Month: June 2018

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Tarpon Parties, Tarpon Sex

Hornaday, William Temple, The American natural history : a foundation of useful knowledge of the higher animals of North America, Vol IV, Reptiles, Amphibians, and Fishes, at 246, 1914. Drawn by J. Carter Beard.

I’ve been reading about tarpon. There are more alien things, eyeless lizards that live in the depths of caves, big-eyed large-toothed fish at the bottom of the sea, sloths, but I haven’t been reading about sloths.  I’ve been reading about tarpon. And one shouldn’t fly fish for sloths.

Hornaday, William Temple, The American natural history : a foundation of useful knowledge of the higher animals of North America, Vol IV, Reptiles, Amphibians, and Fishes, at 246, 1914, at 279. Drawn by J. Carter Beard

There are two species of tarpon, our tarpon, Megalops atlanticus, and the Indo-Pacific tarpon, Megalops cypnrinoides. The Pacific tarpon ranges from the east coast of Africa to the Indian Ocean or thereabouts–my geography gets a bit vague.  Atlanticus, our tarpon, ranges down the Atlantic Coast  from Virginia to Brazil. They move through the Panama Canal to the western coast of Panama.  There are populations in the eastern Atlantic on the west coast of Africa ranging from Senegal to the Congo. Wherever they are, Atlantic tarpon aren’t made up of genetically distinct populations.  They may only be cousins, but genetically they’re kissing cousins.

Everyone who fly fishes admires all things anadromous: Salmon, steelhead, striped bass, even the lowly shad. These are fish that do it up right. They’re spawned in freshwater rivers, go to sea to grow, and then in their turn return up-river to spawn. It’s a perfectly reasonable life cycle.  Join the navy, see the world.

There are other ways to do it though.  The counterpoint to anadromous is catadromous, which is how the Chesapeake drainage American eel reproduces. Catadromous is peculiar, at least to my ears. True eels are born in saltwater, then the larvae drift with currents into freshwater and grow into adulthood upriver.  When it’s time the eels migrate back to the ocean to spawn.  It’s just wrong. Not that it takes much for eels to seem wrong.

Uwe Kils, eel larvae of Anguilla rostrata, 2003

Tarpon are not considered catadromous, but are often compared to eels because of the larvae stage.  Like eels, tiny tarpon larvae migrate via currents inshore. Unlike eels, tarpon can develop as juveniles in any estuarine environment, salt, fresh, or brackish, and as adults they move back and forth  between salt and estuary, and even upriver into fresh.  Twenty years ago we didn’t know much about tarpon: I’ve read old stuff that says we don’t know if they spawn inshore or offshore. Now folks know more. They spawn offshore, maybe as far offshore as 100 miles. They broadcast spawn, so there’s not a lot of close and personal, but there’s at least got to be some vicinity. The lady tarpon flings out her lady stuff and the boy tarpons fling out their boy stuff and the eggs get fertilized in the deep blue sea. There’s no eHarmony for tarpon, so without spawning grounds, how would tarpon meet up? How would they get to the same place at the right time to fling their stuff?

Identifying and protecting spawning grounds would be a good thing.  Tarpon are considered a vulnerable population by the International Union of Conservation of Nature. Some folk eat tarpon, particularly in Central America, Columbia, and the Caribbean, and they’re killed as by-catch in commercial fisheries. Juveniles require relatively specific habitat to mature, and that habitat is shrinking with coastal development and damage to water quality. They’re also killed by anglers, both intentionally and as a by-product of catch and release. The IUCN reports that over-exploitation of tarpon by sport fishers is a particular problem in southwest Florida, and neither Mississippi nor Louisiana have tarpon catch limits. Absent predation by sharks, the IUCN estimates post-catch mortality of adult catch-and-release tarpon at 5 percent. In a 2005 study in Tampa Bay, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission estimated that with shark predation figured in, tarpon mortality after release was about 10 percent.

Populations of adult tarpon are thought to be both migratory and resident. Migratory Texas tarpon have been tracked from the middle Texas coast nigh on to Quintana Roo.  Researchers track Floridian west coast tarpon up the Florida coast (with the height of the season in Tampa from May to July) on around the Gulf Coast to Louisiana–these are travelin’ fish–but lodges in Belize and Nicaragua routinely advertise resident tarpon. As tracking studies get more sophisticated, researchers hope to get better population numbers by figuring out how and how many fish migrate.  And maybe someone will let me know where the tarpon hide in Galveston Bay.

Being strange and witchy creatures, it’s fitting that the tarpon spawn is linked to moon phases, the new and full moons.  That must be why their eyes are up top on their heads. One wouldn’t want to miss a good spawn because one wasn’t looking up at the moon (or absence thereof). If I were a tarpon, it would be just my luck to be caught looking at my shoes while the other tarpon were out on the town.

NOAA, Southeast Fisheries Science Center

 

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Where We’re Not Going: The Keys

I’ve read a lot of trashy novels, real dreck. I’ve read stuff that no one would admit to reading, from Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour to all of the Game of Thrones novels (well before the television production–I didn’t have that excuse), and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed much of it. I think though that if I had to come up with a list of the ten worst novels I’ve ever read, Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, set in Key West, would be right at the top of the list. It’s the story of an unlikeable fishing guide, Harry Morgan, who does increasingly unlikeable things and then gets shot and dies, and as far as I was concerned his death came 200 pages late. There are also plenty of unlikeable minor characters doing unlikeable things: I remember disliking particularly the drunken playboy based on John Dos Passos.  As a reader I had no empathy for the Haves, sure, but as a reader I didn’t have any empathy for Hemingway’s Have Nots either. As a matter of fact, in addition to the characters, I didn’t like the place, the plot, or the author. I didn’t even like the boat.

EH 8124P Ernest Hemingway fishing, Key West, 1928.
Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.

 

And generally I like Hemingway. I fly fish now in large part because of Big Two-Hearted River and A Farewell to Arms. Generations of young men wanted to go to Spain to drink wine and run with the bulls at Pamplona because of A Farewell to Arms.  Not me.  I wanted to go to Spain to drink wine and catch a trout with a McGinty. Not that anyone’s caught a trout with a McGinty in the last century.

Not much of a McGinty, but you get the general notion: It looks like a bee, for the bee hatch. It’s at least as good of a McGinty as To Have and Have Not is a novel.

Like  1920s Paris and Cuba, Key West is forever tied to Hemingway, but plenty  of other writers  also passed through Key West. It’s a Bona Fide Cultural Mecca: Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Annie Dillard, John Dos Passos, Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost . . . Key West was the place where the Haves could go to drink and sleep around and in later times do drugs while the Have Nots could go to Key West to drink and sleep around and in later times do drugs. Piracy and smuggling was available to all, or at least real estate development was available to all.  Long before Vegas, Key West like New Orleans was where in the popular imagination everybody could skirt the edges of propriety. Somehow though I suspect fried conch in Key West isn’t as good as the turtle soup at Commander’s Palace.

The Keys are also one of the places, maybe with the Bahamas one of the two places where modern saltwater fly fishing developed.  It’s where Ted Williams had his Florida house and where bonefish and tarpon and permit became a thing. Thirty-six years after To Have and Have Not was published Thomas McGuane would publish his own fishing guide novel, Ninety-Two in the Shade.  It was a much better novel than To Have or Have Not, if a much lousier movie. Peter Fonda isn’t Humphrey Bogart. Margot Kidder isn’t Lauren Bacall. Tom McGuane isn’t Howard Hawks as a director or William Faulkner as a screenwriter. Tom Skelton, the rather hapless anti-hero of Ninety-Two in the Shade, plans to make his reputation as a guide on permit. And then of course he gets shot and dies. If I were a Key West fishing guide I’d be concerned that death by gunshot was part of the job description.

As for Keys’ guides, it’s a running joke that they excel mostly at rudeness. In the popular imagination they give you the opportunity to buy them breakfast, pack your own lunch, and pack their lunch. They will yell at you for missing casts, and then will expect a decent tip for your troubles. So far my exposure to Florida guides has been 50-50, I had a very good Florida guide in Palm Beach and a very bad guide from Florida in Louisiana, and it may be the stories about Keys’ guides are urban mythology. Island mythology? Still. High-handedness could explain the gunshot wounds.

Maybe I’m all wrong about Key West. I haven’t been there, and the only thing more treacherous than long distance-judgments are the close-up kind, but if you read the current crop of Florida writers, the Carl Hiassens and Dave Barrys and Randy Wayne Whites, they ramble through the Keys in the midst of amusing decadence and unamusing debauchery.  Maybe I’m just old, but it doesn’t sound like that much fun to me. Plus there’s no baseball. I think I’ll save the Keys for the next life.

Ok, maybe it sounds like some fun.

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Where We’re Not Going: The Everglades

I first read Marjorie Stoneman Douglas’s 1947 River of Grass when I thought I wanted to canoe the Everglades. I thought it was a travel guide, and I’m not certain I finished it. I may have only carried it around for a while. I’ve started it again, and it’s a far better book than I remembered. Shows what a little time will do.

This may be obvious to everybody else, but it wasn’t obvious to me: The Everglades system is not coterminous with the Everglades National Park, and the system was not preserved by designation of the Park.  The Park is about one quarter of the area originally covered by the Everglades. Not small change, but the Park is only the southern part of the original area. It’s separated from its historic northern water sources by building a dike around Lake Okeechobee, building barriers like the Tamiami Trail, changing the direction of water discharges from the Lake, and draining 700,000 acres  for agriculture in the Everglades Agricultural Area.

Before that stuff happened,  sheet flow flowed from Lake Okeechobee down to the Bay of Florida, with normal flows of as little as 100 feet per day. Douglas described the system as a shallow river, often only inches deep, that covered most of South Florida. The river stretched from near present day Orlando south to the Keys where the land ran out.

Map of the Everglades by US War Department, 1856

In the decades after 1920 the flow stopped. After deadly floods in the 1930s, Lake Okeechobee was surrounded by the Herbert Hoover Dike for flood control.  Areas of the Everglades were isolated, drained for agriculture and urban development, urbanized at its boundaries, and managed for different purposes. Today’s arguments aren’t really about restoration to original conditions, but the extent to which regionalization can be reversed and the freshwater sheet flow out of Lake Okeechobee restored to its original southerly meander.

The Park now gets most of its water from the 60 inches of average annual rainfall in Southern Florida, and it doesn’t feed much freshwater into Florida Bay.  Because there isn’t freshwater flowing in, the Bay is hyper-saline. It’s lost thousands of acres of sea grass and is periodically strangled by algae. Not just any old algae, either. You can’t talk about Florida algae without saying toxic algae. It’s gotta be toxic.

And up top the Okeechobee isn’t the cleanest of lakes. Except for industry, it receives pollutants from the same list of sources as The Chesapeake: Agriculture and urban development.  Phosphorous and nitrogen, the stuff of fertilizers for yards and crops, seem to be the biggest problem. Instead of flowing south to Florida Bay, the Lake overflow is now shunted east to the Atlantic estuaries by the St. Lucie Canal and west by the Caloosahatchee River.

The phosphorous-laden freshwater flows hit the saltwater systems on the Atlantic side around Stuart and in the south central bays on the Gulf side. The whole mess plays havoc with fish and wildlife in a big swatch of Southern Florida. The Everglades is also the recharge source for the Biscayne Aquifer, the principal water supply for South Florida, Miami and whatnot. There are 8 million people who depend on drinking water ultimately sourced from the Everglades, plus a lot of golf courses. Where’s the water for putting greens going to come from?

The bad guy in all of this is Big Sugar.  Florida produces about half the nation’s sugar through three refiners. At its worst, Big Sugar’s historic labor practices made the West Virginia coal industry look benevolent.  And the two, coal and sugar,  ran neck and neck for environmental sensitivity: lop off a mountain top here, drain a wetlands there.  Federal sugar subsidies are a favorite target of fiscal conservatives, who argue that artificial support of American sugar prices kills American jobs.  Maybe anymore it doesn’t deserve to be the active bad guy it used to be: Creation of the Everglades Agricultural Area is done, no additional land will be added, and it’s half-life is short because of the subsidence of the soil in the EAA.

But unfairly or no Big Sugar remains the Villain in the eyes of restoration proponents. In South Florida, a fishing guides’ environmental group, Bullsugar, takes its name from the alliteration of sugar and, well, shit. Orvis is a sponsor. Patagonia is a sponsor.  Hell, Raymond James is a sponsor.  Raymond James. There are lots of other similar groups too: The Everglades Foundation, the Everglades Trust, Captains for Clean Water . . . The Everglades Coalition counts over 50 member organizations. Meanwhile in 2016 the New York Times reported that the Miami Herald had reported that over the past 22 years the sugar industry contributed $57 million to Florida elections.  Sweet.

It’s probably no wonder that the proponents think that the governmental group with the most direct control over the Everglades water, the South Florida Water Management District, isn’t an ally. Its board is appointed by a Governor who is not seen as an ally. $57 million.

Meantime proponents believe that establishment of a storage and treatment reservoir in the Everglades Agricultural Area is the key to Everglades restoration. The reservoir would use about 15 percent of the EAA area. It would release water South, surely whistling Dixie, down through the supposedly cleansing and detoxifying Glades to the southward bay. Neither east nor west but only south.

Apparently the money is there: as a result of federal lawsuits Florida has pledged expenditures for restoration. Maybe the plan is there.  Expenditures are being made and the Tamiami Trail is being raised. Apparently the big hold-up to return of substantial southward flow is Big Sugar’s willingness to sell the land for the Okeechobee drainage reservoir. 26,800 acres were purchased by the state in 2010. The proponents want 46,800 more acres. Sugar backed out once. It reached agreement and then . . . hesitated. And of course the concern is that on the horizon Big Sugar sees the possibility of more lucrative residential development, and maybe there’s a lack of sufficient interest at the state level to force the issue.

So’s anyway we’re heading to Florida, but we’re not going to the Everglades.

http://www.evergladestrust.org/toxic_algae, From the Everglades Trust, Algae Bloom in Stuart, Florida

 

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Florideuce

We’re going back to Florida. Our trip in February wasn’t really planned. The Astros won the World Series, Kris bought spring training tickets because she wanted to go, and we threw in a half day fishing.  It was pretty spur of the moment.

This isn’t spur of the moment. Most summers we take a baseball trip  somewhere, somewhere we otherwise wouldn’t go.  Last summer it was Baltimore. The summer before was Kansas City.  This summer it’s Tampa/St. Pete. Friends tell me that Tampa has great cigar stores and the only true Cuban sandwich, but even with those accomplishments without baseball it’s unlikely I’d go there. it’s not an obvious place for a random trip from Houston. But late June is apparently the heart of the Tampa tarpon season, the Astros are playing the Rays, and I really want to catch a tarpon.

Kris has caught a tarpon, and I have a great photo of that holy shit moment where she realizes that she’s hooked something different.  And that tarpon was small. I, on the other hand, ain’t.  I’ve had them follow my fly but that’s it. I ain’t.

Ted Williams caught more than 1000 tarpon. I want one. Just one.

C’mon St. Ted. You didn’t get me a hit in little league. You owe me.

*  *  *

Meantimes Saturday we drove to Elmendorf, Texas, 196 miles from Houston, to pick up our boat. We’d had some work done, and most important New Water had added a casting platform on the bow.  That’s how us nautical types talk.  On the bow.

We then trailered the boat 246 miles back to Galveston, where the hardest part of the day, getting the boat down the ramp and off the trailer, was waiting for us.  Success! We docked the boat, parked the trailer,  and drove the 50 miles back to Houston. That’s nearly 500 miles in the day, plus unloading the boat, plus that whole thing in the McDonald’s parking lot. I got back to Houston and went to bed.

Sunday we took the boat out for the first time since its return, and after more than a year one of us finally caught a redfish off our boat.  It was a dinky, tiny redfish but there you are. It was a redfish. It even had room for multiple spots.

Kris also caught a flounder.  If she’d only caught a Speck we’d have had a slam.