Saltwater Fly Fishing - April/May 2005
"Prelude at Pine Cay" by Scott Bowen
Breaking the ice on your first bonefish isn’t easy. But out on the emerald edge of the Turks and Caicos Islands, you will surely get your chance.
In all directions around me I can see nothing but an endless world of blue and green - water, mangroves, sky. There are no other boats or people, nothing but the wind blowing notes through my rod guides.
Standing on the bow deck of a small motorboat, I scan the wide, sandy shelf for movement but see only mirages. Out on the flat, everything can look like a bonefish, while bonefish themselves can look like nothing. To amateur eyes, that is.
 “Look, way up there – four of them moving over that patch of grass. Big ones”, says my guide J.R. Delancy. He is a native, or a “belonger” as they say down in the Turks and Caicos Islands (TCI), and he has eyes like an osprey.
I look for the fishy shape I had already seen several times that morning but that is different each time. Even though I didn’t even have the bonefish in sight yet, my arms tensed with the desire to make a cast.
“They’re moving over that patch of sand,” J.R. says in his island accent.
And then I have them: four big bonefish in spearhead formation, about 25 years out, moving away at roughly 35 degrees. J.R. smoothly poles closer, but with both the boat and the fish in motion, it feels farther than I can cast without possibly laying the line directly over them. I make a short false cast to wind up. |
“They’re big ones,” J.R. says, as I fire out the shot.
My fly lands just behind the fish. Ugh.
But then one of them zips into a sharp U-turn.
“Strip, strip,” J.R. says, in his heart trying to catch the fish, too.
The bonefish hangs over the fly for what seems a long time in bonefish time – about half a second – then he spins around and rejoins his crew as the four of them hit the throttle.
J.R. sighs quietly through his teeth. Had fate let us down, I ask myself, or is it the guy in the front of the boat?
No matter. At that moment, with the bones fading into the blue and J.R. one again quietly leaning into his pushpole, I knew that this was just bonefishing – and just the beginning of an addiction.
My first taste of this new habit came at Pine Cay, a truly unique place in the Turks and Caicos, lying east of Providenciales in the middle of a chain of cays about 90 miles north of Haiti. Pine Cay is a private island with an elegantly simple resort hotel, the Meridian Club, and a number of private homes. The resort and houses sit along a classic Caribbean beach on the north side, and the interior of the island is a preserve ruled by Cuban crows, iguanas, and innumerable frogs.
The deal is this: spend the time and the money for a stay at Meridian Club and you get access to a wholly untrammeled bonefish wonderland out on the southeastern side of the cay. April through June is the best time to go because the bonefish school up then, and the chance of catching 15 to 25 fish in a day is very good. I went in December, and despite wind and steady cloud cover, I saw good numbers of fish in only two brief days of fishing.
Although I had many chance, I ultimately had just…well, let’s say I had a low fish count. But when that breakthrough bonefish did take the fly, the afternoon exploded. |
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