This was our second trip to Newport, and we had to go back because the first trip we didn’t catch anything. This time one of us caught a good striped bass, and one of us foul-hooked something called a chub mackerel. Foul-hooked means you accidentally snag the fish somewhere besides the mouth. Here are two truths about fly fishing: whenever you foul-hook a fish, it’s a bad thing; and whenever you catch something called a chub, it’s also a bad thing. The combination creates kinda the worst of undesirables. I would have counted the chub though, if only I hadn’t foul-hooked it.
I guess I have to go back. Kris doesn’t, not that I’m jealous, but I suspect she’ll want to go along. She catches great fish in Rhode Island.
We fished with Captain Rene Letourneau, who has spent 71 years in Rhode Island. Rene put us on fish after fish after fish. Why didn’t I catch a fish? I couldn’t keep my line untangled. I couldn’t keep from standing on my line. I couldn’t cast. I was hopeless. Now mind, I’m not usually a horrible caster, but after spending a week two-hand casting in Alaska, I guess I’d forgotten how to cast a single-handed rod.
Last Saturday back in Houston, at the Texas Flyfishers annual mini expo, Jeff Ferguson from Lake Charles told me what I was doing wrong, and I slapped my forehead and said duh. Then I mentioned that in Rhode Island I was fishing with sinking and intermediate lines, not floating lines.
“Oh, that’s different . . . ” and then Jeff tried to explain how I needed to cast a sinking line and it was too much information and I had to walk away.
Even casting badly, I got plenty of shots. We were fishing where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Rhode Island coast, so even if Rhode Island is a tiny state it’s a pretty big place to fish, and seeing from the ocean side where the Atlantic meets the rocks is in itself worth the trip. Captain Letourneau went to where he expected fish and then we watched for birds. The striped bass chase baitfish to the surface, then the birds join the feeding frenzy. The water is boiling with fish and the sky is boiling with diving gulls. It all lasts a few minutes, and then it dies until it pops up again 200 yards away. I had some hook-ups but lost them. My most exciting fish wasn’t a striper at all but a a toothy bluefish that took my fly just long enough to cut my leader.
Did I mention that one of us caught a great striped bass, over 30 inches and about 12 pounds, and it wasn’t me? Dammit.
When we were in Alaska one of our guides, Tom Schaeffer, was from Maine, and he told us about his nephew’s new bonefish lodge in the Berry Islands in the Bahamas, Soul Fly Lodge. In Rhode Island, Rene was telling us about his trip to Soul Fly Lodge in the Bahamas with Peter Jenkins, who owns The Saltwater Edge in Newport. We’d met last year the first time I didn’t catch a fish in Rhode Island. Our last day at the dock there stood Peter, who was buying a new used boat, and who told us he’d invested in Soul Fly Lodge in the Bahamas. Now I kinda feel it’s preordained that we go to Soul Fly Lodge in the Bahamas. Are the Bahamas a state? Can we fit it in after the Dakotas?
Anyway, I’m ok with going back to Newport. We found a place to stay that wasn’t extraordinarily expensive–and there are a lot of places to stay in Newport that define expensive. The Sea Whale was roughly $200 per night, which in Newport counts as a bargain. The Sea Whale had it’s own humble charm and free parking, was spotless, and was only a block from Flo’s Clam Shack.
We reconnected with clam shacks, which are the greatest invention since taco stands, and over the three days we were in Rhode Island we made it to three: Flo’s in Middletown, Tommy’s World Famous in Warwick, and the Sea View Snack Bar in Mystic, Connecticut, where we went to see the Mystic Seaport Museum. There are a lot more clam shacks to visit. Fried clams and chowder are now high on my list of great picnic table eating, though for my money clam cakes are a poor second to hush puppies. Clam cakes could be greatly improved with some green onions and corn meal, but then hush puppies could probably be improved with some bits of clam.
We went to Connecticut and caught fish. It was our state number 30, but on the way to Connecticut we went to New York to the Wulff School of Flyfishing for a two-day casting clinic. We’d been to the Wulff School before, in 2019, and when we went we caught our New York fish in the Beaverkill. Before we took the trout class. The trout class includes things like “Knots You Can Tie” and “The Bugs We Like Best.” There was a lot of casting then, but this time it was all casting. A lot of casting. Then some more casting. And then we went out to the pond to cast.
I signed us up for the casting clinic for Kris’s January birthday because, unlike me, Kris’s fishing is limited by her casting. My fishing, on the other hand, is limited by my head. Maybe I’ve made some progress in my life-long battle against stupid, but that correction is more than I could hope for from a casting clinic.
Joan Wulff wrote the book on fly casting; one of the good books anyway. If you want to learn to cast a fly rod, get Joan’s book. Then go take some lessons because, while it’s great for review, learning to fly cast from a book just ain’t likely.
I do have problems with my cast. If you imagine a fly cast, there are two parts to it: there’s the back cast, where the fly line rolls out beautifully behind you. I can’t see it while I do it, but I’ve been told I have a great back cast. I suspect this is a little like being told you have a great butt, not that I recall ever being told I have a great butt, but if I were so told I’d be flattered. On a day-to day basis though, in and of itself, it’s generally not very useful.
The school’s founder, Joan Wulff, is a great caster. She won the National Fisherman’s Distance Fly title in 1951 with a cast of 131 feet. Between 1943 and 1960, she won 17 national titles–not the women’s title, mind, but the all of ’em, men-can-compete-too-if-they-can-just-keep-up title. In 1960 she took the New Jersey distance casting competition with a winning cast of 161 feet. That’s more than half a football field, and about 101 feet further than I can cast on a really good day. She was a pretty, petite woman in 1960, and that hasn’t changed.
Joan married Lee Wulff in 1967. Lee Wulff was the sort of famous angler who, as a kid back in the 60s, I watched on Sunday afternoon fishing shows after football was over. If you didn’t watch famous anglers on Sunday afternoon fishing shows back in the 60s, you really missed out–it was a lot better than football. Lee created a whole series of flies, the most famous being the Royal Wulff. it’s certainly as pretty as a fly can be. He popularized catch and release fishing. He died in an airplane crash in 1991.
Mike Cline, Royal Wulff, Wikipedia, 2008
In 2002, Joan married Ted Rogowski, a Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft patent attorney, which, in the legal vernacular, is an elite lawyer at a white shoe law firm. He was a friend and fishing companion of Lee. He was a co-founder of the Theodore Gordon Flyfishers in New York, and, according to the patent lawyer board member I talked to at the Beaverkill Valley Inn (they were there for their annual dinner), Rogowski was an author of the Clean Water Act and one of the folk responsible for founding the EPA. At 93 he was featured on the cover of Fly Tyer magazine with his article “A Better Way to Tie Mayfly Wings.” It’s a good article, though not having tied a lot of mayfly wings, I can’t vouch for it being better.
Rogowski also represented Ted Williams during Williams’s Sears days. The guy knew Ted Williams.
Joan is now 95. She was around for most of our class and made sure the instructors remembered everything. There were four instructors,** and Kris and I had met all of them before–there’s a lot of consistency at the Wulff School. We had caught our New York fish with Craig Buckbee on the Beaverkill. He seemed happy enough to see us. He must not have remembered my casting.
Anyway, there are two parts to the cast, the back cast where the line rolls out beautifully behind you, and then the forward cast where the line rolls out beautifully in front of you. To each of the back cast and the forward cast, there are three parts to create that roll: the loading move, the power snap, and the follow-through. The instructors drill this in the class, explain it, demonstrate it, hold your hand to show you how it feels, yell it across the pond, and whisper it in your ear while you sleep.
What a forward cast is supposed to look like.
What’s great at the school is the consistency of the message. They’ve been teaching the same thing over and over and over for 40 years, and there’s real value in that consistency. If anybody deviates, Joan’s there to pull them back into line.
And the casting instruction works. At least it works if you can do it: there’s no magic cure for ineptitude. My problem is that I’ve got this cute butt on the backside and a mess on the front. There’s the loading move, the power snap, and the drift that perfectly rolls out the line behind me, and then on the forward cast I skip the loading move and move straight to the power. Wham.
A tailing loop. How my cast looks way too often.
It’s not that maybe 70% of the time through long adjustment to bad habits I can’t get the line to go more or less where I want it to go. I can cast well enough using my sloppy ways to catch fish and maybe even fool some people some of the time, but it’s not good. About every fifth or sixth cast my line is going to cross itself (there’s a name for what happens, a tailing loop), and the line is going to puddle 30 feet out and tie itself into knots. It’s ugly. It’s inefficient. It’s frustrating. It’s all my fault.
A common result of my lousy forward cast.
It’s what I’ve learned. I know it, my muscles remember it, and I don’t know if I’ll ever get over it. It’s certainly mild as bad habits go, a lot milder than stupid, but it’s a mess.
Sometimes I just cast backwards. I’ve got a really cute butt.
** Sheila Hassan from Boston, Mark Wilde from Vermont, Dennis Charney from State College, Pa., and Craig Buckbee from Livingston Manor, New York. These are great people. Each of them separately guides and gives casting lessons, and Dennis is associated with a fly shop we visited in State College, Pennsylvania. State College is mostly known for its fly fishing and its ice cream.
We went to Hawaii two years ago and didn’t catch a fish, so this is my second Hawaiian packing list. This trip was different enough that it’s worth the effort.
Gear
We took 9 weight rods again, with big Orvis and Tibor saltwater reels. This is heavy-weight stuff–we normally use 8 weights (which are considered heavy); this was heavier, but when the first bonefish ran I was scared that the 9-weights were too light. They weren’t, but I wouldn’t have minded a 10-weight.
In addition to the bonefish, I saw three giant trevally, and with only the 9-weight, I was kinda glad they ignored my flies. The 9-weight really isn’t enough for giant trevally.
Our flies were weighted–they weren’t just a hook and fur and feathers. They had barbell eyes so that the flies sank as soon as they hit the water. Barbell eyes are also a spur to better casting, because they hurt more when you blow it and the fly whacks the back of the head. The first day I fished with weighted EP mantis shrimp. I lost both heavy shrimp flies I’d brought, and the second day fished with a similar fly donated by our guide, Joe Kalima.
EP mantis shrimp
Joe wanted us to use 30 pound leaders to tie the fly to the line, which is crazy heavy, but maybe he wanted the heavy line because it’s harder to lose in the coral. Because of leader breaks I lost enough fish the first day that the second I used one of his. On Kauai we went back to 16 pounds.
The Molokai Ferry
There used to be an inter-island ferry from Maui to Moloka’i, but it seems to have shut down in 2016 (though there’s still a website). Now you have to take a plane or drive, and driving between islands really doesn’t work that well.
There’s something about flying on a pond hopper that makes every adventure better, even if the flight itself isn’t really adventurous. It sure feels adventurous when I walk across the tarmac to that bit of a plane. When I get on a pond hopper, I know I’m heading someplace out of my ken.
Traveling between three islands we took a lot of planes, so I likely raised the earth’s temperature a couple of degrees. Sorry. We flew to Honolulu on Delta, took the Mokulele Airlines flight to Moloka’i the next morning, flew back from Moloka’i to Honolulu a few days later, and then immediately flew Southwest from Honolulu to Kaua’i. We flew back to Houston direct from Kaua’i. The only flight we couldn’t cover with mileage points was the flight on Mokulele Airlines, and it wasn’t cheap, maybe $300 by the time we paid added luggage fees. That’s about $10 per minute for the flight.
There was no in-flight meal, but there was a black lab puppy.
Hotels
We spent the first night in Honolulu at the Equus Hotel. On our trip to Honolulu two years ago, we rented an AirBnB for three nights, and spent our last night in a dank dark motel near the airport. I wouldn’t stay near the airport again. The Equus is a bit off of the Waikiki strip, and it’s a $40 cab ride from the airport, but it’s also well priced (for Honolulu). Our room was small and the hotel needs another elevator, but I’d stay there again.
Because we had to fly out early the next morning, we paid the extra $15 per person for the hotel breakfast. I assumed it would be the typical hotel buffet, but instead the Hungarian barmaid at the Paniolo Grill made us bagels and lox. It was lovely, and she gave us her recipe for pickled red onions.
On Molokai, we stayed at the Hotel Molokai. There wasn’t any real choice for hotels on the island, and I’d guess the Hotel Molokai was built in the 60s. The rooms are scattered about the grounds in separate clusters, which gives it a nice open feel. The rooms and grounds are well-maintained, the staff was helpful, and the island’s best restaurant and bar are at the hotel. Internet service kinda sucks, but every room comes with its own rooster.
North Kauai seems to specialize in family condo vacations near a golf course. We stayed at The Westin Princeville Ocean Resort Villas. It was fine, and on a beautiful part of the island, but there were no chickens.
Food
On Kauai, we went to a luau. Tourist luaus are commoditized Hawaiian traditions, but how do you go to Hawaii without sooner or later going to a luau? The mai tais were good, there was a pineapple appetizer, and the poi was surprisingly purple. The music and dancing reminded me of a Ballet Folklorico, or that evening in Spain when we went to see flamenco, or in Lisbon when we went to see fado. The performers took pains to educate the audience, and there was a Tahitian fire dancer. I think it’s Hawaiian law that you can’t have a luau without a Tahitian fire dancer.
On Moloka’i, we ate dinner every night at Hiro’s Ohani Grill at the Hotel Moloka’i. Just like the hotel choices, there aren’t a lot of restaurant choices on Molokai, and the grill had excellent poke, the bar had martinis, and the tables were on a veranda that overlooked the Pacific. There were table cloths. The last night the sun was setting and I thought, “they’ve done a really good job copying a tropical bar,” and then realized it was a tropical bar.
There is a national park on Moloka’i, Kalaupapa National Historical Park. Beginning in the 1860s, about 8,000 Hawaiian lepers were exiled to the Kalaupapa Peninsula. It was an active leper colony until sulfa drugs were available to control leprosy, and there’s still a remnant resident population. Ironically, the peninsula is currently closed to tourists because of Covid. There’s an overlook though, on the cliffs a couple of thousand feet above the peninsula, and on the walk back we talked to a lovely woman who had retired to Molokai from Eugene, Oregon. She was originally from Lake Charles, Louisiana, about 90 miles from Houston. I told her that I had tried the saimin–the Hawaiian version of Japanese noodle soup–at the Ohani Grill, and that it was bland and that I had to ask for hot sauce. The Louisianan in her came to the fore and she said that a lot of Hawaiian food needs hot sauce. She was pretty much right.
When we were planning, I found an internet post on where to eat in Hawaii, and on Kaua’i we followed its recommendations. We ate at Hamura Saimin, which is a working folks soup joint in a warehouse district. It was better saimin than on Moloka’i, and there was sriracha on the table. There weren’t any table cloths though.
The luau was at the Tahiti Nui, a restaurant and bar in Princeville near where we stayed at the Westin Villas. Our first night on Kauai we also ate there, when there was no luau and it was only open as a restaurant. Like the Ohani Grill on Moloka’i, the Tahiti Nui did a good job mimicking a tropical bar by being one, and to celebrate its authenticity we drank mai tais. They didn’t have little umbrellas.
Where We Didn’t Go.
We fished on Moloka’i’s coral reef, but didn’t snorkle. We never saw Moloka’i’s southern beaches, and we couldn’t go to the the Kalaupapa Peninsula. I would like to, and I’d like to visit the Catholic chapel dedicated to Saint Damien of Moloka’i. Damien was a saint in anybody’s book, and I should have stopped at the chapel, at least to pay my respects.
We didn’t visit Mau’i, or the Big Island, or The Four Seasons Resort on Lana’i (though at $1500 a night, it’s out of my price range).
We haven’t eaten at Helena’s or Ahi Assassin in Honolulu. I keep missing Helena’s, and I suspect it’s a real failure on my part.
Covid
You can’t travel to Hawaii without parsing through its Covid regulations. Unless you plan on a 14-day quarantine, you can’t enter the state from the mainland without either proof of vaccination or a negative test within two days of entry. Those are the liberalized rules as of November. Before November there was no entry, vaccinated or unvaccinated, without a negative test. Before testing, the state effectively shut down outside travel. Testing requirements are still in effect for foreign travelers, but those are federal rules for foreign entry to any state.
You can’t enter buildings in Hawaii without a mask, and most people are wearing masks on the street. The grocery store on Moloka’i would only allow one family member inside at a time. Kris guessed that was enforceable because everyone knows everyone else’s family on Moloka’i.
Meanwhile every place was packed. The plane from Houston to LA was packed. The LA airport was packed. The plane from LA to Honolulu was packed. The plane from Honolulu to Molokai was packed (though since it only carried 12 of us, that’s relative). Restaurants were packed. Given the spike in infections, it was nuts. Everybody should have cleared out for us.
You can’t travel in crowds without exposure, and I’m sure we were exposed. We tested negative before we left and we tested negative when we got home. We’re vaccinated, boosted, and we wore masks, but we were lucky.
Once you’re in Hawaii, you can fly from island to island without additional documentation. Returning to the mainland doesn’t require documentation either.
Music
A lot of stuff in Hawaii has to be imported: most of the food, building materials, cars, gasoline, tourists . . . For that matter most residents are imported.
Music is an exception, and Hawaiian music is everywhere, all the time. When you unload from your arrival plane, there’s Hawaiian music playing in the airport. When you get to your departure gate there’s Hawaiian music playing in the airport. At restaurants there will be Hawaiian musicians, really good musicians. When we got into our rental car in Moloka’i, the radio was tuned to a Hawaiian music station.
Michael Keale, Tahiti Nui
If you think about what Hawaiians gave us musically, the steel-stringed guitar, the ukulele, the slack-key guitar . . . If you think about their lovely vocals and gracious melodies . . . Ok, ok, it can get cloying after a while, but then I find Jimi Hendrix cloying. I’m fairly easily cloyed.
But any guitarist has to be fascinated by Hawaiian slack-key guitar tunings. Ry Cooder is the most famous mainland student of slack-key, and Gabby Pahinui and Keola Beamer are famous Hawaiian players. Meanwhile I found this YouTube recording of Chet Atkins playing slack-key, and making it sound a good bit like Delta Country Blues, which is a pretty peculiar bit of cultural fusion. It’s great stuff, but it would have been perfect if he’d been playing a sitar.
Guitar
I took my old Kohno, and sat on the veranda at the Hotel Molokai and played to the chickens. I don’t remember what I played, but it wasn’t Hawaiian. The chickens didn’t seem to mind.
William Brigham photographer, 1889, Saint Damian of Moloka’i, shortly before his death.
Our guide in Kaua’i, Rob Arita, said that he thought Moloka’i is the best bonefishing in the world.
That’s a surprising statement, especially about Hawaii, especially about a place as relatively obscure as Moloka’i. Usually descriptions of Hawaiian bonefishing tend more towards it’s interesting, not that it’s great. I’m not a good judge. I’ve fished for bonefish some, once on Oahu when I didn’t catch fish, and a couple of times each in Belize and the Florida Keys. I caught a pretty good fish in the Keys and a lot of smaller fish in Belize, but that’s it. I haven’t been to Venezuela or the Bahamas or to Christmas Island or any of the other numerous places where the bonefishing is famous. Hawaiian bonefishing is not famous, and is usually mentioned as an afterthought.
Outside of the islands, Moloka’i is mostly famous for its historic leper colony.
Here’s what I can tell you about fishing on Moloka’i. Over two days I had at least 30 legitimate shots at bonefish, scared off some fish by hitting them on the head with the fly, had a bunch of follows with no takes, and had a dozen takes when I either failed to set the hook or lost the fish during its run. I landed two fish, one about six pounds and one close to 10 pounds. Ok, ok, I’m a fisherman. It was absolutely 10 pounds, and it’s getting closer and closer to 11. That’s a lifetime bonefish, and that’s an extraordinary bonefish trip, anywhere.
Back to Rob and Kaua’i. I haven’t been to Maui or Hawaii Island, but it would be hard to find a place prettier than Kaua’i. Kaua’i was the setting for the movie South Pacific, which is all us folk of a certain age need to know. The song “Bali Ha’i,” by the way, is the worst earworm ever. Kaua’i is pretty developed now, with a surfeit of golf courses and condos–it tends towards a Florida beach resort–and the island Bali Ha’i in the movie is motion picture trickery–there’s no such place across a tranquil bay from Kaua’i–but Kaua’i is gorgeous, and it’s famous for producing championship surfers. We couldn’t fish where Rob wanted to fish on Kaua’i’s north side because of 40-foot swells. I bet it was great surfing.
We fished the east side in the surf, which had two- or three-foot breakers. No one was surfing.
I like the notion of fishing the surf, and I’ve had some pretty good days in the Texas surf, but I’m not sure I like the reality as much as the notion. On our day fishing, I blind-cast hard until my arm fell off, saw one bonefish (well, ok, Rob saw one bonefish), may have missed one take by a fish, stayed colder than I wanted, and got slapped around by the breakers. I’m not usually much of a cursing man, but at one point I was so sick of getting hit by breakers that I would face each new wave and tell it to fuck off. None of them did, but it made me feel better.
You can’t judge Kaua’i fishing by our bad day. Sometimes there are just bad days to fish, and that’s what we hit. There was nothing Rob could do, there was nothing we could do. We fished, and then I was kinda glad it was over and went and had a mai tai. I’d fish with Rob again in a heartbeat.
By coincidence, it turned out that Rob also partnered with our Moloka’i guide, Joe Kalima, to guide from time to time on Moloka’i, and the best part of our day was talking to Rob about Joe and fishing on Moloka’i. Rob showed us pictures of his 15 pound Moloka’i bonefish. He said that he thought Moloka’i was the best bonefishing in the world. Did I mention that? I can’t tell you what an extraordinary statement that is. Saying that Moloka’i is the best bonefishing in the world is like saying that Houston is a great walkable city. In our neighborhood that’s pretty much true, but it violates most people’s notions.
I may not be a competent judge of Rob’s statement, but I’ve fished with a lot of guides in a lot of places, and I will say that Joe Kalima is about as fun to fish with as it gets, not least because he brings his dachshunds on the boat. Saltwater fly fishing usually consists of one angler fishing, while the other helps spot fish. Fishing with Joe consists as often as not of one angler fishing, while the other sneaks off to scratch Boo-Boo the dachshund’s head. It makes for a very satisfactory day.
I suspect Joe guides fly fishers because he already knew the fish, Not because he knew fly fishing. He’s all you could ask in a guide though. Joe sees fish and he calls the shot. He can tell you how to land the fish. He’s funny. And, as they say in East Texas, he knows everybody on the island and the names of their dogs. He’s got great stories.
Getting to Moloka’i isn’t easy. Unlike Maui or Oahu where you can fly direct from the West Coast, you have to take a commuter flight to Moloka’i from Oahu or Maui. I’m not sure that everyone is happy you’re there, either. Plenty of the islanders have signs in the yard telling tourists to go home, though some temper the message by suggesting you spend your money and then go home (which frankly I pretty much agree with). I don’t remember why I picked it as a destination, but I’d read somewhere that Moloka’i is more like the Hawaii of 50 years ago than anyplace else in the islands.
Moloka’i has fewer than 7500 inhabitants, and when we picked up our rental and started driving down the island (I had also read, by the way, that Jeeps are recommended), my first impression was that it was exactly like Lockett, Texas. Yeah, it was set in the Pacific. Yeah, it’s arguably prettier than Lockett, the fishing is certainly better, and there are apparently even more of Joe Kalima’s friends and relations on Moloka’i than there are Streits in Lockett, but it shares the feel of any other relatively isolated, moderately self-contained country place. It has the kind of grocery store where any country people from the contiguous states would feel right at home. People may not always be happy, and sometimes it’s likely that getting by is hard, but the best of the people really are always the best.
Rob told a story about Joe, about how Joe didn’t have an ID for years, because Joe said that whoever might stop him on the island was likely his nephew anyway. That’s Lockett, Texas.
The only way to Moloka’i from Honolulu are 12-seater commuter flights on Mokulele Air. It’s worth getting to Moloka’i though. Did I mention that I think Moloka’i has the best bonefishing in the world, and that I caught an 11-pound bonefish?
* * * * * *
Here’s how I lost fish on Moloka’i:
I lost two fish when my leader broke. The leader is the size-graduated bits and pieces ofnylon knotted to the end of the fly line to attach the fly. I don’t know why it broke. Maybe it was cut on coral, maybe it was nicked or had a wind knot. It couldn’t have been that my knots failed. My knots never fail.
I lost one fish because my knot failed. When you fly fish, all the beauty is in the casting, all the work is in dutifully retrieving the line from your beautiful cast. I hold the rod with my right hand, and retrieve and set the hook with my left. By the time a fish takes, I may have 20 or more feet of line puddled at my feet. For most fish, that’s no big shakes, but when you catch a strong fish that runs (like a bonefish), then if the puddled line gets caught on something in the boat, or if you stand on it, or if it’s tangled and the tangled line gets stopped by the rod guides, then your leader will snap and you’ll lose the fish. My line got wrapped around my reel. My leader snapped right in the middle of a knot. I possibly cursed.
Four fish came off the hook. That’s annoying, but that’s the fish’s goal, and sometimes it happens. I de-barb the hooks on most of my flies to make it easier to get the hook out of the fish, and on the first day I mashed the barbs on my hooks. On the second day, after losing all those fish, I didn’t. I’m sure my decision not to flatten the barbs had nothing to do with me landing that 12-pound bonefish. Or was it 13-pounds? I think it might have been 14.
For the rest of the fish, I failed to either set the hook or be quick enough to even try. It happens.
I lost one fish that wasn’t mine to lose. Hooking a bonefish is a bit like hooking an ancient Volkswagen traveling away from you at 30 mph: you think you can slow it with a rod and reel but you’re not completely certain. Kris disputes that, and says to heck with the Volkswagen, it’s like hooking a Jaguar XJ12 screaming away at 60. You just hold on and hope it breaks down.
Kris finally hooked her fish when Joe poled us toward the take out. She saw the fish, cast and spooked it, then recast and it ate the fly. Meanwhile I was busy scratching Boo-Boo’s head. The last time we’d switched places she hadn’t bothered to pick up her rod and was fishing with mine, and as soon as the fish started to run she was yelling for me to take the rod before she lost either the rod or her fingers or most likely both. Of course I was a little worried about her fingers getting caught in the line, but I was more worried about my rod, and worried most of all that we’d never manage a hand-off. We did, and 40-feet further out the fish came off the hook.
When Joe stopped laughing, all he could say was did you see her face? I had. It was a memorable face, a shocked face, a horrified face, and accompanying that horror was the excitement of the puppies, the whir of the line coming out of the reel, and Kris’s demands that I take the rod.
Kris asked later if I got her picture playing her fish. I didn’t.
