All through high school, instead of dating or hanging out at the Green Turtle with her friends, Caroline would sit at her desk and tie flies. Caroline Powers became famous for her flies; grown men paid good money for them—good money, the price jacked up to an almost absurd level because Caroline didn’t want to sell them. Her flies were works of art; she had the patience, the attention to detail, the slender, nimble fingers. She had the love and devotion.

While Huck was in Vietnam at the tail end of the war, 1974 to 1975, Caroline went to college in Gainesville, met a boy from the Florida Panhandle, followed that boy when he went to law school in Tallahassee, married him, and gave up fishing altogether. That, Huck didn’t understand. Whenever Caroline and her new husband, Beau, came back to Islamorada to visit, they would go sport-fishing with their father on the big boat, and although Caroline was impressive the way she cast and reeled in the big fish, Huck yearned to see her with her fly rod again. He even suggested it once, the two of them out together on the flats at dawn in the pontoon. She shut him down immediately in a hushed voice: “No, Huck, I can’t.” As though fly-fishing were something embarrassing she used to do as a kid, like going roller-skating in just a bikini and a pair of red knee socks.

Caroline was diagnosed with a brain tumor the week after her fortieth birthday and was dead by forty-one. Soon after, her husband, Beau, gave Huck a flat tackle box. When Huck opened it, he saw Caroline’s flies, one in each sectioned compartment like so many jewels. He has them still.

Before she met Huck, Kimberly Cassel was a bartender at Sloppy Joe’s in Key West. In those days, Huck was not yet Huck—he was just Sam Powers—and he was not yet a captain; he was first mate for a guy everyone called Captain Coke. Every Sunday, Coke would invite Sam to go out on the water “just for fun,” and nearly every Sunday, Sam said no because Sunday was his only day off and he had to do things like laundry and grocery shopping, and sometimes he hitchhiked up to Islamorada, where his mother would cook him dinner. But one Sunday in March of 1978, Sam said sure and Coke said, “Finally! I’ve been wanting to introduce you to my sister.”

Huck remembers that he’d bristled—he did just fine in the women department on his own and he’d been looking forward to a day of real fishing (instead of baiting clients’ hooks and turning back early if someone got seasick), and he wasn’t sure he’d enjoy the presence of anyone’s sister, aside from his own, on a fishing trip.