the back-cast, he was able to perform the mechanics of the hand-lining cast with just the line, hook, and sinker.
“You work harder at what you love,” David explained to me one evening as a cumulus at the foot of the southern sky caught the falling sun like a baseball. I was trying to listen intently to his wellspring of backstory but found myself repeatedly drawn to the memory of a huge bonefish, my biggest to date, that I had hooked earlier in the day and lost, after a two-hundred-yard run, on a barnacled mangrove stem—that twenty-second connection to a ten-pounder, before the tippet gave way, the briefest of affairs, most clinical of severances.
David waited for me to return, then continued.
“I was always the last guide to leave the lodge. Some nights the Drakes would leave a fly rod on the dock and I would go on the beach and practice with it after work was done. I had their permission. I couldn’t do much with it, but they couldn’t do much, either. It was still a foreign object back then. I believe it was a cane rod, bamboo, but it could have been fiberglass as well. Whippy as a skate’s tail. Anyway. I got to thinking about our old coffee cans with fishing line wrapped around them, the way we used to hand-line—you had to use a lot of arm to get that hook and sinker going, so that their weight would carry out the line. About then I started heaving with that fly rod. Big wide-open looped casts, way more line than those other boys were using. It wasn’t pretty at first, but it was something.”
By opening up the cast’s loop, and dropping the rod almost parallel to the water, David was able to create more fulcrum, thus momentum, thus line speed, and thus conquer the element that had been besting American sports since they first arrived on the bonefish flats: the wind.
A saltwater angler’s most plaguing bane, wind flummoxes from all four directions, alternately hampering both back-cast and forward cast. Say the angler stands on the bow of a skiff in a fifteen-mile-per-hour headwind: the wind will accommodatingly sling his back-cast out at the speed of sound, but will stunt the forward cast or otherwise urge it toward unintended locales. A tailwind, on the other hand, forces the angler to initiate the back-cast with extra chutzpah so that the line’s loop unfurls; thus the forward cast comes rocketing uncontrolled past the angler, who, if he’s had a brass-eyed fly whack him in the back of the neck a time or two, knows to duck. If a wind comes across the body, both angler and guide find themselves in high dudgeon: again the back-cast snaps to perfect planed-out attention, but the forward cast resembles a willow branch in a tornado. Grunts and body English don’t help one “play the wind” but are nonetheless frequently employed. At the back of the skiff, the guide removes his hat and kneels, either in supplication or to avoid puncture.
“Most of the guests were pretty bad,” David said of the early days. “I used to wear an old baggy jacket so that when they would hit me on their back-cast, the flies would go into the jacket instead of my skin. The thing was full of holes. Do they hit you with the flies up north?”
Pleased that he had acknowledged, for the first time, our shared profession, I nodded with exuberance: Oh, do they.
“One time a guest was on the boat with his young son,” David said. “He had the hardest time spotting the fish. This can be frustrating but sometimes it helps because the client doesn’t get too riled up, he just does what he’s told: fifty feet, three o’clock. Finally the man sees a big bonefish coming toward us and he winds up, winds up, and sticks the fly right in his son’s thigh! The man’s still excited, so he’s whipping the line around, thinking he’s just tangled around himself. But the son is screaming, ‘Dad, it’s in me! It’s in me!’”
David watched the guests from the back of the skiff, unnerved by the approaching fish, and learned what inhibited his clients’ febrile casts. Mostly not enough power, going ten-to-two, ten-to-two, restricting the arm’s strength and the line’s ability to power the rod. His mechanical casting epiphany equaled distance, and casting distance earned him credibility with the guests. What followed, as bonefish became an industry, far eclipsed credibility:
“There were some great guides at Deep Water Cay,” Valdene told me, “but for decades, David Pinder was famous.”
From the lips of the man poling the Sea-Squid through a stiff northeaster, a sound squeaks forth—something he almost says but doesn’t. His bantering clients hush and turn to their guide, who weighs what he may have seen against hours of piscine vacancy, against the assurance of a timely arrival at the dock, against his better interests.
At the bow on the casting platform stands his client, British guest of his employer and potential investor at the lodge, gazing like someone who might suddenly fall prey to a narcoleptic episode.
Planting the edge of the push-pole starboard, inclining against the skiff’s momentum, the man says he might, he’s not sure, have seen a wake in the cove. Explaining that the fish’s tail will look like a mangrove leaf, he urges the Brit not to blink. The man has yet to see an actual fish but the tide is slipping out and revealing the bottom’s subtle sags and crab domes, several half-dollar-size indentations in the muck made by a feeding fish’s attempts to dislodge prey. A trail of these half-dollars leads to the inlet.
The lodge owner perks up from his seat on the dunnage box and whispers the Brit to attention. Be ready. I can tell by his tone.
The man points his push-pole over the Brit’s left shoulder. Tailing fish, he says. You see the leaf pointing sideways? A tail.
The Brit says he sees the fish, but his voice belies his uncertainty.
Coming straight over the skiff’s transom, the wind wants to sail the boat with the man’s billowed shirt for a jib away from the cay, but he pins the pole port, deep in the soft seafloor. That he holds his ground for thirty, forty seconds, without so much as bumping the pole on the skiff’s fiberglass sidewall, is a feat the lodge owner will later gush over.
From somewhere inside the oily green leaves a catbird mews. On his fourth try, the Brit lands the fly in the wheelhouse.
Whatever you do, the lodge owner intones, don’t move the rod tip on the take again or you’ll pull the fly out of the fish’s mouth. You can’t let the right hand know what the left hand is doing.
Though neither of his guests perceives any indication as to why, the man, from his slightly higher vantage, commands the Brit to set the hook.
Somehow the Brit manages to heed the voice in each ear, keeping his right wrist rigid while pulling tight a yard of line with his left. As the rod flinches and bucks with animal energy as the fish leaves the mangroves in its wake, the lodge owner curses at his guest to clear the line: Watch your shoelaces, goddammit! That’s why we go barefoot.
With the loose line spooled to the reel, the Brit puts the buzzing Hardy to his ear and declares the fish tallied.
Not on the board quite yet, the lodge owner chides. Still have to land it.
Crown law, Drake, Crown law. A solid hookup goes down in the book.
Running, the fish scribes a wide parabola on the flat, fifty yards west by southwest, then sixty yards south by southeast, stopping to breach not far from where it first felt the hook. The Brit’s line, beset with slack, lolls in the wind.
Gather the line, the man says, poling the boat away from the fish to tighten the surplus lest the fish spit the hook.
The Brit switches the rod to his left hand, so that he can reel with his dominant right, and cranks with abandon like a man vigorously scrambling an egg in a bowl, regaining connection with the fish momentarily before stopping to take a breath. During this inaction, the fish feels the
