Flip Pallot, whose avuncular narration and Hemingwayesque beard were the trademarks of a long-running ESPN fishing show, “The Walker’s Cay Chronicles,” which helped transform saltwater fly fishing — the pulse-pounding sport of hooking large fish with featherweight tackle — into a pursuit of stockbrokers and C.E.O.s, died on Aug. 26 in Thomasville, Ga. He was 83.
His family said the cause was complications of surgery.
Mr. Pallot, a Florida native, abandoned a banking career to become a professional fishing guide, TV host and technical consultant to fly-fishing gear makers, as well as a conservationist who worked to protect the Everglades and South Florida estuaries polluted by the sprawl of the megalopolis he called “My-AM-uh.”
The magazine Garden and Gun once pronounced him “arguably the most famous angler in the history of saltwater fly fishing.”
The American Museum of Fly Fishing called Mr. Pallot “one of fly fishing’s true greats.”
“The Walker’s Cay Chronicles” ran from 1992 to 2006 on Saturday mornings, with Mr. Pallot, its engaging, low-key host, telling tales of expeditions he took with other fishers in waters as close to home as the Florida Keys or as distant as New Guinea and Midway Atoll in the Pacific Ocean.
He invited viewers along on his adventures to “pit the smallest lures and the lightest rods against the toughest fish.”
The program inspired a generation of fly fishers to pursue the sport beyond their local freshwater trout streams. The destinations they sought out — the Bahamas, Costa Rica, Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean — required deep pockets.
“We’d watch the show in college, and then we couldn’t wait for spring break so we could go do this stuff we saw on television,” Ryan Seiders, a founder of Yeti coolers, told Garden and Gun magazine in 2017. “He helped bring about a new kind of lifestyle, an approach to fishing and travel and adventure that no one had seen before.”
When Mr. Seiders and his brother, Roy, founded Yeti in 2006, Mr. Pallot was its first brand ambassador.
Mr. Pallot had experienced his own epiphany as a young man when he first saw a fisherman in the Florida Keys using an ultralight fly rod to hook one of the ferocious sport fish, including bonefish, permit and tarpon, that frequent those shallow waters among the mangrove trees.
“We saw someone catch a bonefish on a fly rod in the Keys, and we had no idea what it was,” he told Anglers Journal in 2024. “It was just like some foreign witchcraft.”
The renowned fly fisher Lefty Kreh later visited a sportsman’s club Mr. Pallot belonged to, borrowed a fly rod from a man in the front row and stripped all the line off the reel. Using just his hands, he worked the line backward and forward overhead before shooting a cast of 70 feet.
Mr. Pallot and Mr. Kreh became friends and together made episodes of “The Walker’s Cay Chronicles.” The series was named for Walker’s Cay, a tiny island in the Bahamas, the home of a hotel with a marina that was a lead sponsor of the show.
Mr. Pallot’s narration was sincere if sometimes a bit hokey. He struck a nostalgic note for the disappearing ecosystems of Florida threatened by development and industrial agriculture.
“I launched my boat and set off into a world few know and none control,” he said in one episode about fishing in the Everglades on waters he had known since childhood. “Every channel, every lake and every pond is a different room, or a different passageway in a great house crafted by the wind and the water and the sun. There’s no place where I feel closer to myself than here, in this house called the backcountry.”
Paradoxically, Mr. Pallot’s youthful life was privileged, and he was groomed for a career in a boardroom.
Phillip Roger Pallot was born on June 6, 1942, in South Florida, the oldest of three children of William and Alberta (Tannenbaum) Pallot. His father, a judge, was appointed Miami city attorney in 1957 and later became chairman of the International Bank of Miami. He was also active in politics: He was a founder of Democrats for Eisenhower in 1952, and in 1960 he was treasurer of John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign in Florida.
Flip — the nickname came from his skill at making flip turns on a youth swim team — attended Windsor Mountain School in Lenox, Mass., Auburn University and the University of Miami. He was drafted into the Army and served in Central America from 1963 to 1967.
After returning home, he worked as a vice president at his father’s bank. But he chafed at the life that his background had set him up to pursue. Wearing a coat and tie to a bank “was physical and mental torture,” he later said, and the time spent making loans was “helping other people achieve their dreams, while watching mine wither.”
He yearned to be on the waters and in the woods, after a childhood exploring the Everglades and Biscayne Bay, whose abundant redfish and snapper he caught as a boy while floating on an air mattress.
In the 1980s, he quit his bank job to guide hunters and anglers full time. He was soon making guest appearances on outdoor television shows like ABC’s “American Sportsman.” He eventually created his own series, “The Saltwater Angler,” which ran for two years on TBS before “The Walker’s Cay Chronicles.”
In 1986, he married Diane Rabreau, a flight attendant he had met while guiding her on a fishing trip.
Hurricane Andrew in 1992 flattened their home in Homestead, Fla., and destroyed the necessities of Mr. Pallot’s livelihood: his fishing tackle, airboat, pickup truck and skiff. The couple relocated to Mims, Fla., near Cape Canaveral.
Mr. Pallot’s wife survives him, as do a daughter, Brooke Pallot, from his marriage to Suzanne Barnett; a granddaughter; and his brother, Scott Pallot.
The first episode of “The Walker’s Cay Chronicles” aired in 1992. At the time, outdoor shows had typically been built around a celebrity guest each week from the movies or the music business. Mr. Pallot’s idea for “The Walker’s Cay Chronicles” was to skip the Hollywood angle and narrate adventures with his fishing buddies, many of whom were among the world’s best.
“Flip’s show was different because he was different,” Mr. Kreh, who died in 2018, told Garden and Gun the previous year. “He used fishing to tell about the people who lived in these amazing places, and what the local culture was like, and how communities interacted with the environment. He didn’t sell tackle. He sold story, and there was nothing like it on television.”
Trip Gabriel is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
The post Flip Pallot, Banker Turned TV Fly Fishing Star, Dies at 83 appeared first on New York Times.
