Join Kau Tapen Group’s Doug Larsen for a week at Mayazul Lodge
Doug might be our in-house permit expert, and his enthusiasm for permit is unbridled. He will be fishing Mayazul the week of July 24-31, 2025, and has room for up to six anglers for a week that he has handpicked for moon, tides, and because it falls after the Ascension Bay Fishery has rested for several weeks. The focus is on permit, but in the summer months tarpon in the 30-100 pound class are well distributed, and bonefish are prevalent. Mayazul is perfectly located on “permit alley.”
Contact Doug by mailing douglas@nervouswaters.com
Doug Larsen has been with The Kautapen Group in some capacity since the very beginning, and he has guided, developed or managed, sporting properties across the globe for over 40 plus years. He recently returned from a trip to Punta Allen and instead of filing the usual trip report, he sent us the following story which we hope you’ll enjoy.
Permit Vibe
By Doug Larsen
Thirty-something years ago I had the opportunity to visit a guy in the Catskills that was something of a trout fishing legend. You might know his name, although he labored largely in obscurity somewhat adjacent to the angling press. His world revolved around catching difficult trout, and he was very successful- legendary successful. He’d lay on his stomach in shallow riffles to present tiny emergers to big trout that fed in tail outs, and he would routinely catch them on highly pressured water. I once saw him catch a big fish on a tiny dry fly, after watching the fish for days and determining that the fish was blind in one eye and rose only up and to the right-never left. This man was consumed with the minutia of selective trout fishing, and I eventually wandered away from his place thinking, how could anyone be that wrapped up in one specific pursuit?
Scroll the clock forward some years, and I live a very normal and wonderful life with a great wife, highly successful kids, and a nice lawn that I cut myself. I have been blessed to have fished in many, many places for dozens of species. But on any given day, when I lay my head on the cold pillow at night I mostly think about permit. I think about them tailing with fins out of the water like shining paring knives slicing through the surface. I think about trustworthy knots, and I think about permit swirling crazily behind a dark string ray, and I think about schools of permit on the flats pushing a bulge of nervous water I can see from hundreds of yards away on a slick day. I think about the crucial timing of a strip set, with a long pull ending near my right hip while my raghead crab is in the permit’s rubbery mouth, but before he has expelled it with a pint of water. My free time is spent making long casts into gallon buckets on windy days in my side yard, and my forearms are strengthened not only by casting, but from carrying Johnathan Olch’s heavy two-volume set of permit books back and forth from my desk to my easy chair. I weigh my flies on a tiny gram scale of the type drug dealers appear to be using when the cops crash through the door on Law and Order type television shows. I scratch my head over bead chain eyes or lead dumbbells, and I have never watched an inning of televised baseball when I have not been tying leaders that terminate in a long arm’s length of 16- pound fluorocarbon. I have tested the sink rate of various crab flies in wash tubs, bathtubs, and the neighbor’s pool and I have enough invested in 10 weight fly lines to have easily afforded a pool of my own had I made wiser decisions or not succumbed to “textured line” marketing. So, on reflection, watching a trout that is blind in one eye doesn’t seem so weird.
This obsession with permit and permit fishing has led me to the truly sleepy town of Punta Allen which is on the east coast of Mexico on a big thumb-shaped peninsula of land that sticks out into the Gulf pointed at Cuba. Far south of the neon wrist-banded resort madness that is Cancun, and still south of the thumping EDM music of Tulum where tattooed tourists in sleeveless t-shirts ride rented scooters past open air vendors of growth hormones and erection pills. You follow the only dirt road that glimpses the ocean until it leaves you just on the verge of carsickness, and eventually it leads to the Sian Ka’an biosphere, a well-kept National Park with a nondescript entrance. From there you can get to Punta Allen by boat and it’s a breezy ride through mangrove-lined basins populated by turtles and porpoises. Eventually you will idle to a dock on the bay side where it’s just a short ride for both you and your luggage in the bed of a small truck that will take you to your lodge of choice.
After fishing permit in many places where permit are often a haughty side hustle to scuba diving or piracy, I have fallen deeply in love with the vibe in this small town, which is home to a handful of permit lodges. When not fishing it’s an easy and friendly town to walk, and there are a few open-air bars, including one that advertises a free tequila shot if you have caught a permit that day, an adorably tiny catholic church, and the most touristy establishment in town, a stand-up coffee shop whose large sign advises you to “Be Fucking Nice.” In the town square there’s a playground and a sand soccer field that is walled like a hockey rink, both donated and built by fly fishing companies, and in the evenings after fishing it’s enjoyable to sip a beer, take in a little local football and watch balls go into goals sponsored by Yellow Dog and the Palometa Club. Just outside the soccer complex in the center of town is an ornate metal statue, and children park their bikes near it and sit on the base so they can view the soccer just beyond. While you might expect the statue to feature Juarez or perhaps Santa Anna with sword drawn on horseback, that’s not the vibe here. The statue is a of a large permit depicted in a posture that is angled downward, as if to suggest that this giant metal fish the size of a sedan is about to pick your crab off the marled sea grass bottom of one of Ascension Bay’s flats, a pleasant thought as you stroll the dirt road back to your lodgings to dream of just that kind of episode, as waves lap the beach and giant moths swarm the pale streetlights in the dusk.
In Punta Allen the permit vibe is everywhere, from guides in sun-bleached lodge swag to kids in Simms t-shirts, and waif-sized grandmas in polarized Costa’s. It’s not a tourist town unless you are one of the few tourists that came here packing a quiver of 10 weights and three pairs of your own Costa’s. If you aren’t here to fish permit, there is little else to do unless you favor dominoes in the shade or watching slack-skinned dogs amble dirt streets. Permit are the subject of most conversations, and in the evening, the most frequently asked question on the streets is, “How’d you do?” This town exists almost solely to support fishing lodges that comprise a catch and release permit factory along a coastline that has been dubbed the “Permit Riviera” and “Permit Alley.” Like many other anglers I came to tour the factory.
I don’t know if getting out of the boat for shots at permit originated here, or if it originated in the Keys and spread here, but guides in both locales seemed to start doing it at about the same time. In any case, that’s the way you fish here, out of the boat if possible. You leave the lodge in a large panga, kitted out for flats fishing and you are poled by your guide. But in addition to the guide who is poling, you’ll have another guide that is standing on the deck of the panga with you, and he also scans the flats as you pole down sun. In addition to serving as another set of eyes my second guide is also responsible for keeping tabs on the pile of loose fly line I have scattered around the deck, and he tends to it like a bridesmaid marshalling a bride’s veil, keeping loops apart and watching for anything that might threaten a tangle. But upon seeing permit we apply the brakes and slip over the high side of the panga to wade the last few hundred feet for our shot and that is where I am now, rib deep in the bathtub warm water of permit alley where a school of about twelve fish are tailing in a lazy circle in the slightly shallower water just a long cast in front of me. I have cast at literally hundreds of permit and I recall thinking that somewhere in my core I should summon calm and I began long childbirth-worthy exhales to try to control my breathing-but the feeling of being in proximity of a band of these silver fish is electric. Careful to keep the fly line from hovering above the school I release a long cast just ahead of the nervous water and it unfurls as I drop my tip and collect my loose line. My can of Zyn has come out of my pants pocket and floats freely in front of me, which gives an odd shipwreck feel to the episode but I refocus as the fish are now over the fly as the guide on my shoulder advises “strip long,” but I have already started slipping the white line under my index finger when I sense that the nail knot connecting leader to line has stopped, then the line comes tight and my hand is at my hip and there is hard tension and my guide is watching loose line rip from the surface and soon this permit is on the reel as fine yellow backing points like a laser beam to a spot in the water that is suddenly farther and farther away. Time stops for me during the fight, but in some minutes, I have the permit in my grasp and I feel the strength in the wrist of the fish just ahead of his black forked power plant of tail. After the permit swims off I remove my hat and submerge myself fully into the waters of the bay, baptizing myself in the waters, and the vibe, that lies just off the coast of Punta Allen.
