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

Locations — 2 comments
19
Jun 15

Florida Keys – 2015 – the first three days

I know tarpon on the fly can be hard. I know there are easier ways to catch tarpon. Float a live crab under one of the bridges and you stand a pretty good shot. That’s not what I wanted to do. That wasn’t what I was there for. It wasn’t what any of us were there for.

We came from near and far to try to get our own piece of the migrating ocean-side tarpon. I came from California, Matt Smythe from New York, Davin and his dad from the Cayman Islands and we had Ty Lloyd Jr. from the Naples area and Eric Estrada, as close to a local as we had in the group, from Miami. Davin was up in Tavernier with his friend Nate, the rest of us were down in Marathon.

Heading out on Day 1, High Hopes, Good Weather

The day I got in I got my rental car and headed South. Matt and Ty were already out and not having someone to head out with right away, I did the only thing I could think of and went fishing. I waded, looking for something roughly bonefish shaped and instead found three somethings tarpon shaped. A wolf pack of three big tarpon came skirting the inside of grass. Sure, I cast at them, just because, but they wanted nothing. It seemed like a good omen.

It wasn’t.

When I got out with Eric later that day, we didn’t see much. The next day with Eric we didn’t see much more. The next day with Ty, we didn’t see much more. We covered water. We staked out. We moved. We made calls. We peered into the water for hours and hours and hours and had nothing to show for it. No one was catching fish, not up in Tav, not in Islamorada, not in Marathon.

See, I had been saying these fish have been making this migration for tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of years and they were unlikely to stop any time soon… but they seemed to have kind of stopped. They were running off the script. They were making an idiot out of me/us.

Ty, Matt and I, out looking for fish.

The big meat balls weren’t there. Those rampaging swarms of tarpon, all eyeballs and tails and pushing water visible from a quarter mile… they just weren’t there. We saw a few fish, very few, usually too close to do much about, or, in one case, slightly out of reach.

You head all this way and it’s in the window, but there isn’t anything there. Kind of kicks you in the gut. It’s one thing to get shots and miss them, but it is another to just not get the shots. We were counting fish seen, not fish cast at, not fish fed or jumped and certainly not fish released.

We went through this a couple years ago, although we saw more fish and there was about 1,000% more rain. From that experience I knew we had to stay positive and, oddly enough everyone did.

We slugged it out and there wasn’t much to write about because beyond fishing different places and going out in the back a bit to look for laid up fish, we didn’t see much of anything. We looked for bones and reds on a couple of occasions and every bit of nervous water was a lemon shark.

At least there were drinks in the evening and food and friends and good conversations. Stay positive… that’s the trick.

Tactics — 4 comments
17
Jun 15

When the first cast falls apart

On this FL tarpon trip every shot gained in magnitude and importance because there were so few of them. So, each flub was a massive failure, bringing down the skies and ripping out a bit of my soul (to be dramatic about it).

One of the problems I had was on that first cast to really close in fish. Conditions meant we didn’t see fish from too far away. Often we’d see the fish 30 feet away, maybe 20, sometimes 10. Always they were coming at us, closing the distance fast. Trying to get a cast at a 100 pound fish 20 feet away is harder than it sounds on the face of it. The rod is 9 feet. The leaders were were fishing were between 10-13 feet. That means your cast, if you can call it that, was basically the length of the rod and the leader.

Ever try to load a 12 weight with no fly line out? Or even just a couple feet? It doesn’t work so well. You can’t load the rod and you can’t make the cast. On the first cast, everything would fall apart and then… oh calamity.

Trying to correct from a bad cast, that hurry, that rush… nothing goes right when you find yourself in that mode of “trying-to-recover.”

In retrospect, I should have shortened the leader so I could have more line out, so I could have loaded the rod for the super-close-in shots we were getting. A 13′ leader is a clear-day luxury we didn’t have, but tried to insinuate into the situation. It was the wrong call.

The second lesson, which will be learned and re-learned a hundred times over an angler’s life is simple… when it feels like you need to speed up, that’s exactly when you need to slow down. Take out the panic and get methodical with it. Think mechanics, not fish, and concentrate on the movements of your hand, your arm, the rod, the line, and not the movement in the water of that shot evaporating in front of you. If you don’t get it right, it doesn’t really matter if you had a shot or not and you won’t get it right if you panic.

I heard or saw this in some military show or movie… the infantryman’s proverb of, “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.”

Truth.

Speaking of casting, here’s Davin, aka Windknot, aka Flatswalker, talking about another bit of casting that he diagnosed me with and that I tried to get right on my last couple days.

All the other stuff — 1 comment
16
Jun 15

Truths I don’t want to hear

Not fishing, not catching, most like running from the storm!

There are these sayings one hears (I’ve heard them come out of my own mouth even) that can really drive you mad.

Maybe it is a tolerance thing and you hit it at a certain point, say, day 3 without a tarpon really even looking at your fly. Maybe it is 4 days. Regardless, there is a point when you you can see it coming, you know someone is going to say one of these things and you want to run up the tracks and flag down the locomotive before it hits the washed out bridge (you, fishless, or rather me, fishless on day 3-4 is the washed out bridge in this case).

Two of the most egregious of these sayings are:

“You can only catch fish when you have your line in the water.” Yes… true, but the other side of that is the “There is a fine line between fishing and waving a rod around in the air like an idiot.”
“That’s why the call it fishing, not catching.” True… but I’m out there to catch things, not just share their water. I know I’m supposed to enjoy “just being here” and all that, and I do, but I am there because I want to connect with the sliver king, because I want to do some catching.

These are thoughts you have when you mostly don’t catch anything. I had lots of time to think about these things since my hours on the bows of various skiffs was mostly not taken up with casting to or fighting fish.

Sure, I can laugh at it all too, so don’t take anything above too seriously. At the end of the day, I don’t. But a good rant is cathartic.

Locations — 3 comments
14
Jun 15

Back From Florida

I’m back. I’m back in California from my week in the Keys where the fishing was hard and the friendships easy.

I’ll get to posting later this week, but I wanted to give a little color to events of the past seven days.

In short, we got our collective asses handed to us by Mr. & Mrs. Tarpon. Seems like the big fish had mostly stopped running the ocean side flats by the time we got there, although there were a few big herds seen and cast to (although not by me).

The number of tarpon seen in a day, sometimes counted in the hundreds, on this trip were often counted in single digits. There were not water jugs poured over any heads in celebration on this trip, but it had its moments, although mostly of the friendship type and not the fishing type.

I’ll get some stories up over the next few days.

Matt and Ty

Davin on the lookout.

Me, Bill Horn and Dan Dow, running.

A bit of weather to round things out.

Conservation — Leave a comment
05
Jun 15

A toe in the water for BTT

Support BTT

Maybe you don’t have a ton of scratch, maybe you just aren’t much of a giver. Maybe you’ve always thought about joining, but just have put it off.

Well, you can now join the Bonefish & Tarpon Trust for $25 and get the $50 bennies, including a new BTT hat.

This is the organization looking out for the fish we love and if you want these fish to be around for generations to come, this is the place to put that $25.

So, join now, if you haven’t already. It is a great promotion and a great organization doing important work on a shoestring.

yeah… what he said.

Locations — 3 comments
03
Jun 15

The Mad Dash

The trip to the Keys is right close now, just a few days away. I fly out on Sunday, should be fishing on Monday. And so it goes that there is a mad dash to get all my gear put together by the time I need to head to SFO for my red-eye.

The rods are sorted, although not all here. I have my Orvis H2 8 weight, my Redington Predator 10 and a loaner Predator 12, which should be here on Friday along with a super-secret reel for the 12, which I’m excited to get my hands on.

Going through my lines in the garage I found I was short a 12 weight line. Now… it could be I’m NOT shore a 12 weight line, I may have just mislabeled, which is the sort of thing I’m prone to do. I don’t have the time to find the line scale and weigh all the lines, so I just bought a new one, which should be here tomorrow. Along with that was an order for backing, because while it is possible I mislabeled the lines, I never labeled the spare backing I have at all and so don’t know if I have 20# or 30#.

Back in 2012 when I went to Cuba and managed my largest tarpon to date (about 85#) I was really, really nervous knowing all that weight and tension was on 20# backing (my plans to get 30# blew up the day before I left). So, 30# backing is on the way.

I got the gear bag out and started putting the odds and ends you want with you out on the water. Tape for fingers, super glue, wire, spare tip tops for rods and other things that fall under the heading of “Misc.”

Of course, there are things I can’t control… like the weather. I’m prepared for rain, mentally and physically. I know it will pour. I know we’ll be chased off the water some days, maybe every day, but I’m going anyway because this is the time, that is the place and you only catch the fish when you are there, ready to go.

So… the mad dash to the finish line will continue for a few days. Can’t wait.

So… good, maybe? Or bad, maybe? So hard to tell, and maybe impossible to predict.

Gear — 1 comment
01
Jun 15

What we knew already

Fast Company had a story about how spending money on experiences is better than spending money on things. To this I say “Duh.”

Any fly fisherman will tell you that (or most, if they think about it long enough… sure, some will never get to that conclusion, but some people are idiots and this cannot be helped).

Experience > Things

The purpose of the rod is to enable you to take the trip, to be out there, on the water, near the water, in the water, doing the thing the rod was built for. The purpose of the rod is not to sit in your garage, unused, unseen, un-bothered. The rod is to be held, gripped, dipped in water (fresh or salt) and flung around a bit. A rod is built to be thrown, in excitement or in frustration because of the power wrapped up in the experience. The purpose of the rod is not to be owned, not to be counted as a thing, but to be counted as an extension of your arm, of your will, to reach out with it across the distances to connect you intimately to the experience.

It is the experience we seek, that we crave, and the thing becomes a tool, a means to an end, or, sometimes, a substitute for the thing until we can be out there again.

The vice is not something we have to have a vice, but to connect us to the experience of creating. I think the experience is more valuable than the sum of all the flies I’ve tied, of all the materials I’ve bought (and man, I sure do burn through materials when I’m on a fly tying kick). The act of wrapping the thread around the hook, the act of creation, of art, that is what it is really about.

Of course the experience > the thing. The thing has no purpose without the experience. It is the experience I crave and dream of, not owning more rods, unless the new rod or reel opens up some new experience.

Yes, this is a thing we anglers know and know well. So, we’re ahead of the game on that front at least.

Locations — 1 comment
27
May 15

Redington Find Your Water Finds the Everglades

Redington has been doing a series called “Find Your Water.” I’ve seen it come through my in-box, but I figured it would be mostly freshwater stuff. Well, that proves not to be the case. The latest episode (it’s short, watch it) takes place in the Everglades with Alex Tejeda and his Kayak. Cool stuff.

[vimeo clip_id=”128881943″]

All the other stuff — 6 comments
25
May 15

A young man’s game

I’ve been thinking about the trout fishing I’m not doing right now on my home waters of the Upper Sacramento and McCloud Rivers. I see the pictures come through on Facebook of friends up there, getting after it, fishing those waters that once so captivated me and still hold a very special place in my heart.

I was remembering a trip over a decade ago I took on the McCloud at the close of the season. I was hiking up the river, fishing solo, and I came to a section where the banks meet high rock walls as the river flowed out of a gorge section. As I hiked up the trail along this section of river I looked into one run far below and saw a massive trout. The thing had to be 10 pounds, almost certainly a brown trout, and it marauded around the pool like it owned the place. I wanted that fish.

To get to the fish I had to scale down a rock cliff, which I did, rod in my mouth to keep two hands free to grab the rocky cliff face. When I got down to the water I got one cast into the pool and one of my flies (an egg pattern) was immediately hit by a good trout. It was a good fish, not 10 pounds good, but a good fish nonetheless. After a couple minutes I landed a beautiful 19″ rainbow. The big brown didn’t like the commotion and had vanished.

The way I fish for trout on my home waters and how my home waters fish best is by aggressively covering the water. You get in and walk up the river, climbing over rocks and logs and whatever else is in the way. It is a tight-line, short-line nymphing technique using two flies and one more split shot than you might otherwise consider wise. You pound the pockets and the runs and you strike on everything. Sometimes there is a fish when you strike. That’s why you do it.

I was thinking about that episode on the McCloud recently from my perspective today. I realized I wouldn’t have climbed down there now. I’m more cautious. I have two kids and a wife who depend on me and I can’t do foolish things. My body also doesn’t respond as well to challenges as it once did.

While I wouldn’t have made it down to the bottom of the gorge, I know if I did the cast I would have made would have been better than the one I made all those years ago. I’ve lost some of my aggressiveness, but I’ve gained some skill.

When out on the flats there isn’t much of a place for aggressiveness, but skill gets you everywhere.

I wonder if that’s one of the things I like about bonefishing, that shift in focus, that shift in what ends up being important.

I can still wade semi-irresponsibly and cover the water, but I find myself on my rivers much, much less often and the call I hear is usually from the flats in places too far away and too expensive to visit frequently.

Fly fishing is still a huge part of my life and I imagine it will be until I can’t fish anymore. Maybe the trout will come back around for me in terms of importance and maybe one day again I’ll get to know a river’s pulse and hatches and moods like I used to. Maybe I’ll come to appreciate different aspects of the trout game in the future that don’t rely on the aggressiveness so much.

Maybe I’ll seek out spring creeks or take up lake fishing. Maybe I won’t and I’ll still pine for bonefish and skinny water flats and the need for long and pretty casts. We’ll find out.

Uncategorized — 3 comments
23
May 15

Ruined

I just can’t get into tying trout flies anymore. I just can’t do it. The salt stuff is just too much fun. It’s so big and expressive and substantial. I don’t want to tie any more #16’s.

I know which I’d rather tie.

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