Becoming The Borskis

BY MONTE BURKE

There are, by my count, approximately 10,385 stories about Tim Borski, the Islamorada-based artist/fly-tier/naturalist/ homme amusant. My favorite among the select few that are T printable in a family publication involves a baseball card.

It goes something like this: When Borski was 16 years old, he lived in a cabin in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, in the central part of the state. Though he was in school, much of his energies were focused elsewhere. Whenever and wherever he could, Borski, along with some of his friends, hunted grouse, woodcock and ducks and fished for smallmouth bass and brook trout, slaking a seemingly insatiable thirst for anything outdoors. On occasion, the boys tried to slake another thirst as well.

One late afternoon, after a day spent tramping through the woods, Borski and his buddies decided to go to a bar in Stevens Point. Borski, however, did not have a fake ID, which would have been his ticket in.

But he did have a plan, one that displayed an early penchant for audacious creativity. At the door of the bar, when asked by the bouncer for ID, Borski first delivered an impish grin. And then he reached into his pocket and handed over a Chili Davis baseball card.

The bouncer looked incredulous as he stared at the picture of the great Jamaican-American baseball player. “Man, this is a baseball card,” the bouncer said. “And, man, you’re not even black!”

Without missing a beat, Borski replied: “Yeah, but ask me how many RBIs I had last season.”

The bouncer shook his head, smiled, handed the card back to Borski and let him in.

**

From his childhood to his early 20s, the 12,700-acre Buena Vista Marsh, just a few miles from Stevens Point, was Borski’s playground. He hunted its grasslands for birds and fished its spring-fed ditches for brook trout. “I spent so much time there,” he says. “It is such a great place.” It was also, as the name suggests, his first true panorama, something he would realize later in life that was of some great importance to him.

After high school, Borski worked in a couple of factories—one produced pre-made fireplaces and the other produced furniture. “I was a terrible employee,” he says, a recurring theme in his life. At one of the factories, Borski had a boss who had been there for 27 years. One day Borski asked him about his salary. “The guy was only making $1.65 more an hour than I was,” says Borski. “The next morning I went to the local arts university and applied for a student loan. I had no idea what I wanted to do other than not work in a factory.” He took a class that was “basically Watercolor 101” and thought: “This fits me.”

Tim Borski’s studio.

Tim Borski

He would never finish his degree at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. One nice April day, after a long Wisconsin winter, Borski went fishing on a nearby river and caught a boatload of smallmouth bass. “I was so excited to get back out there again the next day,” he says. “I went to bed early that night, woke up and called work and coughed and said I couldn’t make it and grabbed my rods. Then I opened the door and there were nine inches of snow on the ground. I just lost it.”

Borski with a permit on fly.

Tim Borski

Borski says he went immediately to his bank, took out all of his student loan money and then bought a round-trip plane ticket to Miami. “I’d read about bonefish in my dad’s old Sports Afield magazines,” he says. “I decided that I was going to catch one or go broke trying.” In Miami, he called around to tackle shops to try to find a bonefish guide. Everyone told him he had to book the famous Bill Curtis. As luck would have it, Curtis had a cancellation one day and took Borski out. “I struggled all day long, but Bill got me a bonefish right at the end of the trip,” says Borski. “I just couldn’t believe how far and how fast and long that fish ran. I was blown away.” That night, he says, on the way back to his hotel room, “I stopped at a 7-Eleven to buy a six-pack of longnecks and ripped up my return ticket and threw it in a green dumpster.” It was 1983 and he was 23 years old.

The next day, Borski got a job stocking shelves at a Toys “R” Us. “I caught the same kid trying to steal something three times and thought, ‘this isn’t the job for me,’” he says. He then applied for a job at an arts and crafts store run by a woman named Pat Oblak. “I had to take a lie detector test for the job,” says Borski. “The first question was ‘have you ever smoked pot?’ and I said, ‘um, noooo.’” He got the job anyway, and worked four days a week and spent the rest of the time fishing in the Keys, first under the bridges for tarpon and snook. “I just fell in love with the big vista of the Keys,” he says. “I live for wide-open spaces.”

It so happened that Pat’s husband, Frank, was a fairly wellknown fisherman. Frank had injured his back fighting a tarpon and sold Borski his fly-tying material. “I had never tied a fly before, but Frank walked me through some of the basics and away I went,” says Borski. “That fit me, too.”

One day in 1986, Pat introduced Borski to a Keys fishing guide named Randy Towe. Towe looked at some of the flies Borski was creating, took him tarpon fishing with a fly for the first time and then offered him a job at his new tackle shop, World Class Outfitters. Borski accepted the offer and moved to the Keys. “I was a terrible salesman, but I got to meet all of the players, like Chico, Flip and Lefty,” says Borski.

He lasted about four years there and says he realized that the gig was up one day when he was approached by Towe’s wife in the shop. The Towes’ golden retriever shop dog had been mysteriously losing the hair on its tail. “Randy’s wife looked at me and said, ‘the vet says the dog doesn’t have mange,’” says Borski. “And then she handed me the vet bill.” Borski said he had indeed been snipping off the dog’s hair to use for his squid patterns.

By this time, though, the greater fishing world had taken notice of his flies, which were known not for their “true-to-life” designs, but for their impressionistic bugginess. His first commercial pattern was a bonefish fly named the Captain Korn’s Grizzly Bone-er. (“I really wanted to see the word ‘boner’ listed on a fly at a fly shop,” he says.) Other flies, like the Bonefish Slider, No-Name Shrimp, Critter Crab and the Chernobyl Crab soon followed, and were carried by many fly shops in south Florida. Jimmy Buffett once called Borski to order some flies for a Bahamas trip. “I told him I was going to tie his flies on some shitty hooks,” says Borski. “He asked me why. I said ‘Margaritaville.’” (Borski ended up tying them on good hooks, anyway.)

Borski’s famous Captain Korn’s Grizzly Bone-er.

Tim Borski

As Borski neared the end of his tenure at World Class Outfitters, the fishing rep, Raz Reid, convinced him to pitch his patterns to Umpqua Feather Merchants. And by the time he left that shop job, he was earning royalties from Umpqua on several patterns. His favorite remains the Chernobyl Crab. “It’s so versatile,” says Borski. “There are so many different ways of tying it. And it catches everything. I get photos from all over the world—Lars from Norway with a halibut, some guy on the Ponoi with an Atlantic salmon taken on a pattern without the lead eyes. I’ve caught carp in Lake Michigan, smallies in Wisconsin and big brown trout on the Missouri with it.”

With his commercial tying days behind him, Borski took a job as a caretaker at a Craig Key home owned by a prominent doctor named Gene Coin. It was then that he went all-in on another of his passions: sporting art.

Borski had been painting ever since his interrupted stint in college, but while working for Towe, he began to get serious about it, and his pieces were picked up by fishing tournaments as auction items and prizes. After taking the job as a caretaker, Borski started to expand his repertoire, working on bigger canvasses for his paintings of fish (bonefish, tarpon and trout are some of his favorites), birds, snakes and other wildlife. His paintings— acrylics, which he paints inside in the summer, and oils, which he does outside in the winter—are known for their contemporary colorful boldness. “A lot of sporting artists do it straight up,” says Borski. “I paint what makes me happy, and I bend the rules as far as I possibly can. Sometimes I go too far. In the business, we call that a Frisbee piece. I just rip the paper off the board and Frisbee it into the yard and start over.”

Borski's Chameleons

Tim Borski

Borski sells his art through his website. Prints go for around $75. His finished oils cost as much as $3,000. “I think he’s immensely talented,” says Bob Rich, the chairman of Rich Food Products, who owns many Borskis. Sandy Moret, too, owns some Borskis and has hung and sold some of his artwork at his shop, Florida Keys Outfitters.

A Borski bonefish.

Tim Borski

There are some obvious parallels between Borski’s flies and art: They are both designed to attract, and they both intend to do so in an impressionistic, suggestive manner. His style—in the fly-tying and art worlds—has been influential enough that he has spawned some imitators, which may be the greatest compliment of them all.

**

After graduating from Duke University and getting a journalism degree at the University of Indiana, Jill Zima moved to Florida in search of work. That search eventually led her to the Keys. There, she had a friend who was a fireman. The fireman also knew Borski and decided that he and Jill would be a great match. He badgered both of them incessantly about going on a date. But neither Jill nor Borski was interested in a blind date. “We eventually did it, but just to shut the fireman up,” says Borski.

Gus and Jill Borski

Tim Borski

The fireman set up the date, instructing Jill to go to the Safari Lounge in Islamorada and “look for a guy with a ponytail,” says Jill. “But when I arrived, there were three guys at the bar who had ponytails. So I just sat there. And then in walked this wonderful cute guy with a ponytail and I was like, ‘that’s the one.’ And he was.”

The couple dated for five years, and then got married (they’ve now been together for nearly 23 years). They had two children, Josef and Gus, and became deeply immersed, as a family, in the Keys. Jill worked for nearly 25 years as a journalist, at places like the Key West Citizen and the Free Press, and now is the executive director at the Islamorada Community Alliance, a website that reports on civic life. Islamorada, Jill says, was a great place to raise a family. “The schools are exceptional and the community is safe and we all look out for one another.” She remembers one Sunday when she and Borski dropped off eight-year-old Josef and four-year-old Gus at Sunday school…but there turned out to be no school that day. “The boys just decided to walk home,” she says. “When we got home, we had three or four messages from neighbors asking us, ‘did you know your little blonde boys are walking alone on the Overseas Highway?’”

But maybe more than that, Islamorada and the Keys offered an upbringing completely immersed in the natural world. The Borskis did everything outdoors together, from going to the beach, to hunting pythons in the Everglades, to fishing. “The boys know all the names of the fish and reptiles and birds around here,” says Jill. “It’s just innate to growing up here.”

Because of Borski, fishing was, of course, the most dominant family activity. He was completely smitten with Keys fishing. He says that for his first two decades there, he fished close to 325 days a year. He quickly moved on from the early bridge fishing and began to explore Florida Bay, becoming particularly fond of the no-motor zones. “I have a bunch of stuff back in there,” he says. “I would bring along a tent and live off of PB and J’s and water.”

Borski began taking his kids along when they were very young. “We grew up sitting on the boat, watching dad fish,” says Josef, who is now 21. “And then we began to fish with him.” Josef, says Jill, has become a “clone of Tim. He loves anything to do with fishing.” Josef is currently studying entrepreneurship at Florida Gulf Coast University, and has already started on what he says will be his post-college career as a fishing guide. Bonefish, he says, is his favorite species, but he has a soft spot for tarpon. He caught his first on a fly at age 11, and landed a laid-up 174-pounder—his biggest— fishing with his father and the guide, Tim Mahaffey, in 2020.

Josef Borski with a tarpon landed in the Keys.

Tim Borski

Gus, though he enjoys fishing and loves the Keys, has been bitten by the bug of wanderlust. “He wants to see the world,” says Jill. The seemingly limitless expanse of the Keys helped inspire that disposition. The 18-year-old recently spent a month studying in Spain and graduated from high school in 2021. He will attend Florida International University to study international business.

**

Borski says that if he has a guiding principle in his life, it’s that everything he does has always revolved around hunting. “By ‘hunting,’ I mean looking for something specific, going about the search correctly and then finding it,” he says. “There’s a great reward in this.” This holds true for him when it comes to fishing, or creating a new fly pattern, looking for snakes or sitting down to paint.

To a certain degree, this is also the guiding philosophy of the entire Borski clan. Jill has spent her career hunting for great stories. Josef hunts for fish. Gus hunts for adventure. And the Keys, in one way or another, have made that hunt possible for all of them.

Monte Burke is The New York Times bestselling author of Saban, 4th And Goal and Sowbelly. His new book, Lords of the Fly: Madness, Obsession, and the Hunt for the World-Record Tarpon, is available now. He is a contributing editor at Forbes and Garden & Gun.