By Orlo Dietrich
It seems every walk of life has its legends, and certainly fly-fishing is no exception. For anglers who love the graceful symmetry of the cast, solitude and quiet reflection in the most beautiful places in the world, the ability to pursue anything from blue gills in local ponds to billfish in bluewater, and the intensity of a take, the legends come immediately to mind. Lefty Kreh, Chico Fernandez, and Flip Pallot always headed my list, and probably the list of many others as well. Flip, however, due to his 16 years on ESPN as the maestro of Walker’s Cay Chronicles, his quiet voice, and probably most importantly, his understated, philosophical nature, earned recognition far beyond fly-fishing’s normal core community. For many he was not only a fly fisherman, he was what a fly fisherman should be.
I am also fortunate to have called him a friend.
Our friendship began, oddly enough, on an elk hunt. Living high in the San Juan Mountains, remote and off the grid, I received a call from a friend. Kirk Deeter, editor of Trout Magazine, was doing a story about fly-fishing enthusiasts who also love hunting, and he wanted to know if they could gain access to the nearby wilderness area through my land. Normally very protective of such access, I agreed. I figured a couple of days of climbing the rugged, steep, blow-down infested mountains and they would be gone.
About a month before the season I received a second call. Knowing I had a small cabin on my land, Kirk asked if they could use the cabin. I answered yes. Then, ten days before season, the clincher: Their guides had baled on them, and he wondered if I would “show them the lay of the land.” My son also said he’d be glad to help.
The day before season, Kirk arrived along with a couple of photographers and Bruce Holt from G Loomis Rods. Later that afternoon, we heard the roar of a diesel engine laboring up the steep grades that lead to my home and saw a pickup emerging from the golden aspens. As the truck got closer, I could see only a big guy behind the wheel of a white Ford pickup pulling a trailer. Centered on the trailer was a big Harley.
When he pulled up, out stepped Flip Pallot. I remember thinking that southwestern Colorado is tough on a four-wheeler; but a Harley? Later, I understood that in addition to all things outdoors, Flip had been a Harley rider for many years and had spent the previous weeks riding his beloved bike through the West, including a visit to the big biker gathering in Sturgis, South Dakota.
The pursuit of the wild things often yields success but it’s unpredictable: the bulls go silent or the bonefish become ghosts. Such pursuits, if done correctly and honestly, are often laborious; backpacking 800 pounds of elk meat or poling into an unforgiving wind. And sometime, expectations fail to materialize at all. Such circumstances frame the experiences of hunting and angling more than the quarry itself—these are the circumstances that define the measure of men.
From the beginning, the weather put us on our heels. Locals swore the jet stream itself had descended upon the San Juans. Gusts between 30 and 50 miles per hour blew day and night through the mountains and across the mesas. We hunted where we could, in the lea of the mountains and in the deep valleys. We saw elk, made even spookier by the wind, and we missed a few. The cracking sound of falling trees echoed through the mountains, the rut went silent. Further to our disadvantage, we hunted with bows, but there wasn’t a compound bow on the mountain. We used only traditional archery tackle; recurve or longbow.
But it was a great week. To the man they were true sportsmen. They neither whined, complained, nor criticized the entire week. We hunted hard, drank good whiskey, ate great food, and filled the time with countless stories. Probably my fondest memories were the stump-shooting contests that Flip organized each day after lunch. We wandered the fields and nearby ridges, stick bows in hand, losing arrows, and generally harassing each other. Even though I had seen him on television for years and felt I already knew him, Flip’s humility, concern, and love of the outdoors is even more evident when he’s among friends. And that’s what we became during that week of harsh weather and hard hunting.
Flip’s life story has been told many times. He grew up in South Florida, served in the army as a linguist, left the military to become a banker, then decided to build his life around his dreams and love of all things wild. What is often missed, lost among the public visibility of any angling or hunting legend, are the contributions he quietly made to conservation.
He had long been actively involved with the Everglades Protection Association, Ducks Unlimited, Sierra Club, Bonefish Tarpon Trust, and the Nature Conservancy, among many others. He was serious and articulate about our natural world, its threats, and its solutions. His convictions were firmly held and formed by a lifetime of living in, and loving, angling, hunting and the wild places in general.
He was a major contributor to the great improvements in fly fishing equipment over the years. Some of the industry’s leading tackle manufacturers—G Loomis, Sage, Temple Fork Outfitters, and Tibor—relied upon him as a consultant. Other companies, such as Costa, Yeti, Simms, and Columbia, that make the equipment and clothing that supports the fly fishing world, also employed his counsel. He was a 30-year member of the Mercury Outboard Saltwater Team.
Talking to me about Flip, Bruce Holt of Loomis summed up the difference between consultant and endorser. “Most consultants are really just endorsers, happy with putting their name on the product and getting a check,” said Holt. “Not Flip. You understand that when you bring Flip in, he is going to get in the weeds with the designers, engineers, and production teams. If you want his name on something, he is going to make sure it performs as advertised and to his satisfaction. He is a perfectionist.”
For me, one of Flip’s most significant contributions to outdoor sporting equipment was clearly Hells Bay Boats. As one of the original founders and the original designer, he strived to make the Hells Bay Flats Boat the standard against which all others are measured and the brand mere mortals such as me continue to lust after.
In the early 2000s, Flip and his partners sold their interests, and the company went through a change in ownership and honestly some slippage. Since 2007, however, it has been in the very capable hands of owner Chris Peterson and his team. Chris was wise enough to bring Flip in to work with Hells Bay’s designers and marketing folks. Ask him about any model and you would get a detailed explanation, from a design, production, and performance perspective. Every model is built to be a masterpiece.
My dad always told me that a man without any pretense is a man worth knowing. Walk with Flip into the RIGS Fly Shop in Ridgway, Colorado, across a deserted landing strip in Costa Rica, anywhere in the Bahamas, or through any restaurant in Charleston, South Carolina during the Charity Redfish Tournament, and his gray beard and quiet smile would be recognized, and probably approached. He was always gracious, modest, and never hurried. He simply made folks feel comfortable.
Several years ago, I spent the night at his home in Mims, Florida, and had a great supper with he and his wonderful wife, Diane. We set out early the next morning to fish the very shallow waters of the St. Johns River. In his airboat, we wandered for miles through the grass and marsh before arriving at a small stream that flowed through a nearby cattle ranch before emptying into the river. We spent the entire morning wading and fishing the creek for bream and bass. The trophy of the morning was barely 10 inches long, but that was immaterial to Flip. He just liked to fish.
Spend time with him and you would also learn that he was a storehouse of knowledge and carried a great passion for birds, flowers, alligators, and anything else that naturally inhabits the world. Just don’t try to get him to large gatherings or places where someone is trying to “showcase” him. His humility was an honest reflection of who he was.
The morning Flip, Kirk, Bruce and the rest of the crew left my home, I walked back into my office and gunroom and found a copy of Memories, Mangroves and Magic sitting on my desk. The book is a thoughtful pictorial on Flip’s life on the waters of South Florida and beyond.
On the inside-front cover, Flip had penned a kind note. He included a sincere thank you, a promise to get together again soon, and a closing that was right on target: “It is probably a good thing we didn’t know each other during our ‘youngerhoods’ or we would have knocked a lot of bark off a lot of trees.” So true, Flip, but it would have been a blast.
Epilogue
My last text from Flip before he died:
“So good to hear from you.
We’re still in an air pocket in central Florida, but it’ll all get developed eventually. I’m satisfied for my lifetime Mims will still be the perfect place. No traffic. Plenty of woods and good fishing, so I’m staying here till the finish line.
In any case, let’s find some time to get into some kind of trouble.”
Pure Flip.
Orlo “Spike” Dietrich and wife Myriam fly fishing for Giant Trevally on the flats of the Seychelles.
