Nobody knows why someone would steal the cremated remains of a Florida Keys fly-fishing legend from a pickup truck parked outside a restaurant earlier this year.
Captain Bill Curtis had no spurned lovers, lifelong enemies, obsessed fans or angry family members, according to friends, family and police.
Yet, shortly after 5pm under rainy skies in late January, a man wearing a black hoodie broke a window of a Chevy Silverado parked outside a Flanigan’s restaurant in Miami’s Coconut Grove neighborhood, surveillance video showed.
The thief ignored a laptop computer, a US$400 pair of sunglasses and valuable camera gear.
Instead, he snatched the box of ashes from beneath a stack of books and sped off in a black pickup truck.
That was the last time anyone saw what is left of Curtis, who invented the poling platform for skiffs and the Bimini twist knot, spotted fish for Jimmy Buffett and Ted Williams, and inspired characters in the novel Ninety-Two in the Shade.
“It’s like losing my father twice,” Nancy Curtis Bacon said about her father, who died on Oct. 24 last year, aged 91.
Bacon said her father wanted his ashes spread at Curtis Point, the seaward reach of Old Rhodes Key in Biscayne Bay, Florida, that bears his name.
She was planning to hold a memorial service there when the weather cleared. She never got the chance.
Curtis was one of the fathers of saltwater fly-fishing. He valued the respect and admiration from his fellow guides and would laugh each time he caught sight of them peeping at him through binoculars, studying his skills and trying to figure out his next big move.
In 1975, he invented the poling platform, which is above the engine at the stern and is used to stand on and propel a skiff boat across flats and sight fish. Fellow guides initially made fun of Curtis, saying the platform looked like a fish-cleaning table.
He would laugh and say it was a shade to keep his engine cool. The platforms are now standard equipment on fishing skiffs.
He created the Bimini twist and the Curtis connection knots, which are known for their strength and are now commonly used by anglers. He designed and developed the first mass-produced flats boat.
Some say he established sport fishing’s grand slam: catching bonefish, permit and tarpon in one day.
Besides Buffett and Williams, Curtis befriended writers, like Jim Harrison, Carl Hiaasen and Thomas McGuane, for whom he was the inspiration for the fictional Florida Keys fishing guides in Ninety-Two in the Shade, published in 1973.
Stu Apte, a member of the Fishing Hall of Fame who holds 44 world records, guided Curtis to the first bonefish he ever caught in Biscayne Bay, in 1949.
The two first met at Captain Mack’s tackle shop in Miami one year earlier and formed a successful team — alternating between poling and sighting while the other fished.
They won numerous tournament trophies and earned widespread notoriety in fishing circles. They even had some degree of fame: Apte said it was Ernest Hemingway who first recognized him on the docks in Cuba, not the other way around. The writer had known Apte from newspaper reports on US fishing tournaments, invited him aboard his boat, called Pilar, and taught him how to make mojitos.
Curtis lost one eye in a stick fight when he was four years old, “but he could see fish better than most people could with two,” Apte said.
When Florida denied Curtis a fishing guide license because of his limited sight, Apte wrote to his congressman.
“If Bill Curtis is good enough to serve this country as an aerial photographer piloting F-7s over North Africa during World War II for the US Army Air Corps, then he is certainly good enough for a fishing guide license,” Apte said.
The state issued Curtis a license with the caveat that he not guide at night.
The days of fly-fishing on the Florida Keys flats from the 1950s to the 1970s were cutthroat, with turf wars among the guides.
At that time, Apte said, words could quickly escalate to threats involving lumber and revolvers.
He remembered being stranded with Curtis in the Everglades after someone sabotaged his boat.
“Some people didn’t like Bill,” Apte said.
The puzzling theft of Curtis’ ashes is worthy of a Hiaasen novel, so it should come as no surprise that the two men were close.
They met in the early 1970s. Hiaasen was just learning how to fish, and Curtis was widely known.
“He was the emperor of Biscayne Bay,” Hiaasen said in a telephone interview. “He was like our Willie Mays.”
After a day of fishing, Curtis would sometimes invite Hiaasen and his friend Bob Branham, now a successful fishing guide, for drinks. The young men would sit and absorb the knowledge acquired from years on the water.
“The only way to get knowledge was to hang out in the joints after these guys were on the water all day,” Hiaasen said. “You had to stay on the edges of the conversation. You could learn so much — phases of the moon, tide changes, wind shifts.”
Hiaasen and Curtis grew close enough to trade fishing hot spots over the radio in code while on the water.
“He knew that body of water better than any human being,” Hiaasen said. “It was just legendary the way he found fish. He was a fish hog. He knew where they would be. He was a tough customer and crusty dude with rough edges, but we loved him. He was the prototypical tough and surly fishing guide.”
Hiaasen remembered Curtis as creative and resourceful.
Curtis once told him to use a fly made from the cardboard lid of a Quaker Oats box with legs tied on to resemble a crab. Hiaasen laughed, cast and landed his first permit.
“On the flats, you definitely didn’t want to get in his way,” Hiaasen said. “You didn’t want to be in his range. He had pioneered that sort of fishing, and he expected some deference. He expected people to clear out when he showed up.”
Theories on the theft vary. Some say it was a rushed smash-and-grab or part of an organized crime ring. Others laugh it off as a premeditated plan.
“That’s either an act of profound stupidity or they were trying to steal the ashes,” Hiaasen said.
Hiaasen said he thought the culprit was an illiterate criminal, because the box containing the urn was clearly labeled with the name of the funeral home.
“I think you are talking about someone who is not a reader — a garden-variety nitwit,” he said. “Or possibly it was a junkie who stole it and ran off and opened the box and sat there in an alley snorting Bill’s ashes. That’s not how Bill would want to go.”
“Part of me wants to think that it was somebody who would be honored to have the urn with Bill’s ashes, like Tom Brady’s jersey, but I suspect it was some certifiable moron who reached in and thought it was a jewelry box and ran,” Hiaasen said.
Curtis’ family thinks it could be something more sinister.
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