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.

“Flatswalker’s Journal, March 2010. We descend into paradise to look for the Grey Fox, but we also find a wolf…”

Do it yourself (DIY) fly fishing leads to an unusual discovery for this small group of anglers at an undisclosed location in the Caribbean. Barracudas (the Wolf) are on the attack and bonefish (the Grey Fox) scatter everywhere. Nevermind, they leave that flat well alone and continue their search for bonefish on the flats… and they find some.

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.

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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.

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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]

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]