We’re at 16 states, with two more, Hawaii and Wisconsin, where we didn’t catch fish. I thought this would take ten years, but then Louis Cahill wrote that we were doing it in five, and that wormed its way into my head. If ten, we’re way ahead, if five we’ve got some catching up to do.
Going someplace and catching a fish is pretty easy, except for time, money, and effort. There are states that are left, Tennessee, New Mexico, Arkansas, North Carolina, Colorado, California . . . Where I’ve spent enough time in my life that I could probably fly or drive in, catch a fish, and check the state off my list without missing much, but there are also states, New Mexico, Montana, Wyoming, Maine, where spending less than a week just seems wrong.
If we really spend a week in all the places that deserve a week ten years won’t be enough.
In eight days we can do some justice to three states, say Arkansas, Missouri, and Tennessee, but try to add Georgia into that and it’s just too much for anything but a drive-by. Pennsylvania, for instance, is one of the reasons we’re doing this. Neither of us have ever been to Pennsylvania, and how can we not spend at least a couple of days in Philadelphia, and how can we not see Gettysburg? I could probably spend a week in Pennsylvania. Meanwhile I’ve still got work, and there are our dogs at home who love us, and there is the cost of long trips.
So we’ve been planning for 2020. Earlier this year I had decided Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa as a trip, taking about a week so we could fish the Au Sable, some of the UP, Hayward for Muskie, and then the Driftless in SW Wisconsin/NE Iowa. We had talked about a ten day driving trip north, fishing in Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, and North Dakota. We booked Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, mostly to fish with the guide and teacher, Dom Swentosky in Pennsylvania; and to see Philadelphia. We talked about a great tailwater trip through New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah, but no.
Here’s the first map I came up with. The proposed 2020 states are light blue or pink.
And now that’s all shot to hell. Instead we’ve scheduled Washington in February, which is great fun to tell people, and which I blame on Kris: She didn’t say no. New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina are still on for June, and then, because of a chance conversation, we’ll go to North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia in early August. That driving trip to the great Southwestern tailwaters will have to wait, and we won’t be driving straight north to North Dakota.
Here’s how the map looks now. Blue states are pretty settled. We’ll try to pick up some of the pinks as we go along. Maybe we’ll make Arkansas Christmas morning.
I’ve known the coffee bean fly for a while, decades really, and a long time ago I tied a few and fished them. They were simple to tie.
Size 8-10 dry fly hook
Brown thread
Coffee bean
Super glue
Five-minute epoxy
Wrap thread from the eye to the bend to lay down a base. Score the coffee bean down the center line of the flat side with a hack saw, then Super Glue the bean onto the thread along the scored line. Cover the bean with epoxy. Let dry. Done.
I suspect that now I’d cover the bean with an ultraviolet resin instead of epoxy, but to tie any I’d still need to find my hacksaw. Most internet discussions recite its origins as beetles generally, and invasive Japanese beetles particularly. It’s rough justice that a fly for an invasive Asian fish imitates an invasive Asian bug. Palmered hackle is sometimes added for legs, though we don’t bother with that down on the Bayou.
Bruce Martin, Adult scarab beetle, Popillia japonica, commonly known as the Japanese Beetle, 2006, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en
I learned to tie the fly from a friend and guide, Mark Marmon, and Mark was the first person I knew who fished the fly. I thought for years that he had created it, but if so he was probably not its only creator–pre-foam beetles it’s a pretty obvious choice, at least among coffee drinkers. There are reports on the internet of the fly used for trout as early as the 30s, and not even Mark and I are that old. He did start fishing the fly for carp on Brays Bayou 30 years ago. That’s long before the current carp craze, long before Orvis published a book on carp and long before there were Internet forums on fly fishing for carp. Shoot, this was before there were Internet forums. Mark discovered carp early, particularly grass carp, and he figured out that they take flies, sometimes nymphs, but also sometimes a coffee bean fished as a dry.
Brays, also spelled Braes or Brae’s, runs 30-odd miles from west to east through Houston and then empties into Buffalo Bayou, which in turn empties into Galveston Bay. The Corps of Engineers channelized large parts of Brays 50 years ago for flood control. Brays was once probably slow and meandering, at least during low flow, but prone to flooding. Straightened and lined with concrete Brays water never moves slow but it still floods, and maybe floods more as concreted Houston has spread west and global warming has increased our severe rain events. Harvey, Tax Day, Imelda . . . In the rash of recent 500-year Houston floods Brays has done its part, and more than its part, to flood the city. Two years after Harvey I can still find boarded windows and cleared lots along the Bayou.
Aerial view of Hermann Park, Harris Gulley and Brays Bayou looking north. 1925, John P. McGovern Historical Collections and Research Center, Houston Academy of Medicine-Texas Medical Center Library: https://hdl.handle.net/1911/36730Courtesy of Photograph Collection at the McGovern Historical Center, HAM-TMC Library, 1133 John Freeman Blvd, Houston, Texas 77030, 713-799-7141, mcgovern@library.tmc.edu.
Only the Corps could come up with the verb “channelized,” and only the Corps could think concrete was our best drainage solution. Channelized Braes isn’t pretty, at best you can say its a fine example of 50s Brutalist Architecture, and is part of the excess of concrete that gives a good city an ugly reputation. The walls are maybe 15 feet high and slope at 30 degrees, but they don’t meet to form a V. At the base there is a flat, 50 feet across, gently sloping towards a narrow deeper center channel. Even at low flow there is always flow in the center channel, partly from upstream sanitary sewer plant effluent. After a few days’ rain Brays can rise 15 feet and run 100 feet from bank to bank. At lower flows the water doesn’t look particularly dirty, though there is an odd ozone scent in the air, and downwind from the City’s Braes Bayou treatment plant the odor can be decidedly rich. I wouldn’t recommend contact recreation.
On the Bayou Purel is part of any smart angler’s kit.
There are always enough runners and bikers along Brays to make me feel conspicuously foolish approaching the water with a fly rod, or even a camera, and I’m always conscious that I’d just as soon no one I knew saw me. It’s one of the reasons I stopped going. If this is glamorous fly fishing, it’s decidedly perverse glamorous fly fishing.
For the first few coffee beans I tied I didn’t coat them with epoxy. A glued bean is secure and they look fine, but because the roasted beans are brittle and the banks are hard, unless you cover the bean with epoxy the flies don’t last. One slap against the concrete slope and the bean is crushed. When I long ago fished Brays somewhat regularly I wasn’t a very good caster, and in addition to not casting where I wanted I couldn’t keep the fly from slapping the slope. I coated the next batch, and that’s probably the last batch I tied.
Brays runs not far from our house, and this year for the first time in a decade I’ve been down there a few times. Originally Kris wanted to go for carp and I went along. I don’t really like carp: I’m old enough to think of them as an undesirable trash fish, and ugly, with coarse scales, ragged fins and tales, and unrefined features. Plus I’ve been told all my life that carp are inedible, and notwithstanding Czech Christmas traditions I’m good with that. I’m not eating anything I pull out of the Bayou, even if it is Christmas.
Plecostomus, Braes Bayou
When I first fished Brays I hired Mark as a guide. It’s sight-fishing, walking along the concrete liner to look for feeding fish. At low flows–you don’t get near the Bayou at high flows–you can see the fish, both pods and singles, and if you’re a good enough caster the idea is to lead the fish by a few feet when they coast onto the shallow flat to feed. There are more fish than carp in the Bayou; there are supposedly largemouth, certainly mullet, gar, and the occasional rogue koi. One night late after an Astros game we boarded the train downtown with a guy with a spinning rod and a catfish in a five-gallon plastic bucket, caught in Buffalo Bayou. I talked to him, and he said he fished the Bayou often. He seemed . . . simple, sketchy, but I don’t know if his deficiencies began before or after he started eating Bayou fish.
Maybe I caught a carp that day with Mark; I don’t remember. What I remember was catching two mullet on the coffee bean fly. When I went with Kris to the Bayou last spring I cast for a while in the general direction of a seven or eight pound carp holding in shallow water. I’ve seen osprey this winter on the Bayou, so carp holding in the shallows to sun may be a summer avocation, and anyway in the Bayou feeding carp are moving carp. This fish was just sitting, from above looking all the world like a dark tumorous lump, and it was something I was decidedly ambivalent about catching. In any event it ignored me. It finally got tired of my fly slapping around its head and moved into deeper water.
Plecostomus, Braes Bayou
Recently I’ve thought a good bit about the coffee bean fly, in part because I opened an old box of flies and found a couple, and in part because of the rash of perfect tiers I follow on the internet. It’s apparently the golden age of fly tying, where everyone but me is artful, creative, and careful. I’m not. I mostly follow recipes and hope that the end result is useable. On my bench I keep a razor blade to scrape off failures and salvage hooks, and I use it often. Even if tied well the coffee bean fly, along with San Juan worm variants, beaded salmon eggs, and spoon flies, is as far from artful tying as one can get (though it takes some skill to tie a decent spoon fly). Even in its day it was controversial. Mark would have the record for grass carp on the fly except that the bean has a scent, and therefore doesn’t meet IGFA standards. Who knew carp drink coffee?
In the same box where I found the coffee beans was a brown spun deer hair fly shaped to look like a coffee bean. I guess that’s Artful, Creative, Careful. I didn’t remember when or where I got the fly, but it was certainly something I had bought. Like I said, my tying is none of those things.
According to Benjamin Gosset at Bayou City Angler the Braes fish have moved out of the channel for winter, into the wider, deeper water where the concrete ends, but at least once recently I saw a few large carp stacked in a plant outfall on the far bank. I gather that both the grass carp and mullet are essentially vegetarians, so when 20 years ago an otherwise forgotten fly shop clerk said he wouldn’t fish with a coffee bean fly because he wouldn’t fish with something designed to imitate shit–that’s the alternate explanation to a Japanese beetle–his denunciation had the ring of truth, even if it also rang of arrogance.
I tried a couple of times to cast to the stacked fish in the outfall. There were four or five, and they were big: I could see their tails and their backs, and who wouldn’t try to make that cast? I had to cast across the center channel current and there was too much drag on the fly, but about the fifth stubborn cast I snagged a fish, and it ran out into the current and upstream until I was left with nothing but a smashed coffee bean hooked through a thick ugly scale. I suspect that both of us, me and the fish, were ok with that result. I didn’t want to snag fish and the fish didn’t want to be snagged. After it came off the hook I went back to my car and dug the Purel out of the center console. Down on the Bayou you can’t have enough Purel.
Mark still guides, and I hope we fish trout together on the Guadalupe over the Christmas holiday. There was another young guy guiding carp for a while, Danny Scarborough, but I heard that Danny moved to Dallas. Here in Houston carp are now Chosen Ones, and there’s even a local carp tournament in the spring, because carp are now a lifestyle choice. Bayou City Angler is always good for advice on carp. It’s magic having a destination fishery so close to home.
