April 2006
Greeting from Vieques.
If there is one species that will send anglers around the globe
with their fly rods in search of a single hook-up, it’s the
bonefish. This is the species that started saltwater fly fishing
as we know it, and down here in Vieques we have an abundance of
them.
For a lot of different reasons, they’re a mysterious animal to
most anglers who never venture to the ocean. They don’t grow
huge like tarpon. The world record bone was a freakish nineteen-pounder
caught off South Africa, but an average example will weight in
around five pounds. They’re not good to eat. The name bonefish
describes the consistency of their meat appropriately. They also
don’t jump like sailfish or crash any bait or lure like dorado,
and on top of everything else, they often spook if the angler
blinks too loud. But they inhabit the most beautiful shallow
waters in the world’s warmest climates and when hooked, the
bonefish has few rivals for sheer speed. Landing a big bonefish
on a fly rod quite simply takes skill.
In the early part of the last century, many anglers thought
bonefish couldn’t be consistently caught on fly and with the
gear available, few tried. Fortunately, there were handful of
anglers who had mastered the fresh water species like trout and
salmon and were looking to invent a new sport.
It happened in the Florida Keys sometime in the late 1940’s,
depending on who you talk to, when there were just over a dozen
flats guides working the entire island chain. Outdoor writer Joe
Brooks cast a freshwater trout streamer with a bamboo rod at a
tailing bonefish and got it to eat, something which surprised
most of the locals at the time, and the sport was born. Now,
sixty years later, there are several hundred guides prowling the
Keys full time, hosting tens of thousands of visiting anglers
all looking for that tailing bonefish. The rods are made of
materials found on the Space Shuttles and the flies are so
realistic that many crustaceans will attempt to mate with them.
Shallow water fly fishing for a variety of species is now a
multi-million dollar per year industry, and the sport often goes
by the name of the fish that started it all; “bonefishing.”
While this revolution was taking hold of the Keys and the
Bahamas, the bonefish down here in Vieques were left blissfully
unaware. Unlike their northern cousins, our bonefish had air
cover. While they were busy prowling the flats, digging up crabs
and grass shrimp, a half century of U.S. Navy fighter jets
roared overhead on their way to the bombing range past the big
bay called Ensenada Honda at the eastern tip of Vieques. The
local fishermen where kept out from under these flight paths for
decades, and the tailing bonefish where never exposed to the
tourists until a few years ago when the military left the
island. What we have now is one of the last undiscovered
bonefishing grounds in all of the Caribbean.
I was marveling at this simple fact a few days ago, while
drifting along a pristine flat just a mile down the hill from
the old range’s observation post known as OP-1. The post itself
was the site of a tragic fatal accident in 1999 involving an
off-course jet and a civilian guard named David Sanes, now a
famous incident in the history of Vieques and the beginning of
the end of the military presence on the island. The bowl shaped
valley on the other side of the hill is still dotted with the
hulks of armored vehicles that served as live fire targets since
World War Two. Up until 2003, a common sight overhead might have
been an F-18 Hornet loaded with 500lb bombs and screaming in at
near sonic speeds to blast one of the old tanks at the bottom of
the range. The jets have been gone for three years, but the dive
bombing continues over the flats, now carried on by the local
pelicans, terns, and frigate birds pointing anglers like me to
the fish we seek to hook with our skinny graphite rods.
For
several days last week, with OP-1 clearly visible behind us, my
anglers made cast after cast to numerous bonefish, jacks, and
snapper, all cruising the shoreline in less than two feet of
water. On the bow one perfect morning I had a long time customer
and friend from my Key West years. Alex Baydin first heard of
Vieques two years ago when I told him I bought a house and was
moving here permanently. Fortunately, he and his wife are
adventurous, seasoned travelers and Vieques was right up their
alley. The bonefish Alex landed that day weren’t world records,
but the day-ending nine-pounder was his personal best. Most
remarkable was the fact that for an entire morning, we were the
only two humans in a three mile long bay, casting flies to big
bonefish every ten minutes or so. Here at the start of the 21st
century, with TV shows, magazines, and thousands of websites
devoted to the sport, Vieques is one of the few places left
where someone can go bonefishing with a fly rod and be the only
one on the whole island doing it that day.
Capt. Gregg McKee,
WildFly Charters
