Friday we fished the San Marcos River with Chris Adams of Go Outside Expeditions.  We’d fished on the San Marcos with Chris before, and there are few things as pleasant as repeating a river with a guide you like. Chris had a new raft, which was great, and his wife made cookies which were also great,  and we fished from 7:30 or so until almost 5, with Kris the client spending a good two hours trying to re-think Chris the guide’s business plan.  Meantime I added to my sunfish collection.

There was a nice redbreast, the most notable feature of which is that weird long opercle flap–the ear.  I also caught a long-ear, which is more boldly named but which runs a poor second to the redbreast in the long-ears competition.

Kris caught the pretty Guadalupe-largemouth hybrid in the top picture and a warmouth and some largemouths and some other stuff.  I got a nice river largemouth.

Mostly we were fishing poppers and streamers with 6 weights, and we switched flies a lot during the part of the day when things were slow.

I noticed that the river fish aren’t as dark as the pond fish I usually catch.  They seem almost translucent, less brightly colored, and better matched to the shades of the river than the fish in weedier ponds. As long as it’s not time to spawn the fish match the place.

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We go to Tampa at the end of the week to fish with Court Douthit, and I’ve had a lot of conversations in Houston about Tampa. It seems that everyone but me visits Tampa or came from Tampa, and a lot of the people I talked to have fished Tampa Bay for tarpon.

In the elevator a colleague told me that she went to St Petersburg for a deposition, and thatshe had to cross the Howard Frankland Bridge. Halfway across with no other traffic she had a memorable anxiety attack. Duly warned.

At Gordy & Sons, I was buying a big game sinking line and got into a conversation with an employee and another customer. The customer said he’d fished Tampa a lot, that the bait fishermen gather to catch tarpon on their way into the bay at the Howard Frankland Bridge, and that the boat bloom was not to be missed. “You should get your guide to take you there just to see it.” The same thing happens up and down the west coast of Florida, famously at Boca Grande for abundance of tarpon and Homosassa for the size of the tarpon. The customer told me that the boats were so crowded that the guides carried knives, big knives, to slash tangled lines. I could picture guides in center consoles slashing away with sabers.

Last Thursday a client showed me his picture of a 70-pound tarpon caught in Tampa the weekend before.  We were in a medium-sized banquet room, about the size of a basketball court, and he said that in a space the size of that room there would be 100 boats. He said they were fishing 60 feet deep with crab, and that the guides were so used to the press that a path opened for his boat to follow the tarpon’s run.

I’ve been reading Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s River of Grass, and because of the conversations and the reading it finally struck me that I was missing something important.  Douglas is a lyrical writer. She describes the Rock, the limestone spine that gives Florida shape and substance, the concave shape of which creates the Everglades, and which plays out as the Keys in its final submersion. It struck me that because it shapes Florida the rock also shapes the tarpon migration up the western coast. Like I said, Douglas is pretty lyrical, and maybe I let too much rub off.

The tarpon migration, not the limestone migration, follows the Gulf Coast from the Keys as far as New Orleans. For marine biologists the number of tarpon that migrate and why they migrate, including their inshore excursions, is one of the grand mysteries. It’s probably all the usual fishy reasons: Sex and food and protection. They spawn offshore so inshore would only be a staging point for spawning, but there’s certainly food inshore.  Maybe they come in because from larvae they’re hardwired to move offshore to inshore, inshore to offshore. It’s some kind of vestigial biological instinct that plays no real purpose. Maybe.

In the 1880s anglers figured out that tarpon migrate and could be caught with light tackle at the openings of the bays, so the anglers began show up in numbers to match the tarpon. Maybe we’re as hard-wired to follow game migrations, whether woolly mammoths or salmon or tarpon, as tarpon larvae are to move inshore. Maybe the angler migration is as much a vestigial instinct as the tarpon migration.

Postcard, Tarpon Inn, Port Aransas, Texas, 1911-1924, The University of Houston Digital Library, from Wikipedia

It also struck me that I hadn’t connected Marjory Stoneman Douglas with  Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where the mass shooting occurred on Valentines.  She doesn’t deserve that connection, but no one does.

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Bakeries, which in my worldview includes donut shops, are necessary to fishing, and on our way to fish with Chris from where we were staying in San Antonio we stopped at Mi Tierra’s panaderia for breakfast.  Of course what we really wanted was to have the huevos rancheros at Mi Tierra: there’s no better bacon or coffee or wait staff anywhere, but we were running late. It was doubly disappointing.  There was no pan dulce that early, only empanadas, and they were only ok.

Earlier this year driving from Houston it struck me that every donut shop on the way to the Guadalupe River seemed to have a Buddhist shrine.

There’s a large Vietnamese population in Houston, and I figured the donut shops must be Vietnamese.  Turns out no.  Cambodian.

At the Foodways Texas symposium in April there was a panel on Cambodian donut shops moderated by Rob Walsh, with David Buehrer, Houston’s hippest coffee guy, filmmaker Keely Steenson (who showed her film on Cambodian donut shops), and Samoeurn Phan, a shop owner. Turns out that most donut shops in Southeast Texas are Cambodian-immigrant owned. These aren’t hip donuts, they’re not cutting-edge donuts, and they’re not authentic kolaches (because every Texas donut shop has to have a kolache which is a sausage roll which is not actually a kolache). They’re working class cheap donuts. Joy Donuts. Snowflake Donuts. LeDonut (where I go for the boudin kolaches, which are also not technically kolaches but which are delicious).

It’s no accident, and it’s all in the business plan. A Cambodian donut entrepreneur builds out the shop then finances its purchase by a Cambodian family, as often as not relatives of the entrepreneur. There’s no bank, because no bank would finance the venture, and it’s a family affair. Mom’s in the front at the counter, dad’s at the back turning out donuts.  It’s a hard way to make a living, but it’s a way to make a living.

Steenson has a film on Cambodian donut shops which was shown at the symposium and which I hope will someday make it to the internet.  Buehrer, the hip coffee guy, had worked at Phan’s donut shop in high school. That, he said, is where he learned about customer service. And kolache. So a hip Anglo coffee entrepreneur learned about an old-fashioned Czech pastry from Cambodian donut entrepreneurs in the Houston suburbs. That’s kind of the way Houston works.