Wading The Flats for Permit

Wading The Flats for Permit
By Jonathan Olch

(Originally published in Tail 31 - September 2017) 

The liberation of walking the flats can be a euphoric experience. Freedom of movement and kaleidoscopic colors energize your body and mind. After frying your feet and stoically enduring the stagnation of standing on a casting deck all day, it’s a pleasure to slip into the water. Be mindful, however, of aimless jaunts down a long flat that will rob you of the prime, precious tidal flows. When it comes to permit, wading is a distinctly different game than bonefish. Unless chasing specific pushes or tails, leave interminable wandering to the bonefisher.

There are many different scenarios on the flats where wading becomes the best option for stalking permit. The most obvious wading situation occurs when permit are consistently tailing while feeding on shallow flats. Stalking the wily permit on foot can be an absolute joy and represents the quietest technique to approach them. Go for it.

At other times, skiff approaches can be problematic. If the flat is composed of coral rubble, limestone or volcanic rock, a skiff hull might scrape bottom, or the push pole might clank at exactly the wrong moment. In Bocas del Toro, Panama the permit are found on the ocean side, inside coral barriers with waves breaking toward shore. Tailing fish or not, there is no practical way to approach these fish except on foot.

Even if the flats bottom substrate is mostly sand, the brightness of the sun alone may make a skiff approach too risky. If your profile is too high while standing on the skiff, either get lower or get in the water. Sometimes these diabolical permit can even sense your presence just from the water displacement or bow wake of your skiff. Better to get out and wade. Wading allows you to cast a much lower profile, probably by as much as four feet. On calm days when there is little or no wind, permit are more wary and Snell’s “Window” may give the permit a visual portal to your presence if you are poised high up in a skiff.

If you are fixated on a catching a beast of a permit, wading presents several challenges. With few exceptions, large permit on the flats are swimming in a minimum of 36 inches of water—likely 40 inches or more. Submerged up to your ribs, it becomes difficult to manage your fly line. More important, unless your target is tailing routinely, you may have a hard time seeing it in the water from your low vantage point. Yes, your guide can give you hand signals, but you probably never aspired to be a Labrador retriever participating in field trials. This is how the game is often played in Mexico’s Ascension Bay, though, and it can pay dividends……(continued)

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