How many times have you seen this segment to start a flats fishing video: a group of anglers at the airport waiting for their departing flight, their arrival at their destination, rigging their gear; or maybe instead it starts with a pre-dawn crawl from bed, drive to the boat ramp, the skiff sliding off the trailer into calm water as dawn colors the sky. The next segment tends to be images of a skiff skimming across water that mirrors the sky above. Then comes the fishing and the fish and the fun that goes with it. Scan the video offerings on YouTube, Vimeo, and countless web sites and you can blow an entire work week viewing these videos, an entire day viewing just the best ones.
More-so t
han the similarities in the video storyboards, they all have one thing in common – the implicit assumption that the opportunity for you to have this same experience will be there tomorrow, next week, next year. That assumption is flawed. There are places that were once off the charts in terms of fishing quality that have declined so much that no modern-day aspiring videographer would even venture there to today. And chances are that some of the places we see in videos today won’t make the cut 10 years down the road. And even some places that get the video treatment today are mere shadows of their former selves. There are but a handful of places left that haven’t suffered to some extent.
So we have a choice – consider the old places to be lost causes and continue to find the next frontier, or work with the people in the old places to protect what is still healthy and bring back what has suffered. You know where BTT stands on this, and I’m happy to report that many others are working with us on conservation of the old places. This brings us to a recent trip to Belize.
In late May, a BTT team traveled to Belize River Lodge to work with the lodge guides to catch and tag bonefish. But this time instead of fishing, we used nets to target schools. The guides have been doing a fantastic job tagging bonefish with their anglers, but the nets allowed us to tag a greater number of bonefish in a short amount of time. The more tagged bonefish swimming on the flats, the better the chance an angler has at recapturing one. And since the goal of the tagging program is to identify priority habitats and locations for conservation and protection, the more data we get in a short amount of time the better.
Belize River Lodge hosted the tagging team for four days of tagging on the flats of central Belize. The BTT team consisted of Aaron Adams and Justin Lewis from BTT, as well as volunteers Marc Grimes (from Florida) and Jon Pierre Windsor from University of Belize. Also joining us were: two scientists from ECOSUR in Mexico – Dr. Juan Schmitter-Soto, and Addiel Perez who will be conducting a tag-recapture study of bonefish in Chetumal Bay and Corozal Bay along the Belize-Mexico border; Claudia Brenner from the Sarteneja Alliance for Conservation and Development. It’s great to see the effort spreading.
This video tells the story well. Thanks to Marc Grimes for producing the video.
