Sage Seasons: Salt Season

GAME OF BONES:

At dawn in the tropics, a special level of calm settles over an ocean flat, rendering it so still and soundless that you find yourself whispering for no discernible reason. The skiff glides across glass for fifteen minutes, then drifts to a halt as you step to the bow, peering across a lagoon that looks and smells like vacation.

You hear nothing. You feel nothing. But you see everything. So when that pair of big bones swims out from beneath the mangroves heading your direction, you clearly comprehend that the hooking and fighting and occasional landing is all just gravy for a visual feast that freshwater can’t quite deliver. But you’ve still got to make the cast.

In the world of applied medical research, Reaction Time (RT) is a measure of the response to a particular stimulus. RT plays a crucial role in all of our lives, by determining how quickly each of us can slam on the brakes, hit a fastball, or send a 60-foot cast to a seven-pound bonefish cruising through the shallows.

A day of saltwater flats fishing provides as much visual stimuli as any of us can reasonably expect our human eyes to deliver. We use our other senses—the smell of a shallow lagoon; the sound of terns riding a breeze over our head; the feel of a muscle-bound snook on a short leash, bending back to the mangroves. All of this plays into why we covet the salt, but the main draw of standing for hours on the front of a skiff or wading for miles across a never-ending flat is the allure of what we will see when we’re out there.

Read More