The Final Bonefish - A Fighter

Now that I have finally got this figured out a bit, we have to leave tomorrow. I have learned quite a bit about fishing the flats for bonefish. There is a lot to it. You fish the lower out going tide and then mostly the incoming tide. We were lucky to have both sets of tides, one in the morning and one at night, that we could fish.

The fish come in and tail, eating critters in the sand, mud and turtle grass. When they tail you can see the tail flipping up out of the water as they gobble food. At time the fin. Fining is done in shallower water and the motion is much less aggressive. Another thing we looked for is fish mudding. They sit in one spot and churn up the mud eating.

After we figured out a little about the tide and how the fish feed, then we had to get the presentation down and with that decide on what they are feeding on. This took some time.
The presentation and fly that caught all our bone fish was a weedless green crab pattern tossed to the tailing fish and then you had to just wait for a while. Twitch and wait, then hope that the fish sucked up your crab.

All the fish I caught were caught that way. This last one was big and fat. If you look at the picture close you will see that it had bite marks on both sides. It looked like it had been attacked and was lucky to get away.

Today I will clean and pack my gear. I got a taste of bone fishing and was impressed with their strength and speed. Two of my catches ran be into my backing quite a ways. The one I caught last night was my exhibit fish. Just as I set the hook a big power boat filled with fishermen was motoring by. They all saw me hook him and were yelling along with me as it ran across the flats. It was pretty exciting.