Christian’s Bones
Though this was not a fishing trip, I brought the rods because I always do—a habit of hope. When he saw them out of the case, Christian scoffed. By then we were aboard the Motu Iti, a 54-foot catamaran, and under sail. We were in French Polynesia, cruising the waters of Rangiroa, the largest atoll in the Tuamotu chain, which is the largest archipelago of atolls in the world.
A tall, goofy Frenchman and captain of the Motu Iti, Christian meant to be nothing if not accommodating, but juggling my decayed French and his somewhat pidgin English, I couldn’t make him understand the exact features I was asking about. I couldn’t communicate the shape of an ideal flat.
Better you listen to me, was his take on the subject.
“Why not the jackfeesh?” Christian urged. “There are many, many jackfeesh.”
“Oh, the jackfish, too,” I said. “But I will be very, very happy—the most happy—if we find the bonefish. Io-Io, no?”
“Io-Io. Yes,” he said, searching the water, his gaze suggesting that if I would just turn my stupid head and look at the electric blue surface out there, I, too, would understand the foolishness of my desires. “But nobody catches the Io-Io with the, uh, uh . . .” He waved the back of his hand at the rigged 8-weight Winston XD I held and smiled, “. . . like that. In the nets, maybe . . .”
“I promise you I can. Just take me to the right place . . .”
What we were having was a clash of faiths. I had been told Christian was quite the fisherman, and found out soon enough that he was enormously successful at trolling a lure on a handline behind his dinghy.
He thought I was a ninny from the moment I uncased the fly rods. He’d heard of fly-fishing before, vaguely, somewhere . . . it had something to do with mountains and rivers, a movie perhaps. But he quickly and clearly felt that a fly rod was of little use in the South Pacific.
“You cannot catch the Io-Io with that,” he decided, smiling to let me know he didn’t mean to hurt my feelings. He was a charter captain, trained to indulge silly eccentricities—to a point. He wasn’t, for instance, about to let me screw up his showing me a nice time.
“Sure I can,” I told him.
“Non. Non, non, non,” he assured me.
“Trust me,” I argued.
He didn’t, and I’ll tell you nothing quite sticks under your skin the way a tall, goofy, and dubious Frenchman can. He just . . . aarrrgh!
The jacks were easy enough. Find a clot of coralhead blooming from the lagoon floor—or better yet a submerged motu (mound) sprouting dozens of coral formations. Drop a fly around the edges and strip, strip, strip. Money. Christian would drop me ashore, and I would walk the crushed-coral beaches set tight against a wall of palm jungle, roll-casting over the coral. Or I would slide down the steep bank into chest-deep water and climb onto a flat coralhead and catch jacks and barracuda until the dinghy returned to pick me up.
The jacks slammed everything, as long as it was moving fast. Twice I spotted huge, 30-pound, big-headed jacks ghosting through passages in coral formations, although both times I was out of position to reach them and stood watching the long, whisper-fast shadow shoot through the labyrinthine coral.
“Where is the feesh?” Christian would ask me, a lampoon of surprise vaulting his eyebrows each time I met the dinghy empty-handed.
“I let them go,” I would say.
“Oh, ho-ho!” he would say and laugh.
I didn’t make him smell my fingers. Why should I expect him to believe me? The state of fishing in the Tuamotus is so basic that nobody I spoke to in the villages had ever heard of fly fishing. Why would they understand a twisted concept like catch-and-release?
“Maybe at the Pink Sands,” Christian would say, his lips pushed out in a sympathetic pout. Maybe at the Pink Sands he could show me a place where I—even a pinhead like me—could catch a fish.
The Pink Sands rise abruptly in an extreme shelf from the deep vitreous blue. The deep water steps up suddenly to a range of basins and flats that stretch for what seems like miles. In the shallows, the sand is a cobbled yellow-green, electrified by brilliant sunlight charging the water with photovoltaic energy. Crested fingers of pink sand rise from the water as narrow, rose-colored ridges comprised of finely crushed coral.
No turtle grass, no significant vegetation of any type clouds the water. Only black sea slugs littered throughout the bottom break the vast fields of ionized seawater—sea slugs and the dark, rippling squiggles of rays and sharks cruising the flats.
“We will eat what you catch for dinner, non?” Christian said as he dropped me before returning to the catamaran.
“I’ll kill a jack,” I said.
“Ohhh. The jackfeesh,” Christian said, engaging a little boosterism to pump me up about what he clearly considered my only possibility of success.
Christian returned to the yacht. I stood on a sand ridge that petered out 80 feet or so from the deep water. From aboard the Motu Iti I had watched a squadron of fish sliding out of the blue depths and up onto the flat, scouring a run parallel to the shelf and then dropping back off. I had hoped these were bones. Closer now, I could see they were jacks.
I edged toward the shelf, wading after the ridge ducked under water. Cruising toward me from the right, I spotted a different sort of shape in the water, a pair of lighter shadows. I had already cast toward the jacks, to my left, and my line lay on the water. I knew that trying to rip the line out to back-flip the fly would be sloppy, but I did it anyway. The fish attacked. I lifted my rod tip and felt the surge as line sluiced through the fingertips of my left hand, and I knew immediately—bonefish. And for just a moment I thought Aha, Frenchman!
As the hooked bone jetted by, reef sharks, which had before seemed merely lazy, their black forms commingling amongst the rays, leapt into action, twitching and charging. I let the bonefish pick its way through the sharks, letting it convince them that, whatever distress might be going on, it could still outstreak a shark in a tail-chase. Eventually I was able to walk the fish up into shallower water, away from most of the sharks, and land it. I moved the fish in the water, taking extra long to ensure its complete recovery, and watched as brilliant sunlight played holographic tricks down its platinum flanks.
I straightened. All around ranged miles of basin and flat, the unaltered work of weather, wind, and sea—shallow waters shot through with fish. Beyond ran the low rim of green pandanus and palm jungle, and through its gaps, the reef and the open ocean. Surf pounded the reef from outside, building momentary monuments of spray high into the sky. In the other direction stretched the wide lagoon, with nothing but the catamaran to mar its meeting with the sky.
I was alone with these bones and realized that I very well could have been the only one to fish this flat all year. Maybe I was the first fly fisherman ever to cast there. Not only had Christian dropped me where bonefish indeed patrolled the shallows, he had put me someplace where they whirled to the splat of an Abel Anchovy dropping from the sky. He had deposited me in bonefish heaven.
And so I fished for hours. It was not the careful stalking of wise, spooky bonefish you read about in books, but my fishing at the Pink Sands was spooky with the aura of a primordial place. Allowing for gear updates and a little geomorphology, I could have been fishing in 1996, or 1832, or 1789. Nothing would have been appreciably different, and this dissolution of time fascinated me to no end. With my rod arced low against the immensity of sky and my line slicing through the sparkling electrolyte spray, joined to the streamlined trajectory of a sprinting bonefish, I forgot to wonder whether Christian was even watching.
Jeff Hull is a freelance writer working on a novel about fly-fishing guides. He lives near Missoula, Montana.
Copyright © 2012 Intermedia Outdoors
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