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

There is no doping in bonefishing. Well, actually there very well may be doping, but it wouldn’t help and no one would care.

There are tournaments, but they are followed by few and actively avoided by most. The Hall of Fame exists, but not many could tell you where it was and fewer aspire to make it in one day.

There is no Clear and no Cream, no altered blood sample, no dodgey pharmcist in unmarked buildings. This is really so much simpler, isn’t it?

I would guess a great swath of the non-bonefishing public would say bonefishing isn’t a sport and to a degree, I can understand that point of view. We are seldom athletes when on a flat or on the deck of a boat, regardless what you may have been 20 or 40 years before.

It might not be a sport, but it is more than a lot of other things. It is both profoundly important and completely trivial. It is optional and diversionary, unless you are the guide and pushing a boat into a 20 mph wind to give your client a shot at a permit that he will almost certainly blow. That looks a little more sport-like than what we actually call the “sport of bonefishing.”

When you get the haul just right and the line cuts through the stiff wind and the cast lays out like a glass of spilled milk and the fish is on the fly and you strip and feel the connection, that brief, chaotic moment of meeting and then the explosive power and you hear the scream of the reel…

I cannot imagine that Messi feels any better when listening to the roar of the crowd after capping off a hat trick.

I’m glad the secret isn’t out, else we might have to sit through an interview with Lefty and Oprah.

We are spared.

No… not a sport and maybe I’m glad for that.

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