Did He Take the Fly?

Many fish hit a fly hard, or at least grab it with a solid pull, but the take of a bonefish can be subtle. Very often, you don't feel the take at all. Your only indication of the strike is the fish's body language.

If a bonefish comes from the side and takes the fly hard, you will probably feel him. No problem here. You are more likely to feel a strike when you are stripping fast, or relatively fast, as you would with a baitfish pattern such as a Clouser Minnow or Bonefish Special. Bonefish usually take crustacean patterns very softly. The fish will come up behind the fly and take it as he is moving forward and toward you. If he is moving faster than your retrieve, which often happens, he is creating slack rather than pulling, and you won't feel the take. But you have a very short time in which to strike before he decides that the fly is not food and spits it out. To compound your difficulties, in many situations the skiff is drifting toward the fish, creating even more slack. So, how do you know if the fish has the fly?

Usually, you will see the fish following the fly and then rushing toward it and stopping, or stopping and wiggling. He's trying to eat it or he's got it-that's why he stopped. You've got to strip-strike now.

You might think that if you keep stripping, sooner or later you are going to tighten up and feel him. After all, the line has only a couple of feet of slack. Most often, though, the fish spits out the fly before you feel him. You will not know that you had a strike.

I've often heard a guide tell a client, "He's got it, he's got it!" The client stood there puzzled because he didn't feel anything. And since he wasn't looking for the fish's sudden stop, he didn't see anything, either. I've witnessed situations in which a bonefish took a fly two or three times on the same retrieve and the angler never struck once. Meanwhile, the guide and I were going crazy. Fun, isn't it?

When a fish that's right on top of your fly stops all of sudden, he's probably chewing on it. Strike. But even if the fish has the fly in his mouth, you can still miss him by striking the wrong way.

How to Strike

This is one of those situations in which instinct does not help you. When you believe that a bonefish has picked up the fly, your natural reaction is to raise the rod, snapping it up and back. So that's what you do-and you get the first perfect backcast of the day. The fish, as excited as you are, rushes after the fly and comes face to face with you, a large boat, and a screaming guide with an eighteen-foot stick. Poof — he is gone.

Using the rod to strike a fish has several big drawbacks. For starters, it is too slow. Your rod tip is low to the water during the retrieve. To strike, you lift the rod up; then, when it is high enough, you start to bring the rod back until (you hope) the line comes tight and, eventually, the hook sinks in. It takes an eternity. Believe me, you will be late with the strike. And when you miss, the momentum of your long, sweeping strike yanks the fly out of the water and out of the game. You have ruined your chances with a fish that wanted the fly.

With bigger fish such as tarpon, or with any fish that has a hard mouth, striking with the rod does a poor job of setting the hook. You might feel the fish for a second, but the rod simply doesn't transmit enough force to drive the hook home.

You are much better off using the strip-strike method. This is accomplished by stripping line, much as you do when retrieving a fly, but faster and harder. It's more like a pull than a strip. It's also lightning fast. As you strip-strike, you can lift the rod a little, but only a little; nearly all the force of the strike comes from your line hand. Strip-striking is one of the essential skills for flats fishing.

The length of the strip strike varies according to the amount of slack in the line. It may be a foot or a yard. Generally, the strip is shorter if you felt the fish pick up the fly, and a bit longer if you detected the bite only by the fish's body movement or were directed to strike by your guide.

Because you are pulling straight back with the line and without using the rod, this method produces a lot of force. Without much effort at all, you will easily drive the small hook into the bonefish's mouth. When you try to set the hook with the rod, the fish has all the advantage of the 9-foot lever in your hand. With a strip strike, you're pulling directly on the hook.

The strip-strike method has another great advantage if you miss. Unlike striking and missing with the rod, which yanks the fly many yards away from the fish, strip-striking moves the fly only a foot or two. The movement even looks natural, like that of a shrimp or minnow darting for cover, and it's unlikely to spook the bonefish. You are still in the game. Quite often, the bonefish will rush the fly and grab it again. If the fish doesn't charge immediately, resume the retrieve.

Sometimes a bonefish loses interest in the fly-or simply loses sight of it-after you strip-strike and miss. He's not spooked; indeed, he's still looking for food. Let him swim a few feet, maybe a few yards, and then quietly slide the line off the water to make another cast. This presentation should be easy. You have practically all the line you need outside the tip of the rod, and the bonefish is roughly the same distance from you. Since you don't have to shoot a lot of line, you should have no trouble making a very accurate second presentation.

Planting the hook in the fish's mouth does not complete the strike. Once you have made the strip-strike and felt a solid hookup, you need some cushion so that you don't break the tippet. After all, at the instant of the strike, you have a straight, tight line between you and the fish. Lift the rod to about a 45-degree angle as soon as you set the hook. The rod will bend a little, and that bend provides the cushion you need when the fish figures out that something is terribly wrong with the shrimp he just ate.

A good angler strip-strikes, sets the hook, and lifts the rod in a smooth, continuous movement. The entire event takes part of a second. It's the only way to strike a saltwater fish.

Clearing Line

Congratulations. The fish found the retrieve satisfactory, you executed a perfect strip-strike and instantly raised the rod to 45 degrees, and now you have a hooked bonefish at the end of your tippet. A hooked bone may or may not react immediately to the pressure of the hook; sometimes a fish responds with a few seconds of surprise and confusion. Within no more than a few seconds, however, that fish will begin a very fast run away from the flat and toward the deepest water he can find.

Meanwhile, you have a lot of loose fly line at your feet. If the fish followed the fly for a good distance before making up his mind, you might have a great deal of loose line on the deck. When the fish starts his run-and even a very confused bonefish will have started by the time your heart has beat twice-all that loose line has to go through the rod guides without tangling, without catching on one of your feet, without wrapping about the rod's fighting butt. Getting the loose fly line off the deck, through the guides, and out of the tip-top without a mishap is called clearing the line.

To clear the fly line at your feet as the bonefish takes off at high speed, you must again do something that is not intuitive: you must take your eyes off the fish and look at your feet. I know it's hard to do. You want to look at the bonefish you just hooked, but it is essential that you don't.

Separate your hands. Your rod hand should keep the fighting butt against your wrist so that the line cannot loop around the butt, which is a very common way to break off a running bonefish. Don't keep the angle of the rod too high while clearing line. Too high an angle tends to make the rod throb back and forth. This movement makes it harder to clear line smoothly and creates slack that allows the fish to slip the hook. Hold the rod at a lower angle and keep it steady as you feed line out.

Your line hand should be lower than your rod hand. Apply almost no pressure as the line flies out through the guides — maintain just enough tension so that the line isn't running loose. This slight pressure gives you control. But don't hold the line too tightly. If you do, two things will happen, neither of them good. A tightly held fly line can burn your hand, and it will come through your hand in a series of sharp, erratic jerks, bouncing the rod, creating slack, and making the loose line still in the boat jump all over the place until it tangles on something.

I have heard of anglers who make an 'O' with the thumb and index finger and let the fly line run freely through that hole. In my experience, a completely loose line will create more tangles than a lightly held line during the clearing process.

Once the fish has taken all but a yard or two of the loose line, you might think that you can relax and let go of the last little bit. You figure a few feet of fly line can't get caught on anything-it's too short. Big mistake. If you let go of the last portion of fast-clearing fly line, chances are good that that little loop of line will wrap around the first stripping guide. When that happens, the least disastrous outcome is a broken tippet. Many fish are lost this way. The biggest permit that I have ever hooked, a fish that probably weighed over 40 pounds, was lost to this mistake. It happened a long time ago, but I still remember that fish and the sick feeling I had as the last bit of loose fly line made a neat half-hitch around the stripping guide.

Keep control of the fly line as the fish begins his run. Maintain light pressure on it, watch the line at your feet, and as the last of the loose fly line comes off the deck, follow it with your hand toward the stripping guide and watch it disappear. You are not through clearing line until the reel starts to sing.

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