bonefish, bonefish, bonefish

OK… when you are fishing on a boat you see the fish from further away and are making longer casts.  Stiffer rods respond well here with longer casts, but if you happen to see the fish in close, you sometimes have trouble getting these faster rods to load well at shorter distances.

On foot you tend to see the fish in closer, making shorter casts… maybe more in the 30-50′ range. Getting your super fast action rod to load at 40′ is sometimes a little difficult and so many anglers up-line for wade fishing.  Typical bonefish lines are .25-.5 weights above the line weight anyway, so some folks move to a redfish line, which is .25-.5 heavier still.

Here’s a thought… what if you used a SLOWER action rod for wade fishing?  Slower rods (I’m talking medium action here, not a dry fly rod) load better at short distances.

Might a medium action rod actually be better on foot???

I found this little tidbit at Orvis by Jim Lepage and Marshall Cutchin…

In the second situation you are looking for a rod to take bonefishing. You know these fish are strong and fast, that they can get up to 10 pounds in weight and can attain speeds up to 30 miles-per-hour, and that you’ll have to contend with wind while you are casting. The flies you will be using range from size 2 to 6, and they may have some weight added to them. All this means you should look at a rod with a butt section stiff enough to quickly land these fish and a flex profile that puts most of the bend in the tip to mid-section. A rod that flexes in the tip is often referred to as a ‘tip flex,’ or ‘tippy,’ or ‘fast action’. These rods flex progressively toward the mid-section as more and more line is cast. You’ll also want a rod that is on the high side of the “load range” — casting better with 20 to 30 feet of line out of the rod tip than your typical “slow” rod will. In this situation an 8- or 9-weight rod is a perfect match.

Softer, or “slower,” rods allow the caster to feel the loading of the rod more quickly, with less line out of the rod tip. Long casts, on the other hand, tend to benefit from having more line out of the rod tip (there’s more weight to throw), and a stiff rod makes holding more line in the air easier.

From Orvis.

I found something new on Youtube… a vid on rod selection.  In this case the guy has two 8 wts and is talking about the amount of deflection each has, saying it is fast or slow.

Now… I’m sure what he’s said is reasonable.  I’d add, however, that I’d bet there are rods that are much slower that are used for bonefish.  Just because a rod is slower doesn’t mean you can’t cast it in the wind or you can’t hit 70′ with it. We tend to use faster rods because they are easier to use, but it seems to me, that some of the best anglers (and I’m talking about the people here that are much, much better than I am) tend to fish with rods that are a bit slower than “fast.”

Thoughts?

One of the e-zines out there is Blood Knot Magazine.  Every once in a while they put out a blogger issue and the most recent is, in fact, just that issue.

Guess what?  I’m in there.  Page 79 is a piece by me about “Why I love bonefishing.”

Also in this issue are:

• Fishing Jones
• Eat More Brook Trout
• The Caddis Fly
• SwittersB & Fly Fishing

Check it out and I hope you enjoy.

Belize has passed some great laws protecting bonefish, permit and tarpon. That’s great.  Way to go Belize. Passing laws like that is not easy.

However… enforcement lags behind and there are some real threats out there in Belizean waters right now.  Case in point is the matter of a boat, fishing out of San Pedro, that appears to be netting permit, killing permit and selling permit. (thanks for the link Adam)

Authorities have been alerted (thanks in part to the co-owner of El Pescador), but nothing has come of it. While there is a law passed to protect permit, it is not a reality in some of the waters around Ambergris.

So… Come on Belize. Put some teeth in there.

Did you know that the Bonefish and Tarpon Trust has an APP?  Yeah… they do.

It is called “Tarpon Master” and it helps you calculate the weight of that big, huge tarpon without taking it out of the water, dragging it up onto the boat, damaging its internal organs and killing the wonderful brute because you wanted to get a scale on it.

Yeah… I’m going to say that this is kind of awesome.

Yeah… just a gentle reminder…

Let’s keep those fish swiming.

Coach Duff and a big Hawaii bone.  There aren’t a lot of fish there, but the fish that are there are beeg.

It isn’t my birthday, but it is the birthday of a little girl I know.  She’s my side-kick and today she’s five years old.

It’s an odd thing to have a five year old and it is also probably totally normal.  After all, more than a couple of people have been down this particular road.

I’m hoping that I don’t loser her completely to her friends and the mall and her phone and to boys and to all the other things that will creep into her life making it richer and deeper and more complicated. I’m hoping that I can turn rocks over with her in my home river and teach her to tell a caddis from a mayfly, maybe put one of those huge stone fly nymphs in her hand.

I’m hoping I can take her to the clear and warm water of the Caribbean and South Pacific and show her sharks and rays… and bonefish.  I hope she out casts me, out fishes me and out enjoys me with a fly rod in her hand.

I hope she has best friends that don’t try to tell her girls can’t like blue or that girls can’t like snakes or sharks or alligators.

I hope she tries pot once and doesn’t like it and that she’s never too drunk around Frat Boys.

I hope she finds something she wants to do with her life. If it involves the study of fish or reptiles, I wouldn’t be upset. If she decides she has to be a center back for the US Women’s National Soccer Team, I’ll accept that as well.

I hope she is wiser and kinder than she is beautiful and she’s going to be kind of stunning.

I hope she finds someone to spend her life with who is better than I am and who likes to fish and who isn’t upset by the fact that she’s a 32 year old virgin.

Turns out Matt Smythe won the Haiku contest over at Deneki.

It makes sense. He does have the blog “FishingPoet.”

Matt, just so you know, is a contributor to a soon-to-be-released ebook anthology of fly fishing short fiction called Pulp Fly. You’ll be hearing more about that little project very, very soon.

(This, it says, is my 1,000th post, just so you know)

So, a post about SOPA and PIPA on Bonefish on the Brain? What gives?

Well, I work and live in Silicon Valley and happen to be at a startup now. So, the topic comes up a lot in my daily life.

While I’m not really stealing a lot of IP, I do link to things like YouTube and Vimeo and I do actively look for stories from around the web. Now, I attribute the stories I find and I never post very much of it… I’m well, well within my rights under “Fair Use,” but SOPA/PIPA does make the world a little more scary for me and other bloggers around the web.

Here’s some information about how it all works.

We’ll be back to our normally scheduled Bonefishing fixation tomorrow.

On a related note, a friend is formatting a soon-to-be-released ebook that features fly fishing bloggers from around the web, some of whom you’ve probably heard of (like, well… me, Michael Gracie, Pete McDonald, Davin Ebanks, Bruce Smithhammer and more). The SOPA/PIPA issue is really close to that good friend, so as a way of saying thank-you, I wanted to highlight this issue.