Transformations are occurring this time of year. Spartina grass browns and wracks, while the creeks in the marsh fill with shrimp and other nutrients. Redfish take this as a cue, schooling up and feasting hard before winter. As the water begins to clear, my friend Rich Walker and I watch the tides carefully, waiting for…
For those of you who tuned in to Episode #45, you’ll know that we travelled down to East End Lodge in Grand Bahama to chase after the ghost of the flats with Captain Cecil Leathan and Bjorn Stromsness. This episode continues that journey but stops along the way to take a look at the darker…
In today’s audio story, we scan the flats of Grand Bahama in search of a single species: Bonefish. Sit back and enjoy the sounds of veteran East End Lodge guide Cecil Leathan poling Bjorn Stromsness (of the Bonefish on the Brain blog) and listen as they tell the tales of their first bonefishes and find many more.
Did you know that a bonefish’s chance of living to inhale another Borski slider or EP shrimp decreases by as much as sixfold when it’s been overly fondled or gill-fingered by an angler? True story, says the Bonefish & Tarpon Trust, which hopes to increase fish survival odds with its latest series of Bahamas-based educational…
Tommy Robinson remembered his moment of enlightenment. It took place in the ’70s, back when nobody believed you could catch permit on a fly. Robinson grew up in Key West, and began guiding before he’d even graduated high school. But on this day he was an angler, fishing from the back of the boat while…
IT’S 3:00 A.M. IN THE EVERGLADES AND TIM BORSKI IS LOOKING FOR SNAKES. I’m riding along with him as we drive very slowly down State Road 9336—the only four-digit road in Florida. It is 34 miles from Florida City to Flamingo, a distance we are currently covering at about 15 miles per hour. “Right up…
Convincing a permit to eat your fly is similar to doing business in a foreign country in that success in both is hard-won. Guide and Tres Pescados Fly Shop owner, Wil Flack, can relate.
The act of walking across a white-sand flat, knee-deep in endless shades of blue, is made much more interesting by bonefish. Especially if you’ve never caught one. After a few days spent searching empty water on the Bahamian island of Exuma, we drove down a twisted dirt road, past rotting cars and abandoned dishwashers, and…
For every good shot at a tarpon, permit, or bonefish, there’s a cast-per-hour-of-effort ratio that on most days looks like a line graph of the U.S. economy. Then there are those days that you instantly know you’re losing, like a cold February morning when even the boxfish are lurking deep and you’re just hoping for…