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

A bazillion years ago in a world that doesn’t exist anymore I went down to Andros South to fish with a bunch of other fly fishing bloggers. It was called FIBFEST 2 and it was an amazing time (thanks Andrew). It was, literally, the demarcation line between my life how it was and how it would be. I’m eternally grateful for that opportunity.

The crew there at Andros South was a stellar collection of very good guides and staff. One of the top guides there was Josie Sands. Josie was very good, very stern and very serious, I was told. You better bring your A game when you fished with him. All that made me a bit nervous to fish with him. I was worried I wouldn’t live up to his high expectations as my interest and excitement usually outpace my abilities.

I don’t remember who I was fishing with (might have been Andrew Bennett?) but I had one day with Josie. He had me up on the deck as he was poling us along a beautiful bit of Andros when he called out a bonefish. 80 feet. That’s a hell of a cast. By the time I had everything ready to go it was 70 feet, but there aren’t a lot of guides who would even call out a fish at 70. They’d wait until the angler could reach the fish, maybe not even saying anything until it was at 50′. I remember making that cast, consciously thinking about the mechanics and trying to clear my mind of everything else. I summoned up some nordic casting spirit and laid it out 70 feet in a bucket and Josie issued the customary “strip, strip, pause, strip” commands until I was on the fish.

I don’t remember the fish at all. I remember the cast and I remember how good it felt to be given that task and to not let Josie down.

Josie recently passed away in a boating accident down in Andros. It is a loss for that community for sure.

Godspeed Josie.

Here’s a link to a tribute to Josie from FishWest.

I was laying in bed last night trying to go to sleep in this craziest week I’ve experienced as an Adult American Human and my thoughts drifted off to Christmas Island.

So, what did I think about? I thought about two things. First, I thought of the day I missed 20+ bonefish shots… second guessing my flies and strip and wondering what I could have done differently. Was it the UV flash that reflects an odd color in the sun? Was it treating the flies like shrimp instead of like minnows? I don’t know. I can’t know. I won’t know. But we focus on the failures more than the successes, don’t we? Our brains are wired like that.

Second, I thought about the last fish i cast at… a very nice GT and a great shot and the fish that just didn’t eat. The guide was urging me to strip fast and I was… but was it too fast? Not fast enough? do you need to let the fish eat? What could I have done differently? Really, I’d need a dozen more shots, or more, to start to answer the question.

The trip has wonderful, beautiful, fantastic moments, but as 11:30 morphed into midnight and then to 12:30, I kept going back to those two days.

Wishing you all sound sleep and few regrets.

I think a lot of us have gone through a process in our fishing.

I started off dipping worms for bluegill. A little later and I was slinging eggs and hardware for steelhead. I didn’t discover fly fishing and a love for trout until I was 21 and for a long time that’s all I did, maybe with a little superiority in my beliefs.

I had a kid. I wanted that kid to see/be around fish and where I was that meant bait for sharks. I started doing that and grew a love of hers for sharks.

Then, saltwater fishing, I rediscovered the joy of catching fish on a spinning rod… especially barracuda and jacks.

Kid #2 and a new bit of home water emerges, 4 houses away, and I find out we can catch (little) sharks there. He is overjoyed. Said it was the best day ever.

I’ll fish bait. I’ll fish flies. I’ll fish gear.

I still enjoy catching a fish on a fly rod best, but I’m much more pragmatic now.

The joy in his eyes… priceless.

At the start of this thing I wasn’t fishing much at all. Hunkered down, waiting to see how things would go, not really contemplating it would be months and months and months.

My Abaco trip was called off and work travel halted. Conferences were cancelled. Trips to the store were cancelled. Life as we knew it was cancelled.

But, you create a new normal when your old one goes away, and I have. I work from home now, thankful for my job. My wife works from home frequently, doing tele/video visits with sick kids and worried parents. We even seen each other on some days.

Recently, I’ve started getting back out there with a rod as well. We had a few days up at a cabin near my hometown with our “bubble family” and I managed to put all the kids and adults on fish and I managed one of my best trout in years.

I also managed to catch my first striper in about a year and a half, and then my second.

Also managed to catch a ray with my son while taking my lunch break, about 4 houses away… water I’ve visited many times, but not fished. Who knew?

Feels good to fill some of this COVID time with fishing. I can tell I needed by how good it is making me feel.

I don’t know when I’ll be back on the flats, or where. With a wife in healthcare we have to be careful. Lots of the places I’d want to go don’t seem like great ideas to travel to right now. Who knows… maybe we’ll get a vaccine by the end of the year, or early next. That will free things up a lot, if things work the way we expect them to. We shall see.

I hope you get out there, in the fresh air, and get a few tugs. Some good medicine right there.

I have a new hobby. I go out and stand in the SF Bay with water pouring into my waders like a cold brew coffee and I practice my casting for an hour or so. I don’t catch fish. I guess that’s not a thing I do anymore.

I got skunked yesterday. Much as I’ve been skunked the last 8-12 times I’ve been out in this particular stretch of water, after finding that bit of water productive for the previous couple years (in this case 2017-2018, my bad luck started in 2019. I’ve seen fish caught here in the last year, so I can’t say “it isn’t me.” It is clearly me.

I don’t know if the fish gods are mad or if I’ve put some kind of hex on my flies or if the smell of my waders is driving away the fish… but, something isn’t right.

Ever had a stretch of insanity like this?

Who had Pandemic on their 2020 list of possible shit that was going to go down? Not I.

And now… I’m looking forward and kind of wondering what the rest of 2020 is going to look like and what maybe even 2021 might look like.

I have to imagine there is a whole lot of economic damage being done all over the world. Guides from California to Louisiana to the Keys to the Bahamas are all (or very much mostly) client-less. Since those jobs were more associated with the view and the lifestyle as opposed to the paycheck and benefits, I can only imagine how much hurt is being felt out there.

The threats are real, of course. Here in the US we are at 22K dead… either 1/3 or 1/4 done with the dying, depending on the model you prefer. That’s a pretty grim number. No, the hurt isn’t just financial.

My wife, a physician, things we won’t be flying anywhere until there is a vaccine and that is probably a year out. There are a lot of unknows as well. Testing is scarce, but eventually we’ll be able to get people tested for antibodies and that will give you a bit of a “OK, you can go about your business” pass, at least in theory.

I don’t know when next I’ll be on a flat somewhere throwing at a bonefish. Heck, I don’t even know when next I’ll be floating in my own raft. Maybe this summer?

In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter much when I next fish. The real world has intruded on my fishing fantasy life.

Hope folks are doing well out there, staying safe and healthy and I hope we get through this and back to fishing sooner than we expect, but not sooner than we should.

COVID might not have the destructive winds of a hurricane, but it may have just as dire a landfall in the Bahamas. You are being asked not to travel to the Out Islands, which I don’t think many folks would find easy to do anyway these days with restrictions to travel happening all around.

I’m not heading to Abaco in May. We’ll see what this thing looks like in 4-5 months.

Here’s something from the Out Islands Promotion Board:

A trip to the Bahamas in May is starting to look as unlikely as it would be unwise. What a unique moment in history we are living through.

Of course, this is insult to injury to the people of the Bahamas, to survive Dorian and then to have the flow of business shut down by a virus originating half-a-world away. Unfair on top of unfair.

We are a bit of a rough spot here too, of course. We have a “Shelter in Place” order, my son’s schyool may not re-open until the next school year and my daughter is doing distance-learning. I’m working from home, stuck in sweatpants and on conference calls, and maybe this is the new normal.

It is straight out of a movie or book plot. The reason for that is it was always possible. And now… it is here.

How I’d love to be on the flats looking for bonefish right about now, even if the winds were howling at 20. Sure seems like that would be social distancing, if you were doing it right.

But… with no school in and no childcare available and a wife working in medicine (and working in healthcare myself) it seems a very poor idea to go anywhere. I stand a good chance of being a vector for someone else’s misery and maybe even their death. That isn’t a part I’m willing to play in anyone’s story.

Maybe I’ll imagine what that trip would be like and write it as if it happened. In fact, I’ll probably do just that.

Saw this segment on 60 Minutes about the Bahamas going solar. Great idea. While in Christmas Island (about a million years ago, although actually just about a year ago) I talked with a couple of guys looking to instal solar on small Pacific islands to replace diesel generators. It was part of a World Bank or government project. Tons of sense… inspiring, even.

Then there is the Bahamas… they don’t have an Australia or New Zealand to fund those projects and passing the costs down to the consumers isn’t really that realistic in a place where the median household income is officially about $33K in many places and probably well below that number in reality.

The solar array they are putting in Ragged is supposed to cost $3,000,000 to get power to about 100 people. That’s awful math. That doesn’t scale particularly well. I don’t think the 100 people of Ragged Island are going to be able to actually buy that power.

I’d love for this story to be real, but it has the feeling of a lot of window dressing. Still a long, long haul for the people of the Bahamas to recover from Dorian. The housing situation seems poor, at best, and the government seems to be all red-tape and sound bites. I’ll be there in a couple months and I’ll be curious if my impressions change after being there and hearing from the people directly.