Well, my wife just loves Cozumel and since I never want to disappoint her, we just returned from a 3 week vacation there. I took fly-fishing and fly-tying gear and a stack of travelers checks with plans to go fish the lagoons again. I learned a lot...but alas, still have not caught a bonefish. We stay at a B&B where the owners are into scuba diving and last year they hooked me up with one of the owners of the diving outfit that likes to fly fish for the bones. Let me say I was pretty ignorant about what constituted a guide at that time. For what seemed like a very modest fee ($200) I got a 30-40 minute boat ride from the coletta to the lagoons and 5-6 hours of casting along with some pointers like, "cast to the rocks" and "look for silver flashes" and "you can see their fins above water when they feed, sometimes". It was a lot of fishing for the money but as I've come to see it wasn't a 'guided' trip.

This trip I figured I'd get out 4 or 5 times and made arrangements weeks before leaving. It didn't happen. To make a long story short, I finally got out once during the second week of the trip with a local from the same scuba outfit that also fly-fishes. I lost count of how many mangrove snapper I caught but I only connected with one bonefish and that was done casting blind (I never saw it before hand). Well after many promises to go back out, the shop finally suggested another local who actually does this for a living. What a difference!

First, we used a smaller boat and actually got it in the lagoon. We spent several hours scouting and never casted blind - this guy was a genius at spotting the fish and we cast to them. At one point we moored the boat and went wading. My previous experience was just wading. This time, it was different. Ricardo knew the lagoon and the fish and he found several pods of fish for me to cast to. It was as much hunting as it was fishing. I got a real appreciation for how spooky the bonefish are and how important a good presentation is. By late in the morning I was understanding the process a whole lot better - even though my Spanish was only about as good as Ricardo's English. It appeared that my flies were not quite what the bonefish wanted (pale pink/brown Crazy Charlie's).

I think if I'd connected with Ricardo the first week, I'd have had a lot better chance to catch a fish. First, Ricardo made a point of getting me on the fish and second, with my tying gear there, I could have tweaked the patterns some to get a better imitation of the juvenile crab that the bonefish were eating. Ricardo's charge was only $50 more than the other guys but the difference was one was a trip out to go bone fishing and the other was a guided bone fishing trip.

It looks like we will be going back once or twice in the next 16 months and I know who I'll be contacting to go fishing. For what it's worth, this is some really interesting fishing, especially when your reference is fishing along the East Coast for bass, bluegill, and trout. The bird life that you'll see is amazing, the water is warm and shallow (you can wade for miles), and I've never seen a crocodile while fishing in my backyard pond.CZM_fishing1.jpgCZM_Fishing2.jpg