Dem Dry Bones
As the story goes, a young Albert McLane walked in to the Field & Stream offices in 1947, applied for the job of fishing editor, and was hired. On the morning of his first day, he left the building to get a cup of coffee and was fired by then publisher Eltinge Warner . But cooler heads prevailed and the young staffer was re-hired in the afternoon. The rest, they say, is history, and A.J. McClane became a legend at the magazine.

 

He fished throughout the world, bringing his wide-ranging curiosity to all things fishing. He was always a step ahead, too, and recognized trends long before the crowd. For instance, in 1955 he introduced the readers of Field & Stream to a new-fangled lure called the plastic worm. Those who had the privilege of watching him fish witnessed a master at work. Distance , yes, always, but with pinpoint accuracy. And those who had the privilege of working with him saw a complete professional. His copy rarely needed an editor’s pencil, except for the occasional comma—the proper use of which somehow eluded him.

 

He spent years working on an authoritative encyclopedia of fishing, and in 1965 the classic "McClane’s Standard Fishing Encyclopedia" was published. It remains the standard by which all other fishing encyclopedias are judged.

 

The earnings from the book allowed him to move to Florida to pursue his passion—bonefish. Late in life he began to experiment with bonefish flies and concluded that these famous bottom feeders would take a dry fly. The result is "Dem Dry Bones," one of his classics. Indeed, the opening sentence in this February 1986 feature, in which he compares the bonefish to a 12-cylinder Ferrari Testarossa, is all A.J. Enjoy. Click here to read the story.

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My last fish of the day was a sunset loner who came tail-wagging across the sand like a hound dog looking for a long-buried bone. The water was little more than ankle deep. Staring into the smoky blue and gold reflections, waiting for him to come into range, I had that old squirrels-in-the-stomach feeling, wondering whether he would turn, trying to guess when he would be most vulnerable.

No fish is more humbling than a big tailer who ventures into glass-calm shallows—a mere presence that dares you to make the first move. I’ve forgotten how many myotomes, those explosive elastic bands of muscle, are contained in that torpedo-shaped body, but once spooked, an old forktail can take off like a Ferrari Testarossa from a standing start.

Although the fish was zigzagging, when he was about 40 feet away I got down on my knees and began working out the line, then dropped the fly—a dry Salmon Irresistible—on his incoming path. The fish stopped to poke his head in the sand, about 5 feet short of the fly. The squirrels pounded in my rib cage. When he resumed swimming I gave the Irresistible a twitch, and 9 ½ pounds of bonefish dashed at it in a splashy rise. He streaked away with that stunning acceleration that throws spray from a disappearing fly line, and was down in the backing before I even got on my feet.

Until 1982, I didn’t realize that bonefish could be caught on dry flies. Over the years I had hooked a few fish on the surface with a bucktail wing wet pattern that didn’t immediately sink, and even a few on topwater plugs intended for barracuda. But I was conditioned to the belief that bonefish are strictly bottom feeders and I couldn’t think of a logical reason for them to deviate from that behavior. As every student knows, most of their food consists of benthic or burrowing mollusks and crustaceans, prey probably located by “hearing” and “smell-tasting,” senses that must be highly developed in the albulids. The fish literally stand on their heads as they root in the bottom with tails waving seductively in the air. But bonefish also enjoy a bounty of alpheid and penaeid shrimps, crabs, and other mobile food forms that are flushed in panicky flight, and the tailing activity you see then is in quick, jerky movements as the food is pursued visually.