"It is sad to think that Long Key, doomed by a hurricane, is gone forever. But the memory of that long white winding lonely shore of coral sand and the green surf, and the blue Gulf Stream will live in memory." Zane Grey, 1936.

The Long Key Fishing Club was a haven for the very wealthy from 1900 until the 1935 hurricane smashed down with great howling gusts and drowned the wreckage under 15 feet of ocean. The club was a legendary place where a harried tycoon could walk barefoot in the surf clad only in a ragged pair of shorts and a battered straw hat. This was a chance to be a boy again, skip shaving, forget your table manners and indulge in practical jokes.

These pleasures were dwarfed by the joy these visitors took in some of the finest flats fishing in the world. Bonefish, once memorably described as chain lightning married to dynamite, were the most highly regarded prey.

Perhaps the most famous Long Key Fishing Club member was Zane Grey, the nation's most popular western novelist at the time. His books sold in the millions from Texarkana to Tashkent. Interestingly enough, his most famous work, Riders of the Purple Sage, had appeared in Forest and Stream magazine in 1912.

Grey eventually wrote 89 books, including 56 westerns. Among the most popular were: The U.P. Express, The Thundering Herd and The Vanishing American. Hollywood produced more than 100 Zane Grey westerns, many featuring Randolph Scott.

One critic scathingly summed up the ingredients of a Zane Grey western as, "villains, virgins and varmints." Grey's readers were not dissuaded. They loved his strong silent hero, the knight errant in cowboy chaps who wielded a six-gun rather than a sword.

Zane Grey was a regular at Long Key Fishing Club from around 1910 until 1924. An all-around outdoors man who had hunted bear and roped cougars in the West, he also became one the world¹s most accomplished anglers. At one point he held 10 world saltwater records. He was the first to catch a thousand pound marlin on rod and reel, devised and perfected methods to catch the sly broadbill swordfish, preached catch-and-release long before it became popular and enthusiastically advocated light tackle for sailfish.

Fishing writer Ed Zern wrote in 1952 that, "No other man ... has devoted so much of his fortune, nor so large a share of his time and energy, to the catching of fish for the sport of it." Another admirer, George Reiger, selected and edited a collection of short stories titled: The Best of Zane Grey, Outdoorsman. He wrote in the introduction: "Not one in a hundred ... know him as an outdoors man and conservationist. Yet his personal life as hunter, fisherman and wanderer was far more romantic than that of any of his fictional characters.

"That is why the best of his writing are in effect diaries immortalizing a wild and rugged landscape that, even as he wrote, was being tamed and despoiled. Working against time like a painter hoping to fix an impression of a particular sunset, Zane Grey wrote for all of us who will never know an undeveloped Florida Keys or an undammed Rogue River."

Perhaps one of the best fishing stories ever written is Grey's "The Bonefish Brigade," which appeared in a 1922 issue of the Izaak Walton League Monthly.

This tale is an affectionate remembrance of Grey's Long Key fishing companions nicknamed "Rounddelay," "Loosfish," "The Lone Angler" and "Luckystickem."

"Loosfish was the most interesting one of this remarkable group," Grey wrote. "He was the eldest, a slight, serious-faced man, quite frail, and a very courteous and friendly and fine old gentleman, except upon return from fishing. Then he was energetic, violent and exceedingly profane. I gathered that, according to his own statement, he could not do anything but lose fish."

On another level this tale is brilliant in its evocation of the tingling excitement of fishing the flats. Grey wrote: "I was sinking into what may be termed bonefish oblivion ­ a combination of suspense, dream and sleep ­ when I had a tremendous strike. It sort of paralyzed me.

"Hey! Didn't your rod jerk?" yelled Lone Angler.

"Quiet!" I hissed, tensely.

"I waited until I could not wait anymore, perhaps a matter of a couple of endless seconds. ...I was unable to refrain from jerking.

"Sharp and hard I came up on a live weight. There was a quivering of my tight line. My rod bent double. The old thrill went over me, deep and wonderful sensation. Then the shallow water opened with a sodden thump and mud colored the spray. I had hooked a heavy bonefish."

Finally, after an epic struggle, the brave fish tires. Grey draws him close to the canoe where his companion waits expectantly, net in hand. The monster is captured and lies trembling in the bottom of the canoe:

" ... a gleaming silver and opal, with lavender tinted fins and tail, a most beautiful creature of the sea, and believe my eyes. I almost succumbed and let him go free." Grey sometimes spent weeks fishing at Long Key. Moody, often petulant, the stern-visaged Grey was essentially a lonely man. But the writer had long before discovered that fishing was the perfect antidote to depression. He drew spiritual nourishment from the tranquil and sublime intoxicant of sea, sky and drifting clouds.

The one-time Ohio dentist fished the world: wading the flats off Long Key, trolling for marlin off New Zealand and battling giant sharks off Tahiti. He was among the first sport anglers to explore the rich marine resources of Mexico, Central America, South America, Newfoundland, Tahiti, Australia and New Zealand.

The pristine, almost untouched wonder of those places survive in Grey's superb fishing books: Tales of Fishes, An American Angler in Australia, Tales of Southern Rivers, Tales of Fishing Virgin Seas, Tales of an Angler's Eldorado ­ New Zealand, Tales of Swordfish and Tuna and Tales of Fresh Water Fishing.

Florida figures prominently in Tales of Southern Rivers, which, in part, vividly records the wild splendor observed during a tarpon fishing expedition up the Shark River Slough deep into the Everglades.

Rivers of the Everglades, large and small, broke the hard green phalanx, where they emptied their dark water into the Gulf," Grey wrote. "Mystery hovered over this forbidden place, neither land nor water nor forest, yet a combination of all three. ..."

"We glided down shaded lanes where we had to bend our heads to escape the low-spreading branches. Deep creeks of amber water ... where ducks and cranes and herons rose, and fish splashed. We saw numerous alligators ... sliding off the banks. In and out and around we went, through this labyrinthine web of waterways. ...

"Soon we began to see the flocks of birds, like white clouds, rising from the trees, and knew we were nearing the wonderful rookery of curlew. So we put away our rods for our cameras. ... Banks of foliage as white with curlew as if with heavy snow! ... Almost a waterfall of white birds." Fittingly, in 1939, the writer of cowboy tales and fishing adventures died with a fishing rod in his hand at his Catalina Island estate.

Miami Herald outdoor columnist Jim Hardie recently praised Grey¹s considerable contributions to Florida¹s sport fishing heritage.

"He was the first angler to put the Florida Keys on the national map," Hardie wrote, also claiming that Grey was "the first fisherman in history to catch snook and tarpon on fly rod in the Keys."

Furthermore, Long Key was where Grey caught his first sailfish, his first permit and his first bonefish. Hardie advocates the construction of an appropriate monument on Long Key honoring the memory of Zane Grey: Angler, Conservationist, Writer.