The dredging has been temporarliy suspened on Will’s Flat (named after Will Bauer), aka Angelfish Cay, but the fight goes on. Such a bummer when “eco” operations overlook the horrible effects of dredging. You can’t paint yourself in eco green and destroy the flats at the same time. Check out this good write up by the folks over at Flylords. There’s a link to a petition there. There’s this post from the folks over at Yellow Dog. Belize is just a fantastic place full of natural wonders and there will always be those who want to break just a little piece of it for their own. The problem is that t ..read more

If I’m going to Kauai, I’m going to get some time at Anini. This is not because the fishing is fantastic there. It isn’t. It is horrible fishing. It is one of the only places you can sometimes, maybe, almost see bonefish in Kauai. It is also the first place I ever saw a bonefish, back in 2008. This place has kicked my butt more than any other place I’ve ever fished. It just doesn’t give up its fish easily… at least not to me. Maybe there’s an angler out there who just crushes here, but I don’t know that angler (and if real, I kind of jealous-hate them). The flat is big… really big… and is a ru ..read more

Aloha! I’m in Kauai for vacation (kid is off school this week) and of course I brought a rod (two, actually) along. I decided to pass some time right in front of the resort and was rewarded with a few Christmas Wrasse. I mean… how are these even real? Look at those colors! This fish didn’t put me into my backing and barely put a bend in my 8 wt., but… I could look at this fish all day. This is one thing I love about these kinds of places… the fish are often glorious. I had to drop down from a #6 to a #8 for this guy. Otherwise they couldn’t fit it in their mouths ..read more

Well… it is booked. The deposit is paid. This thing is happening. I’ll be heading back to Christmas Island Feb. 11 of 2025. I can’t wait to be back out there. It is just such a cool environment. I really enjoyed it when i was there in 2019, before the world shut down for a few years. I loved the trigger fish, the GT shots, the bonefish, the BFTs and all the wierd and beautiful stuff you’d catch near the Korean Wreck. I just loved it. And I’m headed back. We’ll be at Christmas Island Lodge, which seems a good operation. Here’s to the days and hours of anticipation. Get out there ..read more

I never met Cathy Beck, but I certainly knew of her, and her husband Berry. Word came out earlier this week that Cathy passed away while they were fishing down in Argentina. Condolences to Barry and all those who knew and loved Cathy, and that seems like a lot of people. Here she is talking casting and hauls ..read more

Years ago… many years ago… I had the Helios 2 sent to me to bring on a trip (Cuba, maybe?). I fell in love with the thing. It was my go-to rod for bones and I caught a lot of fish on it. I liked it so much I kept it… I traded some ad space on the blog for the rod. That was back when someone would actually give you someting of value for a banner ad on your niche fly fishing blog (oh, those were the days). Recently, I was an idiot. It wasn’t the first time. It won’t be the last. My idiocy, in this case, manifested with my snapping the tip off the rod. The good folks at Orvis are going to take a ..read more

The site has a LOT of broken links… hyperlinks pointing to the ghostly remains of “something” that once was, but is no more. The blog has been going so long there are a lot of markers in the graveyard… companies that never got off the ground, blogs and websites that shared something important once and have faded into and then out of memory. There are lodges that folded, some that were swept away, guides who have passed on or retired. There has been a lot of water under the bridge. Heck, even this site has had several near misses with demise. I don’t write much on it these days as more of my ti ..read more

Currently (and I don’t expect this to change), I have one day of saltwater fly fishing scheduled (beyond fishing in the Bay). I will be in Kauai in Feb. and I’ll bring a rod and I’ll use it. That is it. This is tempered by the fact that I’ll be heading to Christmas Island in Feb. or 2025. THAT is a good thing to look forward to. I’m already thinking about gear and flies and have dusted off the vice and gotten back to wrapping some threads. I couldn’t remember exactly how I had tied some of the trigger crabs, but thanks to photos of my fly boxes and hat (where I put flies to dry out while chang ..read more

I stumbled upon the Sailboat Diaries from Wild Fly Productions just yesterday. Hadn’t watched it before. I love it. I love it because, damn, what an adventure. I also love it because it isn’t about going out and just banging out a bunch of bonefish. These guys mostly don’t know what they are doing, but they figure it out and you get to be there for that. My first bonefishing trip was with a guide in the Bahamas. These guys decided for their first bonefishing trip they would have a buddy sail a sailboat to a bunch of rarely accessed flats. That’s a big call. They don’t go and have immediate suc ..read more

Ya know what I think about sometimes? As I’m sitting here on a Saturday evening in January on my couch I just started thinking about how on some trip back whenever when I was tarpon fishing I was stripping the fly too fast and the guide told me I needed to “feed the fish.” I took that to mean I needed to strip the fly, yes, but I needed not to have the damn thing WIN in its race away from the tarpon like a scared baitfish. LOSE the race, by gawd. And I think about that in the context of the GT I missed in Christmas Island back in 2019. Last day, last flat, last walk with the guide heading back ..read more