Some days you catch fish and some days you don’t. Even when I don’t catch fish I often really enjoy my time on the water. There is so much to see out there, if you stop and look.

Tara has always been good at this. She isn’t as into fishing as I am, but she is usually happy to go wading or walking or exploring with me when I go looking for fish. She’ll point out all kinds of cool sights that I could easily miss, like a tiny pregnant seahorse, and sometimes cool sights that I do miss, because I’m too busy looking for fish, like a giant manta ray leaping clear out of the water! (True story.)

A while back I shot a few clips of some of the things I might see during a day on the flats, and put them together into a short video:

But Tara does fish sometimes. A couple of months back we were wading together along the edge of a sand patch near Hickam Airforce Base when Tara spotted a fish moving towards us. I told her where to cast and she laid her fly out nicely. The fish saw her fly and chased it almost to the rod tip before it noticed us and spooked. After that, she’s had a bit of a score to settle and we’ve put in some time trying to get her hooked up!

We haven’t spent much time practicing fly casting together, but she has spent a lot of time on the water and knows more about stalking and catching bones than most of the avid fly fishers that visit from the Mainland. A few weeks after the near miss at Hickam, we took the paddle boards out to Keehi. The conditions weren’t great and there weren’t that many fish around, but late in the afternoon, as we were making our way towards the edge of the flat we encountered a trio of big bones that had just come onto the flat from the channel. They were close and moving fast so I made Tara flick her fly out before I even pointed the fish out to her. She made a few strips and hooked up! The fish was pretty big and, not surprisingly, it made a U-turn and headed back towards the deep. Tara did her best running after the fish and reeling in slack while I shouted instructions, but it made it to the edge and cut the leader off on the jagged rocks.

The score remains unsettled.