Guess Who’s coming To Dinner

I had never of “bonefish” before last spring when Ralph and I went to Belize, but fishing for them was the big thing down there. Apparently it is all the rage because they are good fighters. According to the guys here who are really into it this is one of the best places in the world for bonefishing. Bonefish are a fairly uniform and widely distributed variety of bottom feeders that occupy salty and brackish shallows in the tropics, so this certainly is their kind of place. They are a little tricky to hook because they are good at hitting and taking your bait without you getting the hook set. If you do hook them however, they fight like crazy for a relatively small fish (most of them are in the 14-24 inch range, with some up to about 3 feet).
I borrowed some tackle and went down to try my hand at it the other night and it was just as described. I used some of the rainbow runner we had caught on the fishing boat and froze and just started casting in the place these guys said they had such good luck. I started getting hits almost immediately but it took a few minutes for me to hook one. They do fight like crazy. I fished for about and hour and caught 3 of the bonefish, a large thing that looked like a sea bass but with a lot more (and bigger) teeth than the ones at home, and one of the smaller silvery blue fish they call a papillon. I let them all go.
Later I was talking with a couple of guys who had been fishing in the same spot; they had set up a small standing height table of scrap materials in the shallow water and one of them was cleaning a fish he had caught when the other guy yelled and pointed out about a 5 foot shark swimming right toward him in the shallow water. He slapped his fishing rod at it and it swam away; then they threw a bloody piece of cut fish in the water and it came right back. They hooked it and fought it for a good while before it broke the line. I thought they said there were only small sharks in the lagoon.