Category: Saltwater

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Key West

Florida Bay near Key West is beautiful, and in February we had the flats to ourselves. Miles of brilliant blue and green clear water, mangrove islands, three-foot sharks and 30-pound turtles and lurking barracuda and porpoising porpoises. Away in the west over the calm green and blue we could see the distant Marquesas, and behind us almost distant Key West. There was blue sky and white clouds and it was a very gentle 80 degrees.

Of course we had Florida Bay to ourselves because in February Key West is full of Midwestern drinking folk who are busy drinking, not fishing. Gauging by the number of bars per square mile it’s full of drinking folk year round, but other times of the year there might also be fly anglers. Probably drinking fly anglers, recounting tales of their fabulous Key West fish over rum drinks garnished with umbrellas. There are plenty of rum drinks in February but there aren’t any fly anglers because in February there aren’t any fish, fabulous or no.

Let me change that. There weren’t any target fish on the day we were on the water. I’m sure every other day in February there are all sorts of fish. Bonefish. Permit. Tarpon. Arctic char. Crappie. Sunfish. Giant trevaly and channel cats. One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish. You name it, any day we’re not on the water the fish are there in spades and they’ve brought their friends. You’d better bring your three weight and eight weight and 12 and both of your Spey rods, and some golf clubs and do some pushups, because you’re going to be casting and fighting fish with all of them all day long. But not on February 7 when we were on the water.

Andrew Asher was our guide, and besides having a name that sounds like a British film star he has the best guiding voice ever. In another life he will have a British accent and be the voice of the BBC. But Andrew is a guide and he’s a good guide and he knows about fish and water and the grace it takes to guide well. There. I got in my statutorily required Hemingway imitation.

Andrew did a great job. He ran a Maverick skiff with a 115 hp engine that ran easily from flat to flat at 40. He sat us up with the wind and the sun and I trusted that he saw what was there, even when we didn’t see it. He knew enough to say “fish at two o’clock,” pause while I looked left and then calmly follow with “fish at two o’clock on the right.” Then we would decide it was something he called a box fish which is apparently a kind of puffer, and I’d cast to that for a while and it would ignore me until it meandered off.

He and Kris pretty much agreed on politics though, which meant I didn’t have to worry about getting thrown off the boat.

Zane Grey said that he, Zane Grey, not Andrew Asher, was a hard-luck angler, and I think about that a lot, whether there’s just something about me that makes me unlucky at fish. I’ve been so lucky in most of my life. My career has been fortunate and meaningful, our children are grown and are good people with real jobs, and Kris likes to fly fish and seems to like me. We now own a Chihuahua. But on February 7 there were no fish near Key West. Maybe things balance out, and I deserve some fish misfortune for being the recipient of so many good things.

Late in the day Andrew suggested I cast to barracuda. I was not a natural. My attempt at casting was awkward and embarrassing, and I put a wind knot in a 40 pound wire leader. I think I amazed Andrew, who as a guide should be inured to client stupidity, but there you are: when it comes to casting I can be amazing. I certainly amazed myself.

* * *

From Brown, Jefferson B., Key West: The Old and the New, 1912, St. Augustine, The Record Company.

As of the 2010 census, Monroe County had 73,090 residents, of which 25,478 lived in its county seat, Key West. The population is about 85 percent white folk.

By the 1760s, the Native Americans, the Tequesta or the Calusa or both, were gone from the Keys, and Key West was transferred from the Spanish to the British. In 1821, back in the hands of the Spanish, Florida was ceded by Spain to the US. In an early act of piracy (or at least real estate development) the owner of Key West, a Spanish artillery officer, sold it first for about $525 to a former South Carolina governor and then sold it a second time to John Simonton for $2000. After some string pulling Simonton ended up with it, and streets in Key West bear the names of Simonton and his cronies. When the island sold there were no permanent residents. By 1830 there were 517 residents, by 1880 there were 9,800, by 1910 there were 19,945.

Key West’s first industry was pirating, which after naval intervention (the first significant U.S. presence in the Keys) was replaced by marine scavengers (the surrounding coral reefs being an excellent provider of scavenge), smuggling (including slaves before the Civil War, rum during Prohibition, drugs during the 70s, and whatever is now the going concern), fishing, sponges, and finally, after Monroe County had become one of the poorest counties in the nation during the Great Depression (“They’re living on fish and coconuts”), tourism and real estate. It was first connected to the mainland in 1912 by Henry Flagler’s overseas train, which blew away in the 1935 hurricane, and which was replaced by the Overseas Highway. U.S. 1 runs all the way from Maine down the Atlantic Coast, and as much as anything we went to Key West to drive the Overseas Highway.

In 2016, Monroe County voted for President Trump, but the Key West part of Monroe County voted for Hillary Clinton. It wasn’t really close, Trump took the county by 54 percent, and I imagined I could see the dichotomy between the county and its county seat on the drive: the approach down the county through harder or at least more suburban living, where most contact with government is seen as an intrusion, a burden, and where there is a perceived unfairness in the distribution of all good things derived from the burdens imposed. In Key West there was greater affluence, education, urban living. Key West looks Democratic.

In 2018 the vote for governor was also Republican but very close, and Monroe County went Republican 49.59 percent to 49.18. Darcy Richardson of the Reform Party tipped the county Republican by taking 0.57 percent. It didn’t make much difference in the big scheme, but Darcy Richardson is one of those proofs that every politician thinks they’re special and that they can win, even when they’re not and they can’t.

* * *

I really had high hopes for some memorable sights in Key West. From what I’d read it’s nigh on the most decadent place on earth, more decadent than San Francisco during the Summer of Love or Bourbon Street on the night before Lent or Las Vegas on a day that ends with a “y” or even Kansas City during revivals of the musical Oklahoma!. Maybe it’s that tropical lushness that confuses Midwesterners. I guess I’ve lived in a warm wet big city for too long, ’cause it all seemed rather tame to me. Maybe the decadence migrates in with the tarpon and the fly fishers later in the spring.

We didn’t see any memorable decadence. We hung out our first night in a nice wine bar with our new friends Mike and Bill from Michigan. We discussed politics, their house in Ft. Lauderdale and their home in Michigan and ours in Houston, places to eat, and some more politics. We talked about Bill’s work to create the River Raisin National Battlefield Park, and the Recent Republican Troubles. And then we talked some more about politics. They bought us wine, and we owe them some wine and hope someday we get to repay. I also told them the long complicated story about the steelhead fly I tied from the ostrich feather I was given at the Pride Parade and on which I caught my steelhead. I’m very proud of that fly. They politely listened, for which I’m grateful.

On night two we ate at Sole, while on Duval Street the snowbirds drank and a gregarious drag queen invited folk into a bar. We talked to a Canadian couple who obsessively followed horse racing. Lexington and Sarasota they said were prime destinations, but the Kentucky Derby is nothing but an excuse for dilettantes to drink and wear hats. There was some anger there.

Later at a different bar a woman from Pella, Iowa, had drunk too many rum painkillers and felt strongly (if very politely in an Iowan way) that I should be drinking them too. Neither she nor her husband could tell me anything about trout fishing the Iowa Driftless Region, and seemed surprised any one would want to go to Iowa to fish. Who doesn’t want to go to Iowa to fish? Iowa is heaven.

At 9 at night everyone was friendly and talkative and lubricated and if you just stood around long enough you’d find people to talk to, just like a giant cocktail party. It seemed to me that Key West was all-in-all pretty tasteful and pretty tame, though there were plenty of tacky t-shirts.

Andrew the Guide told us that he lived near Duval but for him it was rarely a destination, and when on the rare occasions he went to the bars he left long before midnight. He said that ’round midnight things on Duval changed, and that the drunks came out of the bars to punch each other and so forth. I guess we missed it. Maybe the horse racing aficionado found a Kentucky Derby fan to punch. Maybe the Iowa lady passed out on rum painkillers. Maybe somewhere near Sloppy Joe’s a tipsy Wallace Stevens threw a punch at Ernest Hemingway and Ernest Hemingway knocked him down. I guess I’ll have to wait until next time and stay awake until midnight. Even better, maybe we can find Mike and Bill and buy a bottle of wine.

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N’o’io and Mantis Shrimp, January 11-12, 2019

I didn’t catch a Hawaiian bonefish, an o’io. I saw plenty, especially the first day we fished, and I cast pretty well too, sometimes right where I wanted. That was the problem. Where I wanted wasn’t where the casts needed to be. My casts would land nice and close and then the fish would explode, not onto the fly either. It couldn’t have been more violent if I’d thrown a rock. Or a grenade.

Sometimes I’ve watched fish mosey away from my flies, dismissive and haughty. Sometimes I’ve watched them turn quick and quiet and run for the wild. I don’t ever recall watching so many huge fish blow ups. They were big fish, and big sudden flushes of water, and zoom, gone.

This was not exactly a wilderness experience. The first day we fished flats just off the Honolulu airport runways, near the port at the edge of the city, so there was a line of military jets and passenger jets taking off from the shared runway. Every 15 minutes there would be another jet taking off. Sometimes in deeper water our guide, Jake Brooks, poled the boat and one of us fished the bow. In shallower water we waded. It didn’t matter. I mostly couldn’t see the fish. Jake could, but especially after the first day I couldn’t.

The first day though I did see fish, at least some of the time, plus that first day there were tailing fish and you could see both their dorsal fins and tails above the water. They didn’t stand still, and Jake had me move to intercept them at an angle. As often as not when the fish were moseying away Jake called me off. He said we’d never get close enough for a cast.

And when I did cast there were fish explosions. 

I’ve read about delicate presentations for trout, but for the most part they aren’t useful for bass or redfish, and you have to cast even closer for black drum. Most days you put the fly a foot or so away, hope the fly makes just enough noise to get the fish’s attention, and then things are dandy: one sees fish, one casts near fish, one catches fish. It’s a simple game. Not so Hawaiian bonefish. They won’t belong to any club that would let them in.


Emerton, J. H.; Smith, S. I.; Harger, O. illustrators, from Goode, George Brown, Fisheries and Fishery Industries of the United States: Section I, Natural History of Useful Aquatic Animals, 1884, Government Printing Office, Washington D.C., The University of Washington Freshwater and Marine Image Bank

And mantis shrimp flies are heavy, with big lead eyes to weigh them down. I thought the heavy lead eyes were overkill, but there’s a reason for the weight. Hawaiian mantis shrimp aren’t delicate swimmers. They don’t spurt through the water column or snap above the surface. Both creatures are crustaceans, but shrimp (and also crabs, crawfish, and lobsters) are of the order decapod. What Hawaiian flies mimic, mantis shrimp, are stomatopoda. These are mean critters, living angry, mean lives in holes along the sea bed. They don’t swim, they scuttle, and you fish the fly with slow short strips along the sand. You need that weight to get them down. They’re predators, and it’s thought that they have the most complicated eyes in the world. Each eye is on a separate stalk that can move independent of the other. Those are pearls that were their eyes.


Mantis Shrimp, Todd, H.L. illustrator, from Goode, George Brown, Fisheries and Fishery Industries of the United States: Section I, Natural History of Useful Aquatic Animals, 1884, Government Printing Office, Washington D.C., The University of Washington Freshwater and Marine Image Bank

They hunt. They have a pair of raptorial claws that depending on the species can be either sharp spears for slashing or blunt clubs for smashing. They can break aquarium glass. They can break through oyster shells. Sometimes they’re called thumb splitters, because they can break through you.

Mayer, Alfred Goldsborough, Sea-Shore Life : the Invertebrates of the New York Coast and the Adjacent Coast Region, 1905, A. S. Barnes & Company, New York, New York, The University of Washington Freshwater and Marine Image Bank

So my predisposition for close casts and indelicate casting wasn’t helped by the heavy flies. By the time I got my best shot I had figured out the problem with close casts. I watched two fine fish happily eating down a line of mangroves 30 feet away. I made a perfect cast, five feet in front of them, and watched two fish explosions. Plop. Boom. 

“Ten feet,” Jake said. “You can’t get closer than ten feet.” Then I reckon you let the fly sit and wait for the fish to come to you. I reckon that, but I wouldn’t know for certain. It could be that you lead them ten feet and still don’t catch them, but at least you don’t shake them up. Jake said they weren’t leader shy, they were just generally shy.

Jake had grown up fishing near Tampa, where I’ve also failed to catch fish. He’d grown up playing baseball, a catcher–it’s a city ordinance that everyone who grows up near Tampa has to play baseball–and was injured his freshman year at Tennessee. He’d come to Hawaii to make surfboards. Everybody we talked to in Hawaii was from someplace else.

This fellow drove:

Jake was great to fish with, though I did worry that he and Kris were going to start talking politics and we might have to walk home. Jake was pretty conservative, which in Hawaii is an endangered species. I did tell him that nobody in Texas wants a wall, which isn’t strictly true, but is probably more true than most non-Texans think. For my $30 billion, if 900 miles of South Texas scrub and Chihuahuan Desert aren’t going to keep people out, a bit of wall isn’t either. I’m holding out for RoboCop.

The last day we fished with Jake he said Hawaiian bonefish were the hardest fish he’d fished for, because even with the right casts the fish have to cooperate. The fish have to continue in the same general direction and not go for a frolic before they get there. Jake said other redfish anglers have my problem: we ain’t delicate. We ain’t prone to ten-foot leads. His were consoling words, meant to make me feel better. I felt rotten.

I had one other good shot at a fish on day two with Jake, a puffer.  I saw it, I cast to it, and I felt it take the fly.  I didn’t feel it take enough of the fly though. I jerked it out of its mouth, and even at the time I half wondered if I jerked it out on purpose. I didn’t want a puffer. I wanted a bonefish. I wanted an o’io.

To’au (Lutjanus fulvus), blacktail snapper.

Kris managed to catch fish on the two days we fished without Jake. That’s because she’s not too proud to blind cast, and walked along casting.  Kris loves to blind cast, and would blind cast in a rain puddle in a parking lot. They weren’t bonefish, sure, and they were pretty little things out of a Disney movie, but there you are: for me they were colorful fish but not the right color of fish. Still, she caught fish and I didn’t. I felt great for Kris. Really. She only has to go back to Hawaii if she wants to.

Weke peuk (Upeneus taeniopterus). Nightmare fish, bandtail goatfish. Consume with caution: the head may cause hallucinations. Really.
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Bonefish Orgy

Robert W. Hines, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 2013.

Fish reproduction is peculiar, not sensible like human reproduction. Salmon run upriver and die. Bass get mean. Meaner. Tarpon daisy chain, which nobody can figure out. And then there are bonefish.

Ok, maybe human reproduction isn’t all that sensible either.

There’s always some introductory justification when researchers turn into bonefish voyeurs : Bonefishing is an X-Hundred-Zillion-Dollar-Industry here in the Bahamas, or in Florida, or the How-Do-I-Get-There Atoll out in the middle of the Indian Ocean. I don’t think though that the researchers are only watching bonefish sex for the money, there’s love involved. After all, it’s a tough job. You have to hang out on tropical seas.

Even now, when observers are starting to figure out spawning, they’ve still got no notion of bonefish adolescence. Why the heck are bonefish such a mystery? One supposes that this isn’t rocket science, but it seems like UFO science.

Of course the whole business involves the full moon. Tarpon do that too, but really? The full moon?

Bloch, Marcus Elieser; Schneider, Johann Gottlieb;  A. plumieri & Poecilia vivipara, Systema ichthyologiae iconibus CX illustratum (1801)

In 2017 researchers from the Bonefish & Tarpon Trust identified a seventh bonefish pre-spawn aggregation site at Andros in the Bahamas. This is important, bonefish can’t meet likely mates on the web, so they throw big parties. Raves, Roman orgies, high school proms have nothing whatsoever on a bonefish aggregation. The sites can’t just be random, there’s no text messages saying “meet here.” There are no invitations. If a site is damaged, if a site is developed or destroyed, then future generations of bonefish are damaged.

“The aggregation was comprised of approximately two thousand adult bonefish, which were exhibiting pre-spawning behavior, like gulping air and porpoising.” Gulping air, porpoising, sexy. But these fish are just getting started.

According to researchers from Florida Tech, sometimes aggregations can be 10,000 fish. The fish rush to the surface to gulp air. They bump each other. Let me say that again, they bump each other! All of this timed by the lunar month, each full moon. Then after the bumping things get really wild.

As night fell, fish in the school quickened their pace and headed for the drop-off at the edge of the reef, where water depths exceed 1,000 feet. Using special tags they had inserted into the bonefish on a previous day, the team tracked the school as it quickly descended past 160 feet and drifted about a quarter mile from the edge of the drop-off. These shallow water fish were now suspended in the deep ocean, in water thousands of feet deep. After an hour in the deep, the bonefish suddenly rushed upward, releasing their eggs and sperm as they reached 80 feet below the surface.

University Researchers Observe Surprising Bonefish Spawning Behavior in the Bahamas, Florida Institute of Technology Newsroom, December 11, 2013.

So thousands of fish aggregate, get all hot and bothered, rush the ocean and dive, then after some deep-water foreplay rush the surface broadcasting their boy stuff and their girl stuff in a massive orgiastic exhalation. Now tell me that’s not peculiar.

The rushing of the surface isn’t random. Apparently the change of pressures is a piscine erotic massage required for the release. In the lab, researchers have only recently gathered pre-spawning bones, shot them up with spawn-inducing hormones, and then massaged the fish to gather eggs and sperm. I kid you not.

After all that rushing and broadcasting, the fish go home.

Meanwhile fertilized eggs are left drifting in the current. This isn’t different really than the life-cycle of tarpon, or redfish, or the American eel. Go to the ocean, have a fling with a couple of thousand other fish, then go home and leave your larval children to make it or not. “I gave them a good start,” says Momma and Papa Bones, “Now they’re not my problem.” The larval stage lasts a couple of months.

From the Bonefish & Tarpon Trust:

If they survive the planktonic stage, larval bonefish find shallow waters where they change into miniature versions of their parents. Unfortunately, we’re not sure where this occurs.

Frankly, it’s almost a surprise that we know it occurs at all. Then the juvenile stage:

Despite extensive sampling throughout the Florida Keys and Caribbean, we don’t have a handle on which habitats are required by juvenile bonefish.  We have found a lot of juvenile bonefish while sampling sandy beaches and open sandy bottom, but nearly all have been Albula garcia – not the species caught by recreational anglers. The search goes on.

If they’re like most juveniles, they don’t want the adults to know what they’re doing.

* * *

The weather is not good. A bit too cold for fish, and too many fronts coming through. The flow at the Guadalupe is too high for wading, and it’s not the time of year for bass. All my friends who spend time outdoors seem to be hunting. Hunting’s one of those vices I haven’t cultivated.

So Friday on the 50-fish dinner trail we went and ate sushi at MF Sushi. I had been there once before, several years ago in a different location, and it was better this time. Kata Robata, Uchi, and MF Sushi are the three sushi hotspots in Houston, with two of those being imports, Uchi from Austin and MF from Atlanta. They offered baby barracuda. I had never seen barracuda on a menu, and Kris wouldn’t order it because she was certain it would immediately kill her.

The barracuda was grilled, but cooking doesn’t kill the ciguatoxin that occurs in barracuda. It’s a chemical toxin that’s produced in algae and accumulates in apex predators, so the “baby” gave me comfort. The toxin also occurs in grouper and amberjack. Even though it’s dangerous, barracuda are eaten throughout the Caribbean.

Even if you get sick, barracuda doesn’t usually kill you, and that’s what I remembered. The worst symptoms are usually cramps, muscle and joint aches, vomiting, and diarrhea. What I didn’t remember was that the symptoms can last months. If I’d remembered that, and if I hadn’t had that martini, I’d probably have skipped the barracuda. It does seem fitting though that writing about bonefish, I was eating one of their principal predators. Maybe it was fitting, or maybe it was that martini.

The next morning we took out the boat. It was too windy and choppy, and running across the bay we got soaked. We spent most of the time floating deeper water looking for fish on the sonar. We didn’t see anything bigger than bait.

Most tides in the Galveston bays are small, a foot is a huge tide, but Sunday was bizarre. See that dock? High tide would usually be a few inches below the deck. Low tide might show some oysters. Yesterday the combination of the winter solstice moon and the high winds had knocked all the water out of the bay. It wasn’t a day for the flats, even in a skinny water boat.

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Bones

Jordan, David Starr; Evermann, Barton Warren (1905) Shore Fishes of the Hawaiian Islands, With a General Account of the Fish Fauna, Bulletin of the United States Fish Commission, vol. 23 for 1903, part I, Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office

Given their place in the angling firmament you’d think we’d know more about bonefish than we seem to know. I suppose it’s because all those bones make them hard to eat, but information about the fish itself, as opposed to catching the fish, is spotty. There have been interesting recent studies on spawning, and even for fish bonefish spawning behavior is bizarre and orgiastic, but more on that later. Right now other stuff.

Bonefish show up in the Atlantic, the Caribbean, the Pacific, and the Indian Ocean:  pretty much everywhere there’s some saltwater coast with relatively hot temperatures.  The Bonefish and Tarpon Trust says there are 12 species of bonefish,  all sharing the same genus, Albula. 

International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) . Albula vulpes. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. IUCN 2012.2

Albula vulpes is the species fly fishers chase in our neck of the woods. I stole the range map above from the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The IUCN lists Albula vulpes as near-threatened and its population as declining, naming off all the usual causes, habitat damage, harvests, and recreational mishandling, plus climate change and severe weather.  I hope the IUCN doesn’t come after me for stealing their graphics.  They can have it back if they really want it. It’s a very good graphic though.

Since I’m on a stealing jag, Orvis has an excellent description of bonefish behavior:

Bonefish are usually found in intertidal flats, mangroves, and creeks, and they can tolerate the oxygen-poor water often found in the tropics by inhaling air into a lung-like bladder. Often congregating in schools of 100 or more, bonefish often follow a daily pattern of coming up onto the flats as the tide rises and retreating to deeper water as it falls. . . . Larger bonefish tend to travel in twos or threes, and the trophy specimens are solitary. Bonefish feed by digging through the sandy bottom to root up prey, which are crushed in the fish’s powerful pharyngeal teeth.

Phil Monahan, Fish Facts: Bonefish (Albula sp.), https://news.orvis.com/fly-fishing/fish-facts-bonefish-albula-sp

So like tarpon and gar, bonefish gulp air into a swim bladder, and like redfish they root along using their low-slung mouth to sift up prey.  Just like Mary Ann, they’re sitting by the seashore sifting sand. But Orvis’s description is about flats-frequenting bonefish, and it might better read “Bonefish are usually found [by fly fishers] in intertidal flats . . . ” The truth is that not all bonefish are flats-frequenting (though all are coastal). There are actually two common species of bonefish in Florida, the other species being A. goreensis, which live in channels and are also found around reefs in the Bahamas. A. goreensis is apparently not known as a flats fish, but as a fish that hangs out just a wee bit deeper.

Or maybe it’s A. garcia, not A. goreensis. O maybe A. garcia and goreensis are the same thing. This gets confusing.

Hawaii also has two species of bonefish too. One, A. glossodonta, the roundjaw bonefish is what fly fishers fish for on the Hawaiian flats. The other, A. virgata, has only been documented in Hawaii, nowhere else. Similar to the Caribbean’s A. goreensis, it generally shows up in deeper water. This is all very confusing, and it only gets worse when you start piling on the species and places. The truth is that for fish that dwell in the great big sea, bonefish don’t move around much. The furthest distance traveled by a tagged fish is 146 miles, so I guess populations, even among the same species, are pretty much distinct to particular places. That’s why folk can talk about the bonefish population at Campeche, which apparently used to be healthy, as being largely depleted. That population has to recover, no fish are likely to wander in while out on a spree, and unlike redfish or even salmon no one’s figured out how to reproduce quantities of bonefish in hatcheries.

Meanwhile bonefish aren’t particularly big for such a popular fish. The IGFA all-tackle A. vulpes record is 16 lbs caught at Bimini in 1971. The IGFA all-tackle record for the roundjaw bonefish is 10 lbs 4 oz., taken in Hawaii, and the all-tackle, all-bonefish record is for a 19 lb. smallscale bonefish (A. oligolepis) taken in South Africa in 1962.

I know plenty of people who’ve fished for bonefish in the Bahamas and Central America, but only one who’s fished in Hawaii: Gretchen at the local Orvis (who promised to show me how she ties those magnificent doubled Bimini twists). She was going to Oahu anyway, so she found a flat and went a-wading. I know she didn’t catch anything, and she may or may not have seen any bonefish, but I remember what she did see: she said she saw sharks. They were up on the flats sharing her fishing space. She said she saw sharks and it kind of freaked her out. I don’t know whether they were big sharks, they could have been great whites or moderate black tips or 300 pound tigers or any old thing, and I don’t recall if I asked what they were.  I remember this: she said she saw sharks with her on the flats. That part I remember. Sharks.

I have read that as a general matter only birds, sharks, barracudas, and Hawaiians make a habit of eating bonefish, and of those only the first three have had a real effect on bonefish evolution.  Bonefish can live as long as 20 years and grow as long as 30 inches. Fish in Hawaii average four to six pounds. For bonefish, an eight pound fish is a monster, though African fish may reach close to 20 pounds. The fish appear silver or grey in the water, and the bodies are slender lengthwise and rounded in cross-section. I don’t find them a particularly pretty fish out of the water. In the water, either tailing or ghosting, they are thrilling. 

And pound for pound they are about as powerful and fast as any fish in the ocean. They’re built, after all, to get away from barracuda and sharks. They’re skittish, particularly around my casting, but that’s ok. My casting scares me sometimes.

* * *

It’s winter here, or as close as it gets. We took the skiff out Sunday and saw one redfish at a distance. Kris saw it first, and we watched it’s back and tail come in and out of about a foot of water 150 feet from a spoil bank. Every time we tried to get close though it moved, until finally it was gone.

Notwithstanding the general fish sparseness the days are beautiful, with less humidity and clear water and clear skies. We didn’t see any other fish, but who cares? While I poled the skiff I got to watch a flock of roseate spoonbills (a pink of spoonbills?) huddled on the lee side of the grass against the bitter north wind. It must have been 50 degrees.

Take that Wisconsin.