SALT DUES by Alan Czenkusch

This is a sort of essay about salt water fly fishing, and mainly about doing it on tropical flats. Or maybe it is a kind of checklist. It’s intended to provide some hints, tips, and nuggets of (I hope) wisdom. It grew from a letter I sent to my friend Mike Villa, off to Mexico to fish the salt for the first time. Mike’s a nice guy, I wanted him to have a good trip, and I remembered how lost and intimidated I felt when I started throwing flies into the sea. I built on Mike’s letter and I hope it helps you.

The manatee says that “it will change your life” and I’ll be damned if it didn’t change mine. I’ve had the good fortune of fishing the salt water of the Florida Keys, Mexico, Costa Rica, the Bahamas, California, Maine, Oregon, Washington and Texas. I do not claim to be an expert—few really are—but the more you do it the more effective you become. I try to be an attentive student of Mother Ocean, and I am beginning to learn some of her lessons. You often learn by screwing up. It is no big thing to screw up. It is a big thing to first, realize that you did, and second, avoid that screwup next time.

Fly fishing in salt water, compared to your favorite trout stream, seems harder. The ocean is large, deep, and absolutely indifferent to your wishes. It is good for your humility to realize that the ocean dictates the terms and all you can do is accept them or go back inland. You may have definite, logical reasons for wanting high tide tomorrow to be at a certain time, and at a particular height, but do you think the ocean cares?

The wind blows. Many, many trout-country hotshots who can snap out a laser-like Orvis-type loop on their home water are brought to their knees when they realize that that 18-knot breeze is usual, normal, and will be there the whole week, with stronger gusts and the occasional squall. Their attempts to cast as if they were trout fishing are not attractive, not effective, and do not bring tranquility to their souls. This unpleasantness is compounded by compassionate and sympathetic guide comments such as “Say, when you finish that one, would you knit me a monofilament sweater too?”

First, you must believe that you can. I started fly fishing early, but was indoctrinated with “it’s too windy to fly fish.” Horse puckey—the wind is your friend. Just put the wind on your line hand shoulder and let her rip. Of course it’s not really that simple, but the point is that it can be done; it’s a long way from impossible. There are advantages to wind, too. It covers your noise, and makes it harder for fish to see you. When the sea glasses off you’ll see a lot of fish but you won’t catch doodly. Only a fool wishes for calm. My own personal ideal, I think, is about ten knots—enough to rough up the water and conceal your noise, but casting is still easy enough.

Back on Trout Creek, the angler is pretty much at the apex of the food pyramid. It is well to remember that at sea, you are somewhere in the middle of the food chain. And that in addition to fish big enough to eat you, and wanting to, other hazards exist: salt water fish have various teeth, venom, razorlike opercles, scalpels and spines. Here’s a rule: Don’t grab it unless you know what it is and how to handle it. Besides careful handling of the fish you catch, there are also stingrays, jellyfish, fire coral, sea lice and other nasties to consider. You should educate yourself as to local hazards.

Sandflies must be mentioned. Also called sand fleas and no-see-ums, these biting gnats are tiny, become active in the evening, have a preference for ankles, and bite like the devil. The usual insect repellents, even including 100% DEET, slow them down not a lick. Fortunately for us, Avon Skin So Soft does repel these horrible little monsters. Mixed 50-50 with water, it’s the only thing I know that will keep them from attacking and there have been times when it was a trip saver. Keep this, DEET, sunscreen, and anything else that could leak double bagged in zip-locks. The last thing you want is to impregnate your flies and lines with odorous goo; fish have remarkable olfactory senses. And along those lines, whenever you apply goo, don’t touch your fishing equipment until after you’ve grabbed a handful of turtle grass off the bottom and scrubbed your hands with it.

There are hazards to your equipment too. A light came on in my head down in south Texas when a friend likened the ocean to “a giant acid bath.” The sea is there, patiently waiting to corrode and consume just about any of man’s works. There is an excellent product called Corrosion-X that you should apply to reels, knives, pliers and such before you go. The manufacturer claims that it forms a molecular film with metal surfaces and it sure seems to work. Never forget to wash your gear in fresh water every evening; I also remove my reels and soak them in fresh water overnight. When you change flies, don’t put them back in the box with unused ones. Carry a small box for the day’s used flies, and put box and all in the fresh water with your reels. This keeps salt out of your good fly boxes; you don’t want it there.

Use line cleaners frequently—every day or two. You will be amazed by how clear that ocean can be, but it still builds up an astounding amount of crud on your line. This crud reduces slickness so you can’t shoot line as far, and tends to sink even the best floating line technology.

Barnacles, coral and oysters can damage or cut your lines and leaders. You should consider taking spare fly lines and plenty of leaders and tippet. And on the subject of spares, your party should have at least one spare rod along.

Tides: timing is everything. Typically, fishing is dead at slack, both high and low; then with the slightest tidal current, the switch goes on. You can fish a place at slack tide and swear there isn’t a fish for miles, then an hour later it’s gangbusters because the tide started running. Fish when the tide is moving, either in or out, and eat, nap, tie flies, and birdwatch when it’s slack. Upon your arrival, do your best to get your hands on a current local tide chart. It will show times and heights of high and low tides at one specified point. You will then need to calculate the offset—that is, when the tide chart shows high at Pelican Point it will be high where you’re fishing an hour and a half later, for example. Generally, the further you are from the open ocean the greater the offset will be. Since tides are for the most part caused by the moon’s gravity they are related to lunar days, not solar ones. This means that if high tide today is at noon, tomorrow it will be at 1:10 PM or so; the lunar day is a little over 25 hours. The greatest tidal ranges occur on new and full moons and are called spring tides; the smallest ranges happen during half moons and are called neap tides, pronounced “nip.” Now, since the bite is related to tidal movements, the fishing tends to be best when spring tides happen and worst with neap tides. So do you want to schedule your trip for the full moon or the new moon? Here’s a south Texas clue: if you want to fish in the daytime, fish the new moon. If you would rather fish all night, fish the full moon.

Well, so far this is pretty complicated and discouraging. Anyone smarter than a sugar beet would read this far and opt for golf. If salt water fly fishing is such an ordeal, why do it?

I can promise you that it is rewarding. Simply because it’s harder, there’s more sense of accomplishment when you get it together. On the way to my very first salt trip, I was told that salt water fish fight three times harder, pound for pound, than fresh water fish. Being a smartass young zoology student at the time, I said “Aw, that’s gotta be bull shit.” The very first fish I caught, a small blue runner, convinced me that it wasn’t. Until I landed it, this eight-ounce fish had me thinking that I was attached to a five-pounder. Fish in the salt tend do to get a lot bigger, too. And as the saying goes, the great thing about flats fishing is where you do it. You will at some point realize that the scene in front of you is the most beautiful water you’ve ever seen. You will make the same observation an hour later. It will keep happening . . .

Some big-time dues paying involves learning to see fish. On your first bonefish trip you will be hugely dismayed when the guide spots fish at long distances, several casts away, and narrates their progress, getting closer and closer, until they’re well within even your feeble casting range, and you can’t see squat. If you’re fortunate enough to first experience this in the Florida Keys, you’ll also be able to count on encouraging comments from your guide like “You lame goddamned moron—can you see your FEET?” (Florida Keys guides probably qualify as a separate category of hazard.)

Several salt water fishing writers have described “the window in the waves.” Waves are curved, and refract light. If you become conscious of only the part of wave surfaces that is closest to a right angle to your vision, you will soon realize that it’s like a series of moving, oval windows you can look through. You’ll usually not see whole, individual fish through them. But you will begin to pick up motion, and then pieces of fish. It also helps to focus on the bottom, not the surface. Look for moving shadows on the bottom. Many fish have large amounts of a compound called guanine in their scales, which make them bright silver in the air, but in the water these scales reflect their surroundings. It is common to first see a bonefish’s shadow, then with some effort his black pupil, then finally the whole fish pops into focus. Keep Randy Wayne White’s observation in mind: “Water is a mirror until you learn how to use it as a lens.”

Another part of finding fish involves not seeing the fish directly but seeing their effect on the water. This is spotting pushes (a fish swimming in shallow water often leaves a wake above it), nervous water, and other disturbances of the surface. Chaos theory applies here, in that what you are seeing is water that is not acting “normal.” After you’ve seen enough waves they start to make a peculiar sort of sense and when you see water that doesn’t make sense it’s usually caused by animal movement just below the surface.

Since so much of this finding of fish is visual, you will need to rig up a vision kit. Your expensive polarized glasses will collect salt spray, which leaves a smeary, foggy residue as it dries. Have a small bottle of lens cleaner and a zip-lock bag of paper towels; you’ll likely use them after every motorized move from one spot to the next. Another vision trick is to put on clear goggles over your shades whenever the guide fires up the motor, then take them off when he kills it. Pay some attention to your headwear. You’ll want a long bill, and it’s important that the underside of the bill is black, or at least dark. Your glasses should have sidepieces that block glare, either built-in or add-on, and equipped with Croakies or some other retainer. Spare shades qualify as a necessity.

It only makes sense, given all these difficulties, to get help. Guides will teach you to see things you wouldn’t notice on your own. It doesn’t do much good if the guide sees fish but you can’t communicate and figure out where the fish is that he sees. He can’t very well say “over there by that wave.” So there’s a very helpful system that almost every guide uses. It likens the boat to a clock: the bow is 12 o’clock, the stern is 6, the port beam is 9, and the starboard beam is 3. So a fish that is 30 degrees to the left of dead ahead would be at eleven o’clock. Start the day by making a comfortable cast so that the guide can also indicate how far the fish is in terms of your casts. It should go like this:

Guide: “Fish at two o’clock, three or four of them, about two casts out, moving from left to right.”

Angler: “Can’t see them.” But she points her rod at where she thinks the guide is telling her the fish are.

G: “They’re a little more to the right, and turning towards us.”

A: “OK, got ‘em.” Angler and guide now scrunch down as low as they can to avoid spooking the fish. Never taking her eyes off the fish, she waits until she can put the fly ahead of them. She does, fish bites, reel screams. This is important: until the fish bites, never take your eyes off the fish. When the fish bites, never take your eyes off the slack line on the deck until the fish is on the reel. As soon as you strike with your line hand, form an “OK” circle with forefinger and thumb and let the line run freely through it. At the same time you can guide slack line away from cleats, feet, and other potential tangles. This is called clearing line, and not clearing line loses many, many fish.

You want to get this process worked out ahead of time; it seems like every guide is a little different. (Well, sure, you have to be a little different to be a fishing guide.)

More indirect evidence of fish: once you’ve heard a tarpon roll, and a snook slashing bait, you will never forget these sounds. And then there are bonefish holes and muds. Holes are left by the amazing bonefish feeding process. Bonefish come onto the flats when the rising tide puts enough water on them that the fish feel safe. (Actually, this is an oxymoron. Bonefish never feel safe. “Safer” might work.) They cruise in erratic zig-zags, looking for any sort of prey movement. Virtually all their prey have only one defense—ducking back into the bottom. Darting back into a hole in the bottom produces a little puff of mud, and now you know why a Gotcha, with its tan fur “wing,” catches so many bones. (It would probably be more accurate to call it a mud-puff instead of a wing.) The amazing part is that a bonefish tips up, takes a bite out of the bottom, crunches it, swallows the goodies and spits out everything inedible, all in something like 0.8 seconds. (Joke: How can you tell a fresh bonefish hole? It is surrounded by a bonefish mouth.) You can estimate how long the golf-ball-sized hole has been there; a recent hole has steep, sharp edges and older ones, affected by moving water, get blurrier and blurrier. You can even tell which way the fish was facing when you find a really recent hole, because of the plume of crunched bottom next to it that he spat out. You can get into some fascinating deductions, knowing that fresh holes mean that there were bones here since the last low tide . . . “Which way did they go? How far are they?”

Bonefish “muds” are formed when a school of fish are feeding. All this biting the bottom and spitting it back out, when enough fish are doing it, makes blobs of muddy water. It is a Nice Thing to find muds, and indicates that your heart is pure. Bonefish, the most neurotic and easily-spooked fish you will ever try to sneak up on, seem to lose their fear when concealed by muddy water. The closest thing to a barrel shoot you will find on the flats is a school of bonefish in a mud. If you can get a fly into it, you will almost automatically catch one. That is, if they are still there. If the mud is strung out by the wind and/or tide, and feathery on the edges, they’re likely gone. But if you happen upon a nice round mud with sharp edges, get ready. The fun’s about to begin.

Many predators, like stripers, bluefish and spotted seatrout, make slicks, which amount to fish puke and oddly enough smell like watermelon. Schooling predators that feed on schooling baitfish such as anchovies and mullet get into a feeding frenzy and eat until they regurgitate, and keep eating. The baitfish oils released form an oil slick, which is visible (the water looks smoother) and can persist for some time. Like muds, slicks dissipate; a vague slick spread over a large area is older than a smaller, well-defined one. The point is that if you smell watermelon, look upwind for a slick. If you find a nice, tight one, cast a baitfish pattern on the upwind side of it.

Another, more obvious indicator of fish is birds circling, hovering and diving. Typically, when predators crash bait, they drive at least some of it up to the surface and gulls, terns, pelicans and their kin gather some of the bounty. The bait can be either shrimp or fish, and bait jumping out of the water, with or without birds present, is a giveaway that mass murder is happening below the surface. If you are in a boat, approach from upwind with the motor shut off, and put your fly in the middle of the hubbub.

Standing in the bow of a flats skiff being poled across the flats, ready to cast, you will surely feel privileged and fortunate. This is, in its own way, an ultimate fishing experience. You may be surprised to find that some tropical anglers insist that it is not
the most efficient or productive way to fish the flats—they prefer to walk.

Walking (or wading, if you prefer) obviously requires more effort, it is slower and so covers less ground, and you are looking from a couple of feet closer to the surface so you can’t see quite as well. But it has its rewards. You are in, not above, the water, so it is easier to get attuned to what is happening—for example, you can feel the tide moving. You exhibit a lower profile so you’re less likely to spook fish. It is possible to be much more stealthy afoot than in a boat; there’s a crunch every time the captain plants the pole, and even with carpeting and soundproofing, boat noises transmit efficiently into the water.

There are some details to attend to when walking the flats. For example, the way to get a stingray to deliver you a whack is to step down onto one. Therefore, don’t pick your feet up but slide them across the bottom—the “stingray shuffle.” If you bump a ray this way, horizontally, he will scare the hell out of you when he takes off but he won’t lash you with his tail. You definitely do not want to be stung by a stingray. If you are,  you’re likely to spend two or three days in the hospital and I’m told it is very painful. I gather that it’s roughly the equivalent of a rattlesnake bite.

You would also be wise to avoid jellyfish and their high-octane cousin the Portuguese man-of-war. Their tentacles sport nematocysts, tiny coiled and barbed springs containing a neurotoxin. On contact, these little springs uncoil and inject their venom. All you need to do is watch for and avoid them, but since some species have tentacles several feet long this isn’t always easy. Various household chemicals can neutralize the venom, but when you need them they’ll be in somebody’s household, not with you. The field expedient, believe it or not, is urine. Most jellyfish stings don’t amount to much more than brushing a stinging nettle and they subside in a few minutes. Some species of jellyfish, and especially the man-of-war, are more potent and painful. I have not been severely stung, but I did actually try my own urine once on a mild sting, and I can tell you that the relief is total and instantaneous.

You might be tempted to wade barefoot. Don’t. Sea urchins are plentiful in the tropics, and sea urchin spines are painful and difficult to remove. Wear flats boots. I have gotten into the habit of wearing thin neoprene dive booties inside my flats boots for protection against the abrasion caused by the coral sand that gets inside the boots. Absent dive booties, thick socks help but are a distant second.

Probably the most cogent point in all of this is the proximity of the fly to the fish’s mouth. The slickest, most innovative fly on earth, impeccably crafted from the finest materials, won’t catch any fish at all if it’s: in a fly box, stuck in the back of your head, tangled in a mangrove, inside a wad of turtlegrass, caught on the poling platform, or even waving around in the air. It must be in the water and at the right depth. You may think you were fishing for eight hours, but how much of that time was your fly really in a position to trick a fish?

Don’t get all hung up on having dozens of fly patterns. You can easily get by with five: Gotcha, Crazy Charlie, Clouser Minnow, Lefty’s Deceiver, and a plain white streamer. That said, it is very good to have some options as to sink rate. The usual way to accomplish this is with different eyes—from light to heavy: small bead chain, large bead chain, Dazl-eyes, and lead dumbbell eyes. Sometimes fish will be feeding in shallow water (use flies with small bead chain eyes) and sometimes they’ll be two feet deeper (Dazl-eyes). Tomorrow a front comes through, the water temperature drops five degrees, and the fish are down deep—time for the lead dumbbell-eyed flies. Another way to get the same effect, if you tie your own, is to tie some of a pattern with no lead wire on the hook shank, some lightly weighted, and some with a lot of lead. In order to tell them apart, I color-code them. A white head means no weight, pink means a little, and red is the fast sinker. (“white is light, pink will sink, red has the lead”)

With the exception of the sophisticates of the Florida Keys, bonefish are not picky about patterns. Keys fish see flies just about every day, and can get demanding about not only pattern but also size. But to prove the point that most bonefish are not selective, I once tied some intentionally-silly bonefish flies—one with a body made from a Cohiba cigar band and one having shredded US currency (souvenir of the Denver Mint) wrapped around the hook shank. They both caught fish, and as a matter of fact, the Cohiba Charlie took the biggest fish of a Bahamas trip. (And yes, being able to enjoy Cubanas legally is another benefit of Life in the Tropics.)

Crustaceans and shellfish are big food items for most of the fish you’re after. The fish, therefore, have hard bony mouths. You, therefore, need sharp hooks. Every time you tie on a fly, do the thumbnail test. If the point doesn’t immediately dig into your thumbnail with light pressure it’s too dull. Have a hook hone on your lanyard with your nippers, and know how to sharpen hooks.

You must tie impeccable knots. Practice before you go until perfect knots become automatic. Moisten your knot with spit before you set it, and don’t trim the tag off flush—leave about an eighth of an inch tag—knots usually slip a little before they fail. My advice is to forget fluorocarbon leaders. They are more invisible to fish, granted, but they seem to abrade easily and then break at the abrasion. Using fluoro tippets in the Bahamas, two of us were breaking off over half of the bonefish we hooked. At noon, when we compared notes and realized it was happening to both of us, we switched back to nylon. We didn’t have any increase in refusals, and we stopped breaking off fish.

Line manufacturers now offer tropical fly lines, made specifically for hot weather. They don’t get sticky and flabby, as some cold-water lines do in hundred-degree heat. Because they don’t, they shoot farther. Another recent development is translucent and even transparent lines. I think you should seriously consider springing for a spare spool, loaded with an intermediate-sink line, either translucent or transparent. The main advantage is this: you should always try to manage your line to minimize slack—you want as straight a line as possible between you and the fish. The less slack there is, the more effective your hook set will be. A floating line, because it conforms to the waves, inherently builds slack into the system. An intermediate-sink line avoids it; it’s much easier to maintain a straight line. Translucent/transparent lines allow you to use a much shorter leader, which aids casting in the wind.

And speaking of hook set—learn to strip strike. Don’t set the hook by lifting the rod tip as you do with trout. Don’t set the hook by horsing back on the rod as you do with bass. Set the hook with your line hand. In addition to a more positive set, a strip strike also has the advantage that if you pull the fly away from the fish, it will only move a few inches. Trying to set the hook with the rod will almost always pull the fly clear out of the strike zone, out of the fish’s vision. When the fly is out there working, keep the rod tip in the water, again to keep slack out of the system.

It may seem radical, but use some 0000 steel wool and take the high-gloss finish off that snazzy new rod. Fish instinctively fear things that flash in the air; other fish aside, predation comes from above (pelicans, ospreys, frigatebirds and so on). The flash of a rod must strongly resemble the flash of a wing. Even watch crystals can reflect sunlight like a mirror. A Bahamas guide and I were baffled at the number of bonefish we were spooking. We were making absolutely no noise, we both had on subdued shades of  clothing, and we were doing some expert-level stealth. Still, when we’d get within casting range the bones would blow up. It was a frustrating mystery until Theo got to looking at the sun’s angle, our approach angle (which was pretty uniform because he was consistently keeping the wind on my left), and my watch crystal. He had me take off my watch—problem solved.

You will, when fishing from a boat, usually have a partner and you’ll take turns at the bow. Here’s a system that I learned on Ascension Bay in the Yucutan. Whoever’s in front has a rod, probably an eight-weight, rigged for bonefish. There are rods in holders on the seats of the panga, set up for other species—a ten weight set up for permit, a ten or eleven for baby tarpon, and a spinning rod with a barracuda lure. If the guide spots something other than bonefish, the angler in front locates it and without taking his eyes off the fish, hands his bonefish rig back to the number two, who hands forward the appropriate fly rod. On the other hand, if the other fish is a big ‘cuda, the second becomes the “barracuda gunner” and takes a crack with the spinning rod from the second seat.

More than once I’ve been approached on the beach and told “you can’t use a fly rod in the ocean.” Mankind has been dragging fish out of the sea for centuries, and fishing is common to every culture. Remember that fly fishing is a new wrinkle for many folks. My point here is that not all fishing guides are fly fishing guides, not all fishing shops carry fly gear, and many fishing boats are damn difficult to fly fish from. Especially if you are exploring remote places, you should take along all the fly gear you are likely to need. You may find yourself having the only tapered leaders in 100 miles and in that case you would be a real doofus to have only one . . .

You may have to do some explaining before you can fish effectively using indigenous guides and boats. It can drive you nuts to be into the fish but unable to cast because of the captain not understanding wind-on-the-line-hand-shoulder, boat fittings that capture your line (take duct tape), and awnings or T-tops that block back casts. Patience, diplomacy and liberal tips can usually work these problems out.

As I said, I hope this helps you. If you pay any kind of attention at all on your trip, you should pick up some things that will help me the next time I go. So let me know when you get back. And several kind people took me by the hand and taught me a lot of basics—I honor them by telling you. Please pass their kindnesses on to others.

One final note. No matter how much you fish the salt, you will always flub casts, you will forever spook fish, and there will always be fish out there farther than you can cast. Are you being graded? Will you get some sort of fishing report card? Unless you are truly deranged, fishing the salt is not a competition—if someone is keeping score, push them overboard. Be grateful that you’re there, have a great time, and do not forget to thank the ocean when it’s time to come home.

Captain Zen
Carbondale
December, 2002