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Most of the settings for the patrician art of fishing the dry fly are superb. Standing in running water over mossy slippery rocks in a creek bed in subdued light under overhanging tree branches and brush in a flurry of stinging gnats on your hands and mosquitoes singing in both ears as you strain to identify the ambient flying insect fauna that has brought you here in the first place is a mystical experience akin to solving a Zen koan.
I am now a graduate of an advanced higher education institute of this art form in the holy of holies itself--the Orvis School in Manchester Vermont--also home of the American Museum of Fly Fishing. I am seen here in stalking the native trout of the Battenkill freestone stream, as a part of my residency in this post-graduate experience. But my first post-graduate assignment in the application of this art form in "double hauling" into the tradewinds crossing Sir Francis Drake Channel was in "stalking the flats for the tailing bones."
Bonefish are inedible creatures who are obligate bottomfeeders, not likely to qualify them for advanced status in the Isaac Walton world of high flyers. But they have the habit of skulking along in clear shoal tidal flats, trying to crush crustaceans in their bony plated mouth, and as they do so, they "tail" along the surface while their mouths roil up the sand beneath. While stalking with polarized glasses, more like hunting than fishing, the angler attempts to "fish the fish, and not just fish the waters." Furthermore, they are spooky of the intrusion of wading companions, since they have a paranoid fear based in solid reality, that they are exposed in a vulnerable position in water that is more shallow than they are long amid stalking herons, soaring ospreys and Orvis-equipped fly fisherpersons.
Now, if stalking the tailing bones in the shoals of Tortola along the channel separating Beef Island from the British Virgin Island capital is not a sufficient stretch of the finesse of this method, here comes the next set of extremes within six months of the bonefishing. I will be attempting to catch "tigerfish" in the Zambesi River in Zimbabwe, and then Arctic Grayling, which will constitute breakfast grilled in the Brooks Range, above the Arctic Circle--all three exercises being acid tests of the new diplomate of the Orvis advanced fly fishing school! Stay tuned to find out if I succeed according to the Blalock central teaching, or according to the somewhat more satisfying breakfast menu in the Dall Mountain Sheep country of the Brooks Range on the North Slope of Alaska!
