Hammerhead Flats — a Bimini flats fishing game

How it is played

You are on the poling platform of a skiff on a Bimini flat. Fish cross in front of you. Tap the water ahead of one — lead it, the way you actually would: the seed's own description of how a bonefish is caught says the angler castsroughly 5 ft ahead of the fish. Drop the fly on its head instead and it bolts, and so does everything near it.

Once a fish eats, hold to reel. Reel too hard and the leader parts; reel too gently and the hammerhead gets there first. The shark is the clock, and you can watch it come across the sand — there is no abstract timer anywhere in this game.

Keyboard: arrows move the aiming cross, Space casts and then holds the reel, Enter plays a guided cast that puts the fly on the perfect lead for the nearest fish. Guided casts count for the board exactly the same.

The three tide windows

Game rules, not fish science: the three windows are a clock. They are not a tide prediction, they are not tied to a tide station, and nothing on this page is a Bimini tide. What they do is decide how bold the shark is allowed to be, and it escalates:

1. Making tide. It picks the fly off the water before anything eats it. Cheap and annoying.
2. Falling tide. It comes for fish that are already on your line.
3. Low water. There is nowhere left for it to go, so it bumps the hull — stay on your feet or you are swimming.

The premise is not arbitrary: great hammerhead season runs roughly january–april at Bimini, which is why the island has a shark research station and a dive industry built on them.A hammerhead taking a hooked fish off a flats angler's line is the premise of this game and is written as one; we are not citing a study for it.

What is real

Real: the roster. The three fish that cross this flat are exactly the species the directory files as flats fish, and each one carries its own published size envelope and its own IGFA all-tackle world record. Every fish you land is measured against that record as a percentage, and the record is read out of the data, never typed into this page.

The one that matters most here: the all-tackle world record bonefish is 16 lb, caught in 1971 at Bimini, Bahamas (approx. 300 yards from the Big Game Club) by Jerry Lavenstein, guided by Ansil Saunders. It has stood for over fifty years and it was set here. Landing anything near it in this game should feel like something, and it is deliberately rare.

Real: Permit are considered among the hardest sight-fishing targets due to extreme wariness. That is why the permit's window in this game is the narrowest of the three and why it spooks off the most water.

A dice roll: the individual fish. Its length is drawn inside the species' own published envelope and its weight comes off a curve that passes exactly through every published anchor — so the numbers are plausible for the species, but no particular fish in this game is a real one.

Game rules, not fish science: the lead windows, the spook radii, how fast the leader parts, how fast the shark closes, and the boat bump. They are tuned so each species plays the way its own technique text describes it behaving. They are not measurements of fish and they are printed nowhere as facts.

Everything here is released

Since January 9, 2017, Bahamian law (Fisheries Resources (Jurisdiction and Conservation)(Flats Fishing) Regulations, 2017) makes bonefish catch-and-release only on the flats, bans commercial harvest there, and requires an angler license for anyone fishing for bonefish, permit, tarpon, cobia, or snook on the flats.

Which is why the score on this page is a weighed-and-released total and not a bag. A game about this fishery that scored you on a bag would be teaching the wrong thing.

What it costs, and what it keeps

This page is prerendered. It queries no database, calls no API, and makes no network request while you play. It stores nothing: no score leaves the tab, there is no leaderboard, and closing the page is the end of the session.

Read the real thing

BonefishPermitTarponSeasons, guides and chartersWhy this island fishes the way it does

Bimini, computed in your browser from your own clock.