“BONES DON ea’ now, letta’ mebe,” Graveyard Burrows says.

What he means is:  “Bonefish in the Abacos can be very picky; sometimes they’ll take a fly, other times they can’t be tempted.  Maybe we’ll get a shot at this school later in the day.”

Or something like it.  Graveyard Burrows is our guide and he is no talker.  I don’t get it exact because I’m busy Fed Ex-ing a cast to the fannies 100 bonefish that vanish into the crystal waters of the eastern edge of The Marls in the Abacos, Bahamas.

Graveyard Burrows is a Scrooge with words; he hoards them, dispenses them in muttered bursts, staccato offerings.  This is a bloom of information from an otherwise taciturn 63-year-old Bahamian. 

 “Der be mo’,” Graveyard grunts.  We take this to mean that we will have plenty of opportunities to test our casting mettle and our fish fighting skills. 

He’s right, of course.  We have lots of shots and we relearn to see these fish.  Seeing bones is no easy task.  A bonefish’s God-gift is his camouflage, a silvered body reflective and deceptive as any sideshow mirror, designed to shroud him in local color.

Hide in plain sight.  That’s the plan.

A bonefish uses his patrimony well.  He knows that bottom irregularities and sea grasses, hidden by a sparkly tat of wind ripples, will fool a bonefisher every time.  Couple that with a glaring sea, breathless skies, and buck fever, and a bonefish’s odds go up.

Way up.

What a bonefish can’t hide is his movement . . . and his shadow, movements askew.   By the end of the first day our tallies are moderate.  Fishing partner Lee Hinrichs and I catch six bones each, but we get the picture, we understand the plan.

Day Two

Maybe I had too many local brews last night.  Or maybe nine hours in yesterday’s sun caused a foot fault in my synaptic leaps.  Either way, the irony of fishing for ‘bones’ with a man named Graveyard doesn’t hit me until we’re well into the 35-minute run from Rickmon’s Bonefish Lodge to Moore’s Island.  It’s the second day and the Caribbean is the green color of an old six-cent coke bottle.  

The motor and the gentle jostling lull me to sleep.

I’m braced on the bow of Graveyard’s 20-foot “panga,” a spare and sparse craft.  Missing are the button-down accouterments of modern flats boat; no comfort seats, no poling platform, no custom coolers, electronics, or graphite pole.

This is a working boat that pretty much reflects its owner.  No $90 fishing shirt here.  No up-downer hat.  A ratty black ball cap shields Graveyard’s eyes.  His concessions to modern-day fly fishing are polarized glasses and Simms wading boots, which he tosses in the back with the oil cans and spare gas.

Graveyard poles his panga from the stern gunwale.  Bonefish are easier to see if he’s elevated.  And in skinny water. This boat gets shallow. 

“How shallow can it get?” I ask.

“We can go ‘til da boot stop,” Graveyard says.  His teeth show.  He smiles.  His answer is glaring, obvious.  I feel stupid.  He’s gotten me and he likes it.

I like it, too.

Approaching Moore’s Island, the bottom changes to a patchwork of olives, tans, and creams.  Grass interspersed with sand blended with something that looks like coconut shavings.  The fish will be tough to see here.

“No schoolies on dis flat.  See fish hea’, dey bigga’,”  Graveyard says of Moore’s Island.  Ahead in the grass are the first of hundreds of big starfish, 14 inches point to point.  They sport the hey-look-at-me colors of a whore--candy-apple reds, oranges, russets. 

Breeze ripples the water.  We wait.  More starfish.  It’s tough finding fish over the grass.

But Graveyard has a plan and he’s poling us to it.

Ahead, the grass ends abruptly and the color shifts from greens and olives to a sandy white. The transition makes a seam, an edge.  Fish like edges. The water gets thinner, clearer.  The sand accumulates and forms a flat.

This flat takes its color from the pastels of conch shells, a Dreamsicle orange sand the Bahamians call red.  It melts away to a creamy/buttery sand, to sandy white, then back to Dreamsicle.  Ahead against the bottom we see the broken, ashen silhouettes of sharks patrolling the flats.

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