He held one hand above the other, as if the upper hand was sheltering the lower.

“But at some point,” he said, “the mentee gets here.” He moved the lower hand so that it was in line with the upper hand. “As life goes forward, and you are exposed to more of the world, you improve. That’s just how it works.”

But sometimes, he continued, the mentee gets here. And he moved what was the lower hand to a position over the other. He took a breath, as if some difficult memory passed by.

“If your mentor is a good mentor,” he said, “he’s thrilled that you get here. But if he is not a good mentor, he’s jealous. He’s suspicious of everything you might accomplish. In a perfect world, the higher the mentee rises, the more he surpasses the mentor, the prouder the mentor should be. Because it’s supposed to be this way. In any area of life. The best thing I can do in my life is to help someone else leave me in the dust.”

Do Shit Right

From the casting platform, Flip probed a line of mangroves with precision. His casts were 30 feet, 50 feet, 60 feet long. He curved the fly around the corners of the mangroves. He dropped it into six-inch-wide slots between prop roots freckled with oysters. Flip’s casting style stands out immediately, with its restrained stroke and short, precisely timed double hauls. But the fish weren’t impressed. At least, not at the moment.

“All right,” he muttered. “Come out with your hands up.” He delivered the line almost under his breath. It wasn’t for effect. It wasn’t overdone. But the years—the decades, the half-century—of on-camera chatter have never completely left him.

It’s impossible to be in a place such as this, with companions such as these, and not be struck by the magnitude of the changes they have witnessed. When Flip was growing up in South Florida, the line between what was wild and what was civilized, so to speak, was so porous as to be nearly invisible. The Everglades began, literally, just down the street from his house in the nascent Coral Gables. Today, the Everglades exists only via circumscribed borders, but lines on a map can’t stop all the ills that have accumulated. In 1897, Miami’s first sewer line began dumping untreated sewage directly in the Miami River. The practice wouldn’t stop for five decades. It was a harbinger of things to come, from starving the ecosystem of fresh water to carpet bombing the waterways with glyphosates to pythons that have reproduced so quickly and thoroughly that you rarely see a rabbit on the grassy shoulders of the Tamiami Trail.

This ever-devolving reality of diminished expectations knots the stomachs of old-timers like Flip. There’s a constant tension. He knows he’s in large part responsible for kicking off a generations-long obsession with Florida fishing. Rob is still working the game. But they don’t want to piss on the younger folks’ parade.

Yeah, kid, you think the fishing is good now, you should have seen it in my day. You think the Everglades are wild and woolly? You know nothing.

Whether it is South Florida or the Maine North Woods or Montana’s backcountry, the question facing so many of us is just that: What does it look like to love such a place? In the maw of our guts we know that so many places will never be the same. Yes, we can work herculean magic at times—Chesapeake Bay comes to mind—and there have been significant moves that could brighten the future of the Everglades. But the ill winds still blow. There seems to be a new environmental evil on each incoming tide.

Part of the answer lies in what Flip has created through a lifetime of creating, from curating experiences as a guide to crafting open windows to a much broader world with The Walker’s Cay Chronicles to creating community in the hyperconnected worlds of brand ambassadors and political engagement and social media. Flip has his eyes wide open to the losses. They’ve been more personal to him, perhaps, than to any other living person.

But he’s also seen what happens when people are brought face-to-face with even a small fragment of the wild. When a tactile connection is made to the world beyond the sidewalk. Fly fishing is a nearly perfect medium to that end. It requires a sharp focus on the present. It involves various levels of skill, rooted in various levels of commitment. And the very act of placing a fly in front of a fish is both a symbolic and physical communion: The angler touches the world he or she seeks to discover. For countless guides, outfitters, brick layers, corporate titans, and college kids, Flip was, and is, the conduit to those connections. He has been The Gap through which they’ve passed to a world of which they’d only dreamed.

So maybe the Everglades, or the Big Hole River, or even the Amazon won’t ever be like they were. But if the wild is worn and raveled, if opportunities are fleeting and diminishing, goes Flip’s thinking, then why would you not try to approach those fragments with all the knowledge and understanding and skill you can muster? Why would you not meet the wild— whether you encounter it on the far side of the globe or the far bank of a farm pond—as honestly and as purposefully as you possibly can? Why would you not, to use one of Flip’s taglines, Do Shit Right? What’s left of nature deserves your best.

And on a day like that one in the Everglades, despite the slow fishing, it was hard not to be thankful that the primeval, original pulse of the wild Everglades remains.

Weakened, for sure. But I could feel it. I have to believe Flip could feel it, as well, like a physician who recognizes in a sick patient the spark of life thrumming inside a body ravaged with fever or cancer or age. Feels the hope that yet resides in the weakest pulse.

At one point during the day, I was on the casting bow, and while I managed a few spectacular casts directly into the mangroves, I did manage to catch a small snook, which Flip brought into the boat. The snook was deeply impaled, the hook point buried between rings of cartilage in its throat. Flip dropped to one knee in the bottom of the skiff, working to tease the hook free. He first used his fingers, then fishing pliers. It took a couple of minutes, but the hook came out and Flip worked the fish back and forth in the water, washing water through its gills. Snook are tough, but this one had been down a rough stretch of road. “I’m so sorry,” he muttered softly. “So sorry, little buddy.”

After a dozen or so pulses through the water, Flip relaxed his hand slightly. The snook sensed the freedom that had suddenly appeared, and flipped its tail. It vanished into the ocher water, swimming more strongly that I would have expected.

Undiscovered

Rob was running again, navigating the skiff through the mangroves, the water course kinked up and writhing like a kitten chasing its tail. At one point he called me over to the GPS. Grinning, he pointed out the hashmarks that traced our route across the screen. It appeared we were boating across dry land. “Even the damn satellites don’t know about this creek,” he grinned.

Again, like a half-dozen times that day, the creek opened into a lake, which narrowed to a bay, which constricted to a creek, which fingered deep into the mangrove jungle. We followed it as far as we could, until the water disappeared in a glistening cleft like a hatchet scar on dark wood. A meager run of tide was trickling out the cleft, marked by subtle paisleys of dark current and bubbly water spiraling through the draperies of mangrove roots.

Flip peered into curtain of foliage.

“Have you ever followed this, Rob?

“It gets pretty choked up,” Rob said. “I’ve been in there, but not all the way through.”

Flip was quiet for a moment. “See the oysters?” he asked. “That tells you the water is flowing in and out.” He dipped his head for a better look.

“It definitely goes somewhere,” he said, finally, his eyes probing the dark cleft of mirrored water that led through the salt-caked prop roots to a place he sometimes wonders if it still exists. A place he would like to see, if it does: A place still left to discover.

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T. Edward Nickens is a New York Times best-selling author and award-winning journalist. His most recent book is The Last Wild Road: Adventures and Essays from a Sporting Life (Lyons Press, 2023). He has spent an enormous amount of time with Flip Pallot over the past three years, working on a biography tentatively titled The Last 40 Feet. No publisher or publication date has yet been announced.

tedwardnickens.com | Instagram: @enickens

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