There's a corner of a neighborhood pond in Northeast Florida that shaped everything Jadon Mattox is as a fisherman. He couldn't tell you exactly how old he was the first time he walked down to it. Just that he went often, that his dad and brother were usually there, and that for an embarrassingly long stretch of his childhood he believed, genuinely believed, there was only one lure worth throwing.
A watermelon red Zoom 6" Lizard. Slow. Deliberate. Fished right into that corner.
His dad had him fully convinced. Jadon had no reason to question it.
Bikes and retention ponds
The neighborhood pond eventually gave way to something bigger, or smaller, depending on how you look at it. Jacksonville sprawls in every direction, and tucked inside all of that sprawl are golf course ponds and retention basins that most people drive past without a second thought. Jadon and his friends treated them like treasure maps.
They rode bikes to get there. They pooled money into tackle. They kept score, most fish, biggest fish, weirdest lure. The competition wasn't organized or official. It didn't need to be. They'd hammer a spot until it dried up and then ride somewhere else.
"We were completely obsessed and never wasted a second," Jadon says. "Days like that went by so fast."
He's a first-grade teacher now. He fishes the intracoastal waterways of Jax Beach on his days off, mostly spin and fly. He's measured, thoughtful, good at his job. But spend five minutes talking to him about those retention pond days and something else comes through, the kind of uncomplicated joy that most adults spend the rest of their lives trying to locate again.
"Looking back, those might have been the best moments of my life."
The night before
The competition has faded. What replaced it is harder to explain but easier to recognize if you've felt it yourself.
It starts the night before. You check the tides on your day off and they're perfect, not pretty good, perfect, and something in your chest loosens and tightens at the same time. You pull up a map. You start placing pins. You can already see the flat at first light, the way the water will look pushing over the grass, where the fish are going to be.
You set an alarm you don't need.
Morning comes and you're skipping breakfast to get to the ramp faster. You drive over the bridge and there's water in every direction and it all looks right. The whole day is still ahead of you and nothing has gone wrong yet.
"Those moments before it all begins are filled with pure optimism and possibility," Jadon says. "That gut feeling that it's about to be something special, that feeling never gets old."
For him, that's the thing. Not the catch. The anticipation. The unmarked hour between pulling out of the driveway and the first cast, when the day is still everything you imagined it could be.
What the water actually teaches
Jadon doesn't dress it up.
"No matter how much you do, you're still at the mercy of countless uncontrollable factors."
He prepares. He ties flies, checks the forecast, maps the water. And sometimes the fish simply aren't there and none of it matters. He's made peace with that, or he's working on it, which is probably the more honest version. Either way, the lesson stuck.
"You have to learn how to accept, appreciate, and enjoy failure," he says. "There's no way to guarantee success, and that's taught me to value the small moments and take pride in the little victories."
He applies the same logic to time. The excuse most people reach for, I just don't have time to fish, doesn't hold up when he looks at it honestly.
"The truth is, we do have time," he says. "We just have to own the fact that a lot of it gets wasted being distracted or lazy."
It's a sharp thing to say. Sharper because he includes himself in it.
The honest bucket list
He hasn't caught a bonefish yet. That one's been sitting on the list.
It's not the permit. Permit are the obvious answer for a fly angler building a bucket list, and Jadon respects the challenge, he just doesn't feel it. Too stubborn. Too much of a fight for the sake of fighting.
The bone is different. It moves like a redfish. It rewards preparation and patience and the willingness to make one good cast when the opportunity shows itself.
"Fair and honest," he says. "Where if you play your cards right and seize the opportunity, you'll be rewarded."
They're also caught in beautiful places, which doesn't hurt.
If he could be anywhere tomorrow it'd be the Florida Keys, not the most exotic answer, he'll acknowledge that. But that bridge off the mainland has been doing something to him since he was a kid, and some places just mean something to you and that's that.
The real worry
What keeps Jadon thinking isn't his casting or his fly selection or the bonefish he hasn't caught yet. It's simpler and heavier than any of that.
He wants to take his kid to the creeks he grew up on. He wants his kid to feel what he felt, lost in the water, inside a city, in a place that still has some wildness left in it. And he's not sure that place will still exist when the time comes.
"That's starting to feel like a real possibility," he says. "Keeping these places clean and wild is what matters most."
More fish would be great. But the water itself, that's the thing worth protecting.
He keeps a Jimmy Buffett quote around for the noise that comes with comparing yourself to other people, other anglers, other lives: "I really wish I could play guitar like Eric Clapton, but then again, maybe Eric Clapton wishes he could cast a fly rod like I do."
It's a good reminder. The pond you grew up on made you who you are. The watermelon red lizard wasn't a mistake. It was the whole beginning.
Sean Nguyen (@vin_nguyen)