Bonefish Barehanded Book Reviews
Latest Reviews
Add a review
Bonefish Barehanded!
Your review
* Review is required
Name
* Name is required
Email
* Email is required
* Please confirm that you are not a robot
| 5 star | 100% | |
| 4 star | 0% | |
| 3 star | 0% | |
| 2 star | 0% | |
| 1 star | 0% |
1-3 of 3 reviews
Fly fishing for bonefish has always been a thing, an angling practice with an addictive vibe all its own. That vibe hums within a distinct triangle. At one point of the triangle are the ghostly bones, far less substantial than the wariest trout, more implacable than salmon perhaps, less knowable in their way than tarpon. There and not there, feeding or not feeding. At another point is the guide, high priest of patience and sudden action, full of watery wisdom, tasked with figuring it all out. The guide knows that wind, current and tides, along with the finicky neurology of bonefish, will shape what happens and what doesn’t. At the third point of the triangle, there is the sport, who may or may not be a fisherman, with his gear and ego, sunglasses and sunscreen, aspirations and insecurities. The sport may or may not know how to listen to the guide.
That gets us to Steve Farrelly’s Bonefish Barehanded: Conversations with a Guide (Wild River Press, hardbound, 127 pages, $39.95), an homage to a legendary bonefish guide and a journey into the working consciousness of a master angler and quite a way into the working consciousness of bonefish. The guide in question is Stuart Cleare, of Harbour Island, Bahamas, “a man whose father and father-in-law set the standard for the trade in the vicinity.” “Bonefish Stuart” is the son of “Bonefish Joe,” who features largely in Stanley Babson’s 1965 Bonefishing, an early account of the contemporary interest in fly fishing for bones.
The heart of this unique book is a revealing “dialogue of angler and guide” – a conversation between inexperience and experience, neophyte and expert, outsider and insider. Good bonefish guides are not just colorful characters. The best of them are kin to wary bonefish, their habits and habitat, wired to the ways of their feeding and skittishness. Farrelly knows all this well and in short, well-rendered chapters contrasts his knowledge and awareness of bonefish with Stuart Cleare’s gentle but firm expertise. The guide’s voice is at times a recitation of haunting wisdom: “Searching for the fish, they leave signs when they have just left an area. Whenever I spot a set of fish, I can always tell if a fish is going to bite or if he’s not in the mood for eating. I look at the color of the sand where he’s been. There are certain parts of sand where the color of the sand is not the same. If he has been feeding, poking his nose in the sand, the sand turns bluish. That’s how I know if they are feeding.” In case you wanted to know how the noses of bonefish change the color of sand.
Farrelly has subtitled Cleare’s deepest thoughts as if they were poems: “You Need the Light,” “Where the Tide is Going,” “We Are Going for a Ride,” “You Can Go Where the Fish Can Go,” “My Last Secret of the Day.” And there are more prosaic, practical pronouncements: “Take It Easy with Knots,” “ Learn to Load Your Rod,” “ How to Lose a Fish,” “ Another Way to Lose a Fish,” “ Whenever You Step Into My Boat.” From this luminous interchange between the author and his guide, you will simultaneously get a nuanced feel for bonefishing as a nearly religious rite and a practical sense of how you get to the magic and catch a fish.
The book is also an account of Cleare’s life, family, faith. There are photographs and artwork that illustrate how the legendary seriousness of bonefishing blends with the relaxed atmosphere that surrounds it, the inviting culture of the Bahamas and the pleasant frisson of accommodating oneself to the rhythms of an environment that is both beautiful and slyly unforgiving, like a bonefish.
This book sets the reader ankle-deep in the vivid saltwater flats, where lessons that transcend bonefishing how-to can be gleaned and where the angler can, upon occasion, hook a fish that pulls him out of himself.
Steve Farrelly’s Bonefish Barehanded! is a love letter to both the “how” and the “why” of the sport of bonefishing. His decision to take on the legendary bonefish guide, Stuart Cleare, as a conversation partner in the book is as wise as the advice Cleare offers within it.