Team Bonefish

In couch potato mode, trail mix bowl in my lap, I watched the Rays’ keystone combo, shortstop Willy Adames and second baseman Brandon Lowe, turn a double play. Willy dove for a grounder to his right, caught the ball in the webbing of his glove, braked, planted his right foot and slung the ball to Brandon who caught it in mid-stride, pivoted and fired to Ji-Man Choi at first. Other than maybe an alley-oop pass from the high post to a slam dunking center, a double play is the epitome of team effort. I picked through the random clutter of my brain for examples of team play from my own life. An image came to me.

Meet Captain Marvin Miller of Mangrove Cay, Andros, the Bahamas (captainmarvinmiller@hotmail.com). He is of modest height, a lithe but strong guy, affable, with a ready smile. On the job, he dresses in the latest fishing-tech gear with a Buff up over his nose, fishing pliers and a two-way radio clipped to his belt. He is forty-four years old, was delivered by a Mangrove Cay midwife in a building on the downtown waterfront. Today it is the site of Shine’s Conch Shack, an excellent place for conch fritters and a cool Kalik,  owned by fellow guide Arnold Green, aka “Shine”. At eighteen, Marvin got a call from Moxey’s Bonefish Lodge that a guide had celebrated too much the night before and was a no show.  Marvin hustled over and had his first paying gig.

Andros is the largest island in the Bahamas, running north-south one hundred miles and forty miles east-west. Three bights pinch it at the waist like an old-fashioned Coke bottle. These divide the island into North Andros, Mangrove Cay and South Andros. Eight thousand people live on Andros. They are clustered along a coral ridge with a single road threading down the east side of the island, interrupted by the three bights and tidal creeks that must be crossed by boat to pick up the road on the other side. From this ridge the island falls away to the west, eliding from scrub pine flats to mangrove swamps. Nothing on the island aspires to the concept of height. Hurricanes have that effect

Outside of government employment and a US naval installation, cash flow on Andros comes courtesy of the greenbacks fly fishermen bring in their duffel bags as they arrive to stay at one of the many lodges on the east side, from Nicholls Town to Mars Bay. The object of their interest is the grey ghost of the flats – the bonefish. Though you may examine the menu at Bonefish Grill, sipping one of their excellent Manhattans,  you do not see a bonefish on the menu. There are several reasons: the bonefish is very bony, like the logo implies; commercial netting of bonefish is not allowed; and if it were caught by a fly fisherman in the Bahamas and  transported it to your plate, it would cost about $150 per, filleting extra. In sum, the fish is not great eating and you must lay out many Ben Franklins to catch them if you are not Bahamian.

The bonefish is silver, shaped like a broad-shouldered torpedo terminating in a strong V-shaped tail, capable of generating 40 mph, placing it among the top ten fastest fish in the ocean. Its snout has a pinkish color derived from digging nose-down on the sandy bottom, noshing on shrimp and other crustaceans. Big bones tend to cruise singly or in small pods, little guys prefer the comfort of a school. Lemon sharks and barracuda hang out on the periphery of a school, like serial killers lurking outside a fish apartment building. The bones move across the Andros flats with the tides. Wherever they are, Captain Marvin finds them.

Marvin operates from a poling platform mounted on a boat designed for skinny water – a “flats boat.”  His boat is a seventeen-foot Hell’s Bay Professional with a 70 hp motor. Balancing six feet above water level, wielding a sixteen-foot push pole, he surveys his kingdom. To find bones, he poles quietly along a  shoreline of stunted mangroves. He must spot a fish far ahead and instruct his fisherman as to where they are and what they are doing. Cloud cover is Marvin’s enemy, reducing contrast. Eighty feet away, a cruising bone is but a grey shadow on a light tan-colored bottom. His second enemy is wind. The profile of guide on the platform, the boat hull and his paying cargo standing makes for significant sail area. Poling to control the boat in hefty wind becomes a sweat job. Wind-driven waves concealing the oncoming bones add to Marvin’s woes.

But Marvin’s biggest problem is the fly fisherman poised on the bow, fly rod in one hand, loops of fly line at his feet and fly held pinched between the fingers of his other hand, ready to make a cast when he hears the magic words: “Bonefish at eleven o’clock, off the shore twenty feet, sixty feet away.” Adrenaline rushes through the fisherman; his eyes swing back and forth. Where is it? Where is it? This is a man or woman whose most significant visual task this past year has been to follow the flight of a Titleist golf ball as it slices off the first tee.

Marvin has positioned the boat as it moves along the shoreline so that a right-handed fly fisherman has the wind coming over his left shoulder. The fisherman must finally see the bonefish, avoid stepping on the line under his feet, avoid hooking the fly on his pants, avoid hooking Marvin on the back cast, and get out a forty foot cast that lands six feet in front of the cruising bone. All the while his heart beats like the hammers of hell.

On a beautiful Bahamas day, fishing out of Swain’s Cay Lodge a number of years ago, I stood on the deck of Marvin’s boat, my “Gotcha” fly pinched between my fingers, and blinked through my Polaroids. Marvin spoke softly from the poling platform, “Ten o’clock. Fish coming out.” We had hunted bones coming out of the mangroves as the water dropped, skinnier and skinnier with the falling tide. I saw several fish, loitering about the roots, getting ready to move.  Heart pumped, adrenaline flowed, hands tingled. I breathed deeply. Slowly, the bones glided out, a few small ones at first. Urgent voice from above: “Give me a cast, fifty feet, drop it on the sand.” I did not step on the line. I did not hook my pants or Marvin. The Gotcha landed on a patch of sand in front of the oncoming fish. “Don’t move the fly!” Why wait? There are fish there, one pull of the line to move the fly and I’ve got one. “Wait, wait … big one coming. OK … now strip!” The first run of the bone was half a football field long. I held the rod as high as I could to lift the line above conchs, coral, weed and whatever else was on the bottom. The reel screamed. I screamed.

Study the photo above and then take a gander at the lead photo  of Marvin in poling position. He looks like he stepped from the pages of the Orvis catalog. The fisherman not so much. Team Bonefish did land the fish. The bone is pictured below with the guy who really caught it.