For the permit of the Yucatan, finding something positive in the mats of prop-fouling weeds isn’t hard at all. In fact, they actively look for it, find it, and eat it often.
Like a trendy new restaurant coming to town, the permit can’t get enough of the fresh, abundant eats: Portunus sayi — the sargassum swimming crab. This small pelagic crab inhabits and hunts the weed mats as they drift around the Caribbean. The sargassum provides a mobile, shaded ecosystem rich with life, including small fish, sea worms, and shrimp.
The local permit learned that these mats are transient buffets loaded with crabs — arguably their favorite food — and it didn’t take them long to figure out how to exploit them. Because the crabs float and swim around the weed edges, the permit learned to gently rise and sip them off the surface, not unlike, well… you know what.
For us fly fishers, this means we can target permit dry-fly style. I didn’t really believe it either, not even when my Mayazul guide insisted I tie on his custom, unweighted crab pattern. Time stood still when a nice permit turned toward my floating crab’s waking action, briefly sized it up on the pause, and created a small hole on the ocean’s surface before audibly sucking it down. After I released my permit and some high-fives, my guide said it:
That’s the 8th permit this week on that fly.
While the sargassum is quite unsightly heaped up along the jungle beaches, seeing a permit eat a crab fly on the surface is perfect and beautiful, and unforgettable. I’ll be bringing a box of floating crab patterns on my next trip to Mexico, and remembering the sargassum isn’t all bad.
