Written by Johnathan Young
for THE FIELD May 1999

Well Jon-a-tan, how yar doin?" You need a dark chocolate voice like that after a day's bonefishing. And 23-year-old Guatemalan rum. Lots of it. In a big tumbler. Neat.

At first I blamed my breeding, that mix of Angle, Saxon, and Jute laced with a double tot of Protestantism. A classic brew for English angst and all-out twitchiness. But no. It's entirely down to fishing. A properly balanced person - any colour, any creed - can land on a Bahamian island and think Bounty Bar: white-sand beaches, sunbathing loved ones, the swish of suggestive surf. For us, the Lost Boys of angling, it's impossible.

Up at 6:30, out at seven, throwing the coffee down with one hand, struggling with the Marlboros with the other. That's us boneheads. Then a pounding along at 25 knots and a soaking before the shouting begins. (Naturally, it's very quiet shouting)

Pstttt! PSSTTT" 'Leven o'clock. You see him Jonnie? Cast now!" Teeth-sucking.
Not faaar enough man. Another 10 yards. Come on Jonnie, get it out!" Silence. Silence stretching into minutes. Another bit of water, supposedly a bonefish, has gone.
Haavve to do better than that Jonnie," muses Solomon, my guide. "Now, see him? 'Leven o'clock! Twenty-five yards! Now!"

Without Mitch it might have all have been feasible - just like hurling a Woolly Bugger to a hungry rainbow - but the hurricane had meandered across the Caribbean, destroyed chunks of South America, and left a vacuum into which now poured a steady Force 6, day and night, night and day. The bonefish, clued up on the Beaufrot Scale, were thrilled.

They come in on the tide to feed on the shrimps and crabs of the mangroves. We had to be in the lee to find water clear and calm enough to spot the bonefish, each as visible as a wet smoke. But that meant chucking the line into the wind to catch them creeping out of the mangroves. The results were neither chalkstream nor pretty. Forget fly-casting, this was the gally scene in Ben Hur, with Charlton Heston at ramming speed and a sweaty heavy cracking the whip. All of which could have been dismissed with a careless laugh if the bonefish weren't so dammed stupid. Drop your lighter or splash the cast and they'd be off like a long-dong on a hot sausage. But when the law of averages finally wiggled a Gotcha! or Crazy Charlie or some other epoxy sweetmeat fly right under their Concorde noses they wouldn't see it.

The owner of the dark voices and ready hand with the red rum was unperturbed. Nothing perturbed Brian Hew. Perhaps it once did, in a former existence when he owned a nursery with his wife, Jennifer. But now they own, as the Bounty Bar ad had it, "a taste of paradise" - Kamalame Cay, Andros Island, Bahamas.

There are fishing flats right on the lee shore of Kamalame Cay's private 100-acre island. You can yell "Good Lord darling, I think I'm into a bonefish," to the loved one drinking her coffee and munching the fresh fruit on the verandah of your hut. And since you will be only 60 or so yards away - the merest lob from he beachside tennis-court she will hear you.
But since that would allow you to fish and lie on the beach or snorkel on the world's third largest barrier reef, there is an unwholesome suggestion of sybaritism which would never do. No, for us boneheads it's into those boats and at 'em.

The bonefish are here in numbers, especially at Joulter's Creek, where they assemble like trainered teenagers at Alton Towers on a bank holiday. But the real lure are the trophy fish. Though the bones average 4lb to 5lb, every day we met fish pushing 8lb. A few years ago, Solomon saw one he put at 25lb. To live that long, a fish has to be a finny Ferrari. Nature has made the flats into the ultimate ichthyic test track. The water is only a foot deep, there's no cover, so there are the quick - and there are the dead. And the top speedsters are the barracuda, lemon sharks, and their foodstuff, the bones. How fast is fast? A damn sight faster than any freshwater fish.

Pondering such matters is good medicine when your guide is braiding 10lb monofilament into a nice, strong loop to wrap around the hood's bend and yank it, barbwards, to continue its journey - which you have started - through your forearm. "There! Hardly a hole!" grinned Solomon. Fresh blood - how could the bonefish resist my Gotcha! now? Eh, Jonnie. See them man? At 300 yd.? Please. "Quick, get out of the boat, we'll walk 'em."

Lower down, it was easier. The water was so shallow that I could see it bulging as two dark smears raced towards us. We were going to ambush them. "OOOOKKKaayyy Jonnie, 12 o'clock. Now strip that line! STRIP! STOP! Strip again. Faster! Faster!" Finally, without a false note, the Hardy Sovereign started to sing it's lovely song. I'd wondered, in an unthinking way, why bonefishing pictures always showed people pushing their rods skywards on outstretched direct contact with a fish that's zoomed off with 40yds of flyline and 110yds of backing in approximately 20 seconds.He stopped and the long winching began.

When I was small I worked very hard to get under some geese that had visited our patch of foreshore. After four dark, heavily frosted mornings I managed it - and missed with my single barrel. The memory came back badly. Having worked so hard to catch a bonefish I was sure it would blitz itself to freedom.

It came to within 30yds, saw us and scorched off for 50yds, then came in kicking, to be expertly tailed, held, and released by Solomon. "Hey! Jonnie!"

There was a feast that night, of lobster, claret, and vintage rum. The fellow fishers were an eclectic lot. One owned and cooked for the third most successful restaurant in New York; another, Tony, was part of the Tobasco dynasty and was accompanied by his father-in-law, Harold, who at 82 was still shooting, fishing, and drinking Martinis that would fell a Suffolk punch. The only other English couple spent their lives fishing around the world. They were of to Cuba the following day, the Christmas Island. "This is among the best four fishing lodges in the world," he said, leaning back. The others agreed, and headed to bed.

An early night is always best when you're shooting the next morning, especially when you have to be up at 4:30 an gone by five. Staying up until 2:30, with the Gypsy Kings at full blast and demolishing a bottle of rum between two is not best.

There are few man-made lights on Andros, so the Pleiades, Great Bear and Orion struggle only with the moon and the flash of shooting stars. At 4:30 a.m. they were bright enough to walk by. Tony and Harold were already at the quay, waiting for the station wagon. We were setting out after Bahamian doves, a close relative of the white-wing, a staple quarry species of southern America and the second part of the MacBahamas, the first prize offered by Brian Hew and Frontiers in THE FIELD's 1998 Great MacNab Challenge, and won by Nicholas Sherlock. The third part is to shoot one of the wild pigs lurking in the scrub.

Mr. Sherlock has been set a task. Undoubtedly he will shoot the required brace of doves - 30 to 40 in a morning is usual for those used to them - but he may find them tricky. They do not follow a flight line but arrow in from every compass point, like midges on a Ross-shire loch, and favour a Tornado fighter-bomber approach - low, ground-hugging and very fast.

These are not birds for cartridges-to-kill counters. they destroy your season's averages with vigour usually expressed only by walked-up snipe, October grouse, and Devon pheasants. Brian was thrilled: "Well Jon-a-tan, not so bad for a little island shoot, eh, haw-haw-haw!" (The haw-haw-hawing had the resonance of someone who'd shot a sackful of birds with very few squibs.)

The doves appeared two hours later, stewed for breakfast in a hot Caribbean sauce, while Brian outlined his plans. Since Andros has no mammalian predators he intends to develop a partridge shoot on English lines and has already started releasing duck. Within the next two years he intends Kamalame to be the epicenter for those who wish to combine bone fishing and bird-shooting.

This could prove a trifle wobbly for romance. Kamalame should be an idyll for girlfriend or wife, the Janet Reger of all sporting destinations; white beaches; warm clear seas; beds the size of polo pitches; a swimming pool and tennis-court; and privacy. But this has to be weighted against the chance to be up at four for the doves, breakfast, cigs, bone fishing, snatched cup of coffee, more cigs, duck flighting, dinner, havanas, rum, and exhaustion.

And this is the sad truth. When offered a taste of paradise, the Lost Boys of fishing always prefer a marathon.