It’s hot. There’s the smell of stale sweat mingled with the windborne scent of mangroves as the flats to the northward dry out and a zillion myriad invertebrates bake in the sun, and I bake right along with them. We’re west of Key West and south of most everything dry within sight, [...]
Posts under ‘Old Scratch’
The Keys Chronicles (Pt. 6): Tarpon
“Massively miraculous, a very powerful force, extraordinary;
so extraordinary as to create immediate unreality
in the process upon contact with the fish.”
~ Richard Brautigan, 1973.
The Keys Chronicles
June, 2009.
This season we’re staying at Nate “Dubya’s” Mullet Camp, like always. But this year the flavor is distinctly different, in a bare-bones, fish-camp kind of way. We won’t be sipping [...]
Strange Weather: Adventures in DIY Fly Fishing (Part III)
Eleuthera, Bahamas May 2004
POSTSCRIPT
Our final day: we bid farewell to Aaron (who had an early flight to catch) and went fishing. In keeping with the cosmic laws that govern such things, this day dawned with perfect weather — just as the angler who needed it most was flying out. Winds were light and variable and [...]
Strange Weather: Adventures in DIY Fly Fishing (Part II)
Eleuthera, Bahamas May 2004
Someone once said, always put in the weather. Good advice. Our first exploratory drive to some nearby flats ended in a rain out. Clouds were piling up to the northeast and the forecast looked grim.
We found this flat by the simple expedient of stopping to ask the first local we saw. As [...]
Strange Weather: Adventures in DIY* Fly Fishing (Part I)
Eleuthera, Bahamas May 2004
I once read that it cannot be coincidence that no language on earth has produced the phrase, ‘as pretty as an airport’.
Indeed, and Miami International has achieved a level of ugliness that a writer like Douglas Adams, to pick a name at random, would say could only be the result of a [...]
Catching Bonefish is Easy.
August 3, 2007
Catching bonefish on your own is easy. Just spend hundreds of days on the water, casting at everything that moves: jacks, pinfish, needle-fish, barras, mullet and boxfish; divine their locations from the mysterious cycle of the moon; stalk the flats for sunburned days — scurrying in the mud like a bonefish yourself — [...]
Dog Days
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 [...]
