WHILE IT’S FORGIVABLE TO DRIFT OFF INTO THE HIGH LYRIC while imagining a backlit fly caster rhythmically zinging line back and forth inches from the water’s surface, it’s better to de-romanticize the fly rod, to recognize it for what it is: a tool someone fashioned to help one creature connect to another. Dame Juliana Berners, fifteenth-century Benedictine prioress and inventor of the sport, chose an alder limb and shaved it down to the proper weight. Five centuries and countless industry advancements later, I found after snapping my expensive graphite in a tumble on the way to the stream that a carefully selected willow branch would still suffice: knotted a monofilament leader to the tip of the branch, a likely fly to the end of the leader, and soon felt life tugging at the other end.
The contemporary, of course, necessitates complexity. Today’s $900 graphite rods host custom cork grips at the base of which are seated machined reels containing Dacron backing, synthetic fly line, and monofilament leader. Knots like slip-, Albright, and nail connect these lines, which taper from a butt end like spaghetti to a working end of angel hair. To the end of the clear leader, via blood knot, a two-foot section of tippet testing ten or twelve pounds is tied, and to the end of the tippet a bonefish fly is cinched.
Like language, the artificial fly is a brutal approximation.
The impressionist flytier wraps some chicken rump feathers and chopped-up rabbit fur dyed mauve to the shank of a stainless steel hook, adding two small black plastic bulbs meant to mimic a crab’s eyes; the realist, however, scissors a hunk of brown carpet into a disk, threads it to the hook’s shank, and glues it there with two strips of white leather, razor-cut to look like claws, then epoxies a piece of real crab shell to the abdomen, to achieve the texture of the natural. No matter how impressionistic or realistic, the fly evidences the unbridgeable distance between expression and experience.
While anglers and flytiers argue the merits of their patterns like stumping politicians, most bonefish guides scoff at a well-catalogued box of fly patterns—“It’s not the arrow, it’s the archer,” they say.
In such terms, the bow is the fly rod, and the rod, if we’re fishing during the early 1960s, is bamboo, likely made in upstate New York with cane imported from the Bay of Tonkin, the cork from Asia, too. In the mid- to late seventies, the rod is fiberglass and fashioned in San Francisco. Thenceforth the angler likely wields lighter and stronger graphite pressed and fused together in the Pacific Northwest, new models of rods every year, like fashion lines. The same folks who engineer cassette tapes manufactured the floating line in Michigan. The fly’s steel hook point has been honed by a laser in parts unknown. The serpentine aluminum guides, line keepers running incrementally along the length of the rod, are aluminum from a refinery in Illinois. The hen feathers trailing off the fly come from an Ohio farm that breeds fowl to produce high-grade hackle, the fur dubbing from a rabbit trapped and killed by a young boy in Kentucky who sells his pelts per dozen to a man from Lexington who sells them by the gross to a company named Wapsi out of Arkansas. Maybe the angler hand-tied the fly, maybe he ordered it from a Montana-based company that shops out its labor to factories in Costa Rica and Thailand.
All this is to say that no matter how isolated the flats angler appears or thinks herself (and clearly she searches for some pleasant desolation as she stalks fish barefoot, adjacent to the shore of an unnamed Caribbean cay whose sole inhabitants since time immemorial have been cormorants and frigate birds), when the hooked bonefish accelerates like a gazelle fleeing a cheetah, and the integrity of five knots is tested, along with the rod’s backbone, along with the reel’s oiled clutch—when the line tightens, a dozen seemingly disparate worlds fuse with a flourish, and she feels, as Hemingway’s Nick Adams felt upon spotting a long-desired trout from a high north woods riverbank, “all the old feeling.”
This old feeling is far, far older than we can imagine. And yet we touch it through the new.
THAT DAVID HAD NEVER CAST A FLY ROD PRIOR TO HIS employer’s arrival was perhaps to his advantage; because the former had never learned that it was “improper” to bring the fly rod past two o’clock on the back-cast, he was able to perform the mechanics of the hand-lining cast with just the line, hook, and sinker.
“You work harder at what you love,” David explained to me one evening as a cumulus at the foot of the southern sky caught the falling sun like a baseball. I was trying to listen intently to his wellspring of backstory but found myself repeatedly drawn to the memory of a huge bonefish, my biggest to date, that I had hooked earlier in the day and lost, after a two-hundred-yard run, on a barnacled mangrove stem—that twenty-second connection to a ten-pounder, before the tippet gave way, the briefest of affairs, most clinical of severances.
David waited for me to return, then continued.
“I was always the last guide to leave the lodge. Some nights the Drakes would leave a fly rod on the dock and I would go on the beach and practice with it after work was done. I had their permission. I couldn’t do much with it, but they couldn’t do much, either. It was still a foreign object back then. I believe it was a cane rod, bamboo, but it could have been fiberglass as well. Whippy as a skate’s tail. Anyway. I got to thinking about our old coffee cans with fishing line wrapped around them, the way we used to hand-line—you had to use a lot of arm to get that hook and sinker going, so that their weight would carry out the line. About then I started heaving with that fly rod. Big wide-open looped casts, way more line than those other boys were using. It wasn’t pretty at first, but it was something.”
By opening up the cast’s loop, and dropping the rod almost parallel to the water, David was able to create more fulcrum, thus momentum, thus line speed, and thus conquer the element that had been besting American sports since they first arrived on the bonefish flats: the wind.
A saltwater angler’s most plaguing bane, wind flummoxes from all four directions, alternately hampering both back-cast and forward cast. Say the angler stands on the bow of a skiff in a fifteen-mile-per-hour headwind: the wind will accommodatingly sling his back-cast out at the speed of sound, but will stunt the forward cast or otherwise urge it toward unintended locales. A tailwind, on the other hand, forces the angler to initiate the back-cast with extra chutzpah so that the line’s loop unfurls; thus the forward cast comes rocketing uncontrolled past the angler, who, if he’s had a brass-eyed fly whack him in the back of the neck a time or two, knows to duck. If a wind comes across the body, both angler and guide find themselves in high dudgeon: again the back-cast snaps to perfect planed-out attention, but the forward cast resembles a willow branch in a tornado. Grunts and body English don’t help one “play the wind” but are nonetheless frequently employed. At the back of the skiff, the guide removes his hat and kneels, either in supplication or to avoid puncture.
“Most of the guests were pretty bad,” David said of the early days. “I used to wear an old baggy jacket so that when they would hit me on their back-cast, the flies would go into the jacket instead of my skin. The thing was full of holes. Do they hit you with the flies up north?”
Pleased that he had acknowledged, for the first time, our shared profession, I nodded with exuberance: Oh, do they.
“One time a guest was on the boat with his young son,” David said. “He had the hardest time spotting the fish. This can be frustrating but sometimes it helps because the client doesn’t get too riled up, he just does what he’s told: fifty feet, three o’clock. Finally the man sees a big bonefish coming toward us and he winds up, winds up, and sticks the fly right in his son’s thigh! The man’s still excited, so he’s whipping the line around, thinking he’s just tangled around himself. But the son is screaming, ‘Dad, it’s in me! It’s in me!’”
David watched the guests from the back of the skiff, unnerved by the approaching fish, and learned what inhibited his clients’ febrile casts. Mostly not enough power, going ten-to-two, ten-to-two, restricting the arm’s strength and the line’s ability to power the rod. His mechanical