Sportfish

Yesterday was the beginning of a great saltwater flyfishing adventure for most of the team. Today the plan came together and everybody enjoyed a fantastic day’s sport. Together we landed around sixty bonefish - not bad for a team that generally had never tied a bonefish fly on before yesterday. There were three star performers today. John with a cracking 10lbs bone stalked on a flat, Phil, who not content with eleven bones caught during the day went out with me for and a couple of hours on the beach in front of the posada and added another five bones between 4 & 6lbs, all on the deadly gummy minnow.

Probably the most exciting fish of the day was a 60lbs king mackerel landed by Andy. After a marathon struggle on a light spinning rod the monster was eventually landed, trolling a rapala plug. His boat partner Ricky had to be content with a nice blue runner, also on a diving rapala. Jim had great sport with barracuda including a fish that was attacked by another barracuda on the way in. The attacker was much larger and managed to bite Jim’s fish in half.

Such a great day’s fishing certainly took its toll on the team - a relaxing visit to a beach bar saw several of the guys fall asleep on the comfortable bean bags on the beach in front of the bar. So a really super day with everybody in really high spirits. The weather was also much better - which we hope is a sign of things to come.

Seeing the many islands of Los Roques from the air is always a great thrill. This will be my third visit and by now I feel totally at home as soon as the plane touches down. This year we have a great bunch of rods in the team, five of whom are yet to cast their first flies in saltwater. Three have some saltwater experience under their belts, two at Los Roques.

We are met at the airstrip by Chris Yrazabal, the owner of Sightcast. Chris runs a great operation here, you know you’re in safe hands as soon as you meet him. Nothing is too much trouble and he will bend over backwards to make sure everybody has a great time. We have selected to switch around guides and fishing partners each day as each guide has his own area of expertise and ’secret’ fishing spots. I will also swap around and spend a day with each pair of anglers doing everything I can to help.

After a speedy breakfast we met the guides and soon the central area of the posada was a mass of rods, reels, flies and lures. The guides helped everybody set up and very soon we were ready to go. I headed off with David and Ricky with our guide Jesus in search of a ‘mud’. This is an area of cloudy water churned up by hundeds of feeding bonefish, easy to fish if you are new to saltwater fishing and great for getting confidence to strip strike, hook fish and play them to the boat. Within a few casts both David and Ricky were playing their first ever bones and before long a good score had been chalked up.

From there we took off to some pancake flats for a reality check. Fishing here is much tougher and any little mistake is punished with bonefish leaving the flat at high speed.

Back at the posada it was great to hear that everybody had caught some fish. This was great news considering how the weather had been - overcast days are much harder for flats fishing as seeing the fish is so much harder. It just goes to show the productivity of this amazing fishery that we could all catch fish, even when the weather is not being very kind.