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[ Home > Books, DVD's.. > Books > Autographed Books > Of Wind and Tides - Stu Apte - Autographed ]
 
Of Wind and Tides: A Memoir By Stu Apte, Hall-Of-Fame-Angler, Fighter Pilot, Pan Am Captain, The Incredible Story
Now available AUTOGRAPHED hardcover with 110 color photographs and 41 old black and white photographs, Stu Apte’s Of Wind and Tides is the book anglers and adventure-lovers have been waiting for. In 496 pages packed with action and description, a lifetime spent on the flats with tarpon and bonefish, and in the skies with Navy fighter planes and Pan Am’s passenger jets, is relived in vivid prose. The reader experiences the stalk and the catch of great game fish, sits at the controls with Stu during several crisis in the cockpit, when flying and fishing were only a heartbeat from ending tragically.
Stu Apte’s name is synonymous with the pioneering of great flats fishing throughout the Florida Keys and numerous places around the world. As a guide and enterprising angler, he has fished with and formed close friendships with legendary anglers like Ted Williams, Curt Gowdy, Joe Brooks, Lefty Kreh, A.J. McClane, and was a mentor to other great names in the fishing world, like Flip Pallot, Mark Sosin, José Wejebe and Rick Murphy, just to name a few. As a Navy fighter pilot and Pan Am Captain he has filled his log books with incredible adventures, some of which he was lucky to survive.
You will read about most of them here in Stu’s amazing story, told in his own words for the first time—the big ones that got away, and the ones that didn’t; the moments in the cockpit when the instruments and skill to use them were on the raw edge; plus an intimate portrait of how Stu eventually faced the biggest battle of his life, against the deadly ravages of lymphoma and leukemia.
Excerpts from various chapters:
Preface
Looking back, I can see clearly how lucky I have been and blessed by God time after time. Mine has been a life many would envy--flying a Navy jet fighter; becoming a pilot with Pan Am; fishing literally all over the globe, often with interesting and famous people; becoming a flats guide in my beloved Keys; filming television shows; and learning, along the way, how deeply I need to love and be loved.
As a fighter pilot, I have flirted with extreme dangers and emerged to fly again. As an angler, I have fought, sometimes winning, sometimes losing, many fights with fish to dream about. But I feel today that my most courageous fight came not with a Rod in my hand in some exotic fishing destination, but here in Florida at my home, and in doctors offices and hospitals. Cancer had invaded by blood cells, and had I not fought back, and been lucky at the same time, I would not be writing these words.
Chapter 1, Crisis in the Cockpit
Suddenly the trees sweep past, just barely cleared, and I'm over a cornfield, sinking slowly into it. My wheels-up landing is a good one, and I touch down with a minimum of speed. I am mowing down corn rows when my right wing slams into a tree. Yes a tree! In the middle of a cornfield! Probably the only cornfield in Alabama with a tree in the middle of it. And I've hit it!
No matter how you look at it, flying in the military is a dangerous job, especially operating high-performance aircraft from aircraft carriers. Add flying combat missions to the mix, and you can believe there'll be casualties. Without my realizing it, my Alabama Adventure had been a mere tune-up for what was to come.
Chapter 5, From High Flyer To Flats Guide
To go from flying the sky to plying the waters for fish indeed seemed an unlikely venture to stake my entire future on, more like a frivolous escapade than a solid career. But I was dead serious: I was willing to take the gamble against failure. This momentous decision inevitably created the new pathways that shaped my life into the incredible journey I have experienced. At that time, my fondest dreams could never have foretold the world of fishing that would be mine, the company I would enjoy, the places I would go. But right then, I only knew one thing for certain: a whole new ballgame had just begun!
Chapter 6, Some Of The Most Exciting Fishing On Earth
I'd seen as many as an estimated 3,000 tarpon jammed into an area half a mile long and a quarter-mile wide, plus a grab bag of every kind of predatory fish you can imagine working their way between the glistening Silver Kings. Apparently there are on the palolo worms for everybody. If you could cast an orange and yellow fly, or cockroach pattern with bucktail and grizzly for the streamer, those fish will smack it like you've never seen before.
Chapter 7, Ted Williams; A Fishing Friendship
Not being a baseball fan to the point that I hardly even knew the Boston Red Sox existed, I had no idea Ted Williams was anything but just another guy who knows what to do with a fly rod. And so began a friendship that lasted more than 40 years.
Chapter 8, A Pair Of Aces
Countless anglers of all description and temperament climbed aboard my boat Moms Worry over the years. So many different people, so many days on the water--and images blur together, they'd be on immediate memory. But some of the anglers who have fished with my remain sharply etched in my thoughts, fixed there by their deeds and words. To strongly fit into that category are Ray Donnersberger and Scottie Yeager.
It looked to be about a 65- pound fish, not a big one for sure, but by golly it had been the first opportunity to cast to a tarpon that I had in almost two weeks. I picked up and cast back to that huge color, and the slight northeast breeze blew my fly a little off to the right of my target. "Doggone, Ray," I said, "I missed the shot." I started to strip the fly line to re-cast, and I'll be a tarpon's uncle if the fish doesn't eat. I did see her until she chomped the fly, and I set the hook. Oh... how world records are caught!
Chapter 10, A Jungle Rivers Record-Fish Treasure
The feeling Rodgers and Hammerstein described so evocatively in one of their songs called so the bold and curious among anglers. I certainly am no exception, always at the ready to head for the places where big fish are said to be lurking. In the 1970s, a visit to Guyana became one of my priority destinations. A small country (about the size of Idaho) on the northern coast of South America, Guyana established between Venezuela on the Northwest, Brazil on the South, and Surinam and the Atlantic Ocean on the East. It is a land that includes dense jungles and dark Rivers of strange big fish. Come along, as we had there on a very special adventure: to try to find and land the biggest freshwater fish ever taken on a fly.
Off to my left a jaguar screams, to the right a monkey chatters and a jabiru stork sails slowly across the river directly over the pool ahead of my boat. I am standing on the slim crossbar seat of a 12 foot aluminum skiff that is being handled by my host Peter Gorinsky, while we watch the surge that tells us fish are actively feeding.
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