All the other stuff

All the other stuff — 6 Comments
21
Aug 16

Blog Birthday

Abaco Bonefish

The blog, this little thing I do, turns 7 today. I know perfectly when it has a birthday because it also happens to be my own birthday.

This last year has been dominated by the Bahamas regulation debate and has been a bit skinny in most other regards.

There is a lot more going on, both in bonefishing, and in my own life, than is reflected in the pages and posts of the blog, of course. There are bonefish caught around the globe from the Cook Islands to the Gulf of Yemen to the middle of the Indian Ocean and the Florida Keys. There are so many wonderful places and people to experience around the world of bonefishing and we’ve only just scratched the surface.

This next year we’ll hopefully meet a few more of these people and see a few more of these places.

We’ll also hopefully follow me back to the Keys as I look to finally land an adult Keys tarpon. If everything goes really well, we’ll also see me fish for bones (and maybe tarpon) in Mexico for the first time (family trip, but I’m hoping to grab a day).

I don’t have the kind of life where I can just go and fish all the time. Maybe those people exist, but it is a little harder to pull off if you have kids and a wife you’d like to stay married to and fishing isn’t your job.

And… fishing isn’t my job. It is something I love (need?) deeply and something that makes me feel alive. But it isn’t my job. It isn’t a responsibility. It is a joy and I hope to share some of that joy with you in in the blog’s 8th year.

Things on my mind: Tarpon

This video kills me… that big, nasty, beautiful, wonderful school of good sized tarpon and the shot goes begging… which is pretty much true to form.

Yeah, I’m thinking about tarpon and about next May when I’m going to make it back to Florida and back down to the Keys for a few days of tarponing, which is to say a few days of dodging storms and failing to see fish and fishing hard and maybe, if I’m lucky, getting a follow.

Tarpon are just cool. No way around it.

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06
Aug 16

There is a difference

Tosh Brown is a photographer, among other things. A really good one. He just revamped his site and it is kind of fun to poke around.

Check it out here.

There is a huge difference between what he’s doing and what I’m doing when I’m taking a picture of a fish out on the flats. I’ve seen good photographers (Jim Klug, Cameron Miller) out on the flats and they don’t fish, they shoot. They are looking for the picture when I’m looking for fish. It is kind of like how guiding isn’t fishing. Being a fly fishing photographer isn’t fishing either. You can’t really do both at the same time.

Here is his picture of a bonefish, underwater.

Here is mine.

Yeah… not the same.

Tosh is kind of better at this whole thing… and that’s as it should be.

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01
Aug 16

Gut Feeling

I went out for stripers again on Sunday, fishing pretty much the same tide as I did on Saturday. This is a game I am still trying to figure out. I have a hunch about ideal tides and a notion about what role the wind might play, but these are guessed at things.

july 31 striper

The fishing was slower. I caught less than half as many fish, not including a snagged ray that I thought was a monster striper for a few minutes. I don’t know why it was slower, although I do have half a guess.

At one point, I had a gut feeling that the fishing was done and that there would be no more fish caught. I knew it, but had no reason for knowing. The water here is opaque. You can’t see the fish and they don’t give themselves away. It isn’t like bonefishing where you can damn well see the fish are gone and it isn’t like what I imagine striper fishing to be on the East Coast when you might actually see feeding fish. This SF Bay striper fishing for me at this point is just all gut feelings, limited personal history and vague ideas.

I kept fishing though. I wanted to see if my gut feeling would be proven true. I wanted to test it a bit. I put another 100 casts in and had not one fish, not one grab. I fished it the same way I had fished it for the previous hour and a half with opposite results.

Sometimes, you just know.

I remember other days like that on other bits of water. I had one day on the Upper Sacramento when I had all day to fish, but 30 minutes on the water and I knew I wouldn’t catch a fish that day and I didn’t. This is water I normally do very, very well on, but there was a gut feeling I had that the fish weren’t going to eat.

I don’t know how that sort of information gets transmitted or by what, but it does get received and understood by the angler.

Sometimes the water talks to us and sometimes we understand.

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30
Jul 16

DIY Fishing Giveaway

There is a serious amount of stuff you could win over at DIY Fishing including a trip to Belize. That sounds nice, eh? A week at Tarpon Cay? Um… sign me up (I already signed up, really).

Here’s the link. You have to sing up for their mailing list, but I was already on it anyway.

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01
Jul 16

The Dangers of Facebook

Caught!

Happy to share this tiny bit of news with my friends.

However…

Umm….

All the other stuff — 2 Comments
24
May 16

Now Boarding

Based on a fictional story.

We will begin boarding soon.

We will first welcome our Super Elite Diamond members,

Followed by our Golden Elite Ruby members,

Our Silver Elite Sapphire members

Followed by our Bronze Semi-Elite Visa Card Holders

And then our Tin Chalice members.

We will then board families with children under two, members of the military, Nobel Prize Winners and Survivor Winners.

We then will board our Super Special Semi-Special members,

Followed by C-list celebrities, then D-list celebrities.

Then we will board those in Group 1.

After that… if we must… we might let the rest of you jerks on the plane who didn’t pay us extra money to board early. If we have room.

I’m not making any promises though.

All the other stuff — 2 Comments
04
Apr 16

Tis the season

Right about now, things are kind of perfect on some flat somewhere…somewhere you and I and the people who know whose Facebook photos are full of fish and not their kids.

The wind is manageable. The clouds are fleeting. At least when I imagine it, that’s what I see.

The water isn’t too hot, or too cold and the fish want nothing more than to roam their local and slurp up a crab, spooked and scuttling for cover in the mangroves. .

It is prime time, right in here. A few weeks on other side of the right now time and your feed is full of fish, bones and the rare permit and the tarpon are coming.

Even from the sidelines, the armchair or the couch, it is still a pretty awesome time of year.

Where are you going?

Looking forward to the next trip.

All the other stuff — 5 Comments
23
Mar 16

Post trip funk

My trip is behind me. Abaco was awesome, even with challenging conditions, it was great. I was there, in the skinny water, looking for fish and finding them and listening to the song of my reel. It is the stuff I think about frequently through the day.

And now… now I’m not fishing. I am not even trout fishing. I have no fishing on the books until at least the tail end of August. That may change, but not in any way that will put a bonefish in my path. Maybe there will be some trout, and the stripers will come back at some point and I plan on putting a few of those on my line, but my bonefish are kind of kicked.

There is a family trip to Maui and I’ve seen some indications there are, in fact, bonefish there and I intend on at least trying to find out (those HI bones are tough, aren’t they??). That’s what I’m holding out for.

I don’t have the heart to fully unpack my rod bag from the Bahamas. It is sitting in the garage, hopeful and unknowing and I can’t break its heart to tell it I have no more use of it, not for a while.

Maybe there will be some trout. Maybe I’ll make it up North to my rivers when they drop down into shape and the bugs start moving around, but that means leaving the Dr. on parent duty alone, which doesn’t seem too fair given how hard she works and how little free time she has. Maybe I’d fish a lot more if I were more of an asshole. I guess if I were more of an asshole I’d have a LOT of time to fish, but I’d be missing out on having a wife and being a father and I kind of dig on those two things, so I keep my asshole-ness in check, mostly.

Every glimpse of a river or a fly rod or a picture of a bonefish from Xmas or Andros… it kills me a little bit, a stab in my gut a little bit, especially when I see the lights on, the wind below 15 mph… the kind of conditions you dream of, waking or sleeping.

There will be other trips. There are many more years, I hope, of playing this game, so I’ll try to be patient, only partly succeeding.

Go… go out and fish. Chase, pursue, search. Let me know how it goes.

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18
Mar 16

Getting schooled on photography

Here’s a pretty cool opportunity. Yellow Dog is putting on a photography school… IN BELIZE. How awesome would that be?!?!

Instructors include Jim Klug, Bryan Gregson and Jess McGlothlin.

I’ve had the privilege to be on a boat with Jim and to see his approach to photography (which is the kind of focus the Cookie Monster has toward cookies, and by that, I mean intense and singular).

I know a lot of you want to take better pictures of your time out there and these instructors, and that place (El Pescador, one of my favorite places on earth)… I mean… how could you NOT count that as one of your all-time highlight experiences???

Sounds like an awesome opportunity.

October 22-28, 2016, El Pescador.

Awesome shot by Jim Klug.

Bonefish on the Brain Bonefish and all that relates (maybe a bit about tarpon too).