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.

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.

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.

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.

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.