Exploratory trips sound awesome. Wouldn’t you want to be one of those guys who were first to break the story on river tarpon or the first groups to run down the man in Baja? Of course.
But… for every Costa Rican river full of 100 pound tarpon there is probably a baking hot beach totally barren of target species.
That seems to be what played out in this film. A team goes in search of bonefish in the Gulf of Aden, found in the totally pirate free waters between Yemen and Somalia.
The movie makes one long for, well, not being there. It looks hot and the fishing looks slow. The water off the beaches gets deep quickly and while there are a couple of bonefish caught, you have to think we saw both of them in the film (as in, it seems they only caught two bonefish). There was a decent unicorn fish caught and something in a deeper cut, but mostly… mostly it just looked hot. I can feel the ball sweat just watching this.
Reminds me of hearing about an exploratory trip my friend Shane took to a South Pacific atoll. The fishing was fantastic, part of the time. The rest of the time the water was too hot and the bonefish left the lagoon, leaving precious little to go after with a fly rod. It is a long way to go to maybe find fish.
Turns out it isn’t always so bad. Here’s a video from the same waters in 2013 claiming to be the first fly caught bones on the island. Also, check out the fish at 2:13… what is that??
This trip looks way more interesting.
Such is the nature of exploration though, right? Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t and sometimes those same results happen on the same waters on different days.
