What follows is a well written guest blog from Aaron Ricca who recently spent his honeymoon on Abaco. Cherokee Sound and the southern half of Abaco is one of my favorite places in the world. I’m sitting on my front porch overlooking the flats of Cherokee sound for the last day, trying to come up with the words to portray this amazing vacation. This trip has been such a pleasure for so many reasons. The little town of Cherokee is quaint and secluded and the people here are all so nice and friendly. I could not think of a better place to “get away from it all.” It has only been within the last 20 years that there has been paved road access to Cherokee. Before that it was a 6-hour trip from Marsh Harbour, the main town on the Abacos island chain. The flats are full of life that seems completely unspoiled by man. There are so many conch and crabs, and of course, there are more bonefish than I could have ever imagined. My sweet and understanding wife let me plan our honeymoon. She wanted somewhere tropical where she could relax on a beach, but she knew that I had other motives as well. What started as honeymoon planning, very quickly turned into a DIY bonefish trip. I scoured the web trying to find information on locations with great wadeable flats in an area that she would also enjoy. Luckily I found Rod’s website and blog. He helped me so much in every step of the process from picking the location to fishing details and even other local attractions. For being as green a bonefisherman/saltwater fly fisherman as you can get, I can definitively say there is no way I would have had the success I did without his very detailed guidance. I finally settled on the Abacos island chain in the Bahamas for two main reasons, the environment would make my wife happy, and the fishing would make me happy. As far as the environment goes, as I’ve already said, the beaches and flats are gorgeous. My wife enjoyed walking the sandy flats with me as I was stalking bones. She was happy being in the water and enjoying all the starfish, sand dollars and shells she was finding. The flats are so expansive here that at low tide you get an amazing amount of sandy beach to walk. We also went into Marsh Harbour several times to eat and walk around the shops there. Since Cherokee only has one small grocery store and a tiny marina shop, we bought most of our groceries in Marsh Harbour and cooked most of our meals at home. Another enjoyable thing we did was travel to the surrounding cays by ferry. We visited Hope Town and saw the lighthouse. We also went to Man-O-War and explored the central hub of boat building in the Abacos and came away with quality bags made of sail cloth. They were both enjoyable small towns with everything within walking distance. Now, as far as the fishing goes, it was good enough that this first-timer from land-locked Arkansas hooked up every day he went out but one. It was fantastic. Now to be completely honest I did not physically hold a bonefish every day. There were several days at the beginning where I hooked up with several fish but they either got off or broke off, but all in all it was great. Going into it with only the experience I could gain from reading Dick Brown’s books and watching every bonefishing video I could find, I definitely had some misconceived perceptions. I thought my most difficult task would be finding the fish and that after I found them I could just get the fly somewhat near them and it would be game on. That was not the case. I actually had no trouble spotting fish and by the end of the trip my wife was regularly spotting them as well. Multiple times she even helped me find fish closer to us that I missed because I was focusing on a different group farther out. They are not that difficult to see over sand, and you will regularly see tailing fish as well. Spotting cruising fish over the grass was tough, but I only spooked a small few compared to the ones that I spotted. I found that the most difficult part was getting the fish to eat. You have to make precise, accurate casts in windy conditions while also being able to properly read the fish. You need to anticipate their direction and speed and attitude. Most of the fish I hooked were in smaller pods that were very slowly cruising or actively feeding. I only caught a couple fish that were swimming solo and not feeding. Before I go again I will make a point of practicing casting in windy conditions with the exact setup I will be fishing on the flats. If I could have landed the fly with extreme precision, I would have caught more fish. Fly selection was also important. By the end of the trip if I got a couple solid refusals I would switch up patterns until I found one that worked. My most productive fly overall was the Ghost in olive or in tan/pink, though I also caught fish on a Greg’s flats fly and a Bonefish Bitters. One of the keys to the success in this trip was tide/time management. If you are a type A personality like myself, you can plan out days in advance your activities and fishing times. I used the tide tables and planned out meal times and other activities that we wanted to do on the island and surrounding cays to take place around high tide, and then planned the fishing times at either a falling or rising tide on either side of low tide. I found that the fish were most active during this period, but not quite as much […]
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