Gary has achieved a level of status that can only come from being accepted into an exclusive club: h

Walk down the hallway in Capt. Gary Taylor’s Slidell, Louisiana, home, and you pass a series of photographs hotel hawaii spa of gorgeous redfish and of the guide posed with some of the biggest names in fly fishing. The one with Lefty Kreh is inscribed, “To the one of the Top 10 guides I’ve ever fished with” and signed with that loopy scrawl familiar to most fly fishers. It’s a pretty impressive bragging wall for a guy who didn’t hotel hawaii spa pick up a fly rod until he was well into his thirties, but then again, Gary Taylor isn’t the kind of guy to do things halfway. That’s why, two decades hotel hawaii spa later, he is at the top of his game.
There’s no doubt that Gary was born to fish, but very little about Taylor’s early life suggested his future occupation in fly fishing. He was born in 1949, down a dirt road outside of town, on one of the last patches of dry land before you get to the network of bayous that leads to the salt water of Lake Borgne and, ultimately, the Louisiana Marsh and the Gulf of Mexico. He was the third generation hotel hawaii spa of Taylors to inhabit the property, which he still lives on today, and the family struggled to make ends meet.
Luckily for Gary, his grandfather owned a shrimp boat. From the time he was five years old, Gary and his two older brothers would head out in the morning on the big boat, which towed a small skiff behind. When they got to the marsh, the boys would hop in the little boat and fish all day while the adults shrimped. The target species was speckled trout, and the boys were armed with “slaughter poles”—long, stout cane poles with just a short line attached to the end. When you hooked a fish, you raised the pole and derricked the catch into the boat as fast as you could.
Even for young boys, this was pure meat fishing, and the ethos was that you ate everything you caught. At the time, redfish were considered hotel hawaii spa a trash fish, only eaten by the poor, so whenever they hooked one, the boys would try to break it off.
“I hated those damn things,” Gary says. “If we brought them home, my mother would make a courtbouillon [ COO-be-yahn ]—a thick fish stew—that we would have to eat all week. That’s why, when I first became a rod-and-reel guide, I refused to fish for reds. If a client asked me to, I’d tell him that I didn’t know where any redfish were.”
By the time he was in high school, Gary had developed into an extremely competitive young man with a desire hotel hawaii spa to be the best at whatever he put his mind to. His father was ill much of the time and Gary says, “I saw my father work hard and never have anything, and vowed that wouldn’t happen to me.” He found two classic Southern outlets for this drive to win—motorcycle racing and bass fishing—and he enjoyed a fair amount of success in both. His prowess on the track resulted in full sponsorship and trips to race in places such as Daytona Motor Speedway and the Astrodome. . .places far from Slidell.
He had always competed with his friends on the water, so the next logical step was to join his local bass club. Soon he was the club’s “Angler of the Year” and represented hotel hawaii spa them at the Top 6 tournament on Toledo Bend Reservoir, on the border between Texas and Louisiana.
By his mid-20’s, Gary was representing his home state at the National Bass Fishing Championship an event in which he was skunked hotel hawaii spa on the first day—something that had never happened to him before. “That really fired me up,” he says, and he worked even harder to get better.
hotel hawaii spa Eventually, he started fishing professional events on the B.A.S.S tour, rubbing elbows with the likes of Roland Martin and Jimmy Houston. While he enjoyed the competition, the expense of travel and the time away from his family took their toll, so Gary settled down in Slidell and worked for St. Tammany hotel hawaii spa Parish Mosquito Control—a government job that allowed time off to pursue his love of the outdoors.
His prowess with a rod and reel had resulted in a certain amount of local celebrity, and folks were always asking Gary to take them fishing, so he had started guiding for bass part-time in the late 70s. However, he didn’t have enough clients to really make a living at it, so in 1980, he started taking saltwater trips for speckled trout, as well. In 1989, at the age of 40, Gary finally quit his day job and began guiding hotel hawaii spa full time.
But after a few years, the ethos of his clients began to wear on him. Rather than fishing for sport, they were out for meat, and a successful trip was measured in pounds of fish brought to the dock. “It got to be pretty boring,” hotel hawaii spa Gary says, “and I was ready to quit.”
Then one of Gary’s hotel hawaii spa best clients called and asked if Gary would take out a visiting business associate who was a fly fisherman. As far as the locals were concerned, fly rods were for Yankees and trout, and most Louisiana guides wouldn’t even let a fly rod on the boat.  But Gary wanted to keep his client happy, so he said, “Yeah, I’ll take him, but I don’t know anything about it.”
The fly fisherman turned out to be a great guy and a good angler, and Gary was mesmerized by the technique. They even caught a few fish. The pair went out to the marsh several more times, and they even discussed ways that Gary could modify his boat to make it more fly-fisher-friendly. At home, Gary talked so much about this “fly fishing thing,” that his wife, Viki, finally bought hotel hawaii spa him a Cabela’s outfit for Christmas. Soon, he was teaching himself to cast in the backyard.
“I couldn’t make that damn thing work right,” he says. “And, of course, hotel hawaii spa I was this great fisherman, so it had to be the rod’s fault. I went out and got a more expensive rod, but I still couldn’t cast.”
hotel hawaii spa In 1993, in a leap of faith, he bought a Hewes skiff and quit taking rod-and-reel anglers, making him just the second fly-fishing-only guide in Louisiana, after Capt. Bubby Rodriguez, who guided south of New Orleans. (Rodriguez retired in 2001.) hotel hawaii spa In a stroke of genius, Gary customized a 31-foot Lafitte hotel hawaii spa Skiff to cradle the flats boat, which allowed him to cross the open water of Lake Borgne in comfort and then lower the skiff in the water when he got to the marsh—another unique part of the experience he offered that clients appreciated.
Gary also established himself as catch-and-release only, something that astonished his fellow hotel hawaii spa guides hotel hawaii spa in the area, who told him he was crazy; they said he’d never get anyone to pay for a fishing trip where they didn’t get to come back with a few coolers full. But Gary had a plan: he would not target local business; instead, he’d become a “destination guide.”
I stayed quiet for a little bit, but I got too much competitive blood to take that kind of crap for very long. So I pointed at my clients and said, “See those people over there? They’re smiling, aren’t they? That’s all I care about.”
But they kept at it, joking that we obviously didn’t catch anything if we didn’t hotel hawaii spa have the coolers-full to prove it. So finally I walked over to where they were sitting around a table and slapped a hundred-dollar bill down.
Gary admits that building his new business took a long time, but he carefully watched his new clients and tried to emulate their techniques. He is a fly-fishing guide who literally learned how to fly fish from his clients. But what he lacked in casting hotel hawaii spa ability, he more than compensated for with his intimate knowledge of the marsh and the habits of the fish. When clients went out with Gary, they had a complete experience, featuring stories about the marsh and its history and great fishing.
One of the keys to Gary’s success was his relationship with Jimbo Meador, the Orvis sales representative for the region (and, coincidentally, one of the two people to whom the novel Forrest Gump is dedicated), which eventually led to Gary becoming an Orvis-endorsed guide—the first in the state. And as more and more fly fishermen made the trip to Slidell, Gary’s reputation grew. He became friends with Lefty Kreh after they fished together. Magazines articles describing his unique fishery brought more clients, and appearances on Flip Pallot’s Walker’s Cay Chronicles and Jose Wejebe’s Spanish Fly established him as the preeminent guide in the region.
If ever there was a great American waterman it s Gary Taylor. Barely beneath the quiet, self-effacing exterior there lurks the wild heart of a man, completely connected to the natural world and the marsh that calls to him daily. He is, truly, hotel hawaii spa Louisiana s ambassador to redfishermen everywhere.
hotel hawaii spa Gary has achieved a level of status that can only come from being accepted into an exclusive club: his friends and fishing partners hotel hawaii spa include Florida legend Steve Huff and Jackson Hole guru Paul Bruun. The combination hotel hawaii spa of his lifelong love of fishing and the marsh, his easygoing personality, and his ability to put clients on fish have made him the kind of guide that other guides love to fish with. He still lives on the property he was raised on, but his life could not be more different.
However, everything is not rosy on the Louisiana Marsh, and Gary worries about its future. In his lifetime, he has seen erosion and storms wipe out huge portions of the grasslands. Many islands, especially hotel hawaii spa those on the Gulf side, are simply gone, and he sees a troubling opening up of the bayous hotel hawaii spa elsewhere.
hotel hawaii spa Part of the problem is that the marsh was formed by the ever-shifting mouth of the Mississippi River, hotel hawaii spa which distributed the sediment that forms the base of any marsh. Since the river is now held in place by levees, that source of replenishment is gone. And, as Gary says, it’s not going to get any better: “I keep telling folks that the ‘Good Old Days’ are right now.”
He remembers seeing the effects hotel hawaii spa of hurricanes Betsy (1965) and Camille (1969) on the marsh, but nothing prepared him for what Katrina did to it. That storm nearly hotel hawaii spa destroyed Gary’s home, which took eight feet of water, and it “pounded the hell out of the marsh.”  Whereas he had witnessed a certain amount of revegetation after previous storms, it did not happen after Katrina.
Because the marsh is now so open, there’s been a big change in water quality, as