A pair of DIY anglers solicit insight and guidance from a seasoned guide that increased their success for oversized bonefish plus other species.

Story and photography by Danno Wise

The thought of a trip to Hawaii conjures up lots of images. Giant bonefish cruising the flats likely isn’t one of them — unless you’ve experienced it, that is…

Over the years, my wife April and I have fished in Hawaii on a number of occasions. While the islands are best known for their offshore fishing, we’ve always spent our time on the inshore flats and beachfront.

As is the case wherever we travel, when we’ve gone to Hawaii, we’ve always gone the DIY route. We just enjoy exploring and trying to figure out new waters as we go. To that end, we’ve always done pretty well catching various varieties of trevally, barracuda, triggerfish, and an array of reef fish species. What we hadn’t caught was bonefish.

We finally decided to give the Hawaiian bonefish thing a shot and spent several days wading various flats on the east and south side of the island during one of our more recent trips. A single bone was hooked, but not landed, during that time. We spent the rest of those hours catching tons of barracuda, puffers, and triggers, along with a menagerie of unidentified species, on jigs meant for bones.

Flying home we determined when we returned, we should do something we had never done – book a guide. After giving it a bit more thought, I reached out to Capt. Chris Wright. After all, the guy has had a hand in nearly two dozen world record bonefish catches and from watching his posts on social media, I liked his attitude. Even though we would be on island for 10 days we only booked Chris for one half day. Again, we intended to spend most of our time DIY fishing and exploring.

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