“Ayuh.”
“Big ones?”
“Mebbe.”
“Keepers?”
Apparently exhausted from all that conversation, he just shrugged, which I took for an affirmative.
We followed the creek through a couple miles of marsh before Keith turned the boat around and cut the motor to trolling speed. He pointed at the shoreline, where the outgoing tide swirled around rocks and cut deep holes against the marsh grass. I began casting a chartreuse Deceiver, my most reliable striper fly.
I was vaguely aware that Keith had heaved something off the stern with his spinning rod and was dragging it behind us. A moment later he grunted. I turned. His rod was bowed. When he cranked the fish in, I saw that it was a large bass. He measured it against some markings on the boat, shrugged, and released it.
“How big?” I said.
“Thirty-three and change.”
“Almost a keeper,” I said. “I never caught a keeper. That’s my goal. A thirty-six-inch bass. I don’t want to keep it. I just want to catch one.”
He shrugged. “Toy rod,” he said.
We fished for an hour, during which time Keith caught five bass. None was quite a keeper, but all were within a few inches on either side of thirty. I changed flies a dozen times and never had a strike. Finally I said, “Lemme see what you’re using.”
A stiff wire leader was threaded through a 1-foot length of orange rubber tubing with a sand worm impaled on the hook at the end of the rig. He let it drag beside the boat. It looked like a snake undulating in the water.
“What in hell do you call that?” I said.
“Turkey bone. Wanna try?”
“No, thanks.”
“Hang one on your fly rod.”
“That’s not fly fishing.”
“Nope-suh,” he said, “it definitely ain’t. I promise not to tell.”
“Thanks just the same,” I said.
We chugged up and down the creek for another hour. I continued to get no strikes and Keith landed three more and lost a couple.
“Listen,” I said. “Maybe I will try one of those turkey bones.”
“On your toy rod?”
“No. Gimme that other spinning rod.”
“You?”
“Sure. I’m not proud.”
“Course not.”
“You said you wouldn’t tell.”
So I trolled turkey bones from a spinning rod and began to catch stripers, and then I hooked one that felt bigger and stronger than the others. “Keeper,” I grunted. “Gotta be.” I cranked the handle of the spinning reel one way and the line kept moving the other way, and I tightened the drag and still that big striper took line, and I couldn’t get leverage with the short spinning rod to turn the fish the way I could have with my 9-weight fly rod.
Once the striper rolled near the surface and we saw its breadth.
“Oh, my,” whispered Keith.
Then it wrapped a piling and was gone.
We continued to troll turkey bones and caught a few more before the tide turned. All nice ones, but no keepers. We chugged silently back toward the landing as darkness gathered over the marsh.
Finally Keith said, “Somethin’ wrong?”
I shook my head.
“You’re unnaturally quiet.”
“I’m thinkin’,” I mumbled.
“I get it,” he chuckled. “You finally seen the light. Gonna give up that toy rod and go after stripers with real gear, huh?”
“Nope-suh,” I said. “Just tryin’ to figure how I can tie a turkey bone fly.”
The Bones of Deadman’s Cay
Columbus dropped anchor at Long Island in the Bahamas in 1492 and named it “Ferdinanda” after his patron back in Spain. It was his third stop in the New World, right after San Salvador and Rum Cay.
Carolina loyalists fled to the skinny sliver of land (60 x 4 miles) and settled there with their slaves during the American Revolution. Their descendants live there still, mingling and intermarrying happily, fishing and growing bananas and diving for langouste, the local lobster with the insignificant front claws, and living the good island life.
It wasn’t until 1996 that Garry King, a footloose fly fisherman from Bozeman, Montana, got wind of hundreds of square miles of sheltered, virgin bonefish flats halfway down the west coast of Long Island at Deadman’s Cay. He went, he fished, and he ended up staying a month. “The bonefish,” he reported, “had never seen a fly, and they were more plentiful than in any other area I had fished in the Bahamas.” The fish averaged 5 pounds, and according to King, even a modestly skilled angler could reasonably expect to catch a dozen or so bones on an average day.
Within a year, King had helped his Bahamian friends Samuel Knowles and Wade Smith set up a little Mom ‘n’ Pop bonefishing operation at Deadman’s Cay. Sammy, a crackerjack bonefisherman (he’s won several Bahamas fly-fishing tournaments), was the guide. King, who’s met them all, calls Sammy “the best bonefish guide in the Bahamas.” Wade, a former pit boss in a Freeport casino, handled the accommodations. At first Sammy and Wade hosted just two fishermen at a time. They didn’t spend a penny on advertising (they still don’t), but King helped spread the word through the fly-fishing network. Within two years, Sammy had brought in his cousin Frank Cartwright and Frank’s son, Jerry, as guides, and Wade had built a lodge that would sleep six anglers.
A few years ago my fishing buddies spent a week at Deadman’s Cay without me. Never mind why I didn’t go. As it turned out, my priorities were severely screwed up, and my so-called friends wouldn’t let me forget it. When they got back, they tortured me with photos and stories—eagle-eyed guides, double-digit bonefish days, endless miles of unspoiled flats where they never saw another boat, thousands of happy tailing bones ranging up to 6 pounds that ate anything that dropped in front of them.
They wanted to go back. No way they’d leave me behind this time.
The first week of March, two years later. Back in New England our wives were bracing for what the wizards of weather were calling the Storm of the Century, and so what if the century was only a few years old.
Meanwhile, on a hard-bottomed, mangrove-rimmed flat a ten-minute boat ride from the landing at Deadman’s Cay, Jerry, our guide, and Andy and I were creeping along in ankle-deep, 78-degree water. Jerry stuck close to my left shoulder. He had shrewdly sized us up and decided that Andy could manage on his own. I’d spent our first morning not seeing what Jerry and Andy were seeing.
Then: “Bones. Eleven o’clock.”
Jerry pointed, and I looked, but my bonefish eyes were still somewhere back in Belize where I’d left them a few years ago. I felt like that blind golfer whose caddy sets his clubface behind the ball, lines up his feet, adjusts his shoulders, and tells him which way the wind’s blowing and how far he has to hit it. “I don’t see ’em, dammit,” I said.
“Coming at you, man. Forty feet. Two of ’em. No. Three. They’re turning left. Ten o’clock, now. See ’em?”
“No, I don’t. Shit!”
Spotting bonefish is the whole point of fishing for them. But I’d forgotten what I was supposed to be looking for. Shadows and ripples and turtle grass and the high shimmering Bahamian sun created a thousand bonefish out there at ten o’clock.
Screw it. I made a cast. Was that 40 feet? Was that ten o’clock?
“Queek. Thirty feet. Nine-thirty now, moving to the left. Comin’ fast. Cast again.”
I did.
“Yeah, good shot. He turned. He’s on it, man. Streep. Slow. Stop. Okay, now streep . . .”
I held my breath. Beside me, so did Jerry.
Then he let it out. “He looked at it. Didn’t want it. Spooky damn bones. Cold front comin’, that’s why. The bones, man, they can feel it.”
A few minutes and 40 yards later, Jerry again said, “We got bones.” I thought I detected a note of resignation in his voice.
He pointed, and this time, mirable dictu, I saw them, shadowy shapes ghosting toward us, and I couldn�
��t understand why I hadn’t been seeing them all day. It was a little patrol, eight or ten reconnoitering bonefish, at two o’clock.
“Got ’em,” I said.
I dropped my fly 5 or 6 feet in front of them, let it sink, gave it a twitch, stopped, stripped again… and I saw one of the shadows turn, and then I felt the tug. I stripped, came up on him, lifted my rod, and he was off on that first, unforgettable bonefish sprint, my first of the day, my first in several years, a sizzling, panicky dash for deep water. I held my rod high and watched the line zing through my guides.
Oh, yes.
Then my rod went limp.
Jerry laughed, then began sloshing across the flat where my fly line, now disconnected from my backing, was slithering away. Another in a lifetime of memorable knots.
When I caught up to Jerry, he was holding my line. “You still got your fish,” he said. “He stopped running when he stopped feeling the pressure.”
Jerry handed me the line, and I hauled it in hand over hand and landed, if that’s the word for it, a 3-pound bonefish.
Off to my left, Andy was laughing and snapping pictures. “Behold the famous angling writer,” he said.
“I’m gonna step on that camera,” I said.
“Blackmail,” said Andy. “Gotcha.”
An hour later, we lost our sunlight. “The lights went out,” observed Jerry. “Here comes the front. Look.”
From the west, an immense black cloud was sweeping across the sky toward us like big blanket being pulled over our heads.
“Going for the boat,” Jerry said.
“Rain?” I said.
“Don’t mind rain, man.” He made exploding motions with his hands. “Don’t like lightning.”
By the time Jerry returned with the boat, the rain was coming in torrents and the temperature had dropped about 10 degrees. It was, he said, the first rain they’d had in a couple of months.
It passed over in less than an hour. Behind it came a sharp westerly wind and a brittle sun. We huddled in our windbreakers and shivered.
“Not good, man,” said Jerry prophetically.
I am known among my fishing companions as “KOD.” Kiss of Death. Plan a trip with me and something is sure to go seriously wrong. If you believe my friends, in ’96 I single-handedly flooded the Yellowstone River over its banks and destroyed our beloved Paradise Valley spring creeks. It was I who summoned a September blizzard upon the Bow River, a torrential rainstorm upon the Beaverkill, and a week of unseasonable gale-force winds—always the winds—on both of our trips to Belize.
That night at the poker table in Deadman’s Cay when they started in on me, I reminded them of what was happening back home. We’d all talked to our wives. They were buried under 2 feet of wet snow, and it was still coming down. Predictions called for another day of it. They’d declared a state of emergency in Massachusetts.
“And here we are, boys,” I said. “Playing poker on a screened porch, eating Bahamian bananas and sipping margaritas, wearing shorts and T-shirts. How bad is this?”
“Very bad,” said Andy.
“I’m actually kinda chilly,” said Randy.
“Sammy says it’s gonna drive the bones off the flats,” said Elliot. “He says they’ve never had a cold front come through this late in the season.” He pointed his finger at me.
“You shoulda been here two years ago,” said Steven.
“No way,” said Jon. “If ol’ KOD was here then, we would’ve had a tsunami.”
I suggested that we should all take a few minutes to feel guilty about leaving our families to contend with New England’s Storm of the Century, but they weren’t buying it.
The airstrip on Deadman’s Cay is a little more than an hour’s flight in a prop-driven nine-seater from Nassau. From the air, the west coast of Long Island is a jumble of little mangrove islands and spits and peninsulas that create dozens of intimate lagoons and flats and backwaters. A long arm of land curls protectively around the entire area, sheltering it from the westerly winds as the mainland does from the easterlies. Even from 8,000 feet, you expect to see schools of bonefish gliding over the white sand and flashing their tails in the sun.
From a flats boat, you quickly get disoriented. You’re into the labyrinth barely five minutes from the dock outside the lodge, and all hints of civilization disappear. Some entire days passed without our ever glimpsing the other two boats that we knew had to be nearby. Each of the guides seemed to have his secret flats. Some were roundish and man-made, left behind by a now-defunct salt-making operation. Others were long and skinny, like four or five football fields laid end to end. The shallow flats we prowled on foot, working with the wind to intercept the bones coming toward us. Deeper ones we fished from the boat deck while the guides poled.
Then there were the “outside” flats, vast stretches of sand-bottomed water—ankle-deep at low tide, knee-deep at high—that extended from horizon to horizon on the ocean side to the west. You could spend an entire morning walking one of them. Deep, turquoise channels separated them. As we discovered, giant schools of upward of two thousand bonefish prowled these flats. One morning, Steven and Randy, taking turns casting from the deck, boated 31 bones between them in a few hours on an outside flat.
Sammy estimates that they have 250 square miles of prime bonefish flats at Deadman’s Cay. Recently, he says, anglers guided by other Long Island outfitters have begun to find their way onto their flats. No longer is the area virgin the way it was when Garry King explored it in 1996. Still, in a week, I never saw another boat other than one of our own plus an occasional native lobsterman.
Deadman’s Cay is bound to be “discovered.” Wade philosophically guesses that they’ve still got a few years of unsurpassed bonefishing before the crowds find it.
That Monday cold front dropped the water temperature on the inside flats a crucial few degrees, and for a couple of days, the bonefish were hard to find and harder to fool.
The barracudas and sharks, on the other hand, which typically express baleful indifference to a streamer dragged past their noses, seemed to have been activated by the cooler water. Throw a long skinny fly—preferably something chartreuse—toward a ’cuda and strip as fast as you can. If he so much as twitches, you’ve got his interest. Cast again. Strip. Faster!
You’ve got to drop a big, colorful streamer (red and white is a good combination) within a foot of a shark’s snout. He’s got poor eyesight, so move it fast to catch his attention. If he turns and follows, slow it down.
We hooked several 4-foot ’cudas and 60-pound lemon sharks when the bonefishing was slow. We boated none of them for a variety of reasons that all amounted to excuses. I never did ask the guides what they’d do if they had to bring a shark aboard, but I recalled how Hemingway shot himself in the leg with his .45 when he boated a shark. Enticing them to follow a fly, seeing the predatory ferocity of their take, feeling their power on the end of my line… that was enough, thank you.
Each day by degrees the wind abated and shifted out of the west. The air and the water began to warm up, and the bones started showing up on the outside flats. We followed squadrons of ten to twenty fish that we found patrolling the edges of the rocky outer islands, and on a few occasions we encountered battalions of a thousand or more milling around in knee-deep water. One morning Steven and I took turns plucking bonefish from a vast school while a dozen big lemon sharks circled our boat. Neither of us had any inclination to get out and wade.
Frank had us cut back to 20-pound tippet and crank down our drags so we could horse the bones in before the sharks nailed them.
We didn’t always manage it. I still have visions of the shark that loomed up behind a bonefish I was about to land. He spread his jaws and showed me his teeth before he engulfed the panicky 20-inch fish on the end of my line. Ah, Quint.
In the best of circumstances, no matter where you are, bonefishing varies from day to day. Moon, tide, wind, barometric pressure, air and water temperature… variables both subtle and
blatant affect where they are and how eager they are to bite. A cold front is the worst. Still, six days on the flats at Deadman’s Cay convinced me that the place fairly swarms with bonefish. We saw thousands of them, including a few 10-pounders. And in the end, despite the lingering effects of that nasty cold front, we caught enough of them to cure any New Englander’s cabin fever—especially when the folks back home were digging out from the Storm of the Century.
Well, the boys insisted it wasn’t what it had been two years earlier. We didn’t see many tailing bones. The fish were spooky and cautious. A matter of degree, I guess. It was still the best bonefishing I’ve ever had. If that makes me the KOD, I can live with it.
Spring Break
After Andy and I made our plans back in early January, my non-angling friends kept giving me nudges in the ribs and making lame dirty-old-man cracks. Spring break in Florida, eh? Bikinis, wet T-shirts, keg parties, limbo contests? Heh-heh.
I just smiled and said, “Snook.”
My friends who don’t fish thought “snook” was a funny word, especially when I pronounced it the old-fashioned way—“Snuke.” A tactic for seduction, maybe? Or a drinking game? When I explained that it was a species of fish, they rolled their eyes and said, “A fish. I should have known.”
Teaching at the university, I take my fishing trips when I can get them. I’m not complaining. May through August, my summer break, extends through our long trout/striper/largemouth bass New England summer.
Spring break happens at my school, as it does in just about every American college and university, during the first or second week in March, which is actually still winter, two or three weeks before the Vernal Equinox, so that’s when my tolerant—and more flexible— fishing partner takes his break, too. We head south, of course. Last year Andy and I went to Patagonia. Before that it was the Bahamas, and Belize before that.
We’re not complaining, but early March is not the ideal time to fish anywhere on the planet that we have yet found. It’s almost autumn in southern Argentina. It gets cold, and the big winds howl, and the good hatches are mostly finished. The first week in March can be iffy for Bahamas bonefish and for tarpon and permit in Belize. Cold fronts and hard winds drive them off the flats.
Every Day Was Special Page 12