Sunday, December 24, 2000

I scared some fish pretty badly today. None died of heart attacks, so I didn’t catch any.

For the first time in days it was a decent weather. Not good, but decent. It wasn’t blowing a full gale and there were the odd moments of sunlight between the driven clouds. I hadn’t been on that flat since summer and I wanted to see if there would be any real difference in the fishing… apparently not. Just windier. In three hours I saw maybe eight fish. The first were in a group of maybe a half dozen and were past me so fast I had only one shot at them. The other two were singles and I spooked them both.

I still don’t get this bonefishing thing. I mean, other fish make sense: they eat baitfish so you throw a streamer at them, pull it away, and if they like what they see they’ll come over and eat it. It’s simple. The only worry is maybe matching the size of the bait, though if the fish are biting this hardly matters.

Bonefish seem totally different, even though one hears they can be caught using the same logic. The trick, they say (usually in magazines that come out of places like Illinois or New Hampshire), is to figure out what the bonefish are eating, learn how those bait act, and present a fly accordingly. Apparently this works, since in the same publications they have pictures of anglers cradling five-pounders with the flies still stuck in their mouths. Smug bastards.

Every time I try their advice the whole thing goes to pieces (threatening to take my sanity with it). I have tossed all sorts of flies at many bonefish and the results are fairly predictable. About the only thing that varies is how the fish leave. Some hustle around nervously and then cruise off while others bolt outright, pushing what I invariably think of as “bow-wakes” across the flat. Most, however, either ignore my offerings or never see them. To borrow from Tom Stoppard’s Guildenstern, I feel like a blind man looting a bazaar for his own portrait.

Clearly more research is needed, but how? Do I take a year’s hiatus from my job and try to discover some of their secrets on my own, or do I simply hire one of the Bahamian gurus – “Crazy” Charlie Smith, perhaps – to teach me what they know? I suppose I could pray for enlightenment, but I’m reasonably confident catching a bonefish doesn’t rate very highly on The Almighty’s list of goals for my life. At the rate I’m going I might catch one before the year is out, but the odds seem against it. I’m either so hopeless that I should be banned from all bonefish flats for life, or these fish are just impossible. If I ever do nail this thing it’ll undoubtedly turn out that there was some really simple thing I was doing wrong the whole time. I hope so. I’m tired of throwing flies at fish and either scaring them, or (worse) having them not see my fly at all. There has got to be a middle ground somewhere – a zone where the fly lands perfectly, the bonefish sees the fly, likes it, swims over and eats it. I would love to be there just once.

“Obsession brought us to this place… in search of a ghost, a phantom, a shadow that is all but invisible… unless you know how to find it… Flatswalker’s Journal, March, 2009.”

Windknot and Dad, guided by none other than Big Charlie Neymour, find themselves facing 20 knots of breeze… and some truly BIG bonefish.

To learn more check out www.bigcharlieandros.net and go hunt the Grey Ghost yourself.

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, though I can just make out a few distant keys standing mirrored in the mirage to the south. I’m not alone; tarpon hunting isn’t typically a solitary sport, but when you’re up there on the bow and it’s been awhile since you’ve seen a fish, you tend to forget that there’s someone back there, poling the boat.

The tarpon comes out of nowhere, cruising right to left and on an easy intersect course with our skiff. I’m on the bow, trying to delay that moment when I would have to admit that, dangit, yes, we’re too shallow now and tarpon fishing is over for the day, and knowing that means reeling in and grabbing the smaller rod with a bonefish/permit fly on it.

But, sometimes life hands you those perfect moments.

“Ok, better grab the bonefish rod; we’re too shallow for tarpon here.”

“You mean like that one right there?”

“Where? …Holy Shit! Cast, man, cast! Wait, let me stop the boat.”

The fish is off the starboard bow and I’m afraid to cast directly over the boat and hook my companions, so I make a cast that’s not only off-target, but too short. I know I’ve only got one more chance so I pick up, shoot one back cast, and bomb it out there at an angle calculated to intercept. I hope. It’s a guessing game at this point. The fish could turn aside and miss the fly all together; the fly could sink too much and hang up on the shallow, weedy bottom; or, the fish could turn toward us and see the fly line. But none of those happen. The fly lands about ten feet ahead of the fish and I just let it sit there, waiting. I can no longer see the tarpon in the water—as it crossed the bow it moved under the glare to our left—so I’m just guessing at where the fish would be if it kept swimming at the same speed.

At what feels like the right moment I twitch the fly. A giant head breaks the surface as the fish rolls, taking the fly on the way back down. It’s headed away from me so the line is instantly tight and the fish is on. After days of fruitless casting, spooked fish, and half-hearted follows from reluctant tarpon, such an obvious, aggressive take leaves us all in disbelief. A microsecond later the fish’s head is out of the water and shaking, and it’s big.

“Holy ––––––––––––– shit!”

All of a sudden everyone’s yelling. The Great White Hoke is trying to start the engine and follow the fish, BarJack is securing the pushpole, and I’m trying not to pass out from shock. The tarpon tries to jump, but the water is so shallow and the fish is so big that it’s more of a belly-flopping lunge. I instantly realize what a foolish thing I’ve done (which is a feeling I’m sure I share with all of the tarpon anglers that have gone before me). The fact that I’m using a little nine-weight—a beast of a flyrod I’ve dubbed “Pancho” —makes my folly a little more dire, and (in retrospect) funnier.

By this time the fish is hell and gone and my backing has vanished in a scary fast-forward of anything I’ve ever experienced. I realize that in a few moments it will be completely gone and I debate jumping in and swimming after the fish. Hoke is doing his best to follow, but we’re so shallow that the motor is just kicking up foam and we’re barely making steerage-way. Way out there the tarpon jumps, this time clearing the surface in a clean leap, straight for the sky. It’s so far away now that it could be a different fish free jumping, and I only know it’s mine because the reel slows and my backing stops in mid-Houdini. (Thank goodness, too, I thought I’d have to go back to Worldwide that evening and feed my brand new ten-weight reel to the guy behind the counter who told me “don’t worry, 200 yards is plenty for any fish.”)

The next twenty minutes or so—I’m merely guessing here, since the whole experience was so surreal that time ceased to register: for all I know I could have been chasing that fish for days, or just a few minutes—the tarpon leads us on a wild chase, first out to the deep water, then back into shallow flat (where, again, we have to tilt the engine so high that we’re barely moving), under a broken anchor line (still attached to the anchor), around a shark, and back out to deep water where the real fight begins. I vaguely remember all this: BarJack leaping past me barefoot off the bow to clear my line from the anchor rope, a momentary scare when the shark showed up, and the endless struggle to retrieve line while keeping it tight. Good ol’ Hoke jockeys the skiff like a pro, speeding up to help me retrieve line, slowing down when the line gets too slack, and even turning away from the fish when it runs back at us. At this point it’s mostly a skiff versus fish game, and I’m just the guy holding the rod and reeling like mad. But that is all about to change.

The fight that follows is mostly quiet, punctuated by curses and the reluctant zzzzzzz—zzz of the drag as the fish takes line. Occasionally Hoke gasses the motor and turns the skiff to give me a better angle. Sweat stings my eyes and various joints begin to cramp, starting with my right hand as I struggle to retrieve line. My left leg keeps shaking. An indeterminate length of time later the fish is rolling next to the boat and I see that I can turn her at will now. BarJack is lying flat on the deck reaching for that giant mouth. He’s got blue gloves on and I can clearly see my little fly stuck in the top lip, slightly right of center. The moment of the grab is hidden from me behind BarJack’s head, but suddenly he screaming, and it’s a good scream so I put down my rod and head forward to see “my” fish. My first touch is delicate. I find the silver mechanism of her open jaw a marvel of streamlined leverage and translucent membrane. The barbless fly is an incongruity that is easily removed. I’m retrospectively worried to see that the hook has opened under the strain of our fight. We ease her head back under water and Hoke puts the skiff in gear. A moment later she shoots from our grasp, drenching us with a farewell tail-slap and vanishing into the green world that surrounds us.

I sit down, shaky and sore. We high-five and slap backs, but there’s no celebratory champagne to pop, nor even cheap beer. In keeping with our minimalist ethos we crack lukewarm bottles of water. As we turn the boat toward Key West and the long run home, I know I’ll be riding this high for days—not so much the fight (where even though I “won” I feel like I’ve just had my ass handed to me), nor even the high of landing my first real big Florida Keys tarpon, or even the clean release and watching the fish swim strongly away, but instead I keep replaying the sight of a 90 pound fish rolling on a fly in two feet of water. I might fish for another 50 years and never witness such a take, much less be a part of it.

I keep hearing the immortal words of Jim Harrison: “Who said that we go through life with a diminishing portfolio of enthusiasm? …So you try to seek out in life moments that give you this immense jolt of electricity. So you try to have something that gives you this electricity, and freshens up your feeling about being alive.”

I’m immediately depressed that I might have peaked with my first experience.

“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 our Cuban coffees around his kitchen counter while we whip up new flies, nor lounging on his couch with cocktails after a home cooked dinner of lemon-pepper mahi-mahi. We won’t because (in a fit of hubris and with the best intentions) he gutted the place. This was a few months ago, when business was still booming and before the economy went into low gear and rich people’s portfolios dried up, taking his business with them. His place was a simple structure to begin with—basically a cube with a pitched roof—but when it was full of the accoutrements and paraphernalia of daily life—appliances, stove, counters, tables, and chairs, not to mention lights, walls, and a ceiling—it seemed a normal sort of place. Homely, even. But, with the interior stripped down to the studs and planking, and the ceiling nothing more than a tangle of wires among the rafters—in fact, the underbelly of the roof—well, you feel like you’re seeing a whole different space, like a flat laid bare by low tide.

Thankfully the exterior of the Mullet Camp is much the same, with its wrap-around balcony populated by the odd chair or side table, the warped, moldy floorboards, and the antique tarpon mount hanging at the head of the stairs. It’s cool up there, damp. In the morning—sipping my Cuban coffee and browsing though fly boxes wondering what the fish might like today—I hear doves cooing in the distance and smell the ocean, barely a hundred yards to the south. Even the foliage reminds me of home. There’s Caribbean birch, poinsiana, croton, and coconut palms. However, there are also oak trees and other species I can’t name but which belong firmly to the north American continent.

It feels early, but the rest of the tarpon-fishing world has already put in a good four hours by now. That’s the thing about tarpon fishing, you’re either up before the birds—you can still see stars as you hitch the trailer to the pickup, and you’re on the water when dawn is just a promise on the eastern horizon—or you’re on the veranda nursing your second cup of coffee and checking your leaders while you wait for the sun to rise high enough so you can actually see the fish through the water.

When you do the nocturnal thing you’re looking for rolling fish as dawn breaks, but that’s a hit or miss affair. If the wind is up the fish won’t roll, or you can’t see them if they do. Also, the rolling hour is over quickly and then you’re just sitting there, in a boat, waiting for daylight. If you happen to nail one early you’re glad you made the effort, but if don’t you begin to pine for bed (or wherever you happen to have slept) and wonder if tarpon are really worth all this. By eight o’clock you realize you’ve been blind casting for an hour just to stay awake… and also because the fish are out there, right, one might just grab it.

There’s something magical about that pre-dawn time when tarpon are rolling in channels, canals, and the lee of keys or islands. And if I ever had a perfectly calm morning down here I might be convinced to make the effort and grab a little of that early morning magic for myself, but when’s the last time it was even remotely calm in the Keys in June? Maybe it’s just me—most of my itinerant fishing experience has been in something approaching a young hurricane—but it could simply be the season. I mean, early summer isn’t exactly the calmest period, meteorologically speaking, but that is when the tarpon are here. If I refused to fly fish in the wind I’d never get a cast off. (Never mind that all the trips I’ve taken in the summer, fall, winter or otherwise have been plagued by the same seasonable/unseasonable windy conditions, so maybe it is me after all.) I wonder what would happen if I did encounter a windless day on the flats…

*

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]

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 special effort. Nevertheless, it was not without a certain thrill that I disembarked from our plane into the bowels of the arrival concourse. We were on our way to the Bahamas, and no number of surly security personnel and bad food (at larcenous prices) could dampen my spirits.

The Bahamas hold a special place in any bonefish angler’s heart – as anyone who has flown over this string of islands can attest. The view that greets you from an altitude of several thousand feet is calculated to make any saltwater fly angler lust in their heart [1]. This archipelago stretches from Bimini (roughly 90 miles off Florida’s coast) southeast to Great Inagua, where you can see Cuba on a clear day. From the air miles and miles of keys, reefs, basins and flats stretch to the horizon. As I peer from the port window I’m reminded that the very name for the Bahamas is derived from the Spanish word, bahamar, meaning shoal water. With over seventy-five thousand miles of flats belonging to this island nation, I’d say it was aptly named and this makes it the perfect place to attempt a DIY bonefishing trip.

Of course, nowadays everyone and their mother has heard of bonefishing with a fly rod (and probably seen it on Saturday morning television), and almost every saltwater fishing magazine has an article on the newest bonefishing lodge where they guarantee to put thirty bonefish under your belt by cocktails on the first day. Belize, Mexico, and the Turks and Caicos all have their lodges, but the Bahamas have been with it from the beginning. Since folks have pursued bonefish with a fly rod, they have gone to the Bahamas to do so. With its closest islands sitting just offshore of Florida, they are easily accessible. The residents speak English, and there’s plenty of fish and plenty of water for everyone.

*

We touched down on a small airstrip outside Rock Sound, Eleuthera, Bahamas. By an act of God our luggage made it, though I had taken my usual precaution of packing my reels, lines and rods in my carry-on. I had to take it on faith that my flies would make it, since a post-9-11 world regards them as deadly weapons that must be locked safely in the bowels of the aircraft. Exactly how one hijacks a 747 with a barbless #8 Crazy Charlie has never been made clear, but there seemed little room for discussion with the safety personnel at the check-in counter. I toyed briefly with the idea of trying to smuggle in a few about my person, but abandoned the idea in favor of maintaining my freedom.

There were four of us on this trip. Aaron met up with my dad and me in Miami and Andy joined us in Nassau. Only three of us were fly fishers, but Andy was up for anything, particularly a trip to an exotic island. Beach barbeques, gorgeous sunsets, warm tropical waters and rum drinks sounded like enough fun to convince him. For us other three (more serious and practical minded fishermen), an extra head made the cost of accommodations that much less. That’s not to suggest that the cost was exorbitant anyway. We had rented a place on the beach in Tarpum Bay for $80 a night. It came equipped with two bedrooms, a working kitchen and shower that drizzled sulfurous smelling brackish water, and, most importantly, working air conditioning. No pool, no maid-service, no satellite TV. With our group consisting of a college student, a preacher, a struggling bonefish guide, and a priest in training, luxury accommodations were well out of range.

That was also the reason we were not ensconced in the lounge of a fishing lodge somewhere in Andros or Belize – that and the desire to see how a strictly do-it-yourself bonefishing trip would pan out. I’d done the lodge thing, as had my dad, and while it is certainly a satisfying experience, I was anxious to try the other side of the coin. Besides, I felt that one of the major hurdles for do-it-yourself anglers should be no problem for us – that of spotting bonefish. Aaron, our priest-to-be, was a beginner, but we felt that given fair numbers of fish he’d catch on quickly. We were full of hope and anticipation of a week of glorious flats fishing.

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*Shorthand for “do it yourself” fishing. Often seen on forums, blogs, and is even gaining currency in some of the less formal and stuffy print magazines.
1 The sight is so amazing that you momentarily forget the pathetic smallness of the aircraft you’re in, which reminds you more of a rather unkempt bus than an actual aircraft. [back]