Learn this technique to help you deliver flies in difficult conditions – fish are often hunting closer to the angler during higher wave and wind activity.
“Well,” said Pooh, “what I like best,” and then he had to stop and think. Because although eating honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn’t know what it was called.
― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh
Re-directed by our expert man on the ground who kept the possibilities of our escape from a winter snow storm in Ireland open, we took off at last from Dublin, the second last plane to do so for three days. It was to New York, a quick stop (where we lost Spencer), Atlanta for a day (where we found Spencer) then down to Belize city and onto the ‘Rising Tide’ for six days. A MOTHER ship far from the reach of technology. Disconnected, thousands of miles from home and here we were buying Cuban cigars and Belikin Beer in a local supermarket before we boarded, like our lives depended on it, which they did!
We ran out to the reef far from MMOOTHHHEEERRRR and another skiff came into view, we stopped, a thousand yards between us a stick man at each end.
‘See dat, evreee time day point de boat across de reef days castin to fish’.
I tried to understand Noel the guides’ words.
Suddenly he said ‘Do you see de fish Jim?’ and straight away I did and it was happening faster than I could think which was good. Noel didn’t even have the pole out. Everett my companion and Noel the guide both spoke over each other ‘see de black tail, ad one o clock?’ merged with ‘fuck thats a big fish’ and I saw a tailing Permit at 80 feet eating crabs in the shallow breaking waves of the barrier reef.
The saltwater fish of legend.
The black scimitar tail waved at me in the wind and I made the cast. It didn’t need to be a far cast, the guide positioned the boat, what wind there was, was to my left, it was even slightly downwind! I could see beads of water drop from the fishes black tail. As I came forward on my cast I suddenly found my crab fly buried in the bend of my elbow. Leader wrapped around my neck, line around my legs. I stopped to breathe, to look!
Behind me in the boat the guide was having a little frenzy.
Everett sat and sighed and told me of the Permit he had caught and how I had ‘fluffed my first opportunity’ (read ‘Shot my load‘ from the Alabamian) like a novice buck five minutes into a Texan whorehouse.
Meanwhile the fish waved at us again from the reef, and then again.
Having traveled a huge distance in time (nine months of serious research and preparation) and thousands of miles to be here, I realised I was better than this. The time and place was now the anticipation was over. This was better, this was one of those moments few and far between that may never happen again, they had happened before of course and I had made it then, to other fish equally as prized. And I picked the fly from my shirt and held it and made a few quick short stop and starts to get a loop on the water and some tension and loaded it and picked it up and dropped the fly and then cast the fly backwards in a super cool light tight blue loop of line and turned it over and put it on his nose at 75 feet.
Noel shouted ‘Strip strip strip’ all the previous shit forgotten when he voiced ‘Jesus datza grate kast’ which lulled me into both a false sense of fly-fishing superiority and confidence.
The fish did and didn’t do three things – he didn’t spook and he didn’t eat and then he disappeared.
All the last few years of normal life and its difficulties, the last few days of the heightened and the continued building anticipation, the concerns I had for the next week of fishing so far from home were forgotten and I remained at the bow watching the waves break in a crooked white line for miles over and across the incredible blue green reef and thought that this is what mattered now, this is where I am and I considered what I needed to do. I made sure the head was out, the line was water loaded, I held the leader a few inches from the fly. Ready.
I saw the tail and I cast backwards again and the fly went right on him and I stripped and I stopped and I cast again and made a mess of a few and Noel said ‘dat man, woz a biggg fish’ and he couldn’t believe that after six good presentations and as many poor ones that the fish wouldn’t eat or spook and then I saw a Barracuda to the left and a Trigger to the right and they all wanted the fly and none of them could get there quick enough and then they were all gone, in a blink, into the waves…….including the first Permit I had ever cast to.
I came back to the middle of the baot and sat beside Everett and he said I had done well, and I suddenly remembered taking his advice as he shouted at me in the midst of it all from behind, reminding me to
keep my fuckin’ rod tip dowwnnnn, keep it dowwnnn fur Chhrrrisssakkessss
We opened three bottles of ice cold Belikin after that and we clinked them and I felt the slickness of the cool green glass and once more looked at the endless miles of fly fishing opportunities – it was 10:20 am, Sunday, day one and from far away I heard Noel say ‘tailin fish’ and Everett gets up and hands me his beer, sighs like he’s bored, he shallow yawns, nervous and excited, muttering something about too many cameras. He stumbles a bit to the platform his anticipation over………
I do not think we can hope for any better things now. We shall stick it out to the end, but we are getting weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far. It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more.
R. SCOTT.
For God’s sake look after our people.
Dreaded discovery
Eight months later, in November 1912, a search party found three frozen bodies in a tent half-buried by snow. Bowers and Wilson were zipped into their sleeping bags, in the attitude of sleep. Scott apparently died after his companions did. His sleeping bag and his coat were thrown open, his diaries stuffed beneath his shoulder. His arm was stretched across the body of his friend Wilson.
The searchers covered the tent with snow, marked it with a cross made from skis, and left the dead men where they lay.
Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone. It’s not warm when she’s away. Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone and she’s always gone too long anytime she goes away.
And I know, I know, I know…………
Fred sang all day. He was the happiest and the funniest guide I fished with all week. Fred loved barracuda fishing and here we were at location B, a barracuda shopping mall where they cued up to eat Bruce’s special fly. At a barracuda fly fishing primer Bruce Chard discussed his theory that the fish hit the fly half way down the body rather than at the head, he reckoned long flies produced less fish due to ‘tail biting’. ‘Cuda cut their prey in half, then turned and came back to ‘mop up.’ All these points were discussed at length but when I hooked and fought my first ‘cuda on the fly these finer items of the take were not at the forefront of my mind believe me!
It was a long run to location B, just a little over an hour for a distance of some fifty miles. The further south we ran the greater the sense of sheer isolation. There was no Monday or Tuesday here, no production meetings, no shirt and ties, no schedules or timetables, and the more I considered the vast expanses of the ever changing flats, watching them light up and disappear only to re-appear again in vastly different colours the more I realised how far I had moved away from the ‘normal world’. I was completely unplugged. We were way south of Andros Island. The next stop was Cuba……..
Who has known the ocean? Neither you nor I, with our earth-bound senses, know the foam and surge of the tide that beats over the crab hiding under the seaweed of his tide-pool home; or the lilt of the long, slow swells of mid-ocean, where shoals of wandering fish prey and are preyed upon, and the dolphin breaks the waves to breathe the upper atmosphere. Nor can we know the vicissitudes of life on the ocean floor, where sunlight, filtering through a hundred feet of water, makes but a fleeting, bluish twilight, in which dwell sponge and mollusk and starfish and coral, where swarms of diminutive fish twinkle through the dusk like a silver rain of meteors, and eels lie in wait among the rocks. Even less is it given to man to descend those six incomprehensible miles into the recesses of the abyss, where reign utter silence and unvarying cold and eternal night.
To sense this world of waters known to the creatures of the sea we must shed our human perceptions of length and breadth and time and place, and enter vicariously into a universe of all-pervading water.
Rachel Carson
The sense of total human absence is not how wilderness advocates define a wild place. Rather, the concept of a wilderness is related to the degree of human influence. Because humans have lived in all landscapes except Antarctica does not mean that human influence is uniformly distributed. Wilderness should be viewed as those places largely influenced by natural forces, rather than dominated by human manipulation and presence. Downtown Los Angeles is without a doubt a human-influenced landscape, but a place like Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is certainly not significantly manipulated or controlled by humans. Though, certainly, low numbers of humans have hunted, camped and otherwise occupied small portions of the refuge for centuries, the degree of human presence and modification is small. The Arctic Refuge lands are, most wilderness advocates would argue, self-willed.
By such a definition, there are many parts of the world that are to one degree or another largely self-willed.
Citation
Wuerthner G (2018)
Anthropocene boosters and the attack on wilderness conservation.
The Ecological Citizen 1: 161–6.
THIRTYARDS 
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