The run out to the Marquesas takes long enough that you have time to get your hopes up. You leave Key West in the dark, cross a stretch of open water that is never quite as calm as promised, and arrive at a ring of low green islands sitting in the middle of nowhere like somebody dropped a wreath on the ocean. The water goes from navy to jade to a pale clear green you can read a license plate through. Then the engine shuts off, the guide climbs up on the platform, and the day gets very quiet and very serious.
A permit is a silver dinner plate with a black sickle tail and the temperament of a bank examiner. It comes onto the flat to eat crabs, which means it comes with its nose down and that tail sticking up out of the water waving at you, and the sight of it does something to your hands that thirty years of fishing does not prepare you for. Bonefish forgive a bad cast. Tarpon will occasionally eat out of spite. A permit inspects. It swims over, turns broadside, looks at your crab fly from a distance of about four inches, and then makes a decision that has nothing to do with anything you did.
Our guide had been poling those flats since he was nineteen and had the calm of a man who has made peace with rejection. He counted the shots out loud, not the fish. Eleven shots by noon. Four good ones. Two where the fly landed exactly where he asked, at the range he asked, with the tide doing what it was supposed to do, and both times the fish drifted over, considered it with real interest, and then went off to be somewhere else. He never once raised his voice. He just said, that was a good cast, and started looking for the next one.
Around three the wind laid down and the light went flat, which is the worst news on a flat because now you cannot see anything and neither can he. So you drift, and you eat a sandwich, and somebody tells the story about the fish they hooked at Content Keys in 2011 that has grown four pounds a year since. Then the tide turned, a cloud slid off the sun, and there were three of them coming down the edge in a line, tails up, unhurried, absolutely convinced they were the only thing on the ocean that mattered.
The lead fish ate. There is a moment where the tail tips down and the line comes tight and the whole flat seems to tilt, and then eighty yards of backing leaves the reel in a hurry and you are just holding on and apologizing to nobody. Twenty-two pounds, released in about a foot of water, no photograph worth the delay. On the ride home the guide finally admitted that he had been keeping a running count of refusals for the season and that we were not close to the record. We asked what the record was. He said we did not want to know, and he was correct.