Flylab Interview: Captain Conway Bowman

Flylab Interview: Captain Conway Bowman

Conway Bowman is a highly-regarded shark captain from San Diego, CA and has spent years perfecting the pursuit of mako sharks on the fly. The waters off the San Diego coast hold one of the world’s largest seasonal populations of makos, ranging in size from 300-to-800 pounds. They migrate into these temperate, nutrient-rich waters beginning in April and are present until mid-November.

Who the hell is Conway Bowman, and how does a guy get into fly fishing for sharks?

Hey, I’m Conway Bowman, and I live out here in San Diego, California. I’m a fly-fishing guide, and I primarily fly fish for mako sharks. That’s my main thing in the summer, although I fly fish all over, but I’m mostly focused on the makos. For me, it’s evolved over 30 years, and now this fishery has become the equivalent of big game hunting with a fly rod.

We’re tracking down and hunting these really large mako sharks, and they’ve gotten much larger over the last 10 years. The fish that we’re seeing are anywhere from 300-to-800 pounds, and we’re actually hooking them on the fly. And it’s all sight fishing.

Why do you think they’re getting bigger?

So, the food items out here have changed. When I first started fly fishing for makos and guiding them, the primary food source was albacore and yellowfin tuna, and they were smaller fish–a big albacore was 25 pounds, a big yellowfin was probably 40 pounds. Now, over the last 10 years, we’ve had a resurgence of big bluefin tuna. 100 years ago, we had a lot of bluefin tuna off our Southern California coast, but they disappeared as the water got cooler. Now, we have warmer waters and this influx of very large bluefin that hover around 350-to-400 pounds. Because of that, my theory is that the larger food items bring in bigger predators. That's what I’m thinking about when I’m sitting on a chum slick for eight hours and nothing’s showing up…

We’ve always had some hammerheads, but with the warmer waters, we’re also seeing more great whites–last year we saw 17 (mostly juveniles). That means the big mamas are in here breeding, which they always have, but not to the degree you're seeing now. So, I think there’s a bunch of things in play: warmer water, larger food items and they also stopped a lot of the international commercial fishing off our coast–long lining, purse seine fishing, all that stuff. I think what we’re seeing now is a return of that year-class of fish and younger. I think these fish can live a very long time, maybe 50 years, and if they’re not getting harassed or caught in nets and people aren’t killing them, they basically get to roam, eat and grow.

When did fly fishing for mako sharks occur to you as an idea?

When I was growing up, we spent our summers in Idaho, so that’s where I learned how to fly fish–with my dad. But for sharks, I read a book by Nick Curcione, the Orvis Guide to Saltwater Fly Fishing, which had a chapter on sharks, primarily focused on blue sharks and how you could sight fish to them and that caught my attention. The book also had a subchapter about mako sharks, talking about them as the premier west coast saltwater game fish–they’ll take a fly, and you don’t really have to tease them up. They just grab it. You can feed them like a tarpon, and they jump 20 feet in the air. And I’m like, wow, that’s cool. But when the light switch really went off was when I found out Nick lived just 60 miles north (Redondo Beach), and he was basing all of his information on the fishing right here, right out my back door.

That’s how it started–I don’t have tarpon, I don’t have redfish, I don’t have a fish I can sight fish to, because the water out here is very deep, right? Here, a shark is the only fish you can really sight fish and watch the tape and be engaged with the whole time–watching the take, fight, jump and on and on. No shooting heads, sinking lines, all that stuff.

Walk me through the process of finding a mako shark–obviously, there’s a bunch of trial and error?

Oh, dude. It took me forever. I had a 16 or 17-foot aluminum boat with a tiller control motor–that was my first boat. And I would take that thing 10-12 miles off the coast. I had no electronics. I had a compass. Yeah, this is no joke. And that’s how I learned. I had a commercial fishing buddy, kind of an older guy, Richard. I’d say, “Hey, Richard, I want to catch blue sharks on a fly.” He’s like, “Why? Why do you want to do that?” I’d say, “Well, because I can sight fish to them.” Finally, he says, “Okay, well, just go 12 miles straight out from Mission Jetty on a 270 heading, and when you see the birds, go ahead and put down your blood slick.” So, that’s what I did. I ran 12 miles straight out and I put down a chum slick, and within an hour, I was surrounded by blue sharks.

That was my first day out, but it took me three years to get my first mako, because I figured out you had to fish during certain times of the year, right? Spring and summer are when the makos are here. It was all trial and error. I made a lot of mistakes. Finally, I put the pieces together–it’s spring, summer, fall, at certain water temps, and the fish are a lot closer than 12 miles out. A lot of times, they can be just a few miles offshore.

Can you compare fishing that way (trial and error) to all the technology (drones, radar) we have today?

Well, I’m an old guy now, so I think the tech is a bad thing, because I think it’s bullshit that guys can go out and find spots, without working their asses off, without reading a chart, without learning how to read bird and bait profiles. I started with a hand thermometer. That’s how I took the water temp back then. But, I have all the highly advanced electronics now, and that helps me find the new spots, right? New bottom contours that I think would be appropriate for a certain tide, where I think those big fish are moving. I had a 17-foot aluminum boat, and I went out without electronics. I guess I’m one of those old, curmudgeonly guys now.

The electronics are great, they’re excellent, but one thing they can’t do is teach you how to have an instinct or a “feel” for the ocean. They just get you to the spot. That’s only half the journey. You get to the spot, and it doesn’t look right. If you don’t have the right bird profile or things aren’t lining up, you’re not going to catch any fish. There’s still that element of jazz and collective improvisation: You’ve done it so much, you know how to improv. You know how to feel the water like feeling the music, right? And if it ain’t grooving, I’m moving. So, electronics are great, but you’ll never replace the “time on the water” knowledge a guide has harvested: the observations, the feel and smell of the ocean, the colors of water. If a spot’s happening, it’s probably going to happen, because it’s grooving, right?

Walk me through a bird profile. What does that look like?

We have all sorts of offshore seabirds here–seagulls, terns, shearwaters, storm petrels, and certain birds relate well with mako sharks. I would say your darker birds, like storm petrels, are a very good indication of mako activity. And that could be a mile off the beach. That could be 10 miles off the beach. It just depends on how they’re flying, or not flying, in the air column, right? If they’re way up high, if they’re on the water, how they’re sitting on the water. You have to look at all of these details. And honestly, that's part of the nuance of finding these fish. If you have a bird sitting a certain way in the water, on a current line, or fathom break, I can look at that and think, “Okay, this is probably going to happen…”

How do you think the birds and sharks are interacting?

I don’t know. I do know when I’m chumming makos and have petrels in the chumslick, the makos will come in and try to eat them. So, they may be a food item. They get more annoyed by seagulls, but when they see storm petrels, they want to grab them. A storm petrel is a fairly small bird, but also pretty crafty. So, they sense when makos are around. If they’re sitting on the water, then lift up, boom, and I know there’s a mako close.

Often, there are much more complex interactions happening. People who are just fishing are not forced to analyze that kind of stuff, right? They’re just there to catch and look for fish. As a guide, I’m looking at all the other stuff to lead me to fish. If it’s a bird profile or specific conditions, I need to know, because this is what I do for a living.

I have to do that every single day. Some random guy, headed down to a river, doesn’t give a shit about the birds. They just want to catch fish. They’re looking for fish, not the indications. Does that make sense? You’re connecting the dots, and that’s a lifelong pursuit, because the dots keep piling up. Shit, if it were easy I’d probably go play golf or something.

Talk a little bit about the gear you’ve been using and testing recently.

My gear has definitely evolved over the last several years, because the fish are getting bigger. When I first started doing this, a standard 12-to-14-weight (three-piece) fly rod was great with a standard saltwater reel. No problem, right? But with these larger fish, I had to figure out a tackle system where I could really put the heat on these fish, and have equipment that could handle 500-pound fish. There’s really no fly gear out there that does that. Even for the guys fishing marlin, you can get away with 14 and 16-weights. But not with these makos. So, I started making my own custom fly rods, and for the really big fish, I have a one piece. They’re either fiberglass or graphite fiberglass composite blanks I make up, with a custom fighting butt. 

A lot of the saltwater reels today are geared towards bigger fish. Mako makes an outstanding reel, the 9700, the Orvis Mirage is a great reel and the Hardy Fortuna Regent fly reel is also impressive. All those reel companies have upped their game in the last five years. These fish can run 40 miles an hour away from the boat. I’ve seen them burn up drags, where some brand new reel is completely useless after one fight. Everything has evolved, the tackle, reels, even my leader systems.

I’m using 10-to-12 foot custom leaders with a fuse box. It’s a 10-foot piece of 60-pound fluorocarbon with a very short piece of 30 or 40-pound monofilament tied into the end–about six inches long. Then from that fuse box leader, I tie in a two-foot piece of stainless steel wire that’s rated at about 120-pounds. The fuse box is instrumental when you’re dealing with these big fish, and you have to get out of the battle, because you can’t stop the fish. They’ll run all the fly line and backing off my reel. 500 yards, boom, gone. So, this allows me to grab the fly line and pop the leader.

I can run up on these fish, with really light tension, and get within 20 feet. That takes the pressure off the fish, so they stay up on the surface and kind of swim around and, honestly, they don’t even know they’re hooked. I’ll get to the top of the fluorocarbon leader, which is 12 feet away, and just break it off. Boom. It’s a leader fish, right? I touch the leader. I broke the fuse box, and the fish swims away. And I’m not dealing with these big fish around the boat.

I’m also using tube flies that I tie with very wide tubes–a lot like refrigerator tubing. So, when I break the leader off, the flies float up to the surface, and I can grab them. The fish swims away with a barbless hook and a two-foot piece of stainless steel leader in the corner of its mouth. Because the hook is barbless, they shake it out of their mouth or it rots away in a couple days.

The whole setup is basically a supersized version of standard saltwater fly fishing, which is pretty cool. Everything has really evolved, but there’s a danger factor now with these big fish. You have to be really careful. For example, you can’t fish the shark if it’s coming at the boat–you have to wait for the fish to turn away. Because if they hit the fly coming to the boat, they could jump in, and you don’t want a 500-pound shark landing in a 24-foot bay boat. When these big ones come in, people just say, “Holy shit, look at that thing. It’s like we’re getting hunted by a grizzly bear…”

Can you talk about the biggest fish you’ve engaged at the boat…

Three years ago–it was July 3rd, and we were out about six miles. It was kind of a foggy day, and the big fish were around. So, we set up our slick and the first mako shows up. It’s about 400-pounds. We’re looking at the first fish, then a second one shows up. It’s like 500. Then another one shows up and it’s bigger. We have three of these things circling the boat, and at the time, I’d never seen anything like that. And they wouldn’t hit the fly, because they were chasing each other around. The guys on the boat think it’s a pretty amazing spectacle, and I get up on my YETI cooler (on the stern), where I can stand up and spot. I’m looking out and watching these fish, then see another one that’s over 1,000 pounds that’s coming in. Now, we have four of these giant sharks around the boat.

The biggest one is probably 12-feet long–a giant female. The other ones start chasing her around, because I think they were males, and it must’ve been some sort of mating behavior. Eventually, the female got so pissed off, she came around and rammed the boat, on the starboard side, and knocked me off the goddamn cooler.

At this point, the guys in the front of the boat start freaking out, and these fish were getting really aggressive. I told everyone to sit down. A few seconds later, the big, thousand-pound female had my outboard motor’s anti-cavitation plate, the keel and the prop in her mouth and was swimming the boat in a 360° circle.

One of the guys pulls himself together and says, “I’ve gotta cast to one of these things.” I said, “Dude, you don’t want to do this.” But he was pretty persistent, so I tied two flies together to make a giant popper (about 12 inches long). The guy flops this thing out there, makes one strip and the giant female comes up and grabs the fly off the surface. It was like feeding a hopper to a big brown on a summer day. It was awesome.

I saw the line peeling off the reel and when she jumped, about 100 feet off the bow, it looked like Shamu the whale coming out of the water. The guy says, “You think I can get it?” and I said, “There’s zero chance.” And right then she broke the line. I’ll tell you this, I’ve had that happen quite frequently in the past four or five years, where you get a couple of these big ones around, they get really competitive and attack the boat. They come to the boat, because they think it’s a food item or it’s another shark competing for their spawning ground.

This is the only thing you’ll ever do in fly fishing where you are being hunted down. You are the prey.

Can you talk about your travel interests–where else do you find that mako energy? Is it even possible…

Obviously, I love to travel, but I’ve been so focused on this fishery in recent years. The older I become, the more jazzed I get about the fishing here and watching these big predators–it just gets me going. Like right now, I can walk out my front door, get on the water and start tracking big sharks. We saw our first mako two days ago and it was 500 pounds. So they’re here.

But, I go to the Yucatan every year. I go to the Punta Allen area and fish permit, snook, tarpon. I’m trying to think what would I really like to do?

I still love dry fly fishing for trout–on spring creeks and freestones. It’s just so opposite of what I do. It’s so peaceful. I don’t feel like I’m going to die. I’m not being hunted by rainbows rising to Blue-winged Olives, right? But yet, there’s something really cool about that. I love it. And my kids are really getting into fishing now, too. We went to Stanley, Idaho last summer and fished the Salmon River, the lower right out of town–right where I learned how to fly fish when I was a kid.

I think about the steelhead fishing up there as well. I could do more of that in the coming years. A goal of mine is to spend time in the Stanley Basin and catch a wild steelhead. For me, that would be a great story, to revisit these childhood places, and sludge through the steelhead process and vision–it’s cold, hard and the fish are hard to come by.

Many of us have had the great fortune to catch lots of fish and in faraway places and fish with great guides and learn so much. But I’m getting back to the “less is more” experiences. It could be going out to the local bluegill pond and throwing poppers and my kids are right next to me, watching the whole thing. The older you get, the less you really want to be around people. That’s the other thing: I like the silence. I like the solitude and being away from people, and removing the static and noise. That’s why I love the ocean so much.

I’m seeking out those quiet places, where I can hear my own voice, right? Or the voice of the river or ocean, without somebody in my ear yakking away, or some music blaring, or the guerilla traffic, or whatever political bullshit someone’s hung up on, you know?

In a way, you’re revisiting these childhood moments. I was talking to my son about this yesterday. As you get older, you revisit the moments when you were a child, those moments that built your foundation, right? That inspired you to be where you are today. And oftentimes you lose that over the course of a few years, but you always come back. That’s where I am now. I want to go back to where my foundation was built. I want to go back to Stanley, Idaho. I want to go back to fishing bluegill on the local pond. During the “between years,” I was traveling the world, but it’s not about that anymore. Now, I’m living vicariously through my children, developing them as great outdoorsmen and watching them get stoked on catching a fish, or just going out in nature.

I often have clients on my boat ask me, “Why don’t you ever fish?” And I say, “Well, I’m the guide, I don’t fish.” I get stoked when I watch you, the client, hook into this great great fish. That’s where I get my energy, because I’ve been there, you know? I’ve caught these things. Honestly, I don’t want to hook another one. It’s too much goddamn work. I want to see you experience that connection with these great creatures. And then we can release them and maybe come back next year and do it again.

You talk a lot about people’s “energy” when they’re fishing–is this a physical concept, or more about faith?

I remember as a kid fishing with my dad and he was smoking his pipe, looking like Ernest Hemingway, and we might have caught a fish. I can’t remember. But it was the hope that we were going to catch a fish. There was something at the end of that line that I didn’t know was there, but I had faith that it was going to show up, right? When we go out and explore these places, we’re hoping, we’re wishing, we have the faith that something’s going to happen, whether it’s a trout or mako shark. You’re going into these areas, that might be right out your back door, but maybe nobody’s even been there before.

It’s all about energy.

Growing up in Southern California, surfing is a big thing that I grew up with. When you watch the guys who catch the biggest waves, they aren’t the ones paddling around all day, trying to catch waves. They sit in one spot and wait for that wave to come to them. That’s the biggest part of it. You have to believe. You have to let it come to you. And it’s the same in fishing. You have to develop faith. You have to let it happen organically and ignore your instincts to force it.

And that’s what I find in mako fishing–you just sit and wait and wait and wait. And if you have faith, they will show up. And you know what? Most of the time, that’s what happens.

I have the shittiest days on the boat when I’ve got some guy whose energy sucks. You set up the slick and five minutes later, “Hey, when are the fish going to get here?” Well, I don’t know. They’ll get here when they get here. Ten minutes later, “I don’t see a fish yet?” Yeah, I don’t either. Just be patient. But that guy drives you crazy, because he’s not not letting the world happen the way it should. The experience will happen. It will tell you.

You have to let these fish come to you. You can’t chase them down. You might think this is all hippie dippy bullshit, but it’s not. This is true. This is how you find big fish.

It’s the old-school western river guide concept: The river will tell you. It’s not your job to sling lead and bobbers and thrash the shit out of the river. Anyone can do that. It’s more about learning the rhythms of the river. In that 15 or 18-mile float, there’s going to be this window at some point during the day where the bugs and weather and fish all come together, and that’s the fleeting aspect of it, right? You have to be patient and work your way through the unproductive miles. But that window is going to happen. The lightning round…

Right, exactly.

Don’t burn yourself out at 11am, because the lightning round might come at 5pm, and now you’re four beers in and tired and can’t focus. That’s when your two-footer is coming and you’re not even mentally and physically prepared for when that happens.

And that’s the problem with today, too. People need so much immediate gratification. They’re not willing to put in the time. They require this validation through their phones or Instagram that doesn’t have anything to do with the game of fishing. We’re out there hunting, not looking at people hunting, right? It also sets up really unrealistic expectations. Number one, that this is easy–it’s not. And number two, the size of their expectations is completely out of proportion to reality. You don’t have a clue how to catch that fish on your phone. Where’s the journey to that fish, right?

The journey should be a building block in their lives, something to always hold close to your heart, something you can pass on. The journey is about getting out there and connecting and getting away from the noise. A place where you can be comfortable in silence and hear the voice that drives you.

As parents, we have to deal with all of this technology. Honestly, how many times a day do I want to throw this goddamn phone away? But I can’t, right? Because it’s part of our lives. I’m connected to my kids. I’m connected to my wife. But it’s such a complete distraction. I think any time that we can get with our kids without this technology, whether it’s 20 minutes on a river, or five hours, that’s important. And they’ll remember that.

How do we end this? How far back are you headed?

I’m going all the way back, baby. No electronics. The 17-foot aluminum boat with a fiberglass rod.

Like Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea…

I like that. We’re all just swimming upstream, trying to find that nice cool pocket water, so we can set up shop and breathe.

Resources:

Tideline: Conway Bowman

Conway Bowman Guides & Outfitters

Mill House Podcast: CB

Mako Salwater Reels

Orvis Mirage Reels

Hardy Fortuna Regent Fly Reels