Bud N' Mary's Marina

Casting a fly to bonefish and tarpon in water barely deep enough to float a skiff was worked out on the flats around Islamorada, and this marina is where much of it was refined and passed on. The founding catch came first and belongs to someone else: in 1939 a guide named Bill Smith took the first bonefish ever deliberately caught on a fly, in Little Basin on the bay side of Islamorada, using a pattern he had tied himself. Bud and Mary Stapleton opened this marina five years after that catch, in 1944, on a boat basin that had already been working as a fish camp since the late 1930s, and it became the dock where the new sport was refined and handed on to the people who would go on to make it famous. Jimmie Albright learned it from Bonnie Smith, Bill's wife and a guide in her own right, who put a young Albright on his first bonefish during the war. He guided out of here for about three decades and left two knots behind him, the nail knot and the Albright Special, both still tied by anglers who have never heard of him. In 1948 and 1949 he took the writer Joe Brooks to early fly-caught tarpon and bonefish, and Brooks's magazine articles carried the sport to a national audience. Ted Williams and Jimmy Stewart both fished with him. Islamorada sits where the Atlantic, Florida Bay and the Gulf of Mexico come within a short run of one another, which is the geography underneath the town's claim on the title of sportfishing capital of the world.