Providenciales, Turks and Caicos Islands, British West Indies-Nature has not been provident to Providenciales, shortchanging the island with a browned, wind-scratched scruffiness.
But maybe as a form of compensation, Provo (the island`s merciful sobriquet) is adjoined by a 60-mile endowment of waters called flats, where an abundance of sea life finds refuge and prey. In these saltwater shallows, the bonefish schools hunt.
It is charter captain Barr Gardiner`s job to hunt the hunters. Here, where fish but not fishermen abound, he has a just place in the predatory order. A squat man of bowling-ball blackness and muscularity, Gardiner is sparing in his communion with people; it is a trait he shares with many others who make their hard-won living snapping up life from the sea. But, like many others whose days are absorbed in agreeably ungoverned work, Gardiner has a swift, pink smile. When he does choose to speak, it is with thrift.
”Why are they called bonefish?” I ask him, as we skim and spank the still morning surface of the near-shore flats in his 12-foot skiff.
Answer is obvious
”Because they are bony,” he answers. We beach the vessel, and Gardiner springs out and begins stalking the water`s edge to fetch up its fecund yield of clams, our primary bonefish bait.
I wait for him, casting the shoreline absently for an implausible stray barracuda, amid the laughter of the sea birds. Are they mocking my futility?
At my left, pelicans stand motionless, posing at the cautious margins of flight, in a tableau free of civilization`s taint.
Bucket now piled high with clams, we speed off to the more distant reaches of the flats. Gardiner`s grave black eyes are hopscotching the distance, scanning the now slight chop for the great swaths that tattle on the bonefish. Bonefish, it is explained, betray their position to their hunters. Foraging in flashing swarms, they burrow the sand bottom for shellfish, tossing up explosions which bleach the water the color of lime-tinted milk. Or, feeding on bait fish, they raise a sudden boil to the surface with their ravening, thrashing frenzy.
Bingo! The grave black eyes have picked out a milky patch from the vast morning shimmer. About 200 yards away, we suffocate the outboard and let the subtle undercurrents tug the skiff to the 50-foot patch where the violence of hunger is being enacted.
asily spooked
We drift soundlessly because bonefish are easily spooked by such disturbances as a motor`s tremble. I draw in deep draughts of dry, unsullied salt air and regard the perfection of this ocean fishing genus. I am a man with such an unremitting genetic predisposition to motion sickness, the catch of queasiness might rise in me at the sight of a salad being tossed. I am a man whose fragile triumph over hydrophobia has rewarded me with the swimming skills of a dachshund.
Fishing in four feet of tranquil, sun-sparked water is, for me, paradise. We are passing tensely over the blizzard of bonefish now, Gardiner`s fresh clams jigging seductively near the excavating noses. The bonefish are not seduced. Not one of them. Dauntless as Teddy Roosevelt`s cavalry we circle for another laconic charge.
”Are bonefish edible?” I ask. ”Yes, the flesh is sweet and white, but only the islanders eat them. Too much trouble for visitors.”
”And yet we fish for them.”
”Soon you will see why.”
The strike of the bonefish is nothing like the savage jerk of, say, the northern pike. It is more a slurp that bends a protractor`s arc to your rod. Between the bonefish`s wary strike, shell-hard mouth and skittish distrust, a quick, brash hook set is required; anything less, and its escape will be quick.
First 2 escape
I soon underscore the point by granting pardons to the first two bonefish I hook. Two tardy, irresolute hook sets send them slipping off like quicksilver phantoms.
A third bonefish, though, enjoys no such clemency. I impale its jaw, plunging the hook fast and hard. The scream of my reel stabs through the chatter of the gulls. The bonefish`s startling might propels me-bumping, spinning, careening, stumbling-around the skiff; I am a leashed pet and the bonefish is my master.
For an eternity (10 minutes or so), the valiant aquatic warrior slashes and dives, twists and runs, shakes and leaps for its survival, far beyond what reasonably seems the march of exhaustion.
Finally, with some brave eruptions of surface, it begins to surrender. I have outlasted it. My hammering heart slows. I start to feel the rawness and ache of my spent muscles. Judging by the freshwater benchmarks with which I am familiar, this has been the life struggle of a 9- or 10-pound leviathan.
Gardiner nets the catch. My line and my jaw go slack simultaneously. My silvery rival carries no more weight than two pounds. I seize in one cognitive bolt the reason veteran anglers like former baseball slugger Ted Williams so profoundly respect and covet the gallant hunter of the flats.
The vanquished is freed
Gardiner snaps the obligatory Proud-Fisherman-With-Worthy-Adversary photo and I grant parole to my prey, sliding it gently back to its home and marking as I do just how casual and arbitrary the character of survival can be. In the next two hours, four more bonefish are boated and released.
Afterwards, Gardiner opens up a couple of beers and some of his biography. He talks about his nemesis, a four-foot barracuda who has claimed as his territory a shoreline stitched with mangroves whose branches shoot up from the water like stork legs. There the mammoth fish crouches patiently in the weedbeds that fringe a drop-off prized by Gardiner for its bounty of bonefish. It waits for Gardiner to make his strike. Then, when injury has withered the bonefish`s will, it strikes out in ambush, intercepting the flagging quarry and, with its remorseless guillotine of teeth, amputates all but the head. Gardiner swears vengeance on the encroacher.
As the soporific morning exhales it last breaths, the flats showcase more sea life; their shallowness is conducive to visibility. A pair of indifferent black-tipped sharks glide listlessly under the skiff, smug in the illusory conviction that they have no predators. (The release of ”Jaws” several years ago also released a blood thirst among fishermen which has not yet been slaked.) Stingrays patrol the depths. Sea turtles flog the surface. Conch stud the sands. Unseen, crevalle jacks, yellowtails and mutton snappers laze below. In the last of my four allotted fishing hours, we gather food. The rat-a- tat-tat strikes of small snappers come in easy, eager succession. We tuck away a half dozen for dinner. Gardiner dips his net into three feet of water to mine a conch, cutting away the tough muscle, and gracing me with the firm flesh for tonight`s feast.
In the evening, I chew genially on the garlic-punctuated conch the hotel chef has improvised. And on Barr Gardiner`s spare words about why fishermen pursue the cagey, slippery, feisty, mighty bonefish.
”Soon you will see why,” he had said, through his generous smile.
I had indeed seen why.
