It isn’t always about the fishing. Sometimes it is about all the other things that go along with just being there. There are birds and snakes and big, huge mollusks.
Yup. Conch.
On Long Island I was fortunate to have Conch Fritters three times, Cracked Conch once and Conch Salad twice. It, to me, is the flavor of the islands and I indulged when I had the opportunity.
Aaron cleaning up the last of it.
Mark, making a conch themed fashion statement.
I got this email from one of the Long Island fishing crew. It made me laugh. It seems like for most of my big trips in recent years I have come down with some sort of bug just prior to leaving. I think I’m good this year, but there is always a chance for things to go horribly wrong before a big trip. Here’s the list of things to watch out for.
Just a reminder that for the next week or so you might want to avoid:
– Moving furniture around
– Making that “one last run” down the double black diamond Widow Maker run
– Can lids, knives, glass, razor blades, other sharp objects
– Ladders
– Electricity, lightning and hail larger than a pea
– Proving the steroid-fueled, tattooed gym rats that you can lift anything they can lift (it’s nothing personal if any of you happen to be a steroid-fueled, tattooed gym rat)
– Feeding or taking food away from large carnivorous animals, small carnivorous animals, angry birds, essentially anything meaner than an earthworm
– Bicycling on roads that are still covered in traction gravel, ice or snow
– Trying that new (fill in the blank) ________ restaurant for which you got a coupon from that strange little man with the dreadlocks who was standing outside the pet store
– Large groups of elementary school aged kids
– Un-ergonomically correct body positions and movement while (a) getting your empty bag down from the storage shelf in the garage; (b) lifting and putting the soon to be filled bag which weighs 50 lbs or less into the boot of your ute; and (c) bending over and reaching for anything, even that pencil that rolled off the table, it can stay there until after our trip
Stay safe out there folks!
I’m not going to force my son to follow in my footsteps. He’ll have choices.I’ll just offer up my thoughts and let him decide what he wants to do. No pressure. I won’t be disappointed. He’ll get to figure out all on his own if he wants to reel right or reel left.
Flatswalker is good stuff. Recently, he went to Acklins and, luckily, he wrote about it.
I reach the hotel bar: dry, plainly furnished, with a quartet of anglers drinking in the corner. In place of a bartender there’s a ledger with a number of hash marks. Ah. The honor system. There’s a picnic cooler with an assortment of beer. A little digging surfaces a Kalik and after the first swig I feel my hopes rising. Surely the weather will clear to the east, right? Bound to. Surely.
That is as far as my arms would go out in front of me.
Yesterday I was on baby duty part of the day and then I took the afternoon off so I could go show Cameron from The Fiberglass Manifesto my local fishery.
That’s right… I took the fiberglass fly rod guru to hang bait off the pier.
The Bay is my Lemonade. The Bay Area is really a pretty poor place for fly fishing. The species that should be here (steelhead) aren’t (at least not in numbers that make it reasonable). So, it is to bait and sharks I turn when I just need to get on some bit of water.
Luckily, we got one. It was a MONSTER. Just look how bit that fish is!
Great to hang out for a bit out there in the California Sun.
Trips seem to come at inflection points. They mark the passage of time.
The trip to Andros marked the end of my first marriage.
My second Hawaii trip was freedom.
The Cuba trip coincided with the start of the relationship with my current wife.
My second Belize trip was my honeymoon.
My last Bahamas trip was maybe the last trip we will likely have had with my mom with us and it was when we first found out we were pregnant with our son.
This upcoming Bahamas trip takes place with her home, fighting cancer.
Trips… I look forward to each and every one and as I look back, I plot the arc of my life by the coming and going of those experiences.
I’m eager to get out there on the flats… I’m already packing.
Three rods in there already, one to add.
[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9RuqY-2yYI&list=UUT656FNV-3ToEnG580DbdxA&feature=share&index=20″ title=”Casting”]
I’ve landed well, I have to say. There was a rough patch when things weren’t going so well as my first marriage was crumbling and I was basically just waiting for the end. Sometimes, in those tough days, I’d grab my fly rod and head down to the school at the end of the street. I’d just go to cast and not think. Casting requires being able to block out everything else except the cast, to feel the flow of things, to get a rhythm and to just let it happen.
I recently came across this video from that time of me out on that field, casting and working through it all. My cast is either a little better or worse than it was then, but I understand what that guy was going through and I’d like to just reach out and let him know… you’ll be alright.
I sometimes feel like there is an ideal angler we are all somehow failing to live up to.
It is like the photoshopped model on the cover of the magazine. Millions of girls all over the country see the phoney model as an ideal of beauty and they can never meet the false standard.
Fly fishing has that same problem. There are some really great more-or-less professional anglers out there. They don’t do it as a hobby, they live it. They live on the water, on waters all over the world, and they have deeply honed skills. They are in movies and in magazines and they are generally great guys with very enviable lives.
That isn’t the life of the average angler. Most of us have families, jobs and a whole host of other priorities keeping us behind desks, in cars, doing homework with kids or at soccer/baseball games or the parade of never ending weekend birthday parties and generally in a non-fishing state.
I think it is time to embrace the occasional angler. I think it is time to drop the dick measuring in the “days on the water” metric. I think we should recognize that the standard is not realistic and we should get comfortable with not being a trout bum or having our own entry in the film festival.
Just a thought.
This is who I am.
How about we all just enjoy when we get a chance to get after it and encourage each other when we have those opportunities.
PS – Happy Birthday to my girl, who is 7 today.
My daughter putting the 2 wt. stick to a bluegill.
I recently shared a picture from a Redington trip to Mexico that showed a nice Mexican bonefish. Someone remarked that they were amazed how dark the fish was. It was dark (below), but that same fish, feeding in a different part of its habitat almost certainly would have been lighter in color.
A dark backed bone.
You see, bonefish can, and do, change color depending on their surroundings. They can’t pull a flounder on you and change their coloration to mimic precise shades of the bottom, but they can alter their color to better blend.
Bonefish have chromatophores which they use to control the pigment. That pigment can be concentrated to bring out those dark vertical bands on their backs and make the whole fish look green when feeding over grass. The bonefish can disperse pigment when feeding over white sand, making the silver fox look, well, silver, almost totally colorless.
The fish below was caught over white sand in Andros and, as you can see, it doesn’t have much color. It was blending in nicely.
Nice bone, tagged and ready to go. Photo by Cameron Miller.
They can’t do this instantly, however, which is why my favorite kind of bonefish is the bonefish moving in between dark and light bottoms. That dark backed bonefish stands out pretty nicely over a white bottom.
So, it isn’t that there are light populations and dark populations so much as there are bonefish, capable of adapting to whatever environment they happen to find their food in.
To understand more about the physiology of bonefish, I strongly recommend Fly-Fishing for Bonefish by Chico Fernandez. Dr. Aaron Adams handles the biology and does a pretty fine job of it.
There is a window at the top of the stairs that looks out across the street. It’s a small window, mostly decorative. On certain mornings, when the sun is just getting up, if I look out that window I can see, perfectly framed, a single palm tree.
If I look at that tree, back lit by the rising sun, and I fix my gaze to ignore the roofs of the track housing, that single palm transports me right to the tropics.
I could be in Biscayne Bay or Belize, Andros or Cuba. Just for that instant.
This morning the sun isn’t up yet, so I was deprived of my temporary tropical window, but I do look for it every day.
Somehow, it makes me feel just a little bit warmer, even if just for an instant.
