Walking on the Flats;

a need for balancing movements

BY ED KANE PSIA/AASI-NW BOARD MEMBER

“Okay”, said our guide, “out of the boat and let’s go find those fish.” This was a familiar scene for me and my fishing partner. Standing in the boat and looking over the area we were going to walk, it looked as flat as a parking lot (see the picture). The area we were going to wade was a shallow area near North Andros Island in the Bahamas which consists of sand and mud flats covered by ankle to knee deep salt water. Lurking in the water of these flats is a diversity of fish: bonefish; barracuda; sharks; box fish; and many others I couldn’t identify. The ones of interest to us were the bonefish which travel alone in pairs and in medium to large schools for protection. They feed on small crabs, shrimp and other burrowing flats dwellers. Of course, the sharks and barracudas feed on the bonefish when they can catch them.

The strategy is to walk the flats, look for the schools of bones or the occasional single or pairs, cast a fly to them and then give it some motion by stripping or pulling the fly back toward yourself. It is pretty exciting to see them first swim toward your fly and then watch them chase it down like a piece of real food. Frequently they will pick it up and that’s when the fun begins. After they have been played out enough to get them close, the fly is removed, the fish revived and then released to grow some more and bite the fly again. In theory, it sounds pretty simple. In practice it is much more complex.

What has all this to do with skiing and balancing movements? Hang in there, I’m getting to that. There are several challenges involved in chasing the wily bonefish. The first of which is to spot them in the shallow water. This should be a seemingly simple task but they are remarkably difficult to see due to wave action on the water and coloration of the bottom. The second challenge is casting the fly to them, again a seemingly easy task made a bit difficult by 20 to 25 mile per hour winds that tend to take control of the fly and fly line. Given all of that, the third and perhaps most challenging task is getting to where the bones are feeding.

As I noted above, the flats seem just that from the boat. As soon as one is in the water the situation is quite different. The bottom is, surprise, not flat or even! In fact it is quite uneven due to the fact that it is inhabited by the vary animals that the bonefish love to eat. These creatures burrow in the sand and mud leaving quite a variety of holes and rolling mounds to walk over, around or into. The walking is a bit easier if one peers into the water along the immediate path that one is walking but that is not really recommended since you won’t be able to spot the fish that are out there 50 or 100 feet in front of your path. Therefore, one’s gaze is focused well ahead of your feet and it is very easy to step into the holes, mounds and other uneven features of the flats bottom. As I was walking and recovering from step to step I found most of these features relatively easy to navigate and I started to think about why this would be the case.

I began to focus kinesthetically on my feet, ankles and knees. As I did this, I became aware that the balancing movements that I have been polishing through my years of skiing experience were serving me well. In fact, in 8 days of walking the flats, I managed to sit down in the water only once when I stepped into a hole and the mud under my heel slid out from under me. When I concentrated on the movements I was making to maintain my balance I found that they were the same ones that I use when making turns down the hill. Every step was accompanied by a small amount of ankle movement to keep my hips (center of mass) between my feet regardless of the orientation of my feet. In addition, there was accompanying knee movement, again to keep my hips between my feet. I found also that th movements helped me keep pressure over my whole foot which resulted in more traction underfoot avoiding slipping and sliding, in most cases. The other sensation that I noticed was that with this movement, my shins were in contact with the front of my wading shoes for nearly every step and the amount of contact depended on the degree of change of slope during that step. If it was flat, the contact was fairly constant but if the bottom was angled, the contact became more pronounced which helped me keep from stumbling. The interesting lesson from all this is that the movement patterns that we develop during skiing carry over into other athletic activities that we may pursue. I guess that I have been aware of this but never thought about it that much. So here again was the lesson that I have shared with many students. If you want to maintain balance, “constantly vary the flex of your ankles through every turn, maintain pressure over the whole foot and keep in contact with the tongues of your boots.” Amazing, it works everywhere, even on the flats of North Andros Island. Oh yes, just in case you were interested, I did catch and release a number of wily bonefish (see the other picture).