I’m almost maybe sure that in South Carolina we were fishing in the vicinity of the Kiawah River, or maybe not. I know we met our guide, John Irvin, at a public boat launch on Folly Island, and that both the Kiawah and the Stono Rivers are near Folly Island. At least I think it was Folly Island.
Coastal South Carolina is a confusing mess of rivers and streams and islands and creeks, and ins and outs and ups and downs. Look it up on Google Earth. Locate Charleston and then study the surrounding coast. It’s like the spread out pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that almost but don’t quite fit together. It’s a jumble, a hodge-podge, a physical kerfuffle . . . What I’m used to in Texas is a reasonably coherent system of big bays and barrier islands. From what I can tell coherence isn’t how South Carolina works.
In South Carolina, even if you stand in the same spot, everything changes over the course of the day. There are tides in South Carolina, tides that demand consideration, tides that changed how we fished. Today, where we keep our skiff in Port O’Connor, the tide will range from a low at 2 pm of -.03 feet, to a high of one foot at midnight. It’s a tide of about 15 inches. That’s a smallish tide, even for Port O’Connor, but add a foot and the tide would be judged large. The moon tonight is a waxing sliver so there’s less lunar pull, and late-fall tides on the Texas Coast are usually low anyway. Sometimes we might get a big tide, two feet or more, but even the small tides move bait, and the moving bait triggers fish to feed. Still, the tides are generally so small they don’t really mandate how we fish.
South Carolina is different. Today at Fort Sumter the high tide at around 10 am will be well over five feet, and the low tide at 4 pm will be just a bit over sea level. That’s a five foot tide. When we fished in South Carolina the tide was taller than me, almost seven feet. Between the morning and the afternoon the tide moved enough so that if I’d only picked a low spot and stood still then sooner or later I would have drowned. At low tide we saw mountains of oyster beds. At high tide the oysters were gone and we could fish in the grass. We could fish where six hours before there was only dry–ok soggy–land.
That South Carolina tide was surprisingly magnificent. It’s not magnificent like the Rocky Mountains or the redwood forests or the Gulf Stream waters, but every day twice a day it is the most splendid thing. I was surprised by it, sure . . . I’m used to itsy bitsy tides and this ain’t no itsy bitsy, but I was also awed by it. The South Carolina tidal flats are better than mere surprise. They are magnificent.
John told us that at low tide South Carolina folk would often harvest a bushel of oysters for home consumption. At home I see oyster beds often enough. Over the years I have lost a good dozen flies to oyster beds. I suspect our skiff’s fiberglass is scarred with oyster scrapes. I suppose that if I wanted I could harvest my own bushel where I usually fish in Espiritu Santo Bay, but in South Carolina harvesting oysters appears to be a way of life. While I might be queasy about eating an oyster I randomly harvested from a Texas bay, for Lowcountry South Carolinians it’s an expectation.
But this is about fly fishing, not oystering. I have a theory about redfish, and my theory mostly involves me not catching them. If I appear, they do not, and South Carolina held true. We fished for redfish with John for two days, and Kris caught a very nice red. I think she caught it sight-casting but I’m not completely sure. I got one hit blind-casting where John told me to cast, which hit I diligently missed. John saved the trip by taking me to an oyster reef where there were small speckled trout, spotted sea trout, and I caught a couple of those blind-casting.
I think I’m required by South Carolina law to mention that speckled trout are not trout, but I don’t think anyone would ever confuse the two. If you squint real hard, spotted sea trout resemble trout in a way that a redfish or flounder or even a black bass do not, and it’s easy to see where they got their popular name. They look troutish. I don’t think though that anyone ever thought they lived in rivers and gobbled mayflies.
Speckled trout aren’t really much fun on a fly rod, but they are the great favorites of Texas gear anglers. They’re voracious, run in packs, are excellent on the table, and are reasonably easy to find in legal sizes. And a trophy winter speck is many a Texas gear angler’s life goal.
But the specks I caught were no one’s life goal. They were pretty, and certainly they satisfied my personal goal of a South Carolina fish, but I felt like I’d left something on the table. I wanted a South Carolina redfish. On the other extreme, I had been ecstatic only a few months before with my tiny North Dakota bluegill. It’s all relative, and with my South Carolina speck I’d left things undone.
