Photograph by Russ Schnitzer
Depending where you live, the odds are better than even that you are probably buried in snow right now up to your derriere or at least freezing the latter off. I feel for you—really I do—and I am almost embarrassed to say that is late December here in Mobile and it is a frigid 73 degrees and sunny. In fact, my wife just gave our dog a bath, which resulted in the dog losing ten pounds of hair. The poor dog can’t make up her mind if she wants to shed her summer coat and grow a winter coat, or vice versa. The trees seem equally confused. They are dropping their old leaves at a much slower rate than would be expected and some have commenced the process of growing new ones. Roses are blooming and the azaleas have new buds and look like they are going to explode any day. Naturally, I am still wearing shorts and polo shirts and, of course, the ubiquitous flip-flops. In short, everything (including the winter one wants to escape on holiday) is relative. As Jimmy Buffet once said, perceptions are based on attitudes and attitudes are based on changes in latitudes. Which brings me to changes in latitude.
Several weeks prior to Christmas Russ Schnitzer and I packed our bags and, thanks to our good friend Christopher Pipes, shuffled off to the Bahamas to chase bonefish for a week. Chris is the National Accounts Manager for the Deep Water Cay Club on Grand Bahamas Island and High Lonesome Ranch in Northwest Colorado. He is a great guy, a rather good fisherman, and an impeccable host. In short, he rescued me from our terrible winter down here in Mobile for a week of paradise in the Bahamas. OK, I know this might seem a little unfair to some and I agree complaining about our little semblance of winter reveals that I indeed have the thermal fortitude of a skinny snowflake, but, hey, winter is winter and the bonefish seemed eager to play.
More to the point, it was winter in the Bahamas, too. Thus, some hardiness was still required. Even in the tropics and subtropics, cold fronts roll through with the frequency and dependability of Old Faithful this time a year. Strong winds and cooler temperatures are the norm. Those mythical, travel brochure “warm and gentle breezes” apparently have to be booked separately, or rather simply imagined. Of course, that is exactly as it should be in the tropics during the winter months. The strong winds and cooler temperatures have more of an affect on the angler than the bonefish. The latter are perfectly fine with it. It’s the fishermen who might get a little frustrated pitching their flies into gales and seeing them come up rather short, much to their boat mates’ general amusement. Of course, everything that is frustrating can also be rewarding. As Spock once said, you have to become one with the wind. Clearly, this is easier said than done and sometimes, especially since it has as much to do with the grey matter between the ears as it does with the wind.
Therefore, who you go with on a trip like this makes all the difference. You want someone who enjoys a challenge and knows how to have a good time, even if not every single thing always goes his or her way. Russ Schnitzer is exactly the type of partner in crime that was called for. Russ is a wonderful photographer and writer who, for the most part, will drop whatever he is doing to chase anything that eats a fly—especially bonefish and permit. That is if Kelly, his wife, doesn’t have an alternate agenda. You can’t have enough friends like Russ.
What makes fly fishing an adventure is that fly-fishing trips rarely go as planned. More often than not you can expect at least one snag, maybe two—okay, possibly three. Of course, a little bit of adventure is a small price to pay for a week in the Bahamas chasing bonefish in the middle of December.
The fishing allocation of the trip officially started Tuesday, but if we could manage to get to the lodge early enough on Monday we might get an extra half-day of fishing in. Clearly, the race was on. Our plans seemed sound. Russ was to fly in Sunday night around eleven. I would pick him up and we would fly out the next morning at seven thirty. If everything went as planned, we would even get four or five hours sleep before leaving for the Bahamas. I had been driving for the last ten hours and Russ had driven from Wyoming to Denver then flown from Denver to Fort Lauderdale, so we both needed some sleep. Needles to say, Russ’s flight was a little late and so by the time he arrived and we made it through baggage claims, found the truck, and actually found our way out of the airport it was a little after midnight. On the way to the hotel, we spied a Village Inn and decided to stop and grab a late night breakfast. The flaw in that plan should be immediately apparent to all who have attempted the experiment before: two friends (especially fly fishermen) who haven’t seen each other for five months naturally have a lot to catch-up on. The last time I had seen Russ we were walking the beaches of Sanibel and pitching flies to snook. Maybe we spent a little too much time catching up and had a little too much coffee, so when we finally dragged our tired butts to the hotel, it was rather late. Crawling into bed almost seemed useless.
Tired, but excited, we did nonetheless manage to get to the airport on time, check in, and make it through security fairly quickly, which is not always the case when you travel with tons of camera gear, bags of fly rods, and all the other paraphernalia associated with a fishing trip. The flight to the Bahamas is a rather short fight, 45 minutes or so, and even shorter if you have a strong tail wind. We landed and managed to find our gear easily enough. We even managed to get through immigration in short order and that, my friends, is when the bottom fell out. A nice, but rather stern agent pulled Russ and me out of line and started to tear our luggage apart. I went first, but it was easy to notice that Russ was the one she had her eye on.
It took about ten seconds to search my bags; in fact, she skipped my camera bag completely then moved quickly to Russ’s rolling camera case. I don’t have enough room here to tell the whole story in detail, but, suffice to say, Russ was held for a little over two hours. It seemed, before you enter the Bahamas with expensive cameras, you are supposed to submit the proper paperwork ahead of time. It took an official representative from the tourism department to spring Russ. Needless to say, we were running late but that is not enough to truly deter the determined fly fisherman. I am proud to report we did manage to go out for a few hours later that day and scare a few bonefish.
The next several days seemed to slip past like the tides. As with all great fishing trips, it was over in the blink of an eye and each day seem to meld into one quick memory. Of course, that doesn’t always happen; some trips drag on for eternity. More often than not you find yourself hiding in some out-of-the-way tiki bar drowning your agony in rumrunners or margaritas; this trip, however, bordered on the sublime. The lodge and the fishing were outstanding. Actually, Deep Water Cay far and away exceeded our expectations. We still managed to drink ourselves silly, but it was at the tiki bar of our choosing, and from what I remember, it was always in celebration of a wonderful day on the water.
On this trip, it was the figurative bookends that made for memorable adventure stories because the journey back to the Fort Lauderdale was equally as memorable as the passage in the opposite direction had been. It involved two transitions from one Freeport airport to the other, with ground transportation and various other fun surprises and interludes. Eventually, we did, however, make it back to the homeland. Oh, but the fun did not stop there. You see, when we originally arrived at Fort Lauderdale Airport, I dropped Russ and the bags off at the appropriate airline and then looked for a place to park the truck. Evidently, depending on where you parked, the price of parking ranged from ridiculous to unbelievable (cleverly, there were no clear signs indicating relative tariffs). Clever soul that I am, I thought I would make it easy for us to find the truck and thus make a quick escape upon our return. So I parked directly across from the terminal marked “arrivals.” It seemed to be a rather smart plan and I patted myself on the back for thinking ahead. How was I supposed to know that the international terminal was on the opposite side of the airport? Needless to say when we returned and cleared customs and immigration we found ourselves to be what seemed like several miles from the truck.
Looking back I guess it’s the trial and tribulations that actually define the trip and not necessarily the fishing. If fishing trips went according to plan, without any variation, we wouldn’t have much to write about. More often than not it’s the variables that make our fishing trips interesting and unique, and strangely enough it is usually our sufferings and misadventures our friends want to hear about the most.
In short, let not the hardships or insanely designed airports deter us, let us boldly head out and face untold adventures head on. Most importantly, let us remember life is an adventure not a guided tour and let us also remember where we parked when we get back home.
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