BONEFISH 



is beyond belief. I could not cast where I wanted 

 to; I tried again and again. When I did get my 

 bait off at a reasonable distance, I could feel crabs 

 nibbling at it. These pests robbed us of many a 

 good bait. One of them cut my line right in two. 

 They seemed to be very plentiful, and that must 

 be why the bonefish were plentiful, too. R. C. kept 

 losing bait after bait, which he claimed was the work 

 of crabs, but I rather believed it to be the work of 

 bonefish. It was too windy for us to tell anything 

 about the pressure of the line. It had to be quite 

 a strong tug to be felt at all. Presently I felt one, 

 and instead of striking at once I waited to see what 

 would happen. After a while I reeled in to find my 

 bait gone. Then I was consoled by the proof that 

 a bonefish had taken the bait off for me. Another 

 time three bonefish came along for my bait and stuck 

 their tails up out of the water, and were evidently 

 nosing around it, but I felt absolutely nothing on 

 the fine. When I reeled in the bait was gone. 



We kept up this sort of thing for two hours. I 

 knew that we were doing it wrong. R. C. said bad 

 conditions, but I claimed that these were only partly 

 responsible for our failure. I knew that we moved 

 about too much, that we did not cast far enough 

 and wait long enough, and that by all means we 

 should not have cracked bait on the bottom of the 

 boat, and particularly we did not know when we 

 had a bite! But it is one thing to be sure of a fact 

 and another to be able to practise it. At last we 

 gave up in despair, and upon paddling back toward 

 the launch we saw a school of bonefish with their tails 

 in the air. We followed them around for a while, 



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