Month: February 2018

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TroutFest!

Friday night we went to the Johnson Reagan Richards dinner for the Harris County Democratic Party.  I hadn’t been in a few years. I’ve also been to the Lincoln Reagan Dinner for the Harris County Republican Party.  At the Lincoln Reagan dinner the speakers stand on the stage and toss red meat to the ravenous.  At the Johnson Rayburn Richards dinner, the speakers mostly  talk about how the winds of change are a’comin’ to Texas. They’ve been saying the same thing for years. Nancy Pelosi was the keynote speaker.  I don’t know what kind of a Speaker she’ll make if she again gets the chance, but she’s a remarkably boring and rambling dinner speaker. Kris said she looked good though.

Saturday we drove to New Braunfels. Guadalupe River Trout Unlimited was holding its (our? I’m not a very good joiner, but I am a member) annual troutfest. There were casting instructors but I don’t know where they were instructing.   There were celebrity speakers, but I didn’t see any of them. Nancy Pelosi wasn’t one of them, which was just as well.  Mostly there were a lot of pick-ups parked in a field, some small tents, and a big tent.

We walked about for a bit.  I tried to buy a sweater from Bayou City Angler because it was cold and Kris had appropriated mine.  It might have  been too ironic to drive three hours  to the Guadalupe to buy something from Bayou City Angler,  because they lost their computer link and couldn’t sell anything. I realized later that I could have come by the shop in a day or two and paid, but none of us were thinking that way.

 

I have been to some other trade shows, not a lot but some.  They are all a bit alike I guess. I don’t want to randomly stop and pick stuff up. I did once.  I went through and collected a bunch of Koozies for the boat, but Kris thought it was a joke and threw them away. Yesterday Kris bought a line at the Tenkara USA booth.  I picked up fliers from guide services: Wisconsin, Alaska, New Mexico, Montana. We watched other people, men mostly, mill about.

There were lots of men with beards. Then we went fishing.  We were in a hurry because we had to be back for another dinner last night, but we fished for a couple of hours. I was using a bead egg with a dropper, and hooked a nice fish, but it came off the hook. This was not the fish:

It was only a fish in a tank at TroutFest. I still haven’t caught a Guadalupe trout.

Today we went late to Galveston to take out the boat.  Galveston looked like this:

The photo is a bit hazy, but that’s because everything was a bit hazy.  That’s looking across the street at fog obscuring the Gulf of Mexico. The. Gulf. Is. Gone. We only fish on the bay side of the Island, not the Gulf side, so we hung out at Benno’s eating shrimp po’boys until it cleared enough for us to take out the boat.  I wade fished behind Pelican Island, then we ran down into West Galveston Bay and I poled Kris through what might or might not have been Starvation Cove. The wind was at least 15 knots, and there wasn’t enough water in the bay to get into places, but the water was reasonably clear and it was the first time in a month we’d been able to run the boat.  This winter has been nothing but rain and wind and cold.

 

 

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Florida Canals

The highest point in Florida is Britton Hill at 345 feet above sea level, way up in Walton County in the Panhandle.  The average elevation in Houston is 80 feet above sea level, so 345 feet is pretty high. I suspect I’d have to worry about altitude sickness. Florida’s mean elevation is 100 feet.  The low point is the Atlantic Ocean which is, oddly enough, at sea level.

What that means–and I know this from recent experience with our own Hurricane Harvey–when it rains in Florida the water doesn’t necessarily drain. It sits. If it rains fast enough (and in Florida sometimes I’m guessing it rains fast enough) it piles up. To get stuff to drain you have to spend a lot of money on drainage improvements.  I bet in Denver they don’t have to spend a lot of money on drainage improvements. We do here in Houston. I bet they do in Florida.

So there is the South Florida Water Management District.  It oversees 2100 miles of freshwater and brackish canals in south Florida.  Then there are secondary canals run by cities and counties and water control districts. In South Florida there are a lot of canals that exist to move water in flat land where water don’t move.

In 1984 florida introduced peacock bass into the southern canals, both to create a game fishery and to add an aggressive fish that could control the other weird fish, and there’s some weird fish. According to the internet there are

Peacock Bass (photo from Wikipedia), baby tarpon, largemouth bass, grass carp, tilapia, snook,

oscars (from Wikipedia), jaguar guapote, Mayan cichlid, black acacia, clown knife fish,

snakehead (from Wikipedia). I have heard estimates that as many as 80 species live in the canals. Folk have to dump their aquariums somewhere.

Snakehead make excellent eating, but it may be an urban myth that you can’t catch and release.

It is somewhat of a thing in Florida to traipse or kayak along the canals to fly fish for exotics. In July Kris and I saw a presentation at Texas Flyfishers of Houston (which is sort of like the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, or the Texas Rangers of Arlington), by Jim Gray of the Austin Fly Fishers, on fishing the canals.  We walked out not intrigued so much as disgusted.  These were some ugly fish.

People fish these canals like I fish for black bass, with 6-8 weights and streamers, and I thought that maybe next week in West Palm we would look for a canal to fish. I chickened out and hired a guide.  I still thought maybe we would squeeze in an hour or so, and I asked the guide about them.  “Fire ants” he said, “moccasins” he said. “Be careful.”

Now honestly, I’ve been bit enough by fire ants to know their misery and its limits, and I have just as good a chance of moccasins hereabouts as I might have in Florida. Still, they’re ugly fish. We’re fishing salt water.

 

 

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Valentinekara

So my Valentines Day present was in my office chair when I got home last night. We were never much good at deferral. Kris gave me a Tenkara rod. I went ahead and gave her her present. I gave her a Tenkara rod. I think there was a little bit of Gift of the Magi business going on: She had decided that if I wanted a long rod for nymphing, I should try a Tenkara.  I kept finding Tenkara YouTube videos cued up on my office computer, so I decided she must want a Tenkara rod.  She got a TFO from Gordy & Sons, I got a Tenkara USA from Orvis. I’m sure there’s a big difference.

In the meantime we’re preparing for Florida and spring training, a bit more than a week away.  Usually I read a baseball book for spring training.  This year I’m rewatching the World Series games that the Astros won.  There were four of them.  Four out of seven.

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More Guadalupe River

There was a point on the Guadalupe yesterday when for a moment the sun shone and I thought we’d be able to see fish. We hadn’t caught anything, and I’d fished hard.  I’d fished up from Gypsy Camp about a quarter mile. When the sun shone we’d already moved further north to Rocky Beach, where I’d hooked the nice trout a few weeks before.

But the sun didn’t stay out.  The wind shifted to the north, and 15 minutes later the sky clouded again, and the temperature dropped 10 degrees into the low 50s. We weren’t dressed for it, but that sort of summed up the day.  I’d fished two nymphs, a pheasant tail and a copper john, and I’d added and then deleted both a  girdle bug and a wiggly worm as an attractor.  I’d added weight, I’d taken off weight.  I’d tangled. When the guide in the boat passed me I was fishing an Air-Lock strike indicator over a Feather-Craft Czech Nymphing indicator that I’d several times greased with gink over a tippet ring over the nymphs. I hadn’t fished that much hardware since 40-odd years before when I’d stopped fishing bait. The guide said they’d had their luck with eggs, so  I dug through my vest and found a single bright orange egg, my one and only egg, and threw it into the mix.  I still didn’t catch anything.

Earlier, driving down River Road to Gypsy Camp, we had passed a younger group of anglers–which for us includes anyone younger than 50. There was a tall young woman, maybe 5’8″, very trim, who looked like a Vogue wader model. She really could have worn waders on a runway. It was the most remarkable thing, so we remarked on it, and laughed at her good fortune and our more human fortune. When Kris took off her waders late in the day they had sprung a leak, which is probably a death knell for the waders. I hope that girl not only looks good in waders, but that her waders never spring a leak.

A tall and trim Kris bird fishing.

We stopped at Reel Fly Fishing Adventures in Sattler and there was a pair of Reddington women’s waders on sale. I asked Kris if that was what the young woman was wearing, and Kris said they would almost certainly make her, Kris,  taller and thinner.  They sold us some Trout Beads and some Trout Bead Peggz and some Trout Bead hooks–like I need hooks–and a box to put them in.  Next time I will catch fish on Trout Beads, but unless we go back for those waders Kris will be no taller. The store clerk did make me feel better.  He said no one was catching anything.  I didn’t tell him we never catch anything.

I’ve heard that eggs work well in the Guadalupe because the fish are brought from Missouri to Texas in the Winter, and when they get to Texas the rainbows think it must be spring and start to spawn.  It doesn’t work, but I’ve seen a pair of rainbows wrestling down the river, and I guess that’s what I’m seeing. They drop a lot of unsuccessful eggs. That may not be why the eggs work, but it’s a good story.

Good news? We stopped at Luling City Market on the way in and got early barbecue.

Along with the Capitol rotunda and the inside of the Astrodome, the pit room at Luling City Market is one of the best-known rooms in Texas.  I had a rib for second breakfast, and then later on the river had fatty brisket and banana pudding for lunch. Healthy choices.

Being Saturday morning, Naegelin’s Bakery in New Braunfels was also open. The young man touching up the mural told me that Ferdinand Lindheimer had gotten in trouble with the locals for accusing them of being too interested in bars and too indifferent to hard work. I guess others have accused a group of German farmers of being insufficiently industrious, but I wouldn’t guess it was common.

Naegelin’s has been around since 1868, and I thought the woman at the counter needed to hear my story about how my parents had brought me there from West Texas when I was 10 or thereabouts and how it was the first time I remembered seeing bread that wasn’t white.  She said they heard stories like that all the time, which was either deflating or validating.

We also had a discussion about Naegelin’s kolaches, which I didn’t remember and which were more like a biscuit with a topping.  It was good to see a kolache which was different, but I guess I wasn’t surprised that a great German bakery would make a peculiar Czech pastry.

Third breakfast.