You can’t see Flip Pallot’s home from the road. The driveway isn’t all that long, but the native cabbage palms and oak trees have created a hammock that blocks the sun’s harshest rays, allowing a soft light to filter through. The homestead has the aura of Old Florida set amidst the modern world.
As I pull in, Flip steps out of the detached garage, his laboratory, keeper of the tools needed for a life spent in the woods and on the water. Antlers hang from studs along the walls, and shelves are stacked with buckets, boots, arrows and all the garage accouterments. His airboat is parked dead center. The garage, a simple construction made of concrete blocks, feels like hallowed ground.
When he isn’t in the woods or on the water, Flip Pallot is often in his home “laboratory” hatching plans for his next adventure. Many captains, students, friends and product developers have made this journey to spend time with the IGFA Hall of Famer and star of The Walker’s Cay Chronicles, which ran on ESPN from 1992 to 2006. They come to speak to the oracle, the wise one. His influence has spread throughout the fishing world like tree roots and sprouted in the form of like-minded anglers taught to appreciate nature and her gifts. The roots continue to grow, even in a world that is much different than the one Flip grew up in.
Philip “Flip” Pallot was born in South Florida in 1942. His parents were Florida people and raised their family in the farming community of Homestead. “We were right between Biscayne Bay and the Everglades,” Flip says. “If we went west, we were in the Glades, and if we went east, we were in Biscayne Bay and then the ocean, and just to the south and west were the Florida Keys. It was the perfect playing field for a young guy to grow up in and become interested in the natural world.”
At the time, Miami, which Flip pronounces My-AM-uh, was still small and had all the wilds a young adventurer could want. “Fishing for me started at a summer camp that I attended as a little kid,” he recalls. “I remember catching a very small bream, silver-dollar size, off a dock at the camp. As I was lifting it out of the water, a bass ate it. That was the beginning of it. I clearly remember every inch of that occurrence.”
Growing up with easy access to the Everglades helped ignite Flip’s passion for the outdoors. His father was a “dad of those times,” he says, fresh home from World War II. “He was a good provider and very kind and wonderful, but he was never my pal,” Flip says. “We never went hunting or fishing or bowling. He wasn’t that dad.”
Flip wasn’t all that interested in school or social events, though he did swim, which is how he got his nickname. In the late ’50s, he was swimming competitively, and the flip-turn had just been developed. “Nobody did that flip turn,” he says. “I learned that turn very, very early.” He got so good at it, people started calling him Flip.
As a young man, Flip read Sports Afield, Outdoor Life and any book he could find about fishing and hunting. “That’s where all the information was,” he says. “Finding people that were willing to share and willing to have someone tag along was not easy. But eventually, for all of us, I think those people materialize. We find them, or they find us. I’m not sure what the karmic strategy is, but somehow it happens. I had this small group of friends, Chico Fernandez, Norman Duncan and John Emery. We did everything together.”
Flip Pallot and Chico Fernandez (right) became friends at a young age and continue to fish together.These men became pillars in the angling community. Together they hatched wild plans using whatever tools they could scrape together. With no boat, they needed a way to explore the waters of Biscayne Bay, then abundant with redfish, trout, snook, snapper, tarpon, bonefish and permit. “We didn’t have the wherewithal to have skiffs, so air mattresses were the logical choice,” he says. “The distances we covered were phenomenal. No one would believe it. And the fish that we caught, no one would believe that, either.”
The tackle was rudimentary, making each catch even more treasured. Flip’s first rod was made of steel and had what he calls a “plug reel,” a small conventional reel. “There was no drag on a plug reel at all. The drag was your thumb,” he says. “There was a Cuban woman who made these little doilies, and they slipped over your thumb like a condom, and you could press the revolving spool with your thumb as a fish was running to create drag. If you had one of these thumb stalls on, you didn’t burn your fingerprints off.”
Monofilament appeared in the ’50s. “I had no idea what to do with it,” Flip says. “The knots we used on linen didn’t work. You could see through it. I thought this can’t possibly work.” Experimentation, along with trial and error, opened his eyes. “We were enamored of 2-pound test. We tried to catch everything on 2-pound.
Flip Pallot has helped innovate tackle and skiffs throughout his career.“I’ve been lucky enough to see all these changes and improvements in tackle and outboard motors and skiff materials and all these things, just by the happy accident of when I was born,” Flip says. “No matter what anyone experiences today, no matter how big the fish they catch, no matter how fast they go, they can never do the things that I’ve done or that my friends have done because those times just don’t exist.”
Fly-fishing came next. “We saw someone catch a bonefish on a fly rod in the Keys, and we had no idea what it was. It was just like some foreign witchcraft,” he says. “We started looking into it and asking questions, and then we realized that this was a new way to fish, a new set of challenges, a whole new set of tackle that we could enjoy and modify and adapt to salt water.
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“The idea of catching a billfish on a fly rod was incomprehensible. Catching a 100-pound amberjack on a fly rod or a tarpon on a fly rod — this was unimaginable. And so again, through the wonders of great, good luck, I’ve got to see all these things actually happen, and I’ve gotten to do all these things myself,” he says, “but it doesn’t reduce in any way my enjoyment of other tackle. I still fish 2-pound test.”
Flip’s first forays on Biscayne Bay were as a young boy fishing from air mattresses with his friends.Flip enrolled in the University of Miami in the early 1960s but was drafted into the Army and wound up serving as a linguist in Central America from 1963 to ’67. He fished in his free time, putting the skills he learned in Florida to the test in exotic locales — something he’d continue throughout his television career. When he returned to the Sunshine State, he took up work as a banker and guided on the weekends. But being stuck in an office and wearing a tie was not for Flip. “It was physical and mental torture,” he says.
Flip was signing loans for people to pursue their dreams, yet his own dream lived in the wilds. One such loan was made to a young man named Jose Wejebe, who wanted to purchase a truck and a boat to become a guide. Flip helped Wejebe, and they became friends, often filming their adventures together, for The Walker’s Cay Chronicles as well as Spanish Fly, Wejebe’s television show. They remained close until Wejebe died in a plane crash in 2012. And as for that loan, Wejebe never missed a payment.
In his youth, Flip Pallot learned from such legends as Stu Apte and, in turn, passed his knowledge down to guides such as Rob Fordyce (above right). Flip gave up banking and opened an outdoor shop called Wind River Rendezvous. “That was the worst kind of slavery,” he says. “I was in a major regional shopping mall and had to keep mall hours and mall dates. The whole hunting season was the whole retail season. I was a slave to that shop.”
Despite the hours, the shop led to friendships with like-minded folk of all ages. “I went into his shop to get a particular feather for a tarpon fly. I was 10 years old at the time, and I was kneeling down, going through these drawers of fly-tying material,” says Rob Fordyce. “His boots appeared in front of me, and I looked up, and it’s Flip. I was kind of awestruck.” The two struck up a friendship despite their nearly 30-year age gap. “It started out as a mentorship but grew into more of a brotherhood,” says Fordyce, who would become the winningest tarpon guide with 58 appearances on the podium. The pair still hunt and fish together.
The Flip Pallot tree of influence was growing, in large part because of the mentors he leaned on at various stages in his life. When Flip decided to pull the plug on his shop and guide full time, he followed the example set before him by some of the top captains of the day, such as Stu Apte.
When he was working as a banker, Flip gave a loan to Jose Wejebe to help him purchase a boat and truck to become a fishing guide. The two were great friends.“In a way, Stu was always in my life. His dad and my grandfather were friends,” Flip says. “When me and my friends would fish, we would see him on the horizon. It was like being in a classroom. We would watch his every move. We didn’t know the names of baseball players or football players, but we knew everything about Stu and others like Stu.”
The relationship between Flip and Apte was symbiotic. “It was back in the late 1960s,” says Apte, who is 93 and still lives in the Florida Keys. “I took him under my wing and spent a lot of time with him. He used to pole me around while I caught big tarpon.”
They traveled together to Costa Rica, where Apte caught the first Pacific sailfish on fly, and Flip landed a 101-pound sail on 10-pound tippet to set a world record. “The following year, I went back to that same area and beat that record. I think it pissed him off,” Apte says with a laugh. “Flip is a truly great angler. Not just a good angler, a great angler. I’ve only said that about one other person, that was Ted Williams.”
Known more as a fly-fisherman, Flip Pallot also enjoys fishing with spinning gear and monofilament, especially 2-pound test. Another person who played a huge role in Flip’s life was Lefty Kreh. In the 1960s, Kreh moved to Florida to serve as the director of the Metropolitan South Florida Fishing Tournament, or MET, a mutlispecies event that ran for several months each year and was the largest tourney of its kind. To promote the event, Kreh visited fishing clubs.
“Lefty was not Lee Wolf. He was not an imposing presence,” Flip says. “He was a five-and-a-half-foot-tall, chubby guy with a big belly and a thousand jokes. When he came to talk to our club, he was not getting a lot of respect.”
The kibitzing in the room hushed when Kreh borrowed a two-piece fly rod from a guy in the front row, stripped the line off the reel, gave the rod and reel back, and began casting the line with only his hand. He carried a bunch of line in the air, made a back cast and shot 70 feet of line. That got the crowd’s attention — and Flip’s.
Flip Pallot spends a great deal of time airboating on the St. Johns River in Florida. Kreh didn’t live far from Flip, and a few days after that club meeting, Flip went to his house, knocked on the door and asked Kreh to help him with his fly casting. “We could catch a bonefish, snook or a redfish on fly, but we were not casters,” says Flip, who spent so much time at Kreh’s that he said he should’ve bought a tent and just camped out. “Lefty was always ready, willing and able. Lefty taught me so much about life, and he was always there if I needed anything,” Flip says.
As we talk, Flip’s squinty eyes awaken, and he sits up in his chair, lifting his head a few inches. He points. I turn my head and see a deer 20 feet away slowly moving through the brush on the edge of the driveway. We continue to talk, and the cadence of his voice makes me want to slide my chair closer. He chooses his words carefully.
I offer up an analogy of this transfer of fishing knowledge from legends like Joe Brooks to Lefty Kreh to Stu Apte to Flip Pallot to Jose Wejebe to Rob Fordyce and beyond. I say it’s like an NFL coaching tree, how all these great coaches tend to come from the tutelage of other greats. “The whole thing is very much like a tree,” Flip agrees, “and the branches often go in the same directions and sometimes touch one another, and the wind blows and something else happens.”
Flip met his wife Diane when he was working as a guide and she hired him to take her fishing.It didn’t take Flip long to build a name as one of the top guides in South Florida and the Keys. “I was a guide because I loved being a guide. I wanted to be a guide, and I wanted to be a guide every single day of my life,” he says. It wasn’t just the time outdoors that was special. He relished the time in a 16-foot office showing clients things they’d never seen and coaching them to catch fish of which they’d only dreamt about. “The setup is this mutual admiration. You’re happy being there; the client is happy being there,” he says.
This alchemy can turn into lifelong friendships. People say things on a boat that they may never say in a confessional. Sometimes tremendous ideas are formed. “If you never allow that to happen or give that fire a chance to smolder, you’ll miss something,” Flip says.
One of Flip’s first guiding clients was Miami mobster Bobby Erra. He was a customer at Flip’s shop, and when Flip closed the doors and decided to guide full time, Erra said he wanted to book him for tarpon season — the entire season. They fished together for weeks in the heat of summer. Erra had only two fingers on his left hand from an offshore racing accident, which made stripping line, gripping reel handles and setting hooks difficult. Fits of rage ensued when fish swam free, but Flip hung in there and was rewarded with a brown paper bag full of $100 bills at the end of the season.
“You never know who or how you impact people,” Flip says.Through guiding, Flip also met the woman he would marry, Diane. She had tried to book Flip’s friend John Emory, but he never called her back. It was summer, and Flip was just returning from guiding on the Bighorn River in Montana. He didn’t have anything on the books, and Diane wanted to catch a tarpon. “So we fished, and then Lefty called me a couple of days later and said, ‘I have to make a film of redfishing out of a canoe, and do you know a pretty girl that would be interested?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I do.’ ”
Flip had Diane in the bow of his 20-foot Old Town Freighter canoe. “I was standing up, polling into the wind, and Diane was standing in the front of the canoe with a spinning rod, and we were sneaking up on a tailing redfish. The breeze was blowing toward me, and I could smell Diane in the front of the canoe. I mean, I just knew right then, I said, ‘This is it.’ ”
The chemistry was mutual. “He was very salty-looking. His hair looked like it had gone through the microwave,” Diane recalls. “I wasn’t so much looking for romance, but I knew he’d be a part of my life.”
Flip Pallot is always quick to make a joke.Flip’s life flowed with the fish migrations and seasonal changes. “Flip and I poled thousands of miles through the Everglades and thousands of miles throughout the Florida Keys,” says Fordyce, the tarpon guide. “From Biscayne Bay to Key West, on both sides of the road, there’s not a flat that he and I haven’t poled. And he taught me to do it slowly so you don’t miss anything about it. If you pole far enough, eventually you find something worth finding.”
The Keys were a much different playground when Flip was running trips. “It’s very, very hard for me to explain the fraternal feeling that there was then,” he says. “There was zero competition. There was enough room for everyone. When you saw a skiff on the horizon, you could identify it. You knew that it was Steve Huff or Stu, and by their direction and the time of the tide, you knew exactly where they were going. Today, every place that a tarpon could conceivably swim, there is a skiff.”
Flip reminisces about the days when there was only one traffic signal between Homestead and Key West, and the speed limit on the Overseas Highway was 70 mph. If you did 70 today, you’d kill someone or get thrown in jail. The fraternal brotherhood of tarpon fishermen lived in motels where clients and guides stayed for the season. There were two or three restaurants that served breakfast, and the fishing sect would gather, break bread, drink coffee and chat about their day — a special time, indeed.
After guiding for 14 years, Flip and Diane’s life was uprooted when Hurricane Andrew struck South Florida in 1992 and obliterated their home. The storm ripped the roof off their house. They rode out the hurricane under a mattress in the bathroom. Flip lost his house, his skiff, his truck, his airboat, all of his tackle and a lifetime’s worth of photos. There was nothing green left in Homestead.
Flip enjoying a little reading. “We looked around after the storm, and we realized that this really wasn’t the Miami that we knew anymore,” Flip says. “It was populated by people from other places. There were no traditional Florida values at that point. Nobody seemed concerned about issues involving the natural world. It was all about growth, so we began looking for a new landing zone.”
They settled in central Florida, in an area between the St. Johns River and Mosquito Lagoon where Flip had hunted and fished. The move occurred right around the time The Walkers Cay Chronicles launched Flip into yet another career as a storyteller. The way the show came about is another serendipitous tale. Diane, who worked as a flight attendant, was scheduled to work a flight that was canceled because of a snowstorm. John Abplanalp, whose family owned Walker’s Cay in the Bahamas, was on the same flight. She had met him years before in the Keys during tarpon season. They talked, and Diane suggested Abplanalp fish with Flip. Through this chance meeting, the genesis of The Walkers Cay Chronicles came to be, and it was a massive hit.
“You never know who or how you impact people,” Flip says. “Television — at the time that I had a presence on television — was powerful. The internet didn’t exist. Social media didn’t exist. Outboards would actually run for two days in a row. Skiffs actually floated shallow. Push poles didn’t splinter in your hand. People got to see all this. And the resource was insane. They got to see the best of everything during those times. Everything’s about timing.”
Anglers Journal editor Charlie Levine spent a day interviewing Flip Pallot at his home in Florida.Sitting on my living room floor, I’d watch Flip catch billfish and bonefish and everything in between. It was the first fishing show that drew me in. I felt as if I were there in the cockpit with him. His narrations were poetic and painted a picture that made me want to get on the water. He changed outdoor television, just by being Flip, the watchful outdoorsman. He still works in television but picks his projects carefully.
Most of Flip’s thoughts are focused on the natural world, and he wants us to fight for her. He admits his generation didn’t do enough to protect the environment and that it’s important that we pitch in, speak up and make a difference.
“Flip was born 100 years too late,” Fordyce says. “He should have been a mountain man. He’d have persevered doing that, and he would’ve loved it. He’s a modern-day version of it.”
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