Harrington estimates he has caught about 600 bonefish in the dozen years since he started making Keys sojourns—actually on the same weekend George H.W. Bush took his first presidential bonefishing vacation. At first he wasn’t much more successful than the Prez, whose well publicized score was zero. Likely the entourage of hovering helicopters and press boats had a lot to do with the president’s failure, but that wasn’t Harrington’s problem.

“The first year I lost more than 50 percent of the fish I hooked,” he noted. “I lost all of them on bottom structure—sponges, fans and that stuff.”

The fix for that, he found, was fishing where that stuff wasn’t. That also alleviates hangups while retrieving the grubs, although that isn’t much of a problem to begin with. He also uses 15-pound line, which provides significant advantages for an angler who can’t well follow a hard-charging fish. He can get a bonefish or permit to end that first blistering run with a little less line stretched across a flat, and the heavier line can withstand a lot more abuse than 8-pound, which admittedly casts farther.

The great thing about wading is that long casts aren’t at all necessary. Bonefish can detect boats at great distances, especially if there is a slight chop running. But a wader standing still in 30 inches of water is virtually invisible. Fly fishing’s thick line and more conspicuous casting action make for a somewhat less stealthy approach, but compared to the same disadvantages from the extra height of a boat, wading with a fly rod is much less problematic.

Fly fishing, of course, is much easier when the caster can see the fish—an advantage Harrington gives up at the outset. He doesn’t give up his fly rod, however. If conditions develop for sight-fishing, and tails start popping up in extreme shallows, he is quick to switch to a fly. Otherwise, he just waits until blind casting with a fly is the odds-on thing to do.

“If I catch as many as three fish in an hour, I automatically go to a fly rod,” Harrington says. His favorite pattern is a crystal chenille Conehead Shrimp.

Most times, though, he is bumping his Chubby Grub along the bottom, albeit in a way rarely seen among most veteran jiggers. Harrington imparts all of the action to his jig with his reel, not the rod. He does that by cranking rapidly for two revolutions of the handle, and then stopping the reel dead. The rod never moves from a position parallel to the water.

The advantage to that technique is that Harrington never gets a bite with his rodtip held high. Up there it’s impossible to strike a fish without first lowering the rod, and likely without cranking a bit of slack out of the line as well. The disadvantage to Harrington’s technique, as far as I could tell, was none. Bonefish bit the heck out of his jigs, which he attaches to 20-pound fluorocarbon leader.

If he feels a bite during the significant pause between spurts of reeling, he can instantly strike with the rod against a tight line. If he feels the bite while he’s reeling, he strikes on an even tighter line. That would be what most of us would call a win/win deal (unless you’re a bonefish).

Over the past dozen years Harrington has discovered eight flats with hard bottom, where the wading is easy. In most spots he fishes from about 30 inches of water, casting in some cases into 4-foot depths. Some “private” flats he uses on overnight trips, when he stays at the motels from which they are accessed. He often finds the best fishing very early and very late in the day.

One, the Long Key seawall flat, is especially valuable because it’s on the Florida Bay side of the islands, and therefore is sheltered from south and east winds. Harrington’s Key West spots, one of which is the site of his only mutton snapper on the flats, are well protected from an east wind. The other lucky seven all are favorable for fishing north or westerly winds.

Six others he’s keeping to himself, just in case these become too popular. Try one, and you may get hooked to the bone, yourself.

FS