Flatswalker

August 2000

“Bloody heat! I kya’ see how nobody kin stan’ dis kine a’ heat! Bloody Augus’!”

No one is around to hear my mutterings as I string the rod. Should have done this back at home, but that would have made too much sense, been too logical, you know. Sweat burns my eyes as I thread the last guide and I decide to attach my fly on the flats. I need to get out where the breeze is blowing, if only a little. I’m sure I’ll wish it were blowing less as soon as I see a fish upwind, but for now all I can think of is getting out of this sweltering sauna behind the mangrove windbreak.

On the beach, facing the open sea and southeast breeze, the sweat dries quickly and the mind turns outward. Where will they be today, these fish I seek – outer flats, shoreline, channels? The decision process still relies much on luck but at least I am given the comfort of saying to myself, “I knew it.” if I see one where I decide to go. Listless wandering will come later, after my plans have failed to produce. Right now I am full of hope and certainty: today is the day I shall catch a bonefish…

Hours later I stagger home. Of course I didn’t catch any; no one can catch these things. I don’t believe anyone ever does. All those pictures in the magazines are fakes – digital lies concocted on computers by bloodless designers looking to sell more reels and flylines. Hope they choke on their cafe lattés…

*

“Catch any?”

“…”

“Brederin, catch any?”

“Mmm, wha’?” I look around. I feel drugged by the heat, like I’m playing catch up. In front of me is a bar, but no drink. Something amiss there. There’s the sound of people playing pool in the background and to my right a dark-skinned fellow with a weird grin is leaning close. He has an expectant look.

“What?” I ask.

“I said, catch any today?”

“Oh.” It’s only Angel (pronounced Anhill by his Cuban people.) Thinks he’s a fisherman. Always talking about lures and reels. Blue water, trolling kind of guy.

“Na,” I say, “I seen some nice ones but only gaw a good shot at one. I drop da’ fly on his for’ed and he jus’ blew up, man. I b’lie’e he still runnen’. Mu’ be sum’whi’ ‘rouwn’ Cuba now, I guess.

He laughs and takes a swig of beer. “Yeah. You need ta take up some real fish’nin’, man. Troll fi’ some bonita or barra or sump’in’. Catch sum’tin’ yi’ kin’ take home wit’ ya, man!”

“Yeah. Look, I gaw ge’ up early an’ go pull dem fish-pots. The ol’ man don’ gimme no break. I gaw pull da’ man-killa’ too. Bloody double-mesh pot, man. Late’a, right?”

The night is close as I step outside. No moon – I should go fishing. Might hook a tarpon or snook down by Papagallos. No, better not; the old man’s expecting me early…

*

“Man-killa’, man! Dis enough work fi’ one day, too.”

We wrestle the big pot aboard to the old man’s litany of how poor the fishing is.

“Looka yeh!” He says, “Use’to be we could catch a fish along yeh. I doe’ know why she ketchin’ so poor. I had da’ eas’en’a buil’ her da same way as dem uddas, but deez fish mus’ jes’ go in an’ out as dey please. I ca’ figga it. One time you could always ketch a few squabs along yeh, ‘spes’lly if ya had koke’nut in di pot. I doe know wha’ to say. She mus’ jes’ le’ dem go somehow.”

For weeks now it’s been the same thing. In the still morning air we haul his three fish pots to the surface to find little or nothing in them. I have to hear then about all the fish he used to catch in the old days: squabs, grunts, snappers, doctors, goat-fish, hog-fish, hinds, big mutton snappers, and even the occasional giant rock-fish. He recites the fish names like a mantra or spell. It’s almost as if he relishes each name in his mouth, tasting the fish as he utters the name. Maybe the old people used to call up fish that way.

There’s power in a name. Some tribes think if you know a person’s name you can control them, maybe forever. Real names were guarded secrets, never given to strangers. Perhaps the old man is attempting to exercise such power now, to call fish from the deep. Stranger things have happened, I guess. Maybe I should…

“Boy! Watch da line de! Wa you doin’ inywi’?”

I clear the lines as we flip the pot back over the side. I suppose my apathy shows. For weeks now we’ve caught next to nothing and the worse it gets the harder we fish. It used to be we’d pull the traps once or twice a week, but now it’s up to four or five times. I don’t even make enough to pay for the gas I burn driving to his place and back. All I can think of at such times is the cool solitude of the flats and a fly rod in my hand.

June 28, 2000

It has been a continual source of surprise for me how many different species one can mistake for bonefish. To the neophyte any nervous water, splashes, wakes, or tails that appear on a flat are automatically “bones”. Man, nothing could be further from the truth. So far I’ve mistaken grunts, shads, mullets, jacks, barracuda, and even baby sharks for the coveted gray fox [1] , the “ghost of the flats”. I’ve come to realize that bonefish are seldom seen splashing or waking. Even in very shallow water they only present the subtlest of signs to the alert angler – perhaps an almost imperceptible disturbance and the occasional flicker of a tail or dorsal glinting in the setting sun – a sign easily missed by an ill-timed glance over your shoulder at jacks busting bait on the flat’s edge.

Of course, looking over your shoulder every once and a while can be a pretty good idea, especially on flats that border deeper water. These areas hold many young stingrays, a favorite food of sharks. Now, I’ve never heard of a fly fisherman getting attacked by a shark while wading the shallow grass flats, but they do wander into the shallows on high tides and can occasionally be seen cruising the edges. Hooked bonefish and snook that run off flats for open water can sometimes return to the angler as portions of their former selves – bleeding, severed heads ringing the dinner bell for all large predators in the area. About that time you want to find dry land pretty quick, but realize that the only way to shore is through the bog of the mangroves at your back or a few hundred yards around them.

The same thought process takes place when you look up from stalking a fish to see a tail and dorsal – both large, about four feet apart, and unmistakably shaped – slipping along the edge of your flat, barely a hundred feet away. You do some swift mental calculations and conclude that, one, the distance from tail to dorsal is only half the shark and, two, a hundred feet is not nearly enough distance between you and any fish that size.

That happened to me twice this weekend.

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1 Albula Vulpes (lit. gray fox) is the scientific designation for the Atlantic bonefish. Derived from ablula, a word of indeterminate origin meaning gray and the Latin noun, vulpes or fox, this is one of the most aptly named fish I’ve ever encountered. To my mind foxes conjure vague notions of cunning and stealth. What’s more, they possess a natural shyness, an ability to make themselves scarce at the least sign of an unwelcome presence. Though solitary, at times they seem strangely playful, which makes sense in this context: foxes being more like cats than dogs and bonefish possessing the natural curiosity of the former. [back]

June 11, 2000

I think I shall one day publish a book of my memoirs on bonefishing. It will be titled Casting at Shadows, and listed under humor.

The confessed trout bum, John Gierach, says that “the solution to any problem is to go fishing, and the worse the problem, the longer the trip should be.” Sounds like good advice, but what if the problem is the fishing itself? Should fishing then continue indefinitely until we find resolution? Isn’t this an invitation to hang the proverbial sign on the door permanently: “Gone Fishing” once and for all?

The flats-fishing here has been great. Which is not to say that lots of fish have been caught, but I’ve tried not to let that be the sole measure of good fishing. I am now four for four on hooking and landing fish on the fly – two grunts and two shads. I was trying for bonefish at the time, but no luck so far. Realistically, until now I barely stood a chance since I tried the first few trips without polarized glasses, until a long Sunday afternoon netted me the most debilitating headache I’ve ever had in my life – and, naturally, no fish. Though I had sworn I’d never use them – that polarized stuff is a load of hype to get you to spend more money – the next day I’d recovered sufficiently from the headache to run out and buy a pair. But, I couldn’t buy just any sunglasses. After a good bit of browsing I settled on a pair of one hundred-dollar Oakley’s, with impact resistant lenses, unbreakable frames, and state-of-the-art [1] laminated polycarbonate lenses for maximum clarity. One can’t seriously be expected to fish with ten-dollar drug-store shades while casting with three hundred dollars worth of fly fishing tackle. There’s decorum to consider.

My initial resistance to the polarized glasses likely stems from the same, ingrained distaste I have for all the complicated paraphernalia of the “foreign” fisherman – the gadgets, gizmos, and gee-gaws that we simple, island fishermen (a fraternity I certainly consider myself a part of) know to be extraneous to the basic task of catching fish. We consider most gear and tackle unnecessary; even rods and reels are luxury items – “tournament gear” only used to make easier the subduing of large quarry like yellowfin tuna or blue marlin. Day-to-day, we ourselves fish with the simplest of tackle: line, hook, and sinker. I am beginning to recognize it will take time for someone of my background and fishermanly upbringing to embrace the sophisticated gear of the fly fisher. Undoubtedly it will be proper fun when I finally do catch a worthwhile fish on my fancy new tackle, but it all seems so beside the point of catching fish, somehow. I mean, there is so much to fly fishing: the arcane knots, the various types of lines – backing, fly line, leader, and tippet – the multi-piece rod and direct-drive reel, and of course, all the casting back and forth. The only element that really resonates is the final manipulated of the fly with my hands to make it appear alive and (hopefully) fool the fish.

Yes, but without all that (which is in actuality only the bare necessities of fly fishing) you’d just be out there soaking bait. How much fun is that? How different from your job as a fisherman?

True. I had momentarily forgotten. This is leisure, right? Sport. Efficiency should never be allowed to become a primary concern.

Now that I have acquired the proper sunglasses, I can see the bonefish themselves, but in point of fact that hasn’t helped much. The best I can say is that I have gotten some very good looks at nice-sized fish. So at least they are out there.

The most memorable opportunity came this very afternoon. I was strolling along the beach checking the high-tide line for an idea of the tide stage when I happened to look up and saw, right next to the shore, the biggest bonefish yet, not a dozen feet away. Luckily my rod was strung, but I had no line out. I would have been casting into the wind anyway, so I raced along the shore to get upwind, all the while keeping my eyes on the fish, and summarily bashed my left foot into a half-buried rock. I couldn’t even stop to curse it properly, but waded right out to begin shooting line. This time I managed a couple false casts before the fish just vanished. I mean, it was there, working its way up-current just like logs don’t and then it turned and was gone. No wake, no nothing.

For a while I just stood there.

I took a few moments and properly cursed the rock… and my left foot, which hurt abominably… and the fish.

This is the way most of my bonefish encounters have gone. The times where I do get a good shot off the fish spook at the slightest movement in my fly. I don’t get it. I wait till they’re tailing, drop the fly close and when they look up I twitch it a little, just a little, and they blow out for Cuba or somewhere. I don’t see how anybody catches them on the fly. Ever. Not to say I’ll quit trying, but I would at least like to know what I’m doing wrong.

What’s even more trying are those days when I get no shots at all. Maybe it’s too overcast or the sun is at too low an angle to see the fish and I spend my time casting at wakes or nervous water. Before the polarized glasses (did I mention they’re hundred-dollar Oakley’s) every day was like that. I can now determine that wakes are actually caused by the tail of the fish, following the fish at a distance of a foot or so. I ruefully remember all those times where it is now obvious that I was casting behind the fish, casting to where they were a moment before – in effect, to their water shadows. I don’t suppose they ever even saw my flies…

All the same, there is nothing quite like wading the flats alone to take you out of yourself. For all the sound of the wind and waves, silence is the most pervading and you tune yourself to the slightest deviation. The splash of a fishing tailing thirty yards away is easily heard, although the breeze has not lessened and the waves still break on shore. You try to absorb some of the calm, try to be the stillness as you wade to get an angle on the fish. And, whether you hook up or not, you still feel a connection. You’re right there on the edge of things: on the flat that edges the sea that edges the mangroves that edge the land. And, like your prey, you ride the tide along these edges until, taking your leave, you go off, thinking.

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1 This phrase has always given me trouble. What state are we referring to here? I have always pictured New Jersey, that petrochemical graveyard that they’ve titled – ah, the irony – The Garden State. [back]