Vince Brandon | Wednesday, 18 June 2025
I’ll start Day 2 with me entering the bar at the end of my first days guided fishing to meet my fellow anglers at the Posada. They were a great bunch of people that took me under their wing, making me a fully paid up member of the sundowner club. As ever, the first question that you get asked when you get back is “how did you get on?”, “a dozen bonefish” I replied. They were aware that I was new to tropical saltwater fishing and thought this was a good result, prompting another round of drinks.
Being honest, I was embarrassed and annoyed at myself because the day had been a bit of a clusterf’k, I should have had double the number of bones and maybe 3 or 4 baby tarpon as well. I couldn’t say anything about being disappointed because I hadn’t told anyone that I was a certified instructor, not wanting to come across as a badge wearing egomaniac and the devil has a habit of throwing turds in your punchbowl.
The day started well, I was taken into a beautiful lagoon with a central flat surrounded by mangroves. If you could design a place to fish, this could be it. Almost immediately, I spotted a bonefish that the guide had missed but bizarrely asked for permission to cast and that resulted in a hook up. A few hits and misses quickly followed and life was peachy. As the sun came up, I found it more and more difficult to spot the fish and became heavily reliant on the guide to direct the cast onto the fish and this pattern continued throughout the trip, spotting fish early on then becoming sun blind.
At home, I’d practiced getting shots off quick before coming out by practicing in the field making random turns, selecting a target in my field of view and hitting it. The wild was different though, I had to listen to the guides direction, process it, spot the fish and then take the cast which was a comparatively slow process. Initially, if I didn’t spot the fish, I didn’t take the shot as I wasn’t sure if the guide was telling me where the fish was, or where it was going to be, I really should have asked. To speed things up, I made the shot based on what I thought the guide was telling me but found different guides ranged differently and each day required a bit of recalibration.
Despite this, I picked up enough fish in the first couple of hours such that my guide and I were in a happy place, so we moved into the outer part of the lagoon which was sheltered and deep, to go after the smaller tarpon from the panga. I hadn’t practiced fishing from the foredeck of a boat 4 ft above the water but had no problems adapting to the change. Strip striking the tarpon was another issue though. I often fly fish for pike and have never noticed a particular issue but on this day, I stuffed every eat. When Steffan asked me what the problem was, I told him “I was strip striking it like a fanny”. A Facebook discussion later that evening with Peter V solved the problem; he told me to hold on to the line during the set, many thanks Peter.
The continual misses were more of an embarrassment than a drama and resulted in a lot of onboard banter as I missed one take after another. Having exhausted the stock of willing fish, we went into open water to try my luck elsewhere and that’s when the wheels fell off.
The skipper took the boat out to fish some exposed areas of the mangroves but by this time the wind had got up to about 40kts. We had a lot of shots at fish with the guide calling them quickly, sometimes before the last one had fished out. Fish were following the fly and spooking at the boat, I was not getting the hits as before and the fish could see us. Being the sole angler, I was fishing continuously and it was shot after shot. As this session wore on, my casts began to get very ragged and I could barely get a shot off, my casting was appalling.
The guide was beginning to get irate and so was I and eventually a few words were exchanged. In the following silence, the skipper intervened in Spanish. The guide apologised for piling on the pressure and I did the same, explaining that as a casting instructor I expected better of myself. We took a deep breath and motored off to a nearby beach, catching some more bonefish and the occasional blue runner. The guide was excellent though and it was just a combination of circumstances that caused the session to unravel.
I was quiet in the bar that evening, conducting an internal debrief on why I fell short. Part of the issue, I’ve mentioned earlier is that I’m not used to being directed and casting in a difficult and unfamiliar environment made for a large degree of cognitive overload. There was also a fair bit of travel fatigue.
Although, I had practiced quick shots in the field in the months before the trip, I was self cueing. On the water, I found that I could listen to the guide or sort out my cast, I couldn’t do both. I was in complete cognitive overload, trying to do too much at the same time. For me, there is an instructional to be very aware of when, how and what feedback an instructor should apply and being alert to the students focus of attention. It’s a huge topic that doesn’t get much more than a glancing blow during instructor training.
I also decided to use the next self guided day for a bit of practice before I fished. The following day wasn’t as windy but it was similar and I got to try out some of my thoughts. Not being on the boat, I couldn’t replicate the wave action nor the fact that the boat was turning during the cast; however, I did get to look at what I was doing in the cast. Based on internal and near external cueing, my tracking looked good, forearm and rod butt in plane. Looking to the line as a far external cue, it was tracking about 30 degrees from true with the wind. Whilst, I couldn’t eradicate the effects of the wind, I could significantly improve the situation by hauling all the way through the casting cycle.
Instructor training focuses on carrying a lot of line without hauling and when fishing, my hauling doesn’t really get going until I have about 40ft of line in the air, unless I’m looking for a particular presentation. In this environment, the cast was irrecoverable if I didn’t generate line speed early and I had to pay attention to overcome this engrained habit. Moreover, I have changed the way I introduce hauling into lessons, making it more application specific.
The issues that I faced on the first guided day could have been avoided by better representative learning design and a change to my practice routines, the guide can’t do that for you. I already do this using the constraints led approach when I prepare students for small stream fishing. If I take another saltwater trip, I would try to get a spotter to come out on the field with me and call the shots, instead of self selection. To replicate the behaviour of the moving boat, I could possibly make the shots, whilst standing on a roundabout in a kids playground. I’m certain that there are better ways of preparing for a trip.
After the practice session on day 3, I caught another half a dozen bonefish. With the 2nd of my guided days to follow on day 4 and another chance to hopefully go for tarpon, I was still optimistic.