The flats behind Islamorada are not what people picture when they hear Florida Keys fishing. There is no rail full of rods, no chum slick, no bridge. There is a skiff drifting across water so shallow that you can read the bottom through it, a guide standing on a platform over the outboard with an eighteen-foot pole, and a great deal of silence. The bottom out there is hard white marl and turtle grass, the sky does most of the decorating, and the whole basin looks so empty on the first morning that a newcomer will privately begin to suspect they have been driven out onto a parking lot.
Bonefish get called the gray ghost, which sounds like marketing until you spend an hour looking for one. They are mirrored on the sides, so a bonefish standing on white marl is white and a bonefish over grass is green, and the only part of it your eye can actually catch is the shadow it drags along underneath. Guides down there do not see fish. They see wrong. Something in the pattern of the bottom fails to look like the rest of the bottom, and forty seconds later that is a school of six moving with the tide, and you are still standing on the bow looking at a very nice piece of empty water.
Ours poled us out of a basin near Lower Matecumbe and has been running that stretch since he was old enough to reach the tiller. He gives directions like a clock face and gives them once. "Eleven o’clock, sixty feet, three fish, moving left." The correct response is to cast at eleven o’clock and sixty feet whether or not you have seen anything at all, which requires a kind of faith that most of us had to be talked into. The first four times, we asked where. Each time he said, "Gone," in the tone of a man who has said it several thousand times and has made peace with it.
Then the light turned over, the way it does about an hour after sunrise, and the flat simply switched on. There they were, and there they had presumably been the whole time, three shapes with their noses down and their tails tipping up as they rooted crabs out of the marl. The cast landed ahead of them, the shrimp fly sat on the bottom, one short strip, and the middle fish moved on it without any drama whatsoever. Then came the part nobody exaggerates. A five pound bonefish leaves a flat like a struck match, a hundred yards in about eleven seconds, and the loose fly line on the deck disappears through the guides fast enough to take a wristwatch with it.
We got him alongside a few minutes later, held him in the current until he pulled away, and watched him vanish before he had traveled ten feet, which is the whole point of the animal. Our guide poled on without comment. The rest of the morning we saw fish before he called them exactly twice, and both times we were wrong, and both times he let us cast anyway. Nobody catches a bonefish on their eyes for a long while. You rent somebody else’s until yours arrive.