green turtle cay

Just home from what has become the sun-baked plateau on my idea of heaven – the town flats at Green Turtle Cay. These are the flats – swum over by the bonefish – that reconfigured my hard-drive when I first fished them back in ... well a few years ago. Then, sandwiched as my few days were between two hurricanes, and shone down upon at midnight by a full moon, I put the extra-terrestrial spookiness of the gigantic bonefish I saw, and my all-round skunking, down to lunar cycles and unwinding barometers. I liked to think that if I went back and got my timing right I’d slay them. Went back I did. Last year. At the tail end of my attempts to make my own film – the subject of which was a quest for a giant bonefish – you know, double figure – I refugeed my way to Green Turtle Cay, having lost my camera buddy Matt to real work back in London. I fished it for a few days and on the third hooked into the one bonefish of my time there. It took me thirty minutes to land and its snout crept over my ten-pound duck-tape mark by an inch or two: it was in fact, bloody huge. It wasn’t however any bigger than a dozen or more other fish I’d seen on each tide. The bones there are just pigs. Great big, very smart pigs. You can walk to the flats so they get fished over a lot. There’s never a tide without someone there teaching the bones the difference between right and wrong. Consequently those fish spook at the full menu of things that spook a bonefish, only with a sensitivity factor of maximum. The shadow of the line, a heavy set down, the plink of the fly – and most off all at the fly itself. It works like this. You see an enormous bone swimming right at you. You’re on the line between turtle grass and white sand, so the bonefish is dark and as it meanders from black grass over to white sand it sticks out like a dog’s willy. You have plenty of time to get wired and nervy. You measure out your cast, watching the fish all the while, trying to plot a course. You lay the line down softly. The fly hits the deck. The bonefish keeps on coming. Everything is in place. When the pig is four feet away you scud that fly a few inches, enough to make most bones spring all kitten-like onto the back of it. This one though just turns round and swims the other way. Or worse, it skirts the fly, swims closer to check out who cast it and then swims away. This happens time after time. Once in low light I saw the spectral shape of a ridiculously big fish, mid-teleport between one dimension and the next ... mid “beam me up” in its vaporous not quite thereness. I lengthened my cast to throw a fly a yard or two ahead of it into skinny water, and that the fish simply unzipped the ocean. I hadn’t even landed the line.

So you’ll get why I’m chuffed as a dog with two bones to have landed about ten for my week this last trip, including three off the last tide. I took smaller flies: size eights, tied with small, black bead-chain eyes and sandy rabbit-fur. I took lighter line, a lighter rod. And I got the hang of a strip that kept the bonefish coming, at least as much as it turned them away – which was an improvement. And I took a day out with Rickie Sawyer, who is one of the best guides you could ever fish with – a top bloke, patient and entertaining. With Rickie I landed a fish of 11lbs.

Not bad for a family hol in which I’d promised to – and in fact did – spend most of my time with the kids.

First published 13th April 2008