Posted by: Editor on Mar 16, 2005 – 11:58 AM
fishing Hugh Smith leaned forward, his deep voice rising in excitement as he remembered his boyhood days in the Bahamas.
“Back then, when I was younger, we’d get up at 3 a.m. to hunt, then sit on the shore of the pond until daylight, waiting for the ducks to come in,” he told us, shaking his head and and smiling — his teeth glowing white against the black, leathery skin of his face.
My wife, Grace, sat beside me. She rolled her eyes.
3 a.m. for duck hunting?
That sounded familiar.
Smith, a 78-year old former fishing guide, was born and raised on Staniel Cay, in Exuma, Bahamas.
Until 1990, there was no electricity or phone service on the island. As a child, he fished from his families’ sailboat. He also hunted ducks and white-crowned pigeons, stalked wild boar among stands of palmetto and fished for nearly every species that swam in the sea.
In the ’40s and ’50s, he and his father would skin dive the tropical waters for lobster, conch and fish, then sail their catch to distant islands and trade it for vegetables like corn and sweet potatoes.
Later, he became the first man on Staniel Cay to own a motorboat.
On this stifling morning in March, Smith talked to us about duck hunting with his son Cliff on a nearby island, called Big Major Spot, surrounded by turquoise waters and white-sand beaches.
He’d built blinds from brush, coral and limestone around the pond’s shore, which he told us had weathered countless hurricanes over the years. He remembered watching ducks fly overhead and talked of the excitement and magic of sunrise and the ducks that it brought with it.
We were 1,500 miles from home, but it sounded all too familiar.
“Just like Dave,” laughed Grace.
“More blue-winged teal than you ever seen,” continued Smith. I thought of the blue- and green- winged teal that frequent Merrymeeting Bay, near my home in Maine, and shifted in my seat. It was music to my sunburned ears.
Then he talked of the fishermen he’d met over the years, and the thrill of watching them catch their first bonefish — a hard-fighting, wary fish found only in the tropics.
Earlier in the week, we’d fished with his son Cliff, a bonefish guide on Staniel Cay.
Our budget was tight, so we spent just two hours with him. We headed off late one afternoon to the bonefish flats off Compass Cay.
Flats, Cliff explained, are broad areas of shallow water and sand — sometimes just six inches or so in depth. Bonefish feed in these shallow waters, flipping their silver tails skyward in the sunlight as they tilt their heads down to feed.
When we arrived at the flat, the tide was perfect, Cliff told us. It was low and incoming.
In the distance, we saw a small patch of water that looked windblown on the otherwise smooth surface of the flat.
“Nervous water,” Cliff said. It was a school of feeding bonefish.
We watched the tails of a dozen fish flitting above the water as they feasted on the tiny pink crabs and shrimp that burrow and hide in the flat’s white sand.
Together, Cliff, Grace and I stalked towards the fish, crouched like herons, with deliberate steps — toes first — to minimize noise.
Bonefishing combines the best of hunting and fishing.
In this shallow water, bonefish are constantly on alert for birds — like one osprey we saw soaring high above — that drop in on them. In deeper water, there are other threats like sharks and barracuda which lurk in the depths, waiting.
One misstep, or splash of water, and they’re gone into the deep, Listerine-blue channel, not to return until the next tide.
When you cast a fly or lure at a bonefish, it must land close enough so that they’ll see it before turning off, but not so close that the splash might spook them. It took me nearly an hour to find that magic “spot.”
On Cliff’s advice, I’d knelt down in the wet sand and warm water, with the setting sun at my back and in the fish’s eyes.
I’d tied a long section of fine, 8- pound monofilament to the end of a tapered leader and fly line, and finally got it right: the tiny fly — a pink Crazy Charlie — drifted to the water like a feather in the breeze, and then settled quickly to the bottom.
When the bonefish approached, I saw a tail point skyward. I stripped and set the hook.
Bonefish have nowhere to go but away when hooked in shallow water.
I watched the fish’s back as it tore my line through the skinny water and down the flat.
I’d reel, then he’d run, then do it all again until after a few minutes, I landed him: a dime-bright, silvery bonefish of nearly five pounds.
Over the course of the next hour, as the sun set over the spidery veins of mangrove trees in the distance, we hooked and landed two more bonefish.
We lost many more. Every time we’d hook a fish, Cliff would shout “Yah mon!” and Grace and I would laugh.
Two days later, we sat with Cliff’s father and told him about our trip with his son — the beautiful night, the excitement of stalking bonefish as they tailed on a turquoise flat, and the thrill of hooking one then watching it peel line off the reel as it headed for deep water.
You could almost see the reflection of bonefish tails in the whites of his bloodshot eyes.
“You were lucky,” he said. He was right.
The stories we told on this sweltering morning in the tropics were of places and fish as foreign to Maine as palm trees and warm winter sun.
But the passion wasn’t.
This man and his son loved the outdoors — for the same reasons that we do here in Maine.
Note: Note: Dave Sherwood
Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc.