Tracy&James | Thursday, 20 April 2017
A quick update from our trip. The shark fishing on the Bahamian flats can be frustrating. We’ve both cast to sharks over this last week and experienced some interesting fishy behaviour. A couple of days ago, James cast at a 70-80lb shark whilst wading a flat; it looked like a perfect cast to intercept the shark as it moved across the undulating flat with the fly sinking to the right depth. However once the line landed the shark simply did a 180 turn and slowly swam away, though it didn’t spook. Had it seen the flash of the rod, or sensed the line landing on the water? We have no idea. On another day, a 100lb+ shark came to look at the fly and then spooked and quickly swam away. I had a 30lb one follow my fly to the shore and not take it and then swim away. We did see a huge shark, perhaps 150lb, on a flat but it was always out of casting range. We’ll keep trying and hope that we find some that are in feeding mode, are in casting range and that want to ‘eat’ our flies.
We have however caught lots of other fish such as cudas, jacks and snappers – with a mutton snapper of edible size that we ate that evening with some cous cous. We’ve also caught some quality bonefish, some whilst I was sunbathing and taking a leisurely walk along a nice beach (which was also a flat) – with a fly rod obviously. I saw a single bone feeding in the shallows behind a small shark. I cast once, carefully behind the shark as I didn’t want to spook it as it might spook the bone, waited for the bone to swim along and retrieved. The bone confidently went for the fly, I struck and it ran and ran, taking me down to the backing three times – a beautiful 5lber. Currently it’s my best fish of the trip. James also caught a good sized bone, of around 8lb, from a different flat that he ended up playing for a good 20 minutes. As he was releasing the bone, a large shark came to investigate and he had to scare it away – annoyingly we’d put the shark rods on the beach so we could take photos of the big bone otherwise I would have just cast at the shark and left James dealing with his bone!
The weather has been making things difficult as we’ve had two heavy rain storms that cool down the flats making the fish go elsewhere and then create clouds later in the day, making visibility poor. We’ve also had some strong winds creating lots of waves, also making visibility poor… hopefully we’ll have some better weather for the rest of the trip… and catch lots more fish, especially some big sharks.
Tracy