ANTIGUA, WEST INDIES — Saturday in lateafternoon as I unpacked my suitcase and a duffle full of fishing reels andflies and leaders the tide was full and the cove below was filled completelywith aquamarine-colored water.
The incoming tide had immersed coral reefs that nonethelessremained visible through the clear water and blanketed the thin crescent ofsand that in low tide is a beach.
It's a two-hop flight to Antigua; the TwinCities to Atlanta and Atlanta to Antigua. The first plane leaves just after 5in the morning and when you step onto the airport tarmac on Antigua heat risesup to meet up you and you look at your watch and the time is about 3 p.m.
A friend whom I actually have never met face-to-face has ahome on Antigua and catches some fish here with a fly rod in shallow water andalso while trolling farther out for yellow fin tuna and mahi-mahi.
"I'm not using the place now, go down andfish,'' my friend said. He lives in southern California and in 1987 I sold hima dog and subsequently have sold him four or so more. Our relationship isformed around those dogs and around long-distance reports concerning quailshooting in Baha California, duck hunting in the Central Valley of California,and about dogs running on beaches behaving as dogs do.
"Bring Jan,'' my friend said.
Jan is my wife.
The flats surrounding Antigua aren't asextensive as those along the archipelago of islands that drifts southward fromGrand Bahama. On shallow sand outliers surrounding the Bahamas the rising tidebrings with it bonefish and permit, among other fish, also nurse sharks andoccasionally bull sharks. Bonefish and permit arrive with the tides and dine onvarious crustaceans. You can fish them from a flats skiff, standing on thefront deck, fly rod in hand, line coiled around your feet. Or you can wade forthem, watching for the dorsal fins of bonefish. When you spot these you make tight-loopedcasts, keeping your profile low so as not to spook the fish as they rout in thesand looking for dinner.
"Antigua isn't a fishery like the Bahamas,'' myfriend said. "You have flats around Antigua, but they are not as extensive asin the Bahamas. The offshore marlin fishing is good. Also you can fish themangroves from a boat and find bonefish and permit.''
Over quite a few years I have formed a resoluteprejudice in favor of saltwater fishing, saltwater fly fishing in particular.Not that it replaces freshwater angling in my mental storehouse of fishing fantasies. Rather, the salt air and the flowering trees and swaying palms andthe rising and falling tides along with sea life that is mysterious, as theBible suggests, beyond all understanding, forms an attraction that infuses,literally, the blood.
I was 21 years old and camped alone on the eastcoast of Mexico on a sandy peninsula that divided the Caribbean from amile-long inlet when I first became aware of the pleasures of saltwater.
I was en route to South America without cleardestination, a curious fact then and even more so now. The military draft wasrun by lottery and I had a low number, 13, deferred by college but not for muchlonger. I envisioned in the not too distant future a job for me in the infantry,humping rice paddies. As a final fling I thought I would see part of the worldunknown to me, Latin America, from Mexico south to Panama, across then on afreighter to Ecuador and from there points farther south still.
But first there was my campsite on the peninsulain Mexico, where I ate mostly fruit and pasta and grilled fish that I boughtfor next to nothing at sundown in a barebones harbor within walking distance.
One day a boy came and set crab pots, a dozen orso, in the cove and returned the next day to dive for the crabs themselves. Theboy spoke no English. He saw my interest however in the crab pots and the nextday I swam out with him towing an inner tube and within it a tin pot and wedove for the crabs and placed them in the pot, one by one.
Many years later through a St. Paul friend, NorbBerg, I met Dick Hanousek, also of St. Paul, whose life really was assembledaround flies and fly fishing, saltwater exclusively in winter months. We becamefast friends and together we fished Costa Rica, also Georgetown, in theBahamas, and various places in the Florida Keys, offshore, particularly, in andaround the Marquises Islands.
Now time has passed and my wife and I have twoboys of our own and I fish with them mostly. They are 16 and 13. "That's thebass opener,'' the oldest boy said when I broke the news about traveling toAntigua with their mother and not them.
So Saturday night as Caribbean breezes envelopedAntigua and swept coolly over our home-away-from-home, my cell phone rang.
It was the oldest boy, Trevor, reporting that heand his brother, Cole, and a buddy, Max, accompanied Max's dad, Dave, for a dayof muskie fishing on the St. Croix.
Saturday was the first day also of muskiefishing there and the report was that no fish were caught.
"You should have been here, Dad,'' the oldestboy said. "We would have fished for bass. It was the bass opener.''
But I was on Antigua, and on Sunday night Itelephoned a man named Louie.
Louie drives my friend's boat.
On Monday, he would steer the two of us to flatsor mangroves or the deeper water offshore.
Together we would fish.
In saltwater.
Editor's note: Read Dennis Anderson's secondinstallment from Antigua where he is fishing this week, to be posted Mondaynight.
