We were running along a sand/rock shoreline when Cecil spun the boat around and killed the engine.
“Permit, on the beach.”
Permit, by Juan Bosco. Click the pic to go to the art site.
My reaction to the news was not joy, but more a sense of dread. Permit shots are things to screw up. Permit shots become moments of second-guessing and regret. Permit shots almost never end well.
Elliott, a day after catching his first bonefish, gave me the bow and I got up to throw at the thing. I could see it, silver-bodied and black-tailed against the white bottom. The first and greatest hurdle had been cleared… finding the fish. Here was the fish. He was in range. He wasn’t running. I had no wind. The set-up was good.
I was worried about the fly. Was it heavy enough? I put on a tan shrimp with barbell eyes. It would get down to the fish, although the fish was maybe in 5-6 feet of water and it would take time.
In the back of my mind I had two thoughts about the fly. First… it wasn’t a crab. Aren’t you supposed to throw crabs at permit? Isn’t that how you are supposed to do it? Secondly, why don’t I have more good looking crabs? I don’t fish crabs often at all, but why is that? Has my avoidance of crabs handicapped every permit encounter I’m going to have for the rest of my flats fishing life?
Cecil told me to shoot at the fish and I did. The cast wasn’t bad. I was in the zone, but again, doubts crept into my mind. I went back to my first (only) permit from Belize, a small fish to be sure, which behaved in most ways like a jack, chasing down a fly stripped quickly and eating an inch below the surface. I also thought back to my one permit shot in Cuba where I again stripped the fly in quickly and the permit followed, putting his frigging nose on the fly without eating it before becoming board and blithely giving up on the chase. There was also the permit shot in Mexico where the fish lit up on the fly when stripped, but then gave up. But… aren’t permit supposed to eat only crabs cast 10 feet in front of the fish when the fly never moves an inch and the fish simply intuits the fly’s presence?
So… strip or not to strip?
In the end I managed to pick the middle road the satisfied neither type of permit.
The fly landed about 5 feet from the fish and the permit saw it and moved toward it, looking interested. At this point I simply gave it a slight twitch and that was enough for the permit. It moved away and started ambling leisurely away from us.
We followed, waiting to see if it would turn. I asked some follow-up questions of Cecil like “WHAT SHOULD I DO!?” He was in the “leave the fly alone” camp. Noted.
Mostly, the fish showed us his back. I made a couple more casts when he turned slightly, but to no avail. The last cast was too close and it moved away, disappearing over a darker bottom.
The shot had passed.
As friend Nick Denbow told me, “The permit you catch is easy, it is all the other ones that are hard.”
- If you liked the story above, check out these stories below
- Permit Movie (0.567)
- There is a bonefish record in Texas, 1977 (0.567)
- Florida prepared to kick Bones and Permit in the nads (0.567)
Tags: Grand Bahama, Permit
At least you took your shot, be it hurried, confused, frustrating, or what not.
What’s the saying, “you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take”… or something like that.
No regrets.
It’s how I feel coming up empty handed on bones in the Caymans on a short DIY outing a few years back. Little idea what I was doing when I finally saw a few, but it was awesome just to know they were there…
Ya know… permit are assholes, especially the ones that don’t eat.
Glad I got the shot. That’s about what one can reasonably expect.