Thursday, February 9, 2017

Digg'n Up Bones

Aloha friends and thanks for checking in at the O’Grady Fly Fishing Adventures. The last several days have been some of the most humbling days fly fishing that I can ever remember. I have come to realize that even though I think that I am a pretty darn good trout fisherman, it has absolutely no correlation as to my bonefish abilities. I was warned before coming to Hawaii that these bones are like no other in the world and even though I believed that, I didn’t think I would spend nine days shaking my head. Cat and I are here with Cody and Kim and a few other friends that have all fished this area before and even they are finding themselves shaking their heads. The first few days I would tell Cody that today is the day, the next few days, were today may be the day and the last few I was thinking about learning how to surf. Now partially to our “un-credit” we have been battling awful cloud cover and the plague all week.
I started telling Cat that we are fishing on the Jeromy Wade schedule, he always spends weeks looking for a particular fish and the morning of his last day he catches the fish he was after. This morning we headed to a different flat that we had only fished once so far and we could not have been rewarded more. In the first ten minutes on the flat I saw more tails than I have seen in the last week. I got some good shots off but the fish that I didn’t blow up, just didn’t seem all that interested. My first few shots were a little embarrassing with panicked casts and then I found a spot that seemed like a Bone highway.   I got a few what I thought were pretty good shots and then I saw my fish moving across, I casted and watched as the fish continued to near my fly. I gave it a little twitch and watched the fish move over and stick his face in the mud. My hands were shaking and as I slow stripped I felt the line come tight. Tip stayed down and the magic exploded. My best way to describe the first run would be like lassoing a speeding dump truck while on roller skates. Before I even had a chance to screw it up I could see my backing flying out of my reel. I quickly chased him to the coral reef and just as I reached it, I could feel that he had wrapped me in the coral. I moved closer to the drop off and was able to reach out and jar it loose. The fish made a short second run and then raised the white flag. I looked around and there was no one to take a pic of my first bone ever. I snapped a few pics but made my mistake of not taking my lanyard off my neck so the pics are a little lame. Fish was right around two feet and around four or five pounds, the pics don’t do it justice.
Last night, Cat and I were laughing about trying to find a bone fish stocker spot but they just don’t exist. The flu has run through our group over the last week and hopefully Cat will be back at it again tomorrow. I feel like I’m playing with house money now and hopefully I can enjoy the rest of the fishing without the pressure. Heck, even if we never bumped a fish, Hawaii is incredible. As always, Connell, Cat, Winston, Jeremy Wade and the Drift Fly Shop want to say maholo for reading....
         









No comments:

Post a Comment