On Thursday we leave for Hawaii, which for some odd and I suspect Southern reason I pronounce Huh-wah-yuh, which Siri can’t understand when I call up my playlist. We should spend today packing, which we won’t. What do we take? Some shorts, some shirts, some wading boots. The couple of 9 wt rods we gave each other for Christmas. A guitar. We fish with Captain Jesse Cheape of High Tide Fishing, a full day on Friday and a half-day on Saturday. After that we’ll sightsee. I think sightseeing is required by the nature of the thing.
It is the second farthest distance we’ll travel, closer than Alaska but further than Maine. I’ve actually practiced casting some, which is frustrating and unrewarding. I’m such a mediocre caster. I’ve tried to keep up my Hawaii reading, and have been through a couple of additional Hawaiian books–The Descendants by Kaui Hart Hemmings, which was very likable, and Dreams from My Father by Barrack Obama, which was about his birth in Kenya.
I guess my thoughts have moved on to Mississippi, which I’ve been working on for May, and Florida which I have to go to in February. I’m beginning to despise Florida and its uncatchable fish, but the Astros open there in April, and if we fail again in February (with a one-day fishing trip to the Keys) maybe we’ll make a fourth trip in April.
Hawaiian music hasn’t really grabbed me: it’s melodic, sweet, all major keys and thirds and fifths and pure tones. I’ve been cheating on Hawaii with Mississippi Blues. It shares a slide guitar, but not much else.
Frontispiece, Life on the Mississippi, The Baton Rouge, 1883, Gutenberg.org.
I also cheated on Hawaii with Mississippi books, and re-read Twain’s Life on the Mississippi. It is such an essential book. It’s only a bit more than a six-hour (read eight-hour) drive from here to Vicksburg, and we could visit the battlefield memorial and the National Cemetery over the long Martin Luther King weekend. Of course with the government shut-down nothing at the National Cemetery would be open. It’s too bad all presidents aren’t required to be born in Kenya.
Early on Twain also traveled to Hawaii (née the Sandwich Islands) and wrote a series of letters from there for a San Francisco newspaper. I didn’t find the letters particularly illuminating, though Twain liked the place immensely and always talked of going back.
I’ve tied some leaders which won’t turn over, and some flies which won’t catch fish. I’ve also bought some flies, almost all of which are some kind of spawning shrimp, which is the only fly I can ever seem to remember on Captain Cheape’s list. I do own a bunch of bonefish flies, almost none of which are on said list. I’ll haul them along anyway.
Meantime the weather here in Houston is as good as it gets: clear, windless, dry, and cool, 61 degrees this morning with a high of 71 degrees. There’s a mockingbird singing through the open door to the porch. Maybe I’ll go look for black bass this afternoon, or spawning crappie. Yesterday we took the skiff out on Galveston bay, and the combination of cold weather and still air left the water clear. We saw some redfish, too.
Didn’t catch those either. We did get some excellent oysters and ceviche at the Black Pearl Oyster Bar on 23rd Street.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’ve never really wanted to go to Hawaii. People tell me that if you get away from the crowds it’s a beautiful place. I’m sure it is, but it’s never much appealed to me. There are so many other places to see, places with deserts and rivers and such. But damn, Willie Nelson. Willie Nelson now lives in Hawaii. That’s tough to ignore.
The contact I’ve had with Hawaii has been pretty casual. My Dad’s first cousin, Houston O’Neil Thomas, U.S. Navy coxswain and son of Sam Houston Thomas, died on the Arizona at Pearl Harbor. I guess that isn’t exactly casual but it was 15 years before I was born, so it was remote. I’ve looked up his name in the Arizona’s dead, and my great-grandmother, Sam Houston’s grandmother, died ten days later, on December 27, 1941, the second family casualty of World War II. Maybe that run-in with Hawaii explains some of its lack of appeal.
Like a lot of bookish teenagers of a certain age I read James Michener’s Hawaii, and I’ve watched enough episodes of Hawaii Five-O to say “Book ’em Dano” with conviction. For years though I thought the lead actor was Darrin McGavin. I’m not much of an Elvis fan either.
I do like the music, or what I know of it. There’s a particular style of guitar in Hawaii, called slack-key. The name comes from slacking the guitar’s standard tuning to an open tuning. If the 1st and 6th strings are tuned down, slacked, from E to D, and the 5th string is slacked from A to G, the guitar is tuned to a G chord without the left hand–every beginning guitarists dream. The open tuning changes chording and scales, but there are some famous open tuning players–I always think of Joni Mitchell–and slack key guitar is lovely. This song by Keola Beamer is pretty perfect.
But open tunings were never enough to make me want to go to Hawaii. I’m not a beach guy, and at least from what I can tell, all of Hawaii seems to be an enormous beach town. I suspect I’m too old to learn to surf, and always was. Or maybe just too pale to learn to surf, and always was. Or maybe just too dubious about my own athleticism.
So last year when I made my New Year’s resolution I was thinking I’ll have to go to Hawaii, and this is the only thing that would ever get me there. I’ve never wanted to go to Las Vegas either, though I did have a layover in the airport once. I wouldn’t mind a layover in Hawaii on my way to Christmas Island.
Maybe I’d think differently if Hawaii was a fishing destination, but it’s not. I think there’s some offshore fishing, but I get seasick, and I think it may be touristy stuff. Of course I guess I’m a tourist. There’s also spear fishing, but it’s hard to catch and release with a spear. Anyway Hawaiian fishing was unregulated and subsistence or commercial for long enough to deplete much of the inshore fishery, and despite all that ocean there are apparently not a lot of fish.
And it’s not really known to fly fishers, except as a layover for the Christmas Islands. There is some freshwater fishing in a freshwater supply reservoir near Honolulu, but the only report I’ve read was during a drought, and it wasn’t very appealing. Maybe in better years it’s like any other lake. There are also stocked trout at high elevations on Kauai. Trout fishing in America.
The last decade though there’s been some good press on Hawaii bonefish, o’io. They’re big. Bonefish are a destination fish, and the best places I know, Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean, Los Rocques, Venezuela, parts of the Bahamas, the east coast of the Yucatan, Belize, and South Florida, are destination fisheries. Los Rocques and Christmas Island are supposed to be the best, if you can get past traveling to Venezuela, on the one hand, or the time and money investment of going to a place where there’s one plane a week. The plane! The plane! Book ’em Danno.
Belize and the Yucatan are really the same place separated by a border that the fish ignore. The fish there are smaller, mostly in the one to three pound range, but there are lots of them. That’s where I’ve fished, Belize, with small, relatively easy-to-catch fish. Big fish are apparently a different fish: warier, faster, stronger . . . The Bahamas is a destination not because of quantity but because it has big fish.
Hawaii is supposed to have big fish, as big as the Bahamas, but the bonefish flats, the places where you fly fish for bonefish, are apparently small, scattered, and mostly on Oahu. Mountainous volcanic islands that pop up out of the ocean aren’t the best places to find flats. There must be something there though. There are lots of guides. Maybe there are lots of tourists? I suspect there are lots of tourists.
It’s also a place where apparently the wind blows hard much of the time, up to 25 knots (that’s a nautical mile, or 1.15 statute miles), and if you do hook a fish you have to keep them out of the coral or you’ll lose the fish. When we go it will also be the rainy season. It’s not ideal.
