On a recent episode (#41) of the Fly Fisherman Loop to Loop podcast, Ross Purnell, Publisher/Editor of Fly Fisherman Magazine, sits down with close friend Ben Annibali, fly fishing filmmaker, photographer, climber and professional flight nurse for Penn State Health Life Lion Critical Care Transport operating out of Southcentral Pennsylvania. This podcast is especially timely because of the recent re-release on the Fly Fisherman YouTube channel of the short film "The Shoals," which was produced by Ben Annibali and chronicles Purnell's trip of a lifetime to fish for giant trevally in the remote coral archipelago of St. Brandon Atoll northeast of the island nation of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean.
"Ben Annibali has been a big part of the magazine, especially in the last year," said podcast host Ross Purnell. "I met Ben when he was 16 years old and first learning to rock climb [rock climbing and ice climbing are two of Purnell's other outdoor passions]. We've been friends ever since, and for years I tried to get him interested in fly fishing but to no avail. But that all changed when we made a climbing trip a few years back to Wyoming's Wind River Range and Ben and my other climbing friends became a captive audience for some impromptu fly-fishing lessons. That's all it took."
Having the opportunity to see and appreciate how much effort goes into fly fishing finally captured Annibali's curiosity. "Seeing how active it was," began Annibali, "seeing how many things go into fly fishing. It's not just the spot, getting to the spot. I just remember being blown away by your [Purnell's] looking in the bushes for what bugs were around, the time of day, what part of the lake you were fishing, and so for me it was very stimulating and very complex, and it still is, and so immediately, just like climbing or anything else that I enjoy as a hobby, the more complex the sport or the hobby is, the more I enjoy it because when it all comes together I find it to be much more rewarding."
A couple of years later, Purnell and Annibali went on another climbing trip to Yosemite National Park in California's Sierra Nevada mountains, and they also found time to fly fish. "It was amazing," Annibali confided. "…That was about a year or two later, and I was very much still learning, but that was the first time I felt like I could go out by myself and actually connect with fish. After Wind River, coming back here to Pennsylvania and trying to fish and figure out what they were eating, it was very hard, it was very hard to land a fish. Then going to Yosemite was amazing. I thought it would be a lot harder to catch a fish there, to be honest, but I mean, you showed us where and how, and we kind of went out on our own every day after climbing."
That was also Purnell and Annibali's first experiment in filmmaking. Ben had just bought a new video camera and wanted to try filming. "We had planned a primarily rock-climbing trip, but it turned out to be unseasonably warm out there with really low flows, and we figured we're going to need a rest day, I mean we can't climb in 80-90 degrees all day, so a few days before we left you came up with this idea of rappelling down Yosemite Falls, mainly for fun and to just get wet because it was going to be so hot, and I forget how you discovered it, but you had heard that in those pools there could be trout, so if we're going to go through all that trouble, we should try to film it. And I had a Sony camera overnighted two or three days before we left and spent the next two days learning how to use a brand-new platform that I'd never used and trying to think about how I would capture this rappelling down waterfalls and swimming with backpacks to use the equipment."
The resulting film, "Descent" is also available on Fly Fisherman's YouTube channel.
"I didn't know it at the time," explained Annibali, "but I think that video really kicked off in changing what I do, my life for the better, and that showed me there's a lot in fly fishing yet to be discovered, yet to be documented, and a lot of cool stuff that you can do. I can't think of a bigger adventure than that, especially [from the standpoint of] doing it and trying to capture it – except 'The Shoals.'"
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Annibali had proven himself during filming of "Descent," and Purnell knew that he would leap at the opportunity to travel more than halfway around the globe to film sight fishing for giant trevally on the rugged and remote shoals of St. Brandon Atoll.
In answer to Purnell's question about the challenges he faced in filming "The Shoals," Annibali said, "Well, when we got there, just from Minute 1, plugging the equipment in shut down everything that was powered on the island. Sparks flew, I heard yelling, 'What the?' We'd taken a 30-hour boat ride; we were 300 miles from nowhere. So, literally everything you need, you need to take with [you] and plan for backups. Ask yourself, 'If this fails, what are you going to do? What's the priority? I knew that I wanted to capture basically cinematic, documentary-style film or footage, so that required a lot of different pieces of camera equipment and audio and some things that just didn't exist. I knew that I wanted to capture audio moments of you actually catching the fish so that the viewers could hear the line, the reel, the dialog with guides. I knew that there would be times where that would be from a couple hundred feet in the air from a drone, where there is no audio, so how are we going to do this? How do we keep audio packs dry? How do we record audio on you when you're hundreds of yards away from the boat and wading through the surf and swimming?
"So, I came up with just some waterproof audio packs with transmitters and then recorders that stayed dry, and then pinned microphones to you and the guide, two of them every day, so there was always a backup. That was probably the biggest hurdle to leaving, or the prep work, to make sure that was all going to work, which thankfully it did. I think that's one of the things that makes the film really special, because every piece of drone footage that you see is the real audio. It's not just a 'Oh, this looks, this will match up, this random audio clip will work, they won't be able to tell…' No, it's 100 percent real! And that was, of course, difficult to capture. The other thing is, I'm alone. I'm trying to do everything. The guides helped a little bit with holding some cameras now and again. But essentially, it was the whole gamut: drones, cinema camera, three different Sony cameras, an underwater camera, a full-frame underwater camera and housing that you can go swimming with to capture some of the coral shots, some of the release shots, laptops, charging stations, batteries, you name it. I could go on and on. It was a lot of Pelican cases, a lot of transportation every day just getting that equipment on a boat and getting there..."
"What I thought we were going to get, and what we got," admitted Annibali, "was much different, and for the better. I feel like there's a lot of films that, or just trips, where everything goes right, fish after fish, we got lucky, we got perfect weather – not that that's not real – but we had the opportunity to show what truly happened on this trip, which is how hard it is to fish in this environment. So, we were able to show that through days of attempting to hook up with a GT. So, on the film you'll see multiple different angles, from the air, from the boat, where you can actually see a GT come in and eat the fly and get scared, scared off, how they swim, how we find them, and just the struggle, and how the interactions with the guides go, which I think is far different than what I expected, but it's the reality of it, and it's good."
"I'm so glad that friend and filmmaker Ben Annibali was able to find time in his busy schedule to stop by the Fly Fisherman office to talk with me. It was great to talk about some of our other climbing and fly-fishing trips we've shared, to remember our first filming effort at Yosemite Falls, which resulted in the short film 'Descent,' and to talk about the incredibly unique challenge of trying to capture the sequence of wading across coral flats to locate a GT alongside a big, brown shark and to cast accurately in very difficult conditions and catch that GT on a fly. I'm so thankful that Ben accepted that challenge, and I'm sure our audience will enjoy our resulting short film 'The Shoals.' Rest assured that Ben and I are planning our next fly-fishing film adventure. I'd invite listeners to visit Fly Fisherman's YouTube channel to experience The Shoals.
Available on Apple Podcast, YouTube, Spotify, and at FlyFisherman.com the latest episode of Fly Fisherman Loop to Loop podcast is a must-listen for fly fishing enthusiasts of all levels who want to stay informed.
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