My solitude on the flats was broken by the arrival of an Island guy. He was one of the tall wiry ones, with the very broad zygomatic arches tapering to a spiritual point of chin hairs. A deep "Hi-ee" with the tipped up inflection at the end was predictable... very improbable that the sound of the contact would be much different.
His approach to the flats was one of familiarity, unlike mine. I was covered from stem to stern: well-used flats "booties", holes patched with "Goop"; polysomething socks to avoid blisters from the neoprene; nylon cargo pants; nylon shirt with pockets galore, tabs&vents; a hat so highly designed for this activity it looks truly dumb to anyone but a tropical flats flyfisherman. Fanny pack with coffee, power bars, fluorocarbon string, box of big flies, box of small flies, saltwater pliers and more stuff for a pretty tough, irresistable full day out there. Lycra gloves to avoid the blistering and melanoma-challenging I learned to avoid a few trips ago. And a honker of a stripping basket to top it off. So knowing full-well the beauty of light travel, I'm traipsing through this wilderness looking like an ensemble of Mediterranean-style dining room furniture, but I've been fishing and alone out there and I've gotten burned and cut in nine different ways in the past, and I NEED this ge
ar.
This guy is wearing shorts, an old baseball cap and a little bit of T-shirt. He's the color and surface sheen of excellent coffee beans. He's got a form-fitting canvas bag attached over his left shoulder for his catch. He fishes with a hand line carried in 12" diameter loops in his left hand, whips the line around with his right hand and casts his 3/4" cube of fish meat out about 20 feet. He's fishing for "shad".
The day is rare. Here's this amazing man, probably from the Forest Settlement. (The Forest on Exuma is literally the only place in my life where I have ever gotten really lost. No moon, slit of a view to the sky, dozens of intersecting winding paths through utterly undifferentiated vegetation and terrain, paths which peter out to zero after a mile or two. That's another story, but I'm sure this guy knows his home forest as I do mine). The morning is of a type of calm that I only saw once before in this windy place. The horizon is somewhere along that range of blues, but you have to sight along the level of some distant cay-tops. I've cast as coolly as I can muster to twenty small pods of good size tailing bonefish in the last three hours, and reverberated throughout my central nervous system to every ripping slash of barracudas within a quarter mile. There is really a lot of life happening this morning, and I'm just so happy to fit in.
The reality is that there are three of us fishing. I've been sharing the water with a crane of some large sort also. My knees go the other way, but I swear the wading technique is the same. And he sometimes gets just as excited and flustered as I do. We've spent some time within twenty feet of each other with no sense of interrupting what we're doing besides a sideways glance meaning everything's cool, don't screw me up. The crane flies over to the point when Forest-man comes. I would too. Three's a crowd.
I figure I'll just walk, not cast to anything until I'm a decent distance on this vast flat past the especially rich acre he's occupied, which I've come to think of as "The Garden", with some shallow troughs and a grouping of three or four weedy, rocky areas with clear, ten foot wide troughed-out channels between them. Ver-ry fishy. But there they are! Bones! Many! Fifty feet straight ahead. Fssh...fsssh......strp..strp.strp. BANG..set/set/ fast fish on a string in hand, now on the reel and I LOVE the song of my Lamson going backwards! This guy's a little smaller but great. Just two runs, pretty heavy pressure by me on this little one, back to me, we dance two full circles around and around, I reach down and turn the hook out and he's gone. I look back to my fishin' buddy to get my just approbation for a thing I feel pretty cool about, you know.. a decently performed procedure if not a miraculous display of instinctive total eptitude or whatever... but he's doing the crane walk
out toward the point. I've got three miles fish to the north today.