Anderson: Casting an eye south, to Belize, in winter

AMBERGRIS CAYE, BELIZE — Wednesday morning of this past week broke a long way from the Stillwater Dome, but the routine was the same. Assembling an 8-weight fly rod, I looped line through its guides while feeling the outfit’s familiar heft in my right hand. A lot of things change over time, but as comforting as an inanimate object can be, this one stayed constant.

Over many years on winter mornings, a bunch of us gathered in Stillwater to test fly lines and rods while casting as far as we could as accurately as we could. This happened long before dawn while marathoners and other runners, also seeking protection from the elements, circled the Dome’s inside perimeter, hoping not to be ensnared by our unfurling lines. The leader of our bunch was Bob Nasby of St. Paul, whose pickup truck during these exercises gathered snow outside while bearing a large rear window sticker that said, “Shut up and cast.”

I had come to Belize to try again to catch a permit on a fly. This isn’t a Holy Grail type of quest, but it has stuck in my craw for a long time. The closest I came to boating one of these flat, silvery saltwater fish with its deeply forked tail occurred some years ago while fishing off the Marquesas Islands 20 miles west of Key West. Bud Grant and I, along with a friend of ours, Tony Andersen, were staying for three days on a mother ship in the Marquesas that towed three flats skiffs for fishing. Bud was with me in one of the skiffs on our last day when I missed casts at two permits, one maybe 10 pounds, the other half again as big. One of the fish spooked when I laid my fly line over its back and the other spat out my fly after initially inhaling it.

Now, these many years later in Belize at seven Wednesday morning, white-winged doves cooed, the temperature neared 80 degrees and the low sun glistened off the Caribbean’s amalgam of azures, cobalts and sapphires.

But the wind was blowing a ton, gusting to 30 mph, an unlucky break but not atypical for this time of year.

Sitting on a dock when I walked up, his feet in his panga, or boat, Eloy Gonzalez, my guide for the day, said if I wanted to cancel, it was OK with him.

“There’s a lot of wind,” he said. “We can maybe find some bonefish. But no permit. We can’t reach where they are in this wind.”

I thought about this for a long moment.

Then I said, “Bonefish are OK. Let’s try it.”

Some guides will take you for a ride in good weather or bad, knowing it pays the same. But Belize is a friendly place and not the type to arouse suspicions. Anyway, here on Ambergris Caye, a short flight from the mainland, the fast money is made hustling beer, peddling street tacos and loading gringo snorkelers onto boats for journeys to the 1,000-mile-long Belize Barrier Reef and its teeming aquatic life.

With rich estuaries, endless gin-clear shallow water, or “flats,” and ancillary deep-water habitats, Belize also is a fly fisherman’s mecca. Anglers from throughout the world make pilgrimages here nearly year-round to pit their predatory skills against the finely honed survival instincts of permit, bonefish and tarpon.

Though fly fishing’s origins date almost to the time of Christ, modern saltwater fly fishing is a relatively recent phenomenon, and Belize, like other Caribbean nations, has benefited from the resulting angler tourism.

Playing a critical role in this evolution was the late Maryland outdoor scribe and raconteur Lefty Kreh, whose 1965 article in Outdoor Life magazine titled, “New Way to Cast,” helped toss into history’s dust bin the stilted “10 a.m. to 2 p.m.” rod positioning for fly casting. In its place Kreh advocated more fluid, athletic involvement of the body, including an angler’s hips, so flies could be cast farther and more accurately.

It was Kreh’s name and advice, along with that of his acolytes, that Nasby and others of us who gathered in Stillwater on winter mornings bandied about as if reciting from scripture.

Not entirely apart from these thoughts, Eloy had his own concerns about casting Wednesday morning.

One was that, given the incessant winds and a client he didn’t know, he might pass the day dodging flies I zinged alongside his head. Or, worse, threatened to embed in an eye.

Still, he said, “Let’s go,” and angled his panga toward buffeting white caps reminiscent of those stirred up by Nor’easters that occasionally cascade across Mille Lacs.

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“Fish at 11 o’clock, 50 feet.”

The attraction of fishing in shallow saltwater is that everything occurs in plain sight.

This isn’t always the case because not all flats are clear all the time. But under ideal conditions, a fish is visible at a certain distance, and the angler’s challenge is to assess that distance and cast a fly either to where the fish is or, as often, where the fish will be when the fly lands.

Unfortunately, the muddy bottom of the flats Eloy and I were fishing had been stirred up by the wind and often as a result I couldn’t see the fish he saw. Also, from his perch atop a platform above his outboard, from which he propelled us across the flat with a long pole, he was better positioned to see fish than I was, standing in the bow.

Still, following his directions, I cast slightly to the left of the bow (“11 o’clock,” with the bow being “12″) and about 50 feet out, watching as my fly disappeared toward the turtle grass undulating with the outgoing tide in the shallow water. The cast wasn’t as easy as it would be indoors because the wind was crosswise, requiring me to speed up the line as much as possible while dispatching it slightly sidearm.

Seven hours had gone by, and I’d caught one bonefish and two stubby little groupers.

This cast didn’t add to the tally.

“We move,” Eloy said, and for the next 30 minutes, he guided his panga through vast mangroves before rounding the boat into the lee of a small island.

The water here was glassy and hued indigo, teal and turquoise.

Immediately we saw bonefish but nothing that would bite.

Swapping one fly for another and another still, I kept casting.

Finally, a good bonefish hooked up and quickly spooled all of my fly line into the clear water, peeling off some of the reel’s backing, too, and bowing my rod into a neat arc before I gained on the fish, boating it soon, and releasing it.

So it went Wednesday in windy Belize.