Palolo worms fresh from the water. They spend most of their lifetime burrowed in hard bottom.
I fished with Capt. David Kesar in Key West when we specifically tried to hit the hatch during June. Kesar had calculated the days, tides and moon and promised me that the worms would be swimming off Fleming Key, Calda Channel on a specific Thursday and Friday. When the “magic day” arrived, we left the dock at around 5:30 p.m. and set up at the mouth of Calda Channel as the tide fell. Kesar filled my hopes with tales of jumping 25 fish in a few hours when the hatch was hot. But on that day, there were no worms and no more tarpon than usual. I think we jumped one. Next night, same thing. No worms, a few fish, three bites. I had to be back in Miami on Sunday, so naturally the hatch went off on Sunday evening before sunset. David called me at the office Monday morning to relive the hot bite, and assured me we’d catch it next year. Yeah, right!
Since that summer, I’ve listened to fly fishers’ stories about worm hatches from the Upper Keys to Key West. At one point, I gave up trying to hit the hatch. But every year the reports would come in.
During the spring of 2004, I fished regularly with Capt. Kris Suplee, of Duck Key. During our first conversation, he asked whether I had ever fished the worm hatch. He had a June date open, and he felt that conditions would be good for worms off Bahia Honda. I said sure, let’s do it, though I wasn’t hopeful, figuring it would just be another day on the water. Before our trip, he explained that the hatches typically last only two or three hours, and you need flies that look just like the worms. Since I’d never seen a palolo worm, I wasn’t going to be much help with the fly tying. No matter. He had plenty, tied on No. 1 and 1/0 hooks.
Suplee’s terminal-tackle rigging is different from normal big tarpon rigging, too. He ties 30-pound fluorocarbon leader to the fly, without the standard heavy shock tippet. For one, heavy tippet inhibits the action of the small fly, and usually won’t fit through the eye of the small hook. Consider the fact that we didn’t really care to land any tarpon, just play with them until they wore through the relatively light line. Also, possibly thousands of tarpon would be feeding on millions of worms, so the odds of a tarpon actually seeing and grabbing our flies was pretty low. A bunch of hookups was not likely. What Suplee did promise was the visual experience of a lifetime.
Some "wormers" use light bite tippets so that fish can wear through them quickly, allowing for more hookups.
As of the morning of the Friday afternoon that I was to fish with Suplee, the worms had not appeared, but he’d heard that a hatch went off Thursday night in Key West, so things were looking good for the weekend. I met him at the ramp on Bahia Honda and we ran through the nearest cut, then headed north to Bahia Honda Bridge. When we got to the bridge there were at least a dozen skiffs floating and looking. There was hardly any wind. Conditions were perfect. Occasionally we’d see a tarpon roll here and there, and then schools of tarpon were rolling regularly. Finally, Suplee pointed out the infamous palola worm to me. There it was! A tiny maroon-and-gray creature paddling madly downcurrent toward the open Atlantic. Finally, I was in the middle of a worm hatch!
Atokes and Epitokes
When naturalists first described palolo worms, it was noted that the swarming worms were headless. For a long time, it was a mystery where the heads were. The first scientific description of a Samoan Palolo worm was based on the headless portion only, later called the epitoke. At the end of the 19th century, Friedländer (1898) and Krämer (1899) independently discovered that the worms spend most of their lifetime burrowing in hard substrate. Only once a year, their hind ends break off and swim spiraling to the surface to shed eggs and sperm. This reproductive frenzy only lasts for a few hours. Over the course of the next year, the head ends (or atokes) regenerate and eventually produce new epitokes.
The outgoing tide in the Keys carries floating turtlegrass from the Gulfside grassflats so at first it was hard to spot the worms. I scooped some up with a Styrofoam cup. Just as described, they were two to three inches long. The front third is gray and the back part is maroon on the top, and more grayish underneath. They looked exactly like the bloodworms I used as bait in New Jersey, but much smaller. Suplee ran his electric motor to intercept schools of tarpon sipping worms off the surface much like freshwater trout sip mayflies. Eventually, schools of snapper, jacks and blue runners joined in and later I heard that pods of bonefish chased worms that floated along on the shallow side of the channel’s edge. Kris and I hooked six tarpon that evening, all of which were over 80 pounds. A tarpon in the 150-pound range sucked in my tiny fly and proceeded to hook itself in the nose. We spent about 45 minutes being dragged all over the ocean, and when we returned to the bridge just before sunset, it was all over.
