The guides call the tiny island of coral and thickly clustered red mangroves Fly Caye. It's not shown on most area maps of the Turneffe atoll, a part of the barrier reef 20 miles out in the Caribbean off the Belize mainland.

Doctor flies are always there, and when we wear shorts, we have to sit in the water to keep our legs covered and inaccessible to the ferocious vermin, which hungrily remove hunks of flesh from our legs when they bite, painfully interrupting our casts just as we are about to send them out to the large bonefish that patrol the prey-rich turtle-grass flat and coral reef surrounding the island.

The water there is never more than knee deep, even during the strongest of tides. The fish are selective, hard to approach in the shallow thin water, and never aggressive to the fly, due to their close proximity to the lodge. They see every bonefish fly known to man. It is also there that the Turneffe Flats' famous "golden" bonefish can be observed--but seldom caught. Fly Caye is the first place we fish during our three weeks on Turneffe every February. Our patterns are tested on these most difficult of Belize bonefish. [In areas that don't get fished heavily, these flies may not be necessary. Check with the local lodge or guides to determine the best patterns and sizes. The Editors.]

Bonefish swim at a maximum 22 miles per hour (mph), and barracuda rip at 27 mph. Since the 'cuda relish bones (the largest 'cuda we've ever seen lurks in the cut between Fly Caye and the nearest caye to the north), we have lost more than a few bones to them. Fortunately, most of those bonefish are "tailed" by the attacking 'cuda. The 'cuda slices off the tail of the bonefish, leaving you the front two-thirds of the fish to land. It allows for complete stomach analysis, since the intact stomach of the bonefish is usually left with the remains.

Over the years, we have examined the stomach contents of many 'cuda- and shark-mauled bonefish from several Belizian reefs and flats. Crabs have been present in nearly all of our stomach examinations of bonefish in the Turneffe Island area as well as most of our fish taken in the Yucatan and the Bahamas.

Turneffe Foam Crabs

The guides working these areas have cleaned and autopsied thousands of bonefish and permit, confirming the importance of crabs in the diet of these fish. Most successful Bahamian and Belizian guides have cleaned thousands of bonefish in their previous jobs as net, conch, and hand-line fishermen. The best guides now all practice catch-and-release fishing, but their experience with past bonefish and permit postmortems is invaluable to fly tiers and fishermen.

According to Dick Brown in his definitive book Fly Fishing for Bonefish, large bonefish eat the same prey (spider and reef crabs) as small ones, but in greater numbers. Randall Kaufmann, in his superb book Bonefishing with a Fly, reports that crabs supply an important and consistent food source to bonefish and are of major importance to anglers. He goes on to say that crabs inhabit every shallow-water habitat and are one of the reasons that bones patrol the shallow water of the reefs and flats.

Hermit Crab Bitters

There is one important crab we accidentally discovered in our observations and postmortem exams, one that has been largely neglected by fly tiers, anglers, authors, and students of bonefish and permit. The bonefish's crushers efficiently smash and destroy the evidence of crabs, shrimp, lobster, snails, clams, and other mollusks, along with sea worms, sea urchins, and other foods. These food items pass from the mouth through the crushers and into the stomach.

Pop's Bonefish Bitters

We often find bits of perwinkles, nerite, snails, baby bonnet, and other shells in our stomach-contents checks of 'cuda-killed bonefish. We have even noted in our exams bits of claws and body evidence of the tiny subtidal hermit crabs, like the common three-colored, red bar-eyed, smooth-jawed and green-striped hermit crabs. When we observed bonefish picking off shells containing these tiny crabs from the mangrove roots and shoots behind Fly and Cockroach cayes at the north end of Turneffe Island, we decided to work up an imitation.

Turneffe Foam Crab

Hook: #2-12 TMC 800S, Mustad 3407 or 34007. Thread: Uni-thread 6/0 to match body. Weight: 3/32" bead chain or mini non-toxic lead Lite Brite eyes. Body: Cream, tan, brown, olive, green, or dun gray Furry Foam. Legs: Round rubber mottled with Sanford marking pens (red tipped with green or brown mottling. Coral/Weed Guard: Natural deer hair.

Big bonefish most often travel alone, in pairs, or in small schools of ten or fewer fish. One day during our last week's stay on the island, the "reef rangers" had been especially tough. Reef rangers are the single and double bonefish that patrol the shallow reef and edges of the flats, feeding on creatures in the prey-rich turtle grass and coral reef. These big bones are more selective than fish feeding on the bare sand flats. We watched as the rangers batted the mangrove shoots and roots with their snouts and tails, scraping and knocking the hermit crabs--hidden in their shell fortresses--loose from the shoots. The fish picked off the crabs in their tiny armored shell homes like kids plucking popcorn kernels off a place mat.

We collected samples of the many varieties of shells and crabs inhabiting them, and back in Montana we had a year to design patterns to imitate the hermit crab specimens we had collected. Since then, we have tied crab patterns that have outfished other flies, yet are far easier and take much less time to tie. They work extremely well on bonefish, permit, and other reef and flats fish such as snapper and jacks.

The Turneffe Foam Crab, Hermit Crab, and Pop's Bonefish Bitters are our new flies that imitate the crabs and mollusk shells hermit that crabs often inhabit.