When he was eight, his father, who was in the lumber business, moved the family to Aspen. Mill was born in Fort Collins, Colo rado, and lived for a while in Wyoming. They go to bed at around nine every night and are usually among the first boats on the water in the morning. Breakfast is usually a bowl of cereal with bananas and a very strong cup of coffee. They eat dinner on the couch and watch the Golf Channel. When the neighbors are out of town, the Mills sneak over to their yard to practice longer shots. There’s an archery target in the backyard. Good dark rum holds down one corner of the kitchen counter. An opened bag of Fritos rests on a pantry shelf. Tucked in various corners of the house and its garage are bikes, golf clubs, paddleboards, and at least three dozen rods.

The kitchen table has been requisitioned as a fly-tying station, strewn with hooks and feathers. The Mills rarely host guests or fish with anyone else down there. In the fly-fishing world, poon is shorthand for tarpon.) It functions as some sort of father-son nirvana. (This name is a bit less prurient than it may seem. A few years ago, he made the AARP magazine’s list of “top 20 hottest men over 50.” Only the wrinkles near his eyes-from decades spent on water and snow-betray his age.įor the past five years, Mill and Nicky have rented a house in the lower Keys for five weeks during the spring tarpon season. His long black hair, streaked with only a few strands of white, sprouts from the top of his head and spills over his fishing visor. At sixty-three, he remains constantly at play (fishing, hunting, golfing, biking, skiing) and in great shape (he hiked a hundred miles bowhunting for elk last fall). He is exuberant and exceedingly warmhearted and loves to share his knowledge. Some of his fishing friends refer to Mill as Peter Pan. He made it look so easy and cool that everyone wanted to try it.” “He brought a lot of popularity to the sport, somewhat to my dismay as a guide. “As a tarpon angler, he’s so much better than anyone else that I’ve seen it’s almost unfair,” says Dustin Huff, a well-respected tarpon guide in the Keys. He wrote the must-have coffee-table book A Passion for Tarpon in 2010. Mill’s cast, even with the big tarpon rod and a twenty-five-mile-an-hour wind in his face, is graceful and unhurried, exactly how you picture the perfect cast (his girlfriend goes so far as to describe it as “sexy”). A man once paid $10,000 to fish with him (Mill donated the money to an Aspen ski club). In his best year, he landed 107 in just over fifty days of fishing. He has come up with game-changing innovations in the sport and improved on the work of others who came before him. He’s won more tarpon tournaments than anyone else. Five o’clock.”īut to those in a certain smallish but fanatical subset of this vast world, Mill is known primarily as one of the best tarpon fly anglers-if not the best-who ever lived. A few minutes later, with the Zen-like koan still bouncing around in my head, Mill suddenly and emphatically whispers: “Nicky. I look to the bow, where Mill’s son Nicky stands-compact and alert-his tarpon rod in his right hand, the fly in the fingers of his left. Without hesitating-or taking his eyes off the water-he answers, “You have to show the fly to the fish without him seeing it.” “Andy, what’s the key to being a great tarpon fly angler?” I decide to take advantage of that fact to ask Mill a question. A few tarpon are rolling in the distance, but nothing is happening near us. Ten other tarpon boats are within view, everyone, it seems, seeking the lee. A stiff wind luffs his camouflage fishing pants like a sail and threatens to whitecap the water even in this relatively protected inner basin in the Florida Keys. A ndy Mill stands on the poling platform in the stern of his Hell’s Bay flats boat, scanning the water before him, searching for signs of tarpon.

Andy mill.