Month: April 2018

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Tenkara-san

Kris gave me a Tenkara Sato outfit from Orvis for Valentines Day.  I gave her more or less the same thing, a Temple Fork Outfitters SH 11’6”. She tried hers on the Guadalupe but didn’t catch anything. I tried mine for the first time Sunday, fishing along the banks at one of Damon’s 7 Lakes for sunfish.  I only had about an hour, and kept meaning to switch to a popper but never did. I didn’t see many sunfish, but I caught one small bluegill and three smallish bass.

It took me a while to set up the rod and line, and my set up was . . . creative. Ignoring the instructions I tied some perfection loops and stuck things together. It was close enough to the picture, with the line that came off the rod dangling off the rod tip and a bit of standard leader attached to that. The booklet informed me that Tenkara was fly fishing, not dapping or cane rod fishing. From what I could tell it was about as much like dapping or cane rod fishing as it was like fly fishing, but I fished with a Damon’s owner’s favorite fly, a BBB. “BBB” stands for something, of which “bitchin” and “bream” are part, but I never have had it straight. They’re pretty easy to tie though, and they catch fish.

For me the 10’ rod had a range of 10-15 feet from the rod tip, plus or minus, but it was easy to cast and reasonably accurate.  Tenkara rods don’t lend themselves to long stillwater retrieves, but in a way they’re perfect for spring bass and bream in shallow water.  Every fish I caught hit while the fly was sinking through the water column, not while it was moving.  Toss, wait, toss again, wait. it’s intimate, visual, almost as good as dapping: all but the sunfish was caught when I set the hook after watching the fish take. If I hadn’t just  blundered down the bank not paying much attention, if I’d used just a modicum of stealth, I probably could have done much better, and caught more fish. Of course if I’d switched to a popper I might have caught more fish.

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Dave Robicheaux: Sex, Drugs, and Other Such

“Louisiana is a fresh-air mental asylum.”
James Lee Burke, Pegasus Descending

I’ve been listening to James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux novels. Other than Ann Rice ( who I find unreadable), they’re perhaps the most popular novels out of Louisiana. I read most of the novels the first time spaced over the years as they were published, but I’ve been listening to them in bunches. In bunches they’re relentless.

Burke was born in Houston, and still has ties here.  I went into Orvis once to buy something, tippet or leaders probably, and the young woman behind the counter had a name tag, Alafair. I told her I was reading a novel with a character named Alafair and she said that it was a grandmother’s name and that Burke was her great uncle. Even before Orvis I had linked Burke with fly fishing; I started reading Burke after a local bookshop, Murder by the Book, recommended  Black Cherry Blues as reading material for a fly fishing trip to Idaho, and Burke’s main characters, Robicheaux and Cletus Purcell, fly fish. In Black Cherry Blues a serial killer runs over Purcell’s fly rod with a car. Dang. They’re violent books.

There was another young woman in law school with me who I also think of when I think of Burke.  I didn’t know her, and never talked to her, but she was noticeable: petite, pretty, dark honey skin and lighter honey hair, and well-dressed for a student. Rich looking I guess. I remember a conversation about her once with other law students. Someone said her family was New Orleans’ mafia and to stay away. As far as I could tell most everyone did stay away. I’m sure there’s plenty of organized crime in Houston, but somehow New Orleans’ mafia just had that special ring.

Burke captures that special ring, that special Louisiana familiarity with prostitution, poverty, violence, drugs, alcoholism, murder, racism, gambling, corporate and environmental greed, and general depravity.  Laissez les bons temps rouler. Before there was Las Vegas there was New Orleans. Before there was online porn there was Storyville and Bourbon Street.

Mostly nothing good ever happens in a James Lee Burke novel. Made guys bring crime into Iberia Parish day-in, day-out, and then for the weekend Roubicheaux visits  New Orleans for some real violence. Wives get executed when the mob hit misses the hero.  Victims of childhood abuse nail their hands to the backyard gazebo.  The hero’s sidekick drinks Scotch in his milk and regularly goes off the rails.  Gun bulls rape the inmates, oil wells blow, Justice is not just. The only time that violence isn’t a breath away, the only time there’s anything like peace, is when Roubicheaux is in the natural world, watching gar turning in bayou currents under the green canopy of the Louisiana coast. The books ring true, unrelenting as they are, because we are certain that New Orleans’ mafioso and corrupt politicians and violence are the stuff of Louisiana. And it’s true. Louisiana routinely has the highest murder rate in the nation, more than twice that of Texas, which is not a place known for peaceful coexistence.

There are plenty of causes for Louisiana crime. U.S. News & World Report seems now to be mostly a publisher of lists: best of this, worst of that.  It ranks states, and of the 50 states Louisiana ranked last. I don’t know how they come up with their list, but they try to measure different weighted factors that are supposed to matter to people: health care, education, economy, infrastructure, crime and corrections . . . Health care? 47. Education? 49. Its highest ranking, 42, is for quality of life. You have someplace where everything else is bad, It makes sense crime is bad. Or maybe it’s just always been that way.

It does have good fishing though, and gumbo.

 

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Snoods and tippets

George Washington’s pocket fishing box

Nothing is more confusing than leaders and tippet. If you set out one morning to make fly fishing arcane, you couldn’t invent something better than tippet.  There’s the whole stupid system of nomenclature, 5x, 6x, 0x. Who calls something 0x? And then you get saltwater with a completely different poundage nomenclature and its own wacky world.  Wouldn’t it make sense that if you were going to catch a 200-pound fish, you’d need a 200-pound leader? But of course you don’t. You use a 20-pound class tippet attached to something called a bite tippet that’s 60 pounds and can’t be longer than 12 inches or some such to qualify. Or something. Unless of course you’re using wire because the thing has teeth.

The leader attaches to the end of the fly line (which is the part of the line that looks like the line in a weed whacker). You add tippet, which is just more leader really, to the end of the leader to make the leader last longer. The fly ties to the tippet. It’s the least obvious thing in the world.  When I bought my first fly rod at Gibson’s Discount Center circa 1970 I pulled off some monofilament from my spinning rod and tied it to the end of my fly line, probably with a square knot.  Nothing wrong with that, except of course it’s not right.  I’m just lucky it didn’t explode.

Since October I’ve lost four good fish on broken leaders or tippet: two nice trout, two bass, and a permit.  A permit.  The second permit I’d hooked and lost in two days. The first flipped off the hook, but it was the second that hurt. My permit.  The only good thing was that for the permit at least the guide thought the leader was cut, not snapped.

Back when I abandoned the square knot and tried to figure out leaders–trout leaders–I started tying my own progressive leaders. There’s a joke there about Democrats. I learned a lot of knots, I learned a lot about how leaders are built. I also learned that most guides hate knotted leaders, and at his first chance the guide would pull off my carefully built leader and replace it with the store-bought kind. I think they all figured my kind of magnificent casting must be blamed on something, and the knotted leaders were the first thing to hand.

Like fly lines, leaders were originally built from lengths of braided horsehair (called snoods). There are still guys out there who make horsehair lines and leaders.  Progress was made when somebody started making leaders out of the silk gland of silk worms, called silk gut. We’ve made a lot more progress, but I’m sorry we don’t still call stuff snoods.

Trotline with Snoods, from Wikipedia Commons

For bass and sunfish I use nylon leaders and tippet. At least theoretically nylon’s cheaper, bass and sunfish aren’t leader shy, and in a perfect world I need some nylon for trout dry flies, because nylon floats on the surface and fluorocarbon breaks the surface film.  The problem with nylon is that it rots faster than fluoro, and that $7 spool of tippet gets expensive fast when I have to replace it every year. The only way I can tell it’s rotten before I lose a fish is because it breaks easy barehanded. I lost both bass on 3X nylon tied to poppers. The 3X was rotten. It wasn’t that old, really, but I’m convinced the stuff doesn’t stay strong for more than a year, so now when I buy new leaders and tippet I mark the envelope or the spool with the month and year I bought it.

At least theoretically I mark the spool with the month and year I bought it.  Usually I look at the spool at the store and think I need to mark the spool with the month and year I bought it.

For nymphs and streamers I use fluorocarbon. It’s stronger for the same diameter and theoretically there’s less breakage from abrasion. It’s problem is that it sinks, but that’s not a problem for nymphs or streamers. I use fluoro for saltwater for the same reasons.  It may rot too, but slower than nylon. I lost both trout on 4X and 5X fluorocarbon leaders and tippet. One broke at the tippet ring, and the other at a knot.  I think the tippet was rotten, and the fish was well played, and the knot was well tied. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

I don’t tie my own freshwater leaders any more. I buy 7.5’ 0X leaders for bass and 3X for sunfish and trout. From that base I can build whatever I need. The guys at the fly shop advised me to never fish bass with anything less than 12 lb tippet or leaders.  That’s about 0X, but I still use mostly 2X. It’s all simple really, and I don’t know why anyone would accuse fly fishing of being arcane.

I just wish instead of tippet I was buying snoods.

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Four New Orleans’ Statues: Battle of Liberty Place Monument

Dorothea Lange, Farm Security Administration, LC-USF34- 009389-E [P&P] LOT 1680, July 1936, New Orleans

Getting ready for our quick trip to New Orleans, sometimes I read about Louisiana and wonder what the hell were those people thinking.  Sometimes I think they’re just like the rest of us only more so.  Unfortunately with the Battle of Liberty Place and its monument I’m pretty sure I know what they were thinking, and I’m pretty sure they’re like the rest of us at our worst.

Early in the Civil War New Orleans was a Union target, and Union forces captured the city in April 1862. It remained occupied by federal troops until April 1877, the end of Reconstruction. Before they were dismantled by the Supreme Court, Congress enacted a series of forward-looking civil rights laws to protect and enfranchise former slaves, but after Grant’s presidency, the country’s leadership was too tired or indifferent or hostile to be bothered, and violence to control race relations became a marker of the Post-Reconstruction South. Louisiana did its part.

The Battle of Liberty Place wasn’t the only Louisiana violence (and Louisiana wasn’t the only location where violence became commonplace). In 1866, at the Republican Party Convention in New Orleans, police fired into the crowd killing 34 blacks and 3 whites. In 1868 in Opelousas, St. Landry Parish, an unknown number of blacks were killed after a confrontation between black Republicans and members of the Knights of the White Camelia. In 1873, in Colfax in Grant Parish on an Easter Sunday approximately 150 black men were murdered by white Democrats in the worst instance of racial violence during Reconstruction. Racial violence didn’t end with Reconstruction. Louis Armstrong remembered hiding in his home as a child because white gangs roamed black neighborhoods after the black boxer Jack Johnson defeated the white boxer Jim Jeffries in 1910. In 1900, Robert Charles murdered a white policeman, and then shot an additional 27 whites, with seven deaths. The resulting white riots resulted in 28 deaths and more than 50 casualties, mostly among blacks.

The Liberty Square riot saw 8,400 members of the Democratic White League attacking approximately 4,000 mainly white Metropolitan Police and mainly black state militia (commanded by former Confederate General James Longstreet who was shot trying to stop the riot) over, more or less, a disputed gubernatorial election between Democrat John McEnery (supported by the White League) and Republican William Pitt Kellogg. Eleven police and militia and 21 members of the White League were killed. After three days federal troops arrived and quelled the riot, but it signaled the end of Reconstruction.

Wikimedia Commons, Battle of Liberty Place, Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 1874

When it comes to Louisiana race violence, two numbers are particularly telling. Largely as a result of violations of racial . . . etiquette, whites lynched 335 blacks between the end of Reconstruction and 1968 (though most lynchings occurred before 1940). Texas had more by the way, 352, and neither state could hold a candle to Georgia, 492, or Mississippi, 539. Lynchings didn’t result in the prosecution of the instigators. At the same time, the number of African American voters declined from a bit more than half of the state’s registered voters in 1880, 88,024 voters out of 173,475, to 1,342 in 1904. The decline was caused largely through laws restricting the rights of African Americans to vote and out-and-out violence. How can anyone wonder why African Americans still see voter ID laws as racist, or that the apparently institutional police violence that spawned Black Lives Matters resonates still? The Civil War was our most violent moment, and we still carry around that violence.

Wikimedia Commons, Michael Begley, Battle of Liberty Place Monument

The Battle of Liberty Place Monument was erected in 1891 by the New Orleans city government. It was removed in 2017. In 1974, the New Orleans City government erected an adjacent marker that stated “Although the ‘battle of Liberty Place’ and this monument are important parts of the New Orleans history, the sentiments in favor of white supremacy expressed thereon are contrary to the philosophy and beliefs of present-day New Orleans.” I like that. I like that New Orleans realized that there was a problem with the Battle of Liberty Place Monument 40-odd years ago.

The world changes, and I think, other than the whole global warming thing and fake news, it’s mostly a better place. Last Saturday Kris and I drove down to Freeport and walked the jetty. We were the only folk carrying fly rods, but since it’s hard to cast off a jetty in high wind they were mostly useless. After 20 or 30 casts I didn’t lose a fly in the jetty granite, but I didn’t catch anything either.  On the other hand it’s a terrific walk through a diverse and lively America. And the Liberty Place monument is gone.

Meanwhile we found a great breakfast taco stand in Angleton, Taco Loco #2.

I don’t know where Taco Loco #1 is located.  We also found a good bakery in Angleton, the Paris Texas Bakery, on the way back to Houston, almost directly across the street from Taco Loco.  The staff was well prepared for Easter.