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

Aloha!

I’m in Kauai for vacation (kid is off school this week) and of course I brought a rod (two, actually) along.

I decided to pass some time right in front of the resort and was rewarded with a few Christmas Wrasse.

I mean… how are these even real? Look at those colors!

This fish didn’t put me into my backing and barely put a bend in my 8 wt., but… I could look at this fish all day.

This is one thing I love about these kinds of places… the fish are often glorious.

I had to drop down from a #6 to a #8 for this guy. Otherwise they couldn’t fit it in their mouths.

Well… it is booked. The deposit is paid. This thing is happening. I’ll be heading back to Christmas Island Feb. 11 of 2025.

I can’t wait to be back out there.

It is just such a cool environment. I really enjoyed it when i was there in 2019, before the world shut down for a few years.

I loved the trigger fish, the GT shots, the bonefish, the BFTs and all the wierd and beautiful stuff you’d catch near the Korean Wreck.

I just loved it. And I’m headed back.

We’ll be at Christmas Island Lodge, which seems a good operation.

Here’s to the days and hours of anticipation. Get out there.

I never met Cathy Beck, but I certainly knew of her, and her husband Berry. Word came out earlier this week that Cathy passed away while they were fishing down in Argentina. Condolences to Barry and all those who knew and loved Cathy, and that seems like a lot of people.

Here she is talking casting and hauls.

Years ago… many years ago… I had the Helios 2 sent to me to bring on a trip (Cuba, maybe?).

I fell in love with the thing. It was my go-to rod for bones and I caught a lot of fish on it. I liked it so much I kept it… I traded some ad space on the blog for the rod. That was back when someone would actually give you someting of value for a banner ad on your niche fly fishing blog (oh, those were the days).

Recently, I was an idiot. It wasn’t the first time. It won’t be the last. My idiocy, in this case, manifested with my snapping the tip off the rod. The good folks at Orvis are going to take a crack at a repair. They don’t make the H2 anymore, so I’ll see what they say when they get it.

Today, it felt like Alexa was listening to me on the phone with Orvis Rod Repair and in my feed popped some posts about the newest Helios coming out.

I’m usually a bit skeptical about 90% of claims of products of any kind. That said… I loved that H2. It was magic.

Maybe you have a special relationship with a rod… something that just comes alive in your hands.

I’m looking forward to getting that H2 back, even if Christmas Island is a year away.

Currently (and I don’t expect this to change), I have one day of saltwater fly fishing scheduled (beyond fishing in the Bay). I will be in Kauai in Feb. and I’ll bring a rod and I’ll use it. That is it.

This is tempered by the fact that I’ll be heading to Christmas Island in Feb. or 2025. THAT is a good thing to look forward to.

I’m already thinking about gear and flies and have dusted off the vice and gotten back to wrapping some threads. I couldn’t remember exactly how I had tied some of the trigger crabs, but thanks to photos of my fly boxes and hat (where I put flies to dry out while changing flies on the flats), I could reconstruct what I had done. So, the blog comes up with a save.

I also was looking at rods and reels and I couldn’t remember what exactly had gone on with my 12 wt. line.

Thanks to the blog I was able to piece together what happened. I lost a medium-sized GT on the coral/drop-off at the Korean Wreck and the loop got mangled. This knot must have been the guide’s work, as it doesn’t look like something I would have done. I’m guessing the line itself is fine though, so I just need to get a loop back on there and I’ll be golden.

2024 won’t see a lot of saltwater fly fishing. My wife has been very patient, waiting for a non-fishing trip, and we are taking one this summer (Norway, Sweden, Denmark, if you want to say “hi”). Next year though, I’ll be back in Christmas and I’m so looking forward to it.

I stumbled upon the Sailboat Diaries from Wild Fly Productions just yesterday. Hadn’t watched it before.

I love it.

I love it because, damn, what an adventure. I also love it because it isn’t about going out and just banging out a bunch of bonefish. These guys mostly don’t know what they are doing, but they figure it out and you get to be there for that.

My first bonefishing trip was with a guide in the Bahamas. These guys decided for their first bonefishing trip they would have a buddy sail a sailboat to a bunch of rarely accessed flats. That’s a big call.

They don’t go and have immediate success. There’s a process, a growing into it. Ya gotta love that because that’s real.

I envy these guys making that kind of trip. I’m unlikely to make that kind of trip happen at this point and I kind of wish I could.

Anyway… go along with these guys on their journey.

Ya know what I think about sometimes? As I’m sitting here on a Saturday evening in January on my couch I just started thinking about how on some trip back whenever when I was tarpon fishing I was stripping the fly too fast and the guide told me I needed to “feed the fish.” I took that to mean I needed to strip the fly, yes, but I needed not to have the damn thing WIN in its race away from the tarpon like a scared baitfish. LOSE the race, by gawd.

And I think about that in the context of the GT I missed in Christmas Island back in 2019. Last day, last flat, last walk with the guide heading back to the boat and here comes a frigging bulge of moving water and the guide loses his mind yelling “CAST! CAST! CAST!” and I do and then he screams “STRIP! STRIP! STRIP!” and I do and fast and I SEE THE DAMN FISH LIGHT UP on that fly. (S)He is excited about that fly and I pulled it right in front of that fish’s face and it wanted it. It sped up and was following the fly, all as the guide yelled “FASTER! FASTER! FASTER!” like piscatorial porn hub mash up. Stip I did and fast as I could, but it didn’t crush the fly and I eventually had no choice or room but to sweep the rod to move the fly and then the damn thing saw us and just stopped chasing the fly and sauntered off just as cool as you please as if it hadn’t just ripped out my heart and destroyed my soul.

I think (and more often than I’d like to admit) that maybe I should have fed the fish, let him catch the damn fly. Would that have worked? Don’t know. Haven’t cast to more than a handful of Geets and all of them on that trip. What do I know?

Man… I’ll never forget that moment… the crushing realization that it Was. Not. Going. To. Happen.

Anyway… I want to go back. I want another shot. Looking Jan or Feb. in 2025. If you are interested, let me know.

Christmas Island is amazing and I’m semi-surprised I didn’t come back and start a trigger fishing blog. Those things are awesome.

I am a Facebook person. My whole life is on there. Some may dislike that, others are similar. That’s not what this is about.

One thing I enjoy is the Facebook Memories and today popped up a memory with my Bahamas 2008 album featuring my first trip to the Bahamas and my first ever bonefish.

I was with my dad on that trip and he caught his first bonefish and one of the nicest mangrove snappers I’ve seen landed.

A LOT has changed since then.

My mom passed. My dad is medically fragile (currently with COVID, so, we’ll see) in assisted living having moved from my childhood home. One marriage ended and another (ambetter, healthier one) began. I had a son. I changed jobs, 3 times. I moved, 5 times. I have less hair and more pounds. I’ve since fished multiple times in the Bahamas, Belize, in Cuba, Mexico, Hawaii, Christmas Island, Florida and more. I’m a better angler now than I was then and maybe a wiser person.

So many memories have filled in the intervening 15 years, but this trip will always stand out as amazing. That’s why we take these trips, to go out there and do the thing and create memories and stories that will hold us over until the next time.

Get out there and create some memories.

This trip, to SE Idaho/SW Wyoming, has been magnificent in some many ways, but it has also been a time for growth and learning.

One of the big things I wanted to do was to get the boy in the raft. He’s 9, coordinated enough to figure some stuff out, but not yet a fully-formed angler.

We had one misfire where we went looking for some small water to fish and basically failed. The boy got tired of walking. He got bored. I didn’t react well to his complaints and there was a spiral that suckes allllll the fun out of what we were trying to do.

Then, I got him out on the raft. I towed this raft ~890 miles to get here. It was not a small endeavor.

He took to it… he loved it… said he prefered this kind of fishing to creek fishing/river fishing. He went out with me twice and talked about about how much he loved it. And, after some amature net work on the first day, we finally got the money shot.

He was stoked. He had a few fish on and many dry eats, but this is the one he got to hold in his hand, knowing that he caught it.

There was a lot of good dad/son time on the water. We saw bald and golden eagles. We saw a moose and a fawn. We saw more osprey than you could shake a stick at. We saw stoneflies and caddis and mayflies. We had a great time on the water.

This… this was a thing worth doing.