Tag: fly fishing in saltwater

My Verdict on Saltwater fly fishing is in: meh.

meh

As I mentioned in my last post, D and I went on a package saltwater fly fishing trip. I got a text from the fishing manager of the nearby Orvis shop asking if we would be interested in joining the excursion after another couple had to cancel.  We had been talking about trying salt and this seemed like a good way to get an introduction.  I guess it was, it’s just that neither of us really liked it all that much.  Full disclosure, we probably would have liked it more if we had caught more fish, who wouldn’t?

I get that other people like it, but I just found it all underwhelming. For me it didn’t scratch the fly fishing itch.  It also didn’t help that we weren’t in love with the lodge.  The lodge was clean, very well run and staffed by very nice people who sincerely worked hard to make sure people had a good time, but it wasn’t for us.  It was one of those all-inclusive places at which you ate meals together at common tables.  It kind of felt like you were on a cruise and not really in another country and D and I are very much not cruise people.

Let’s start with the group meal, the whole thing only works if everyone is on their best behavior and that never happens. On day one, I introduced myself to a tablemate and asked where he was from, he said Richmond, Virginia.  I said something like, “I’ve been there, it’s a great town (I always try to say something nice about where someone is from, because, why not?).” He asked me where I was from and I said Washington, DC to which he replied “Northern Virginia is not Virginia, I’m from the real Virginia,” to which I replied, “We live in DC, not Virginia.”  He than said, “that’s even worse.”

It takes a certain kind of person to insult someone to their face for no reason within five minutes of meeting them. I have absolutely zero patience for this kind of jerk and will ditch them unreservedly.  But for the moment, I was trapped at the table.  I switched to talk to fishing, where does he fish back home? He named some rivers where he fished for smallmouth bass, I mentioned that I fish the South Fork of the Shenandoah a lot and he informed me that “the largemouth have taken over the South Fork and there are hardly any smallmouth in it anymore.”  Like I said, I have zero patience for this kind of thing so I said, “what are you talking about? I fish it twenty times a year and catch hundreds of smallies, there are largemouth in spots, but the South Fork is a smallmouth fishery.” To which the jerk proclaimed, “the smallmouth have been pushed out.”

Jerks usually talk in pronouncements and often have nice spouses who you instantly feel sorry for. This guy was no exception. I refused to say another word to the guy, but engaged his long-suffering wife in conversation. She was very nice, interesting and was retired from important work that she talked about with passion (I’m not saying what it was because I want her to have some anonymity and peace). Jerk cuts her off and starts blowharding about some nonsense.  Sorry ma’am, but I can’t save you; I made the mistake of sitting next to him at dinner, but you made the mistake of marrying him.  For the rest of the dinner I physically turned away and talked to people at the other end of the table and for the rest of the trip I avoided the jerk with great alacrity.

When I’m on vacation, I don’t want to have to avoid people who tell me they hate my home town and are jerks to their wives. I don’t want to eat with them and I don’t want to have to work to avoid them.  There is something about the all-inclusive experience that attracts these kinds of people; people who are jerks to your face and then are puzzled why no one will talk to them more than once.

Now the fishing, we head out in a panga with our guide and here is where I get my inkling that I’m not going to like this kind of fishing. There is a lot of downtime, a lot.  First we are in the boat for an hour to get to where we are fishing, okay, I drive a long way to get to streams, but its’ weird to be on the water and still not be at the fishery.  Then we take turns to fish, which is weird.  You know what I like? Fly fishing.  You know what I don’t like as much? Waiting my turn to fly fish.

On a stream, D and I will fish a pool or two together and then one of us will head off to do their own exploring, coming together every occasionally, to compare notes. In a drift boat we are both fishing, but in a panga, you take turns and wait and wait and wait.  Some of the anglers on this trip were paired with guys who were all about getting their clients in to some fish and getting some early success; these guides took their sports to spots where they could blind cast and have a chance at a hookup.  Our guide was more traditional, for him fly fishing the flats is sight fishing and casting to specific fish.  Over three days we saw maybe six bonefish and caught a couple.  I would rate the experience in the Not Skunked Category in my system for rating fishing trips.  From worst to best, my categories are:

  • It’s Nice Just to be Outside
  • Not Skunked
  • We got in to some fish
  • We Had an Amazing Day
  • If I Quit My Job, I Could Do This Everyday

The Guide was a good guy, but he had his program and if it wasn’t working, or if the sports couldn’t get with the program, oh well. After the second slow day with the guide, we were talking about maybe asking the lodge to make a change with our guide when something extraordinary happened.  We were finishing up the day, maybe hitting one more spot when the guide spotted a Belizean teen on a beach with an American fly fisher.  The teen was waving to the boat to come in to them.  Our guide knew the teen and we went over.

It turns out that the teen was the apprentice of a guide from town who had taken out this woman and another client (also a woman) from a local hotel for some fly fishing. The guide had left the teen and the woman on the beach while he took the second client into the mangroves for some fishing.  He had dropped them off at 8am and now, at 2pm he still had not come back.  They had been stuck on that beach with no shade, no food and no water for seven hours.  At one point, the teen had found a bottle of water floating in the ocean and the two had split it.  We gave them water and a ride back to their hotel.

The client who had been left on the beach was much more collected than I would have been. When we pulled up, she had the wherewithal to give us a concise update on her condition and a quick fishing report, “We’ve been here since 8am, our guide never came back with my friend.  I caught one small barracuda broke off a big bonefish on the rocks on a Christmas Island special.  That was my only fly.”

Now, that’s a bad guide, considering recent events and in homage to the gods of fishing, we decided to give the guide another chance and didn’t ask the lodge to make any changes. We had another slow day on the water and then spent the last dinner trying to avoid the jerk before scurrying to our rooms to pack.  Since we’ve been back, I’ve been monitoring the news from Belize to make sure that the second client from the bad guide hadn’t come to some bad end that would require me to reach out to the authorities.  Between the jerk at dinner, the waiting to fish and the rescuing of marooned anglers, like I said: meh.

Salt

car

 

I’m heading to Belize this week for my first attempt at saltwater fly fishing. The trip fell in to our lap, the manager of the local Orvis texted me that two people had dropped out of a TU group trip to Belize and would D and I be interested?  The price was very reasonable for what you got, four nights, 3 full guided days, and meals, beer and rum included.  Plus, you got an Orvis H3 rod (man, are they ugly rods).  I prepped myself to plead my case to D, but when I asked her if she wanted to go, she just said, “yeah, that sounds awesome.”  Oh, how I love that woman.

Since then, it’s been like kids waiting for Christmas: it seemed like it’s taking forever to get here, but also, it seems like it’s snuck up on us.  I’m writing this on Monday and we leave Saturday morning.  It’s here, it’s happening; now what?  I mostly fish for trout and bass and I’ve never been what you’d call an elegant caster.  I can usually get the fly where I want it to go, but it’s rarely pretty.  I’m a better caster when no one’s looking and when I’m not thinking about it.  Now, I’ll be trying to cast farther than I ever have to on my home water brookie streams and in front of a bunch of strangers.  This is where I plan to make use of the complimentary rum.

The trip is intended for beginner saltwater anglers, so I just need to relax and focus on that first fish on the fly in saltwater.  After that, the next fish and the next.  Being the kind of guy who thinks too much, I’m kind of worried that I’ll like it too much.  That I’ll become one of those annoying guys who can’t enjoy regular fishing-hole fishing.  The kind of guy who caught a muskie once and now can’t shut up about it and for whom brook trout and smallmouth no longer have any allure.  “I don’t even bother with these local streams anymore, let me tell you about the bonefish, he’s a wily opponent.  Did I ever mention they time I fished Belize?  Hey, where ya’ goin’?”

In preparation for this trip, this past weekend I went fishing for brook trout in a skinny mountain stream in the Virginia mountains. I thought it would be a nice bookend to the week, start it with a brookie, end it with a bonefish (actually, in my imagination, I end the week on a tarpon, but I thought that sounded grandiose so I typed bonefish).  It was a nice little brookie trip.  Early in the season there is this one window in the afternoon when you catch all your fish, but you never know when it’s going to start or stop so you need to pay your dues and fish out each cast and get the skunk off the year.

The week before there had been this fierce wind storm. Trees were down all over the woods, including a few across the trail.  I had nowhere to be so I just started walking upstream until I felt the edge of the workweek was off and started throwing my fly.  I resisted the urge to start fishing right away and just waited for some sense of calm to come over me.  Slowly, the work thoughts stopped.  I got to this one pool and remembered that last summer a snake and I surprised each other there and I had let out a yell that they probably heard up at the ranger station 3 miles away.  Seemed like as a good a place as any to get started.

I caught my fist fish of the year on a sweet little cast over a fallen tree and through a tunnel of branches. It was one of those moments when you just know you’re going to catch a fish and she’s right where she’s supposed to be.  It was such a nice cast that I immediately got overconfident and put the next cast into a tree with my back cast.  The universe maintains its balance.

Now it’s Monday and I’ve completed work on this big project I’d been working on. My job has gone from this intense work pace to this weird calm before the next crisis.  My goal is just to tread water and maintain things until I can get on that plane this Saturday.  Don’t let anything fall apart, but don’t start turning over rocks looking for trouble.  Just get through the week and pretty soon, you’ll be sipping rum and throwing Christmas Island Specials to bonefish and permit.  Now, I just have to make sure the universe plays along, no big moves, at least not for the next five days.  Come Saturday it’s put your phone into airplane mode and hope there’s no signal on the flats.  My deputy is a capable young man who I’m sure will figure it out (whatever it is).  Just get to that boarding time and then the biggest problem you face is whether you want to hit the bar or the pool first when you get off the flats.

I was kind of complaining about how crazy work got in February, but I was secretly pleased. I’ve always enjoyed my vacations more when the first twelve hours are spent in this kind of frazzled stunned silence from being overworked.  I think I like the idea that I’ve deserve my treat and that no one who’s been watching can question that I’ve earned it.  I like how the tension slowly, slowly seeps away until it dawns on me that I’m relaxed.  There are phases to it: there’s the hurry up and relax phase when I can’t get my mind to settle and I try to do too much; then there’s the “this is nice,” phase when I have to keep pointing out to D that we are in fact, relaxing; and then there’s the just being phase, where it all just feels normal and right and there’s no need to point out much of anything.  One of my favorite vacation memories was me and D sitting on a beach when I was on a break from Iraq just watching a ship travel from one side of the horizon to the other; that’s it, just sitting there drinking beer and watching a ship go by, but more than ten years later and I remember it clearly.  What had come before had been hard and what was coming next would be too, but today there was no expectations for me, but to watch that ship; I remember the color of the beach chair I was sitting in.

Part of what I like is the juxtaposition of work stress and fly fishing calm. I like that it’s chilly and a little snowy here and that’ll I’ll board a plan in the dark and in the 30s and step off in to Caribbean sunlight and the low 80s.  I love that I’ll go from having to decide what to do about a problem employee on Friday to having to decide between the fish or beef on Saturday.  Soon I’ll be in a place where as long as I don’t hook D, the guide, or myself, the trip has been a success.  Then, it will be over and I’ll be back in the stress.  The universe maintains its balance.