Acid Test: The Science of Ocean Acidification from EARTHNATIVE on Vimeo.

Ok, I confess I was horrified (and believed, still believe) An Inconvenient Truth. Imagine, all my beautiful flats drowned by rising sea levels, acidification of the oceans scouring the coral reefs, and rising ocean temps wreaking havoc on the ecosystem I’ve come to rely on.

Now comes a deeply disturbing documentary about unrepentant overfishing and the death of the oceans, but this time there’s something a little more interesting to watch than Al Gore pointing at a chart… even though I did laugh when he rode that little lift thingy.

Learn more, spread the word, take action and buy a copy at endoftheline.com
Help turn the tide: check out the new widget on the sidebar to learn about sustainable seafood.

The 'Old' New Skiff... before the overhaul

And We Don’t Have A Freakin’ Skiff!

Yup, tarpon season is just around the corner and our brains are heating up along with the weather. Just got this little piece of mental clusterflop from good old Nate “Dubya” down in Tavernier Key. I can’t figure whether to call the Bureau of Mental Health, just feel sorry for him, or start stressing out myself that this tarpon season may find us skiff-less. Read and enjoy.

So I have figured out some things down here.  I don’t think the carbon guy has his shit together to spend that sort of loot on his product.  “Some” is the operative word here [as in, let’s do “some” of what we should to have a nice skiff].  Damn it!  Is skiff construction a winter Olympic sport?

If I knew some of the right answers here I would find the motivation to work on it more at night.  Instead I dream I am sanding fiberglass in the nude.  I know it’s not smart but I keep on grinding.  I do however have a respirator on.  Horrific stress dream, man. I just don’t want to waste my energies or miss a tarpon season.  I think I have misplaced some of my energies lately, and I know I left it near my sanity somewhere? What do you think, Mr. WindKnot?

Dolphin marine has some goodies to be bought for cash:

• Old school poling platform: single pipe from the transom with a “Y” or split with two steps.  We will build an insert like the last boat, as opposed to a mount on top cap.  (Hope to score this for no more than $200.00.)  It also allows us to choose our desired platform height and gives the room to steer a tiller.  Not as stable as I would like it to be, but neither is my life at this point… so why not?
• Slam hatch for the transom replacing the circular access to the bilge.  Like the one on the old skiff. $20.00???
• 27-gallon fuel tank?  I can’t find one that works with her dimensions or my dementia.  It would take the whole space forward.  They are [freakin’] seven inches tall.  They put carpet on top of them.  They have a baffle but not a great one.  I am skeptical about this and wonder if they were not pulled for this reason.  Plus, that’s a lot of fuel. They have temp ones, but I would rather put a perm one in and glass in the step up to support the span of the cap above.
• Spray rails @ $44.00 apiece. (A steal.) They’re pre drilled and counter sunk and the Keys people quote $190.00 for the job.
• Rubrail, end cap and insert for $130.00… a fair deal and we know it is the right one.
• The tiller?  I have been looking on ebay, but no one can seem to tell me exactly what I need.  It cost around $600 new from Dolphin.

[And, after all that there’s still] the trailer.  It has no title. And is a royal pain in the scrotum to register it as “homemade”. [It’s gotta be] weighed, certified, serial numbered, and $200 bucks for taxable worth.  Is it worth it to refit it with new tires, hubs, and bearings? This shit is stressing me out. [I mean,] do I glass the rigging holes or put pie covers?

Tell me if this scheme is nuckin flagrently fucin crazy or smart and nifty/resourceful?

[Wait,] do I put the battery up front?… did you know all the fish froze to death?… L.E.D. lights on the trailer?… paint a tarpon on the entry?… shit, flush mount push pole holders?… composite electric trim tabs or bennett sports?

[Help.]

About the Author:

Nate "Dubya" Landing a Keys "Poon"

Mr. Nate “Dubya” runs a successful/struggling/booming/busting business building sweet-ass shit for rich people in the Florida Keys. In his spare time — which he has none of — he a fish-a-holic… recently inducted into the close-knit (yet suspicious) brotherhood of fly fishing tarpon fanatics. A self taught scholar of the flats, tropical architecture, and interior design, he hopes to one day finish rebuilding his own tropical home and have a functional skiff to wet a line on the fabled flats in his (freakin’) backyard (for goodness’ sake). (He has also promised to one day visit the author of this blog and cast flies at little bonefish in my backyard, but I’m not holding my breath.)

“Our tradition is that of the first man who sneaked away to the creek when the tribe did not really need fish.”
~Roderick Haig-Brown, A River Never Sleeps, 1946.

“And anyone who thinks I brag is stating that I understand fish-thought is obviously ignorant of the way in which fish think. Believe me, it’s nothing to brag about.”
~David James Duncan, The River Why, 1983.

“Imagine the permit coming out of a deep-water wreck by the pull of moon and tide, riding the invisible crest of the incoming water, feeding and moving by force of blood, only to run afoul of an asshole from Connecticut.”
~Thomas McGuane, Ninety-two in the Shade, 1973.

For those of us without a trust fund (to bankroll frequent trips to the equatorial regions), winter is the time to catch up on the flytying, clean your tackle, tie leaders, and live vicariously through the printed word. In case you’ve forgotten, some of those words still come on this stuff called “paper”. So, unplug, mute the mobile phone, pour yourself a glass of your favorite treat and read a little.

Just ran across this link on a comment on a post on the Fly Fish Chick blog. (Wow, there’s something you wouldn’t have heard 10 years ago.) It’s a list of 158 fly fishing books — heavy on the literature and sparse with the how-to types. Good stuff.

I got this letter a few days ago from someone calling themselves “a committed guide” [1]. It’s so damn funny and insightful and delightfully frustrated (in a ranting, I’ve-just-gotta-vent kind of way) that I couldn’t help posting it. Maybe the humor is only apparent to other guides and those readers who’ve only ever been on the other side of that business arrangement might find it harsh or sarcastic or even insulting. I hope not. Instead, heed the simple, earthy wisdom and, go ahead, laugh a little. What follows is the letter in full with only a few minor editorial adjustments for clarity. Enjoy, and please leave a comment.

~ Davin Ebanks (a.k.a. Flatswalker)

How hard is it to get bonefish to bite?

Basically it’s only as hard as you make it. I watch people catch them all the time so know it isn’t that hard. First, the cast has to be in the right spot. Second, you have to move the fly in the right way. Third, you have to make a long sharp strip to set the hook. Fourth, let the fish run when it wants to and keep the line tight if it swims towards you. If you don’t do any of these things it will not work.

Sounds simple but, not really. The Bahamas or Central America or Florida all use different types of flies and different retrieves and different presentations. Now I haven’t fished for bass or trout or salmon, but if I was fishing with a guide elsewhere where the fish are feeding mainly on minnows I wouldn’t throw a fly imitating a minnow at the fish and move it like it was a crab or a shrimp, it [probably] won’t work.

If the fish wants the fly 8 inches from its face to notice it and I put it 5 ft. away I don’t [can't] expect it to bite. If the fish needs the fly to land a minimum of 3 ft away to avoid spooking it and I put it 8 inches away instead, I won’t expect the fish to bite.

Bottom line: the cast, retrieve, and hook-set determine if you’re going to be successful or not. You don’t even need to see the fish; just put it where the guide tells you and retrieve it like he says. If I were to fish elsewhere and didn’t listen to the guide and didn’t hook up, I would be wasting my time and money because I would be paying someone else to advise me on what he knows works and doing things my own way and wondering why it didn’t work.

We [as guides] can only take them where we know the fish have shown up before, advise them on what they need to do, and watch them do their own thing. Remember that it isn’t the guide that wants things a certain way, it is the fish that we are trying to fool with bits of fabric tied into various concoctions. He wants what he wants to eat. Simple.

Remember the strip set, because if the fish bites and never gets hooked the first 2 steps are wasted. Yes, reflex takes over and the rod gets raised and the fly just pops out of the fishes mouth: reflex, habit, it happens to everyone.

All fishermen make errors: bad casts, rod-sets,  the list goes on, (and I’m certainly including myself here), but to blatantly disregard what someone is telling me to do in order to catch a fish… well, not guilty.

I find that people that have never fly fished before listen better than those that have fished in all the exotic locations. Unfortunately it takes a lot of time to get over the rod-set but they end up getting way more bites than the more experienced clientele. [True.]

The only thing that the novice does better than a seasoned fly fisherman is to listen to advice. He can’t cast as far or as accurate but he tries and listens. That is why he is more successful, not beginners luck.

I think it was Lefty Kreh that said the three most important things in fly fishing is presentation, presentation, presentation.

Remember, if it doesn’t look right and doesn’t move right its not going to get bit, RIGHT?

There are some days where nothing works to get the bite or (even worse) there are some days that the fish don’t show up at all. The worse thing is to give up. The sport is called fishing, it is ultimately up to the fish whether it is going to show up and bite or not. Trust me I have yet to meet someone who can promise the fish are going to be at place X at time Y and they are going to bite on fly Z. All you can do is try. By giving up it is guaranteed that you are going to fail. If you don’t try or aren’t there you can’t win.

Do you think this sums up all the things that can go wrong? [Wait, I just thought of another:] add too much alcohol and chances are the fly will never get in front of a fish, and someone might end up with a new piercing. Not cool.

Listening is such a small thing but often without it the hookup will not happen.

IS THERE ANYBODY OUT THERE!!!!

__________

Yes, we’re here, my brother. Semper Fi.
____________________
1 I’m not quite sure if the author was aware of the dual meaning of the word “committed” when he chose that pseudonym — as in “poor bastard just couldn’t stand the strain; I hate to say it but he should be committed”. [back]

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 the sky was crystal clear. In celebration of the perfect visibility we headed north to explore the area call Lower Bogue on the northwestern coast. Again the beaches were stunning, as was the panorama from the fabled Glass Window Bridge. However, we saw no bones, just sharks and cudas. That’s the problem with only visiting a place once: I still can’t figure if we were there on the wrong tide or those bare sand flats just don’t hold fish [7]. I would love to talk with anyone who has actually fished that area successfully. I mean, we had be best conditions for spotting fish ever; they simply weren’t there.

So, we headed back southward to good old Boxfish Bay to catch the falling tide. It was awesome, exactly what you hope for after paying your dues with a week of schlepping it out on blown out flats where you can actually see the shadows of the wind-blown foam lines on the bottom. During the last hour of our last tide we saw fish everywhere. The water was oil-calm and you could spot tails a hundred yards away. All you had to do was wade into range, make an accurate cast, strip once and the fish was on. Dad and I both caught several fish and I had the pleasure of watching a particularly big bone wallow over a shallow bank with its back out of the water to chase my shrimp fly. That’s a sight I won’t forget in a hurry, and a perfect way to end our trip.

Aaron, my friend, you should have been there.

____________________
7 Which logically makes no sense, right? I mean, all those predators — the cuda and sharks — must be there for something. I still like to think that we just hit it wrong and if we’d had better luck in our timing we’d have found bonefish (which would have made those beaches more than just pretty stretches of sand and turquoise water, it would have made them perfect). [back]

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 our priest (in training) pointed out, Hell, this is the Bahamas. Everyone’s a fisherman, right? Right enough. We’d located good bonefish water on our first day and that was cause enough to celebrate. Doubtless tomorrow would dawn bright and clear with light winds and willing bonefish at every cast. After a dinner of cracked conch and grouper fingers we turned in to a night of good dreams.

Day two dawned bright… and windy. Scudding clouds played dodgems across the flat as we pulled up in our rented jeep. The tide was less than favorable but I managed to find a small pod of fish feeding against the shore after maybe ten minutes of wading. A careful cast and a few judicious strips brought the first hook-up and, soon after, a decent-sized bonefish was released: an auspicious start and cause for hope.

Aaron was following me at the time, to see how it was done, as it were. Good plan. Only later did it occur to me how odd the whole episode must have seemed to him. In fact, the surreal quality of that first fish together kept returning at the oddest times, so that I eventually had to get my thoughts out on paper just to see what was bothering me. I sent the following letter to him a few weeks later:

“I wonder what it must be like for the fisher of small ponds and rivers to dream of other waters. You’ve fished so long and know your home waters so well — quiet farm ponds on summer evenings or clear rivers running through small towns and fields — I imagine how fishing there has become second nature to you. Do you wonder, as I do, what it is like for someone to cast tiny dry flies to fastidious trout in small pools on a mountain stream?

Fly selection for you at home is hardly selection at all, more like instinct: “Fish ‘round these parts like orange… ‘n’ crayfish patterns’ll get ‘em too.”

Up there, in the cold water of the stream, trout take the tiniest bugs and you could change flies from now till Judgment and still go fishless. At least, that’s how I imagine it.

I also wonder what must it be like for an angler to wade for the first time in knee-deep, warm salt water. What is it like to wander around looking for invisible fish as the body slowly gives out? Feet first, then the knees and shoulders. (My feet haven’t been right since our trip.) You follow your fishing partner, hoping to pick it up as you go along. Suddenly you see him stop, crouch and cast at a spot of water that looks like all the other water around, all eighty trillion gallons of it, but he strips the fly and instantly the line jumps tight in a halo of spray. The reel hums and the leader shears the surface at a clean angle toward deeper water. Something miraculous has just occurred, but that seems fitting since it’s taken you considerable faith just to believe in these ghosts of the flats to begin with.

Maybe this is an insight into something spiritual or other: casting for fish you cannot possibly see in the dark depths of a farm pond requires less faith than casting at fish that hide in plain sight, as it were. I guess God is sort of like that; you don’t have to go to the ends of the earth to find Him; He’s all around. Someone once said, “God is in the details.” There are details everywhere. Many have strongly suspected that angling and spirituality are related, and I’m beginning to see their point.

If that’s the case I guess a guide must be some kind of prophet, one of the chosen few that can see the Truth and point disciples in the right direction. It still takes an act of faith on the part of the caster, but at least they’re given some guidance. Strangely enough, we don’t lock guides in rubber rooms like we do other folks who see things that are not there, but I suppose the punishment for a guide that fails to win converts is something worse: no work — the modern day equivalent of being driven into exile as a false prophet and a madman.

“He kept sayin, ‘Cast now. They’re right there!’ but I never saw no fish… never caught nuthin’ neither.”

There’s a whole raft of issues here: perception, belief and the possible nature of reality. Just because you can’t see them, doesn’t mean the fish aren’t there. If something like a fish — a five to nine pound fish, mind you — can remain unseen in less than two feet of water as clear as Cuban rum, well, that raises implications about other unseen things we may have dismissed. I find that anyone who spends much time sight fishing begins to deepen his or her perceptions. They start to notice the little things — the details that hide in plain sight. Tiny hermit crabs curl into their shells and sit rocking as you walk down the beach. Curly tailed lizard lounge in the shade, their heads darting as they eat ants from the coco-plum leaves. The breeze shifts as the tide changes and suddenly, the angler finds themselves aware.”

I imagine this might summarize Aaron’s experience during that week in Eleuthera. My dad and I saw many bonefish but they remained elusive for Aaron. Frustrated with the scarcity of fish on the flats, he hooked several in a giant school that hung around the dock just down the beach from our cottage, but they all managed to escape before he could land them [2]. He spent the rest of the week seeing fish that I was casting to, but seemed unable to spot them in time when it was his turn [3]. He did hook a big cruiser on a beach down south (which lasted for about point two seconds) and I’m pretty sure he saw that one.

The rest of the week was also a frustration for the rest of us; the wind stayed up and visibility was poor, to say the least. After a day of driving over the worst roads ever and walking endless beaches (all gorgeous but fishless) we’d drag in at suppertime to find Andy grilling pork chops on the beach or paddling the kayak out on the bay. (We’d invariably leave Andy unconscious every morning as we three anglers headed out bleary-eyed but hopeful to some new spot that would inevitably be as disappointing as the last.) We drank expensive beer and cheap rum and formulated new strategies for the next day and, above all, wondered when the weather was going to break.

The only bright spot was finding a bay down south where there were actually bonefish (that would actually eat our flies). Our other forays to the better-known areas such as Savannah Sound — an absolutely stunning beach on the Atlantic coast — ended in humiliation. Sure the fish were there, but with twenty knots of breeze we could hardly get a fly to them, which hardly mattered since they wouldn’t eat when we did. My dad finally got one fish, which was no doubt addled by the constant bad weather and muddy water. That was day four and by then we were getting just a little sick of breathtakingly beautiful beaches with no bonefish.

On day five we headed for that southern flat, but the weather was just as lousy. We actually caught half dozen fish there, but we had to work at it, taking what shots we could between the scudding clouds. We also had to negotiate heavily with a local there — a manic little hustler who wanted us to pay him for fishing on ‘his’ creek. He insisted that we should have tried to find him first since he was the official bonefish guide in that area. (Apparently he lived in “dat green ‘ouse, right ova’ dere… e’rybody know dat, man”.) Never mind that he didn’t know what our fly rods were or have anything to prove he was a guide of any sort, he kept on about how we couldn’t go into the bay on our own. Suppose something happened, he said, he’d be responsible. (How exactly he was magically in charge of all anglers in that creek was never something I could get him to explain.) Finally I talked him down (from $150) to $20 to let us fish on our own. As I carefully explained, we weren’t really looking for a guide. I figured the money was a fair price to pay so he wouldn’t pilfer our jeep while we fished ‘his’ creek. After finding the other locals so genuinely friendly and helpful, this little guy came as a shock.

Still, there are ways of handling such a situation. First, stay calm and don’t act patronizing. Talk it out. Caribbean people are very talkative and tend to do so loudly and argumentatively even when they mean no real harm. This is one case where the louder the bark, the less the chance of getting bit. Second, explain your side of things without giving too much away. In this case I told him other locals from up north had told us to try for bonefish down here. That was true enough: they actually had. I also said that we couldn’t afford a guide, even though he was right and we probably would catch more fish with one. I did not say I was a guide so we didn’t need to hire one. Bahamian guides take serious offense to outside guides running trips on their flats, as they should [4]. Of course I wasn’t making any money on this trip, but I could hardly have made him understand that.

Finally, I didn’t offer him the $20 for his guide services — that would have been a grave insult. What I did was ask what it would cost for us to fish on his creek on our own and “just mess around a little, you know?” I also got his name and where he lived. I tried to make it very clear that I agreed that he was responsible and I would come looking for him if any of our stuff went missing from the jeep [5]. In the end we got to fish a beautiful, fishy flat and leave our jeep in relative safety, all for twenty bucks. In the grand scheme of things I suppose that’s a deal.

We fished that creek until the tide was gone and then decided we’d had enough of the wind. The bay was on the inside of a beach so we decided there must be a way out there. The road turned out to be next to church house (which some of us took as a sign) and after a drive down the worst road ever, we pulled up to one of the most amazing beaches any of us had ever seen. We ate a quick lunch and went exploring. And, down at the far end of that beach next to a few young mangroves we found a school of bonefish feeding against the shore and there, miles away from anywhere on the edge of a rock in the Bahamian archipelago, Aaron caught his first bonefish [6].

That evening we celebrated with fresh grouper and rum ‘n cokes, with fresh lime for both. Aaron was leaving the next morning, but the rest of us were staying on for a couple more days. Aaron couldn’t get over how a fish that was barely a pound could burn off line like that. He added that it might be a while but he’d definitely like to do this again, you know, when he had the money. Priests aren’t known for having a lot of spare cash handy but he’d start saving.

“My knuckles still hurt where I didn’t get my hand out of the way”, he said.

“Yeah,” I said, “that’ll happen… worth every penny of twenty bucks, huh?”

Sometime that night the wind dropped out and the weather broke. For the first time since our arrival we awoke to a glorious sound: silence. No wind, not a breath stirred the water. Looking out over Tarpum Bay you couldn’t tell where the sea gave off and the sky began. We packed Aaron into the alleged jeep (a car with a varied and storied past that, among other things, had a door that had been reattached by a blind welder, wheels that kept trying to come off, and a steering wheel that only marginally controlled where the vehicle was actually pointing) and headed off to the airport. We bid him a heartfelt goodbye, safe travels, and advised him not to buy anything in Miami Airport, especially not the duty free.

We would have even waited for his plane to take off, but someone said, “Let’s go fishing”, so we did.

____________________
2 Looking back I sort of regret discouraging him from trying that school again — hell, every day if he needed to. It was purely my hangup that casting at such easy targets seemed too much like shooting fish in a barrel. On the other hand his first bonefish should be (and would be) a real victory, not some scrap-fed, half-domesticated schoolie that hung around the fishing dock while the locals cleaned their catch. Heck, if we just wanted to land a few fish, we wouldn’t have been fly fishing on our own in a strange country to begin with. Right? [back]
3 In the interest of full disclosure (and not a little because my good friend the priest has reminded me to include this fact) I have to acknowledge that the tables were indeed turned a few months later on a trip I made to visit him in Indiana. We went fishing in the river behind his house — mostly a smallmouth river, but with some very large carp in there as well. We’d just waded in when he suddenly stopped and whispered, “Look at the size of that fish!” I stared and stared, desperately trying to spot anything that looked remotely like a fish shape in the murky water. “Where?” I eventually whispered back. “Are you kidding!? Right there,” said Aaron, pointing at a spot not three feet in front of me. Now, you’ve only got to know Aaron a little bit to understand that he loves to mess with people; it’s part of his charm. I honestly thought he was playing with me, getting me back for all the times I’d said that to him in Eleuthera. He wasn’t, and as I took a step forward (into what I was sure was empty water) a huge shadow materialized off the bottom and shot out of sight downstream. How big? My best guess is at least two feet long, but maybe closer to three. I could make all sorts of excuses: the fish was too big for me to see, I’m not a freshwater fisherman, I’ve never even seen a carp before, and so on, but the fact remains that I damn near stepped on a monster fish without ever even seeing it. There. My conscience is clean. [back]
4 Nevermind that, like I’ve said, he didn’t actually seem like any kind of guide to me. He might actually have believed he was, which is more or less the same thing in this case. [back]
5 Without every actually being so crass as to come right out and say that in as many words. [back]
6 Which, sadly, was summarily eaten by a passing lemon shark, the grisly spectacle taking place a mere 5 yards away where every shake of the shark’s head could be clearly seen. But, hey, that’s part of our little game here, whether we acknowledge it or not: catching these fish isn’t exactly good for them. As often as we might say, “it’s just fishing, man, not life or death… just having fun, you know?” it often is life or death for the fish. Anyways, the priest not only got his fish, he got a great fishing story too, which was exactly what he’d traveled all that way for. [back]