Salt Season

GAME OF BONES:

At dawn in the tropics, a special level of calm settles over an ocean flat, rendering it so still and soundless that you find yourself whispering for no discernible reason. The skiff glides across glass for fifteen minutes, then drifts to a halt as you step to the bow, peering across a lagoon that looks and smells like vacation.

You hear nothing. You feel nothing. But you see everything. So when that pair of big bones swims out from beneath the mangroves heading your direction, you clearly comprehend that the hooking and fighting and occasional landing is all just gravy for a visual feast that freshwater can’t quite deliver. But you’ve still got to make the cast.

In the world of applied medical research, Reaction Time (RT) is a measure of the response to a particular stimulus. RT plays a crucial role in all of our lives, by determining how quickly each of us can slam on the brakes, hit a fastball, or send a 60-foot cast to a seven-pound bonefish cruising through the shallows.

A day of saltwater flats fishing provides as much visual stimuli as any of us can reasonably expect our human eyes to deliver. We use our other senses—the smell of a shallow lagoon; the sound of terns riding a breeze over our head; the feel of a muscle-bound snook on a short leash, bending back to the mangroves. All of this plays into why we covet the salt, but the main draw of standing for hours on the front of a skiff or wading for miles across a never-ending flat is the allure of what we will see when we’re out there.

Because sometimes that’s all we get. We’re not blind-casting, we are scanning, nonstop, for tails and pushes and fins flashing in the sun. When you see your first permit come within range, that dark shape moving toward you, bigger and stronger and faster by far than whatever is swimming in the pond back home, it will forever alter your idea of what it means to be an angler. And the memory of that visual will stick with you far longer than any memory of the fight.

Bonefish can come from all sides—singles and doubles, mudders and tailers, or one big school to follow around for hours. Permit don’t come from all sides. Often they don’t come at all, and when they do, they can disappear quickly, just like that perfect double-haul you had back at the dock. Nothing lowers your RT faster than an approaching permit and an audience. At the very apex of go time—the precise micro-second to make your presentation—your line will get tangled. You or your guide or your fishing partner will quickly and heroically untangle it, but by then it won’t matter because you’ll be standing on your line, so the cast that needed to go fifty feet goes fifteen instead.

Bonefish will always be the baseline flats target for most saltwater flyfishers. Even in areas known for permit it can be hard to ignore the bones. So the scene plays out the same way for thousands of flats fishermen every year: You and your partner have the 10-weight rigged and ready, but whoever is on the bow will be holding the bonefish rod. It’s crappy light, so you enter that tricky search mode of scanning 40 yards horizontally, then peering six feet vertically, lest a permit suddenly appear at the end of your rod tip. Which, of course, it does.

“Permit, permit! Grab the 10-weight! Grab it!! Here, you go!”

“No, go ahead!”

“No, man, you! Go, dude! Go get it.”

The fish is long gone, of course, spooked by the boat and all the bouncing around, prompting the guide to utter a permit angler’s two least-favorite words: “Going away.”

But permit will eat a fly. So you’ll get one eventually. Maybe even your first time out. And when that day comes, just be prepared for lot of time spent permit fishing to replace a lot of time spent doing whatever else it is you do now.

Until then, it’s back to the bones. Or maybe a little jaunt to a backcountry creek for tarpon and snook. During times like these, a flyfisher learns that the traditional 45-degree angle of a cast won’t always do the trick. Sometimes your line needs to stay low over the water in order to skip your fly beneath overhanging mangroves. Other times, the backcast needs to be only vertical, going straight above your head because that’s the only option. These are fun casts to watch your buddy try to manage as you point at him and laugh, but they are less fun when you’re on deck—when it’s you that wraps your fly around the mangrove branch where the 10-pound snook formerly sat, waiting in ambush.

Luckily, there are Caribbean beers and tropical mixed drinks to take your mind off mistakes. A night of boozing may not help your Reaction Time the next morning, but the fish will keep coming back, as will you, for as many years as you can stand on that bow and cast at the most intoxicating targets our sport has to offer.

Words by: Tom Bie

On the water

Perfect Salt Setup

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