The bonefishing has steadily improved with the onset of summer in Hawaii. Two weeks ago Ed picked me up before sunrise and we headed out to look for tailing fish. We found those, and a bunch more. The conditions were almost perfect and we had the flats almost completely to ourselves. I hooked seven bonefish that day, and Ed must have hooked eight or nine.

Despite the fishing excitement close to home, the real perk for me recently was sneaking away one afternoon during a work trip in Texas to look for carp.

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It has been a busy Spring for me and fishing time has not been abundant. The scarcity has reminded me of the importance of play, which can apply to anything you enjoy doing, not just to fishing. It is easy, at least for me, to let my mind get captured by the idea of “progress,” of achieving goals, but I think that real enjoyment comes not from accomplishment, but from the doing itself.

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Back in January, after several intense weeks at work, I finally got out on the water for my first full day of fishing of 2022. I really wanted to catch my first bonefish of the year, and I did. It was a 3-4 pound fish that bit my small mantis shrimp fly on the edge of the flat. But before that, something crazy happened!

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The halalu (baby scad) have been schooling in the lagoon and the shoreline is busy every day. It’s another example of how the seasons in Hawaii are marked by changes in the ocean.

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There are several important variables when it comes to choosing what fly to use: how heavy, and how the fly is weighted, the size and shape of the hook, the size and profile of the fly, and color. In my experience, the actual fly pattern is probably the least important variable when it comes to catching bonefish. The final variable I consider in my fly selection is confidence. Even the best fly will falter unless the angler is fishing it with confidence.

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I have been fishing almost every week recently. Most days we have gone out, everyone has hooked something, so it’s fair to say that the fishing has been good, but it hasn’t been great. If you asked, I would say that nothing particularly noteworthy has happened. But when I sit down and start to look through photographs from the past few months, I see that a lot has happened. Nothing noteworthy, perhaps, but a lot of really wonderful details. Things that are in danger of being overlooked.

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We paddled out to look for bonefish on a nice day in January. I couldn’t get any bonefish to eat, but on the walk back to where the SUP boards were anchored I spotted a barracuda, lurking hungrily on the reef.

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We set out this morning on the SUP boards in Kaneohe Bay. I badly wanted to catch a fish, but right away I had three strikes against me: It was more cloudy and more windy than was forecast, and the low tide was already too deep to wade (see my previous post about the tides). But fishing isn’t baseball, thank goodness, so we weren’t out of the game completely.

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Last weekend I went papio fishing with my friend Chris. The surf was small and the early morning low tide looked ideal, but the reality was totally different than predicted.

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