Category: Gear

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Smoked Flies

Today we’re fishing the White River at Branson, Missouri, but this month I’m also going to Cuba. I’ll stay and eat in Cuban homes, and talk to Cubans—I know how to ask where the library is in Spanish–but I’ll also fish for bonefish. And tarpon. And permit.

If you haven’t kept up, it got easier for Americans to travel to Cuba under President Obama, and then as one of his final acts, Mr. Trump reimposed Cuba travel restrictions. Some folks think that reimposing restrictions was a callously political act to drum up Cuban conservative support in Florida, but I can’t imagine that any politician could be so self-serving.

Kris isn’t going. I explained to her that Cuba was almost an American state once, before the Civil War. She didn’t care, there’s no star for Cuba on our flag, even if Yuli Gurriel and Yordan Álvarez are two of her favorite baseball players, and going to Cuba gets us no closer to our goal of all 50 states. I’m on my own.

There are forms to fill out, and questions to be answered. Most of all though, you have to prepare your kit. You can’t depend on having anything ready to hand when you get there. You can’t go to the fly shop for some flies, or tippet, or to replace anything that breaks. You can’t even go to the drug store for aspirin. You have to haul everything there, except for black beans and rice, rum, and cigars. I guess I’ll be living on black beans and rice, rum, and cigars. Dang.

Cuban food is kind of bland though, so I’m taking a bottle of hot sauce. You can’t be too prepared.

From top to bottom, that’s a fuzzy yellowish bonefish fly, and a fuzzy shiny bonefish fly.

Anyway, I’ve been tying lots of flies for Cuba, and it occurred to me that while it’s considered bad form to add scent to flies–you can’t in good conscience dab a bit of stink bait behind a fly’s ears–there is at least one scent I wouldn’t have to add, exactly. I’d just have to get the fly into the correct vicinity.

What could be better than barbecued flies?

As you know, every Texan is born smoking meat. Even if you’re a vegetarian Texan, you’re born smoking tofu. To preserve my cultural heritage I have to smoke at least 10 pounds of brisket every week, and at least a few racks of ribs and some sausage. Only then can I go to the gun range. Why not bring my fly-tying and smoking together?

My first smoked flies were bonefish flies smoked with bacon. I used hickory as the wood. I cured the bacon for 10 days, in a dredge of salt, brown sugar, sodium nitrite, and maple syrup, then brought the internal temperature up to 145 or so. The bacon is delicious. I’m sure the bonefish will find the flies equally tasty.

From top to bottom, that’s a fuzzy brown bonefish fly, and a fuzzy pink bonefish fly, both now flavored with hickory and bacon!

After the bonefish flies, I figured I needed some big flies for tarpon, and that means big meat, and that means brisket. There’s nothing better than smoked brisket, and Texans learn to smoke brisket before they learn how to vote Republican.

I perfected my brisket cooking at Camp Brisket at Texas A&M. Here is everything I know about cooking brisket:

  • The single most important factor in good brisket is the grade of meat. Prime wins every time, and Costco carries good prime briskets. Wagyu doesn’t seem to hold up under the long cook, and choice is just a bit tough.
  • Hickory is the favorite wood for brisket, with pecan a close second, and then oak. Surprisingly, despite its bad rep among aficionados, mesquite is pretty good too.
  • Trim the fat cap down to about a quarter-inch. Apparently it doesn’t add any moisture to leave it on, and it retards absorption of the seasoning. Plus there’s a lot of fat on a brisket, and a one inch fat cap is kind of disgusting.
  • À la Louie Mueller, the seasoning of choice for brisket is half salt and half pepper. I think it takes about a cup, so half a cup of salt, and half a cup of pepper. I put on the seasoning, then let the brisket sit in the fridge for at least 12 hours.
  • The smoker temperature must be low: 200, 225, 250. It will take about 12 hours to cook a 12-pound brisket. If you’re serving brisket at 3 pm, plan to start cooking about 1 am.
  • The meat stops taking smoke flavor around 145 degrees. You could finish the brisket in the oven after that, and it probably wouldn’t change the flavor, but that would be wrong. It’s not smoked brisket if it’s cooked in the oven.
  • The smoke ring has nothing to do with smoke.
  • The brisket will stop cooking–in the vernacular, it will stall–at around 160 degrees, and that’s when you wrap the meat to get it started again. Wrapping in foil makes the brisket mushy. It needs to be wrapped in pink butcher paper and put it back on the smoker, presumably because pink is a complimentary color, and I don’t think anyone makes blue butcher paper. Don’t take the brisket off again until it reaches an internal temperature of 200-210.
  • The brisket needs to rest for an hour or so after you take it off.
  • There is an optimal way to slice the brisket, involving slicing the flat and then turning it to slice the point. At Camp Brisket, Aaron Franklin demonstrated proper slicing, and from the attendees’ yearning you would have thought it was 1960 and Brigitte Bardot was strolling the beach at Saint-Tropez. For a long time there was a video on the internet of Franklin slicing brisket at our camp, but I can’t find it anymore. It was probably drowned in the tears of awe.

From left to right, that’s a black and red tarpon fly, a brown-ish tarpon fly, and a purple and orange tarpon fly, and all of them are now guaranteed to catch tarpon. The professors at A&M recommended a maroon and white fly, but then they would.

Kris said this looked unsanitary, but I think a good dose of saltwater will kill anything that might harm the tarpon.

The final Cuban fish is permit, the holy grail of saltwater fly fishing. For permit I needed something really special. Crab flies are the fly of choice, but I was concerned that the rubber legs on my permit flies would melt, and melted rubber legs might make the meat stringy. I decided I’d smoke the permit flies when I smoked salmon.

Unlike brisket and bacon, salmon is cold smoked. Over the years I’ve developed an extremely sophisticated cold smoking apparatus. It’s good for salmon. It’s also pretty good for Velveta to make smoked queso. Queso, by the way, is Spanish for cheese, but it’s also Tex-Mex for a slab of Velveta melted with a can of Rotel tomatoes, and is served along with salsa for dipping tortilla chips. It can get more complicated than Velveta and Rotel, and our friend Lisa Fain has a whole book on Queso variations, but it’s a basic food group for Tex-Mex, and non-fattening when eaten with chips.

It’s not the smoke, by the way, that preserves raw salmon. To preserve the salmon you have to cure it. My cure is salt, brown sugar, lemon zest, and most important, sodium nitrite, pink salt, to prevent botulism. I did not add sodium nitrite to the flies. After all, exposure can be harmful, and I don’t want to do anything to hurt the fish.

Salmon also needs to have been frozen to kill parasites, but unless you’re standing by a salmon river or your fishmonger has in-season fresh salmon shipped from Alaska, your wild salmon is likely to have been frozen. Otherwise it’d smell a bit ripe. If it’s farmed salmon, and you’re not sure if it’s been frozen, I reckon it could be frozen before or after smoking.

I brine my salmon in iced salt water for an hour or so, then dredge it in the cure. After 48 hours in the fridge under the weight of a couple of six-packs, I wash off the cure and give the salmon a series of water baths. About 45 minutes total is enough to tone down the salt, but I change out the water a couple of times. The salmon dries in the fridge for 24 hours, then gets smoked for four hours with apple wood.

Since there’s only the cure and no heat to protect the meat, I tend not to smoke salmon during a Houston summer.

I originally took my salmon and bacon recipes from Michael Ruhlman and Bryan Polcyn’s Charcuterie, but I really like how this guy does salmon. On the recommendation of my friend Tom, I may try black tea in the cure next time, and the permit might like that better. Smoked salmon is best eaten with the classic Texas combination of lox on a bagel, cream cheese, red onions, and capers, all rolled together in cornmeal and fried.

From top to bottom, that’s a crab fly, and then a crab fly, and then another crab fly. The yellow stuff is some Velveta for queso.

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Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin packing list

Gear

We fished five weights mostly, 9 foot with floating lines and 4x leaders. The Driftless streams would have been perfect for bamboo rods, but I’m done with rod buying I think.

At least until I buy another rod.

Reading

I re-read Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead to get ready for Iowa. In our plane trip to Rhode Island, I kept reading excerpts to Kris out loud, because so much of it deserves pondering. I hope the people around us didn’t mind.

I re-read Shoeless Joe (and of course re-watched Field of Dreams). There is a surprising amount of good writing tied to Iowa, mostly because of the University of Iowa creative writers workshop. There’s Jane Smiley, W. P. Kinsella, Flannery O’Connor, W.D. Snodgrass, Wallace Stegner, T. C. Boyle, Sandra Cisneros . . . Frankly, I don’t see how anyone ever wrote a word without going to Iowa first.

I had such success with cooking in New Mexico, I bought a copy of The Flavor of Wisconsin by Harva Hachter and Terese Allen with the plan to try some of the recipes in our Air BnB. I didn’t. It’s a wonderful book, the kind of historic/cultural study of food culture that every state deserves, with a general survey of the food history of the state and then a lot of recipes. The problem is that Wisconsin food is kinda, I don’t know, unappealing in the abstract. Maybe I’ll go back and make that recipe for beef and kidney pie. I’m going to go to my grave though without having eaten the potato and turnip whip.

I should have made a tater tot hot dish.

Food

I’ve written about the Driftless Cafe already, and about trying to find Frito pie in Iowa. There are, I’m sure many good things to say about Midwestern food (and face it, Midwestern food is what we’re talking about here), but the only good thing I can say about those breaded pork tenderloin sandwiches in Iowa is that if you covered them with cream gravy and left out the bread, they’d be a reasonable substitute for chicken fried steak.

You can find 20-year old cheddar in Wisconsin, for obscene amounts of money. They take their cheese seriously.

What We Didn’t Catch

Muskie. Notwithstanding how much I liked the Driftless, I still regret not catching muskie in Wisconsin.

Where We Didn’t Go

We talked about driving to Minneapolis/St. Paul for a Twins game, but we didn’t. I’ve been to Minneapolis; Kris hasn’t.

I’d like to have canoed in the Boundary Waters.

I really wanted to drive through the Amana region of Iowa. I’d been once before, a long time ago, and I liked it. Because of a flat in Missouri we ran out of time. By the way, the family minivan doesn’t have a jack and a spare, but instead has a flimsy fix-a-flat kit, which notwithstanding my distrust, worked fine. Did you know that all the tire repair shops in rural Iowa close on Saturday afternoon? We had a nervous 100 mile drive to Dubuque where we found a Discount Tire that fixed the flat for free. I love Discount Tire, but I’d still rather have a spare tire.

Corn

We crossed Iowa, south to north, in late fall, and the corn stalks were ready for harvest, I suppose for feed? There didn’t appear to be any actual ears of corn. I grew up around wheat and cotton and sorghum and cattle pasture, but I have never seen such monoculture as Iowa corn. There is a lot of corn in Iowa, and that doesn’t even come close to a description. There is more than a lot of corn. There is a plethora of corn, the universe of corn, the place where corn is born and goes to die. No wonder corn fields show up in movies as the place the supernatural comes from; the amount of corn is spooky.

I realized that despite my rural upbringing, I had only the vaguest notion of what silos are for; they could be guard towers, to protect from roving bands of children of the corn? There sure are a lot of them.

Missouri

We were probably in as much of Missouri as anyplace, though we didn’t fish there. We spent a night in Kansas City on the way, at the 21c Museum Hotel. They’re great hotels and pet friendly, but more often than not located in peculiar places–at least if you’re not from there. Louisville and Lexington, Kansas City, Bentonville, Oklahoma City . . . they’re opening a new one in Des Moines. We also drove by the hamlet in north central Missouri where my grandmother was born in 1890, Osgood. I visited Osgood as a child in the early 1960s, and stayed with a great aunt who had no indoor plumbing, and visited a great uncle who kept horse feed in the spare bedroom. It was an adventure. There’s not much of Osgood left, if there ever was much of Osgood. Certainly there’s no tire repair shop.

Osgood, Missouri

On the drive nome we paralleled the Mississippi, and stopped in Hannibal to walk around. I’m not sure we saw the best of Hannibal, or if there is any best of Hannibal.

We spent two nights in St. Louis, took our picture under the arch, visited the Feather Craft fly fishing store (I’ve bought mail order from them for 30 years, but in person it reminds me most of a plumbing supply), and saw a Cardinals game. I hate the Cardinals, but they were playing the Cubs, who I also hate. The Astros played too long in the Central Division of the National League for me not to have strong feelings about the Cardinals and the Cubs.

Music

Iowa. The Everly Brothers are from Iowa, and Glen Miller, and Bix Beiderke. Glen Miller got me through law school. Big Band music was the only music I could listen to and still concentrate on reading.

Minnesota. We listened to a lot of Bob Dylan. I’m not a big fan of Prince (who is of course from Minneapolis or St Paul or whatever), but then we listened to a lot of Bob Dylan.

Wisconsin. I’ve been through this list before. It’s still pretty much the same list.

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Arkansas packing list, part 2

What we didn’t see

Even before this trip, I’ve seen a lot of Arkansas. I’ve visited the Clinton Library, and the vaccine microchip hadn’t yet told me to. I went to Fayetteville as a teenager and as an adult I’ve seen the Arkansas Delta and Washington and Hot Springs. In January we went to the new museum in Bentonville, Crystal Bridges. My parents took us camping for a week at the Albert Pike Campground, to me a magical place with sparkling clear water where we swam in the heat of the day in the river, and that in 2010 was washed away by flood waters. Sixteen campers were killed. It’s never re-opened.

I have seen the Buffalo River, the first designated National Wild and Scenic River, but only from a car from a bridge. I’ve intended to canoe the Buffalo for 30 years. I still haven’t. I should have gone there to catch my fish. I didn’t. I guess I still need to go back to Arkansas.

US Forest Service, Buffalo River

Where We Went

Other than fishing, we stopped at the Dulcimer Shoppe in Mountain View Arkansas (“Folk Music Capital of the World”). I bought a jar of wild elderberry jelly, since that seemed suitably folksy, but Kris wanted a dulcimer. Did you know that in addition to your index and middle fingers, you use your thumb to fret a dulcimer? I didn’t, so I both learned something and got us out of the shop without a dulcimer. Success! It was a nice shop, and Kris really was sold on dulcimers. The jelly is good too, whatever elderberries may be.

This trip we went out of our way to see Little Rock Central High School. Everyone knows the photo of Elizabeth Eckford walking into Central High: the dignity and vulnerability of Miss Eckford, the rage of the white students . . . In person what’s striking about Central is its size, it’s big, and also its neighborhood. In 1957 when Eisenhower enforced integration there were three high schools in Little Rock . One of the schools, Horace Mann, was black, two others, Central and Hall, were white. One of the white schools, Hall, was generally affluent, which is why integration was slated for working-class Central.

The Central neighborhood hasn’t improved since the 50s. It’s still the same small houses, now 70 years longer in the tooth. It has slipped below working class, or maybe the working class has slipped below what it had achieved in the 50s. The school itself is handsome. Its neighborhood is rough.

Derek Chauvin’s trial for George Floyd’s murder started this week, so racially charged photographs are in the forefront, but there was another Arkansas event this week that brought Miss Eckford to mind. The Arkansas Legislature overrode a gubernatorial veto of a bill forbidding transgender youth from receiving therapy, puberty blockers and hormones, that would aid transition. Many won’t notice the legislation, but it is, well, central, and certainly central to the transgender youth and their families. The proponents’ reasoning is that minors are too young to make gender decisions, and the opponents’ reasoning is that those decisions are best left to the youth, their parents, and their doctors, not the state legislature. I don’t know why anybody would be dubious about the decisions of a state legislature. The Arkansas legislature must be at least as qualified as the Texas.

Playlist

I liked the music we listened to driving around Arkansas. We listened to a lot of Lucinda Williams because, while she was born in St. Charles, she attended the University of Arkansas. I first heard her name on Houston’s nonprofit Pacifica radio station, when the DJ said she had a crush on Lucinda Williams. I’ve listened a lot to Ms. Williams since. I always thought that if I could choose someone famous to sit by on an airplane–this is my personal version of who you’d like at your dinner party–Lucinda Williams would be high on the list. I finally saw her on stage a dozen years ago, and she appeared to be just what I should have thought: a little tough, a little road-weary, a little wild. I don’t share that DJ’s crush, but I would like to talk to Ms. Williams for an hour.

Is there a better road song (or a better song about living in the country) than Car Wheels on a Gravel Road?

Currier & Ives, The Fall of Richmond, Va., on the Night of April 2, 1865, lithograph, Library of Congress.

Levon Helm was from Arkansas. That lets in all sorts of great music, including the troubling The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, which is a song I like in part because it is troubling. It is arguably about white loss with no connection to slavery, and is often heard as a South’s arising anthem. Ta-Nehisi Coates apparently wrote of the song that it was another song of the “blues of Pharaoh,” but it’s hard for me to equate Virgil Kane with Pharaoh, and it seems one of the points of the song that Pharaoh is Pharaoh and everybody else isn’t. Kane, the narrator, doesn’t mourn Dixie’s defeat, Kane suffers it; hunger, poverty, the death of a brother, and there’s no pride, no blame, only desperate endurance. As the lyrics say, you can’t raise a Kane back up when he’s in defeat. As difficult to interpret as it may be, it remains one of the great antiwar songs, and Kane could have been black or white–it wouldn’t change the song’s bleak message. Whatever happens to Pharaoh he’s still Pharaoh. The rest of us are going to be Virgil Kane.

There’s a common misinterpretation of the lyrics that explains some of the ambivalence of the song. There’s a line where Virgil’s wife calls to him: “Virgil, quick, come see,/There goes Robert E. Lee . . . “, the general. At least that’s the way the lyrics are as often as not misinterpreted. The lyrics are “the Robert E. Lee . . . “, the steamboat, which is apparently clear in the live version but a bit muddled in the original. I like the steamboat better, both as a matter of history–Robert E. Lee was never in Tennessee and the steamboat was on the Mississippi –and because the steamboat had its own fame and tragedy. It’s the sort of steamboat on which Pharaoh would ply the Nile, while Virgil Kane watched from the shoreline.

August Norieri, The Robert E. Lee, oil, 1884

In addition to The Band and Lucinda Williams, there’s also Al Green, Johnnie Cash, Lefty Frizzell, Roy Buchanan, Iris Dement, Conway Twitty, and blues musicians from the Delta: Robert Lockwood, Jimmy Witherspoon, Son Seals. If you ignore Black Oak Arkansas, Arkansas has a pretty good lineup.

Glen Campbell is also from Arkansas, which justifies Galveston and Wichita Lineman, but not Rhinestone Cowboy. Nothing justifies Rhinestone Cowboy.

Guitar

I took the old Kohno. Four years ago when we last fished in Arkansas, I sat on a balcony above the Little Red and tried to play Duarte’s transcription of Pavane pour une infante défunte. The lady on the next cabin balcony asked what I was playing–which either meant I was playing the piece well enough to be nearly recognizable or I played it badly enough that it was unrecognizable. I like to think that the name of the song–Pavane for a Dead Princess in English (though a more literal translation would be Dance that a long-dead princess might have danced)–was on the tip of her tongue, and she just couldn’t quite think of it.

This year I was still trying to play Pavane pour une infante défunte, so for me Ravel will always have a weird connection to Arkansas. I don’t know that Ravel ever went there, and I still can’t play the Pavane. I’m pretty sure there were no steamboats named The Maurice Ravel.

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Arkansas Packing List, Part I

Vaccines

We had ’em, two of ’em each, plus the 10 days’ grace period. No side effects, though I’m certain that Hillary Clinton is telling me it’s time for another trip to Arkansas.

Besides mind control (of which I’m all in favor–not having to make decisions seems like a real boon), my friend Limey tells me that the CDC has determined that with rare exceptions the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines prevent virus infections, and don’t just lessen the symptoms. I need to check to see where Limey got his information, but part of me wants not to check and believe what’s most favorable to my world-view. I guess I’m having a fake news moment.

Apparently everybody in Arkansas and East Texas has already had the vaccine, because there wasn’t much social distancing or mask wearing. In a gas station, the cashier pulled down her mask so that I could hear her answer my question. I’m pretty sure I’d have heard her anyway, but I guess she figured I needed to read her lips. In a cafe, another cashier told the couple waiting for a table at the register that I was brave so they didn’t need to move. I told her I wasn’t brave at all. Actually, I think I’m brave enough, but I’m not stupid. I am both a baseball fan and a fisherman, so my outlook starts from superstitious, and as a lawyer I’m always belt and suspenders. Why test fate?

We wouldn’t have gone into restaurants without the vaccine, which leads me to

Where We Ate

It’s just as well that fine dining is a consideration but not a requirement, because there isn’t a lot of fine dining in Arkansas. There is some, in Bentonville and Little Rock, but Arkansas doesn’t really rival Paris, France. On the whole it’s a cheap-food-and-lots-of-it kind of cuisine. There’s nothing wrong with that, but as often as not it’s not something one wants to remember.

Kris and I both like to cook, and even before the pandemic we cooked at home most days. Restaurants are rare, so maybe I think more about them than I should. What good things make me remember a restaurant? I can remember some places vividly, a fish place in the Keys where the fish was great and the couples next to us argued about Donald Trump, a dinner at Three Brothers Serbian in Milwaukee with our friends Tom and Sal, a weekend of ethnic eating in Chicago suggested by Tom, a Basque place in Reno (again suggested by Tom) where we sat at a communal table. . . As often as not I remember places because they are great food, sure, but I think as much because they tell me something about the place. I hated Voodoo Donuts in Portland, bad service, bad food, too many gimmicks, but it did tell me something about Portland. That’s not, though, memory created by good things.

On our January pre-Arkansas fishing excursion, we ate at the Hive in Bentonville. The Hive is generic American imaginative–the kind of place you can now find in almost any urban area From Sea to Shining Sea, with pretty similar menus. It was just fine, had a good wine list, and could have been anywhere, from the Wine Country to Connecticut.

So for this Arkansas trip I tried to figure out where Arkansans thought was essential Arkansas eating. A lot of the places were further west than us, a lot involved fried catfish (which I like), and none were in Heber Springs where we stayed. We had been to Heber Springs before, and pretty much knew what was there. I wouldn’t let the food keep me away from Heber Springs, but I wouldn’t go back for it.

On the way to Heber Springs, we drove out of our way to the Bulldog Restaurant in Bald Knob, because (1) who doesn’t want to visit Bald Knob, and (2) they were supposed to have excellent strawberry shortcake. It has excellent strawberry shortcake because Central Arkansas is, apparently, a strawberry-growing region, and there were no strawberries yet, so no strawberry shortcake. We had a good burger and fries, thought it looked like the people at the next table ordered smarter than us. They always do.

On the way home, we ate breakfast at Cheryl’s Diner in Cabot for their chocolate gravy. Apparently chocolate gravy on biscuits is a breakfast thing in Arkansas. If you can imagine a slightly creamier version of chocolate pudding slathered onto a biscuit, you have chocolate biscuits. I like biscuits. I like cream gravy. I have now had chocolate gravy on biscuits. It was certainly memorable. I would go back for Cheryl’s cream gravy on biscuits.

We skipped a last meal in Arkansas and made it to Jefferson, Texas, to Riverport Barbecue, which is on the Texas Monthly top-50 list. It was 3 in the afternoon, and they were out of just about everything. Except for me and one teenager, no one wore a mask. That teenager was a rebel, and so was I.

We did eat at a great place in Shreveport, Strawn’s Eat Shop, recommended by my high school classmate Cindy (who lives in Shreveport). Great strawberry and coconut icebox pie, and chicken fried steak as part of it’s meat and three lunch special. Larry McMurtry once wrote that only a rank degenerate would drive across Texas without eating a chicken fried steak. We weren’t in Texas, but still. Avoiding rank degeneracy should always be a goal, though some degeneracy probably doesn’t hurt. Cindy texted that Strawn’s would be a good place for a reality TV show: The Waitresses of Strawn’s Eat Shop. Thanks Cindy. You’re right, both about the waitresses and Strawn’s Eat Shop.

The Drive

What’s it like driving up I-40 through Arkansas? It’s like this:

Gear

We took trout stuff; a 9-foot 6 weight for streamers, a 10-foot 4 weight and a 10-foot 3 weight, and a couple of 9-foot 5 weights (because you have to have a five-weight when you fish for trout, even if you never use it). All had reels with floating lines. We fished them all except my Winston 5 weight.

There is a story with the 4 weight, a Thomas & Thomas Avantt that four years ago I’d bought on sale. This year Kris gave me a Thomas & Thomas 10-foot 3 weight for my birthday. 

Here’s the thing about all that weight stuff: with fly fishing, it’s usually the weight of the line that lets you cast the fly, so you match a 3 weight rod to a 3 weight line. You can overline, you can match a 3 weight rod with a 4 weight line, or underline–I’ll let you figure that out yourself–but all of that is nerdy fiddling. Weights and lines are pretty much standardized (if a bit esoteric).

Anyway, I thought I’d taken the new 3 weight, but had accidentally taken the 4 weight. Do I need both these rods that do pretty much the same thing? What a silly question, of course I do. The thing was, I thought I’d taken the 3 weight until I got home. I put a 3 weight line on the 4 weight, and never noticed anything wrong. We had so much weight on the rigs, both with heavy weighted flies and split shot, and all the casts were so short, it made no difference. Not to me anyway. 

All the weighted flies and split shot were to get the flies down in the river as quick as possible and then keep them there. And also to smack me in the back of the head if I tried to get fancy with my casting.

Flies

I’m a firm believer that if I’m fishing with a guide, I should use the flies that the guide brings to the river. It’s funny though, I always look at what should fish in a place, and usually try to tie a few things to fish there. This time I tied some big streamers, Barr’s meat whistles, and fished them for a bit. I foul hooked–snagged–one rainbow in the gill plate, but nothing else. I decided streamer fishing was a lot of work for low reward and stuck to the guide’s stuff. I’ll use the excuse on the streamers that my shoulder’s been hurting.

Drew started us out with mop flies (and I could go into a long digression on mop flies, but won’t), but then switched me to a marabou jig fly, and that worked better. He really liked the jig flies, and bought them pre-tied from Little Rock. He claimed that you could catch anything with a jig fly, and frankly I thought they looked like the perfect fly for crappie and white bass.

Thirty years ago in Arkansas, scud flies were all the rage. Scud flies are an underwater fly that is supposed to look like a shrimp-related crustacean called, of all things, a scud. I don’t think it has anything to do with the missile. Think roly-polies, doodle bugs, but in water. I have never been able to imagine the fly, though from time to time I’ve tried to tie them. Drew said that a study from ASU (translation, Arkansas State University) had determined that scuds were Arkansas trouts’ primary food, and that Arkansans still heavily fished scud flies because Arkansas trout still ate them. He put one on a dropper on Kris’s rig. I thought Oh boy, I’ll see a scud fly, and then I forgot to take a look. I guess I was busy watching my orange bobber.

The second day we fished shallower, and Drew had us fish hare’s ear nymphs, which are about as traditional a fly as nymphs can be. His flies were sparse, and tied on tiny jig hooks. 

When we came back I tied more Barr’s meat whistles–I wanted to go ahead and use up my cache of streamer jig hooks, and yesterday I fished a purple one at Damon’s. I caught my largest bass in a while, and I watched it crash across a sandy flat to hit the fly. The meat whistle’s usually thought of as a trout streamer, but as often as not, fish are fish. Next time I’ll try a marabou jig fly.

Terrible picture, I know. But it was a big fish, and I wanted to keep it in the water. The purple smudge in the vicinity of its mouth is a purple Barr’s meat whistle.