Thomas McGuane - The Longest Silence

The dedicated trout fisherman is frequently an impossible human being capable of taking a priceless Payne dry-fly rod to an infant’s fanny. One hardly need mention that more lynching has been done by largemouth bass anglers than by the fanciers of any other species, just as Atlantic salmon anglers are sure to go up against the wall way ahead of Indiana crappie wizards.

But the bonefisherman is as enigmatic as his quarry. The bonefish is as likely to scurry around a flat like a rat as he is to come sweeping in on the flood, tailing with noble deliberation. So, too, the bonefisherman is subject to great lapses of dignity. A bonefish flat is a complex field of signs, quite as difficult a text as an English chalk stream. The bonefisherman has a mildly scientific proclivity for natural phenomenology insofar as it applies to his quest, but unfortunately he is inclined to regard a flock of roseate spoonbills only in terms of flying objects liable to spook fish.

The bonefisherman is nearly as capable of getting lost between a Pink Shrimp and a Honey Blonde as the lone maniac waist-deep in the Letort plowing through his fly box from Jassid to Pale Evening Dun, though, because a boat is usually required, he may be slightly more oppressed by equipment.

As the bonefisherman is sternly sophisticated by his quarry, his reverence for the creature increases. Undeterred by toxic winds, block meetings, bulletproof taxicab partitions, or adventures with the Internal Revenue Service, he can perceive with his mind alone bonefish moving on remote ocean flats in the tongue of the flood.

SITTING UP IN the pilot house, we could see with our own eyes that a serious storm was coming. The Weatherfax hadn’t shown a good picture of it the day before, but you could see it on the radar, streaming through above Cuba, across Grand Bahama, and now it was on top of us. Chris went forward to the windlass while Phil laid down another hundred feet of chain between us and the anchor. The slight shifts in the boat’s position were revealed in the apparent movement of the sandy bottom under deep, clear, pale-green tropical water. We were on good holding ground. There wasn’t really much to worry about though it couldn’t help the fishing. And there were the compensations of a tropical squall: the supercharged atmosphere of deep, humid wind, the unpredictable tide slipping through the roots of heaving mangroves. It was interesting weather.

We were in a remote part of the Bahamas, a long way from even the smallest village. There were so many small cays and deep green cuts that if things abated at all, we could get in a lee somewhere and go on looking for fish. Meanwhile, we hung on our anchor, transom directed at the low, broken coast, covered in spindly pines well spaced in their sandy footing by incessant sea winds.

At the last village we’d bought bread from the local bakery. The people were cheerful and smiled quickly. Most had little to do. Their modest gardens were ruled by stingy rainfall; commercial fishing seemed reduced to supplying a hotel or two. The people were scattered along the roads that left the village, strolling or carrying sacks. Coconut palms bowed over the roadway, and as one of my companions said to me, a coconut did not reach a great age here. These pedestrians weren’t the first poor natives to roam the luxury home sites of the future.

The boat was owned by a friend of mine, and in his foresight and wisdom she was equipped with good electronics, shipboard refrigeration, and comfortable places to eat and sleep. And she carried two bonefish skiffs in davits. Phil, her captain, also acquitted himself as a cook, and the night we ate all the fresh mangrove snappers or the night we had all the crawfish and black beans illustrated the compensations of life on that part of the South Atlantic, which seems at once a global dropoff and shelf of copious marine life, a buzzing cross-section of the food chain with fishermen briefly at the very top. One could raise the poetry as a nonconsuming naturalist, but who besides the angler crawls to the brook at daybreak or pushes his fragile craft to the head of the tide to come out on the flood with the creatures that breathe the water?

The weather broke and we began to fish, poling the skiffs among the myriad small cays in the fragrance of mangrove blossoms, the ceremony of angling holding our minds on all the proper things. Bananaquits, the active little Bahamian honey creepers, flitted along the sandy shore. At one small cay we disturbed a frigate bird rookery, iridescent black birds, the males adorned with red inflated throats. They pushed off the branches of mature mangroves and soared with the amazing low-altitude slowness that their immense wingspans allowed, practically at a walk. For a moment the skiff seemed surrounded by magnified soot, then they climbed steeply and soared away.

We spotted two nice fish well back in the mangroves in inches of water, their backs out of the water as they scoured around the bases of the bushes for crustaceans. Their silvery brilliance was startling. We stopped the skiff and watched. They didn’t seem to want to come out, so I decided to give it a try. I cast the fly into a narrow space between the mangroves and watched the two fish circle toward it. I moved the fly slightly and the first fish darted forward and took. I set the hook and the bonefish roared out of there so fast that for a brief moment the small mangroves swept low by the pressure of my fly line and the fish was off.

At the edge of a turtlegrass flat I hooked a bigger fish that forced a sheet of water up my leader with the speed of the line shearing the water. At about a hundred yards into his run, the hook broke. Now, that’s very rare. I chatted less with my companion and more to myself and tried to stare through the water to the bottom or concentrate on the surface for the “nervous water” of approaching schools. We found one right at the edge of the mangroves. I hoped if I could hook one here, it would head for open water. I made a rather long cast that fell just the way it was supposed to. One strip and I was solid tight to a good fish. He ran straight at the boat and I had fly line everywhere as he passed us and stole line, causing it to jump up off the deck in wild coils that were suddenly draped around my head and shoulders. The fish was about to come to the end of this mess. When he did, I felt the strange sensation of my shorts rising rapidly toward my shoulder blades. At the point they came tight in my crotch, the leader broke with a sharp report: The line had hooked the button of my back pocket. My companion was hunched over the push pole in a paroxysm of laughter. I looked at him, I looked at the open sea, I tied on another fly.

I was in that state of mind perhaps not peculiar to angling when things seem to be in a steep curve of deterioration, and I had a fatal sense that I was not at the end of it. Bonefish are ready takers of a well-presented fly but once hooked, they are so explosive that getting rid of slack line and getting the fish on the reel can produce humiliating results. Their speed and power are so far out of proportion to their size that a bonefish, finally landed, seems to have gone through a magical reduction from the brute that burned line off against the shrieking drag to the demure little fellow one holds in one’s hand while gently removing the fly. With his big round eyes and friendly face the bonefish scarcely looks guilty of the searing runs he just performed. And the fastest individuals are the ones that look fat, bright little pigs that root around the shallows. They’re almost always moving, and if they rest, they prefer to get in among the mangrove shoots where barracuda can’t get a straight run at them. Their reactions to anything overhead are instantaneous, so one good way of locating fish is to watch a low-flying cormorant cross the flats; every bonefish touched by the bird’s shadow will explode to a new position, then resume feeding. You slip up to where you have seen them move and perhaps you make a connection, the slow-stripped fly line jumping rigid in a bright circle of spray.