Thunderous Thursday! (March 6, 2014)

Started today with a great breakfast.  Sliced pineapple, cantaloupe, papaya, and pear.  The salbutes are a traditional mayan breakfast—small thick corn tortillas with ground meat (chicken today) lettuce, onions, avocado & hard boiled egg.  Cantaloupe juice for breakfast as well.  Dad took the day off to read, avoid the sun, and rest a bit for the final two days of fishing.

Breakfast fruit

Mayan specialty-Salbutes

Lunch in the shade with Phil Rollins

We had a busy morning with schools of bonefish we could easily see.  The wind (about 20mph) meant that my casts were less than accurate, so even though the fish were there it wasn’t always easy to get the fly to the right spot.  Phil Rollins & I had lunch in the shade (that was nice!) and then on to more bonefishing.  We had very consistent bonefishing after lunch with Phil & I trading turns casting from the bow.  Usually didn’t sit long before it was time to cast again.  Almost had doubles on several times.

Jack on a fly rod--what a rush!

Plan for the last couple hours was to go to a spot in the open Caribbean Sea for a variety of other fish on the fly rod.  I caught the Jack that is pictured.  Also caught lots of ladyfish and hooked a large shark and fought it for a while before it came loose.  It was about a 6-7 footer.  It fought hard on the fly rod.

View in the same direction a few minutes later

We had to cut it short because we had a little weather roll in as you can see from the last photo that is taken in the same direction as the picture of me with the fish.  Land disappeared, as did the sun.  The rain was pounding and thunder and lightning overhead (think count to two and then your eardrums explode).  We went not very far before deciding to pull into some mangroves and coconut trees along the short to wait out the worst of the storm.  I looked into the ocean and even though it was raining REALLY, REALLY hard (I had on my purple rain anorak and pants) the ocean was flat calm.  I commented to the guide how nice and calm it looked and he said, “That’s really, really bad.”  It means the storm is going to get much worse, which it proceeded to do.  When the darkest had passed over us, we made the break out for home and toward the lighter sky which was thankfully toward home.

Is it bad if the sky is black all the way to the ocean surface?

"Go to the light."

We couldn’t see any land in front of us; in fact there was a boat that passed us by as we were pulling out of the mangroves to break for home and we lost it even though we were right behind it.  Rain was falling so hard it was almost impossible to see.  We simply trusted our guides knew the way home.  When we got to the channel crossing it was really pretty rough and we were banging hard going across, but I could by this time see the outline of Cayo Culebre (Snake Island) that is between the two capes and through which we passed coming out this morning.  Once we got there we also could faintly make out the Punta Allen peninsula in the distance.  Rough crossing there as well, but rain let up somewhat and had almost stopped before we got to home.

When we got to the dock I asked the guides how the crossing was for roughness on a scale of 1-10.  They said 7 or 8 and that if it had been 10 we would not have crossed but would have spent the night pulled into the mangroves on the boat.  Glad it was only a 7 or 8!

Hung my wet things up to dry once we got back to the lodge.  A warm shower, fresh nachos, fresh salsa, and limonada and it was the end of a memorable day.