A woman and the sea - The Taft School

Reeling
ThemIn
Fly Angler Diana Rudolph ‘90 Casts for World Records
By Julia Feldmeier ’99
Diana Rudolph’s world record tarpon catch had all the trappings
of a suspense flick. It was a hot, breezeless day in April;
the shallow waters off the Florida Keys were blanketed by the
kind of stillness that—in movies, at least—portends chaos.
So it was no real surprise when the 32-year-old Rudolph,
fly fishing aboard a skiff called—what else?—Hell’s Bay,
hooked into a giant tarpon. Measuring 6 feet, 8 inches long,
with a 37-inch girth, it tipped the scales at 135.5 pounds.
As fishing writer Jerry Gibbs once wrote: “Tarpon hunting
is not a genteel endeavor. Tarpon hunting is war.” At 5 feet,
6 inches, and 125 pounds, Rudolph was the token underdog.
Her battle with the fish lasted 2 hours and 20 minutes.
Movies that run more than two hours are considered long.
But a fishing bout? Really long. And arduous. Rudolph held
on furiously from the bow of the skiff as the tarpon zipped
back and forth through the water, enraged.
Her fishing guide, Dale Perez, deftly maneuvered the
skiff through the shallow waters using a 22-foot fiberglass
pole, trying to keep pace with the fish. Perez estimates that he
poled for more than a mile during the struggle.
And how’s this for a stunt? The tarpon, a specie known for
its strength and acrobatic maneuvers, shot through the air eight
times while Rudolph had it on the line. Rudolph held on.
Then a plot twist. Enter the bull shark: ruthless, pugnacious
and known to attack tarpon. (Not to mention humans.
Had Rudolph fallen overboard—which occasionally happens,
she says—she’d have been fair game.) Keen to the vibrations
of a fish in distress, the shark began circling the skiff.
“It scared the hell out of me,” Rudolph said, “but it was
one of those things where you obviously don’t want the fish to
get munched.”
Perez quickly put the boat’s engine in neutral and revved
it, hoping the noise would scare the shark away.
“Sometimes it doesn’t work,” he said. “But in this case it did.”
When the tarpon finally surrendered and flopped up
against the side of the boat, Rudolph hauled it in—and burst
into tears. In order to submit the fish for a world record, it
would have to be brought back to shore to be weighed. It
would die in the process.
“I’ve never felt that type of adrenaline or that much emotion,”
Rudolph said. In all her years of fishing, she’d never
brought a tarpon back to shore. “The fun is catching them—
I’d much rather let them swim.”
She promptly iced the tarpon down and called the
University of Miami to pick it up for research. That is, after
the scale revealed it to be a new world record for tarpon
using a 16-pound test (the heavier the test, the stronger the
line)—outweighing the old record by more than 50 pounds.
b Diana Rudolph ’90 loves to fish in Montana as well as the Florida Keys. Most of what she does is catch and release.
Taft Bulletin Fall 2005 27