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N’o’io and Mantis Shrimp, January 11-12, 2019

I didn’t catch a Hawaiian bonefish, an o’io. I saw plenty, especially the first day we fished, and I cast pretty well too, sometimes right where I wanted. That was the problem. Where I wanted wasn’t where the casts needed to be. My casts would land nice and close and then the fish would explode, not onto the fly either. It couldn’t have been more violent if I’d thrown a rock. Or a grenade.

Sometimes I’ve watched fish mosey away from my flies, dismissive and haughty. Sometimes I’ve watched them turn quick and quiet and run for the wild. I don’t ever recall watching so many huge fish blow ups. They were big fish, and big sudden flushes of water, and zoom, gone.

This was not exactly a wilderness experience. The first day we fished flats just off the Honolulu airport runways, near the port at the edge of the city, so there was a line of military jets and passenger jets taking off from the shared runway. Every 15 minutes there would be another jet taking off. Sometimes in deeper water our guide, Jake Brooks, poled the boat and one of us fished the bow. In shallower water we waded. It didn’t matter. I mostly couldn’t see the fish. Jake could, but especially after the first day I couldn’t.

The first day though I did see fish, at least some of the time, plus that first day there were tailing fish and you could see both their dorsal fins and tails above the water. They didn’t stand still, and Jake had me move to intercept them at an angle. As often as not when the fish were moseying away Jake called me off. He said we’d never get close enough for a cast.

And when I did cast there were fish explosions. 

I’ve read about delicate presentations for trout, but for the most part they aren’t useful for bass or redfish, and you have to cast even closer for black drum. Most days you put the fly a foot or so away, hope the fly makes just enough noise to get the fish’s attention, and then things are dandy: one sees fish, one casts near fish, one catches fish. It’s a simple game. Not so Hawaiian bonefish. They won’t belong to any club that would let them in.


Emerton, J. H.; Smith, S. I.; Harger, O. illustrators, from Goode, George Brown, Fisheries and Fishery Industries of the United States: Section I, Natural History of Useful Aquatic Animals, 1884, Government Printing Office, Washington D.C., The University of Washington Freshwater and Marine Image Bank

And mantis shrimp flies are heavy, with big lead eyes to weigh them down. I thought the heavy lead eyes were overkill, but there’s a reason for the weight. Hawaiian mantis shrimp aren’t delicate swimmers. They don’t spurt through the water column or snap above the surface. Both creatures are crustaceans, but shrimp (and also crabs, crawfish, and lobsters) are of the order decapod. What Hawaiian flies mimic, mantis shrimp, are stomatopoda. These are mean critters, living angry, mean lives in holes along the sea bed. They don’t swim, they scuttle, and you fish the fly with slow short strips along the sand. You need that weight to get them down. They’re predators, and it’s thought that they have the most complicated eyes in the world. Each eye is on a separate stalk that can move independent of the other. Those are pearls that were their eyes.


Mantis Shrimp, Todd, H.L. illustrator, from Goode, George Brown, Fisheries and Fishery Industries of the United States: Section I, Natural History of Useful Aquatic Animals, 1884, Government Printing Office, Washington D.C., The University of Washington Freshwater and Marine Image Bank

They hunt. They have a pair of raptorial claws that depending on the species can be either sharp spears for slashing or blunt clubs for smashing. They can break aquarium glass. They can break through oyster shells. Sometimes they’re called thumb splitters, because they can break through you.

Mayer, Alfred Goldsborough, Sea-Shore Life : the Invertebrates of the New York Coast and the Adjacent Coast Region, 1905, A. S. Barnes & Company, New York, New York, The University of Washington Freshwater and Marine Image Bank

So my predisposition for close casts and indelicate casting wasn’t helped by the heavy flies. By the time I got my best shot I had figured out the problem with close casts. I watched two fine fish happily eating down a line of mangroves 30 feet away. I made a perfect cast, five feet in front of them, and watched two fish explosions. Plop. Boom. 

“Ten feet,” Jake said. “You can’t get closer than ten feet.” Then I reckon you let the fly sit and wait for the fish to come to you. I reckon that, but I wouldn’t know for certain. It could be that you lead them ten feet and still don’t catch them, but at least you don’t shake them up. Jake said they weren’t leader shy, they were just generally shy.

Jake had grown up fishing near Tampa, where I’ve also failed to catch fish. He’d grown up playing baseball, a catcher–it’s a city ordinance that everyone who grows up near Tampa has to play baseball–and was injured his freshman year at Tennessee. He’d come to Hawaii to make surfboards. Everybody we talked to in Hawaii was from someplace else.

This fellow drove:

Jake was great to fish with, though I did worry that he and Kris were going to start talking politics and we might have to walk home. Jake was pretty conservative, which in Hawaii is an endangered species. I did tell him that nobody in Texas wants a wall, which isn’t strictly true, but is probably more true than most non-Texans think. For my $30 billion, if 900 miles of South Texas scrub and Chihuahuan Desert aren’t going to keep people out, a bit of wall isn’t either. I’m holding out for RoboCop.

The last day we fished with Jake he said Hawaiian bonefish were the hardest fish he’d fished for, because even with the right casts the fish have to cooperate. The fish have to continue in the same general direction and not go for a frolic before they get there. Jake said other redfish anglers have my problem: we ain’t delicate. We ain’t prone to ten-foot leads. His were consoling words, meant to make me feel better. I felt rotten.

I had one other good shot at a fish on day two with Jake, a puffer.  I saw it, I cast to it, and I felt it take the fly.  I didn’t feel it take enough of the fly though. I jerked it out of its mouth, and even at the time I half wondered if I jerked it out on purpose. I didn’t want a puffer. I wanted a bonefish. I wanted an o’io.

To’au (Lutjanus fulvus), blacktail snapper.

Kris managed to catch fish on the two days we fished without Jake. That’s because she’s not too proud to blind cast, and walked along casting.  Kris loves to blind cast, and would blind cast in a rain puddle in a parking lot. They weren’t bonefish, sure, and they were pretty little things out of a Disney movie, but there you are: for me they were colorful fish but not the right color of fish. Still, she caught fish and I didn’t. I felt great for Kris. Really. She only has to go back to Hawaii if she wants to.

Weke peuk (Upeneus taeniopterus). Nightmare fish, bandtail goatfish. Consume with caution: the head may cause hallucinations. Really.
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Endangered Hawaiian Flora and Fauna; Endangered Hawaiian Republicans

George, David Sischo/Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources

A Hawaiian snail died yesterday, and s/he made the news. Snails are hermaphroditic, but George didn’t self reproduce. S/he achieved a sort of immortality as the last surviving Hawaiian land snail, leaving no descendants. S/he was a handsome snail, but reclusive, and died in captivity.

Species eradication is a problem for Hawaii. Snails are vulnerable, but according to a list by the Hawaii Biological Survey, they’re not alone. There are hundreds of endangered species on the islands, and they range from mammals, the Hawaiian monk seal and the Hawaiian hoary bat, to plants, to George. George used to be on the list anyway. Now George is on the extinct list.

Island plants and animals are particularly susceptible to eradication by invasive species. They haven’t developed defenses, and the invasive species don’t have natural predators. Threatened snails in Hawaii (which includes an entire genus of which George was one species) are the prey of the rosy wolfsnail, an invasive predator imported to control pests on sugar plantations. The wolfsnail didn’t help with the pests.

I understand that there are now biological checks on incoming flights. Barn door, shut.

Meanwhile Republicans are also endangered in Hawaii. Before World War II, Hawaii was Republican. It was an invasive species imported by New England missionaries, and you may recall that New England was Republican then too. Remember that great line in White Christmas about the sparsity of Democrats n Vermont? It sounds dated now, like a line about the sparsity of Republicans in Texas.

The flip from Republican to Democratic dominance occurred in the 50s when the Democratic Party put together a coalition of Asian voters and labor. Hawaii was already an Asian plurality state and they were apparently ignored by the Republicans, and it remains the most unionized state in the nation. According to the Harvard Political Review, the strength of unionism dates to violent strikes against Big Sugar in the 30s and 40s. There’s a theme here, along with Florida and Louisiana and the rosy wolfsnail Whenever you see the words “big” and “sugar,” it ain’t gonna be sweet. It’s almost like Big Sugar can’t help playing the role of evil cattle baron in a John Wayne Western.

There are no Hawaiian Republicans in the United States Senate or Congress, and statewide elections run about 80% Democratic. There is a Hawaiian Republican Party website, which promises “To Make Hawaii Great Again.” That’s the problem with Hawaiian Republican politics: those Republicans who remain in the party are true believers. Only the pure bother to survive, kind of like being a Democrat in Oklahoma. In 2017 the rising Republican star and minority Hawaii House floor leader, Beth Fukumoto, resigned from the party because of a kerfuffle over marching in a women’s rights parade in Honolulu. There were only five other Republican members of the state house, so her resignation probably didn’t leave much of a leadership gap, but it was a classic conflict between the Tea Party wing and the moderate wing of the Republican Party. The moderate wing left. All one of them.

But meantime a similar split affects Hawaiian Democrats. You may recall that after President Obama was born in Kenya, he was born again in Hawaii, and Hawaii voted 71 percent for Obama in the 2012 election. Support for Hillary dropped to 63 percent in 2016, but then she wasn’t a native son, and it was still Hillary’s highest vote percentage of any state. But here’s what’s really interesting: in the Democratic primary, 72 percent of the state voted for Bernie Sanders. Support for Sanders was so strong that after the national election one Hawaiian electoral college voter couldn’t resist casting a protest vote for Sanders, even though the vote was required to go to Clinton. The Force is strong in this one.

The tension between progressive and moderate Democrats is a mirror image for the tension between Tea Party and moderate Republicans, and there seems to be no place where the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is as strong as in Hawaii. If Congresswoman Alexandria Casio-Cortez is now the poster child for progressive Democrats, it could have as easily been Hawaiian congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard. In the 2012 Democratic primary, the senior Senator from Hawaii, Brian Schatz, defeated his more moderate opponent by 1,732 votes by campaigning on issues related to global warming. He has apparently moved Hawaiian Democratic candidates to the left on global warming policy and healthcare and higher education accessibility.

Meanwhile I didn’t really know Daniel Inouye’s story, other than as commodified by James Michener. I recommend it.

Daniel Inouye, U.S. Army, source unknown, Wikipedia.

Postscript:

There was an article last week in Governing magazine that made me realize that the Democratic monolith in Hawaii wasn’t an anomaly. Of the state legislatures, only one, Minnesota, is split between parties. Republicans control 31 states, Democrats 18. Most states aren’t competitive. As a general rule, if rural areas control the legislatures (as in Wisconsin), the legislature is controlled by Republicans. Urban areas are Democratic. “The Republican Party has moved from the country club to the country, while the Democratic base has moved from the union hall to the faculty lounge. Democrats are far more likely to represent districts with a strong minority presence, while Republican areas continue to get older and whiter. ” I guess it’s almost a joke, but there you are.

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Another Interlude

On Thursday we leave for Hawaii, which for some odd and I suspect Southern reason I pronounce Huh-wah-yuh, which Siri can’t understand when I call up my playlist. We should spend today packing, which we won’t. What do we take? Some shorts, some shirts, some wading boots. The couple of 9 wt rods we gave each other for Christmas. A guitar. We fish with Captain Jesse Cheape of High Tide Fishing, a full day on Friday and a half-day on Saturday. After that we’ll sightsee. I think sightseeing is required by the nature of the thing.

It is the second farthest distance we’ll travel, closer than Alaska but further than Maine. I’ve actually practiced casting some, which is frustrating and unrewarding. I’m such a mediocre caster. I’ve tried to keep up my Hawaii reading, and have been through a couple of additional Hawaiian books–The Descendants by Kaui Hart Hemmings, which was very likable, and Dreams from My Father by Barrack Obama, which was about his birth in Kenya.

I guess my thoughts have moved on to Mississippi, which I’ve been working on for May, and Florida which I have to go to in February. I’m beginning to despise Florida and its uncatchable fish, but the Astros open there in April, and if we fail again in February (with a one-day fishing trip to the Keys) maybe we’ll make a fourth trip in April.

Hawaiian music hasn’t really grabbed me: it’s melodic, sweet, all major keys and thirds and fifths and pure tones. I’ve been cheating on Hawaii with Mississippi Blues. It shares a slide guitar, but not much else.

Frontispiece, Life on the Mississippi, The Baton Rouge, 1883, Gutenberg.org.

I also cheated on Hawaii with Mississippi books, and re-read Twain’s Life on the Mississippi. It is such an essential book. It’s only a bit more than a six-hour (read eight-hour) drive from here to Vicksburg, and we could visit the battlefield memorial and the National Cemetery over the long Martin Luther King weekend. Of course with the government shut-down nothing at the National Cemetery would be open. It’s too bad all presidents aren’t required to be born in Kenya.

Early on Twain also traveled to Hawaii (née the Sandwich Islands) and wrote a series of letters from there for a San Francisco newspaper. I didn’t find the letters particularly illuminating, though Twain liked the place immensely and always talked of going back.

I’ve tied some leaders which won’t turn over, and some flies which won’t catch fish. I’ve also bought some flies, almost all of which are some kind of spawning shrimp, which is the only fly I can ever seem to remember on Captain Cheape’s list. I do own a bunch of bonefish flies, almost none of which are on said list. I’ll haul them along anyway.

Meantime the weather here in Houston is as good as it gets: clear, windless, dry, and cool, 61 degrees this morning with a high of 71 degrees. There’s a mockingbird singing through the open door to the porch. Maybe I’ll go look for black bass this afternoon, or spawning crappie. Yesterday we took the skiff out on Galveston bay, and the combination of cold weather and still air left the water clear. We saw some redfish, too.

Didn’t catch those either. We did get some excellent oysters and ceviche at the Black Pearl Oyster Bar on 23rd Street.

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HAPPY NEW YEAR REDUX!

Thomas Rowlandson, British, Anglers of 1811, 1811, hand-colored etching, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, metmuseum.org

I’ve been doing this for a year, and I have a story that’s more or less true about how I got into this business. It started with a New Year’s Resolution. I’m good at New Year’s Resolutions, mostly. I make them and as long as they don’t involve wine I keep them, sort of. And they’re not confined to January either. Once I found myself telling an acquaintance that it was my New Year’s Resolution to go down a bayou in a canoe and somewhat high-handedly she asserted that you can’t make New Year’s Resolutions in July. Shows what she knows.

Thomas Best, Frontispiece, A Concise Treatise on the Art of Angling, 9th Edition, 1810, Wikimedia Commons.

I always figured that some day I would make it to all 50 states. I have been to plenty of states, particularly on the left side of the map and the center and the South, but then there are plenty of places I haven’t been. I haven’t been to Ohio. Who hasn’t been to Ohio? I haven’t been to the Dakotas. Ok, plenty of people haven’t been to the Dakotas.

But I’m not young, and mortality intrudes with bleak notions, such as I’d better get a move on or I’m never going to Maine, or Vermont, or New Hampshire. Maine and Vermont and New Hampshire are probably doing fine without me, so it’s no loss to them, but the first movie I remember that didn’t involve any of Walt Disney, Jerry Lewis, or John Wayne was Lawrence of Arabia, and it gave me forever the bug for travel, riding camels, and blowing up trains. I will never ride a camel or blow up a train, but I figure for a Texas boy Maine is at least as exotic as the Arabian Peninsula. Maybe more so, because how can those people be so different and speak English? They speak English, right?

Detail from a fountain, Palacio Nacional, Sintra, Portugal

So last New Year’s we were in Lisbon, the one in Portugal, and the whole time Kris kept asking why we weren’t fishing? I was pretty happy sampling port and eating pastel de Belém, but Kris would have none of it, and I couldn’t very well tell her there were no fish in Portugal. In Lisbon you can go to fancy shops to buy souvenier sardines in a tin, and they’re good, too, and pretty. Meanwhile I’d taken along a copy of Jim Harrison’s The English Major to read. I’d never read any Harrison, and The English Major had sat on my bookshelf since it was published in 2008. I remember pulling it off the shelf as we were walking out the door.

Tile detail in the cloisters, Porto Cathedral. Or maybe not.

The English Major is a book about a 60-year old whose beloved dog Lola dies and whose wife leaves him. He sells the cherry farm and goes on a mission to visit each state and rename the state bird. He also fishes. It resonated. I was 61. I wasn’t going to rename any birds but I fished. My 15-year old dog Lola was dying. I didn’t want Kris to leave me because I hadn’t arranged to go fishing in Portugal in January. I went back and read the New York Times review of the book and thought that the reviewer was too young to review that book. It’s an old man’s book.

Lola, South Padre Island

Oddly it was a month or so before it registered on me that I’d made a resolution to catch a fish in each state because I was reading Harrison. I’m quick that way.

There is a passage at the end of Batfishing in the Rainforest when Randy Wayne White says, more or less, that carrying a fishing rod gives you an excuse for being someplace, and that if you want to get to know the people in a place go to the local church. He’s talking mostly about Central America as I recall, but it’s good advice for just about anyplace that’s not Brooklyn.

So last year we made it to nine states (including the one we were standing in), caught fish in seven (Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Oregon, Virginia, West Virginia, and Maryland), and owe two, Florida and Wisconsin, a re-visit. Who the hell can’t catch fish in Florida? Who the hell can catch a muskie? We fished a good bit, though I don’t recall going to any churches. We did make it to a lot of bakeries, which includes donut shops.

For next year we have only two certain things planned. We go to Hawaii in a bit more than a week, and in September we take a raft trip on the Middle Fork of the Salmon River. I go to Florida for business in February, but it’s Miami and I hate to give up on tarpon, and it will be hard to take Kris–this has become as much her project as mine. In May we may try the wee bit of Mississippi on the Gulf. I’ve looked at Minnesota, Massachusetts, New Hampshire/Vermont, New York, and a long road trip to catch the three great Southwestern tailwaters, the Green, Lee’s Ferry, and the San Juan.

The problem is that there’s always more in each state than we’ve got time for, and in each state there are so many other places to be. It becomes hard to get off the schneid. I could spend a week in Mississippi–we’ll be on the Gulf Coast, and I want to see Faulkner’s house at Oxford. I want to see Vicksburg and the Delta where the Blues were born* and Jackson. I want to see the two great Mississippi cities, Memphis and New Orleans. And the day on the San Juan we could spend on a tailwater road trip is short shrift for my beloved New Mexico. Waily, waily, waily! A drive through the Southwestern tailwaters should take a month.

Meanwhile Hawaii. Happy New Year!

Thomas Best, Frontispiece, A Concise Treatise on the Art of Angling, 7th Edition, 1807, Wikipedia.

*Kris and I have argued about this a good bit. She says that “blues” is singular, I say “the blues” are plural. There is an unimaginable amount of impolite discourse on the internet about this very subject. My thought is that the word encompasses more than a style of music: where the Baroque was born would always be singular, as would blues music. But “the Blues” encompasses a style of music, a collection of songs, a way of playing an instrument, and a state of being. It also ends in an “s.” I’m sticking to my guns, mostly because “the blues was born” to my ear sounds dreadful. At least one dictionary by the way says that “blues” is a plural noun which may have singular construction, whatever that means.