Category: Gear

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Little Red and Norfork Rivers, Arkansas, March 18-19, 2021

We planned to fish Arkansas last April, but then coronavirus. We delayed. We delayed some more. We finally delayed a year, less a couple of weeks.

We should have gone last April. People now are maskless and uninhibited, and we might have been safer traveling during the first days of the pandemic. At least more people were worried then. Traveling this week through East Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas, people are done with being careful. Some of it I suspect is mulish stubbornness–contrariness (can you imagine an East Texan or Arkansan being contrary?); I don’t need no stinkin’ seat belt and you don’t need one either. Some of it is exhaustion and the strong gravity of normalcy. There weren’t a lot of masks, and no particular effort to distance. Restaurants were packed. My guess is that we’re in a close race between vaccinations and another upsurge. 

At least it’s spring. Ok, technically today when I’m writing is the first day of spring, and we fished the last days of winter, but this is the South. The dogwoods and redbuds are blooming and beautiful. It was cold though. We caught an unseasonable cold front and it was 36° when we left Heber Springs. It was as cold or colder the two days we fished. I wore long underwear, ear flaps, and wind gear because not only was it cold, it was blowing. And blowing. Don’t forget the blowing.

It never rained. That’s a good thing, and the second afternoon it warmed up and the sun shone. Shined? Was shining.

We fished with Rouse Fly Fishing. I finally re-booked because Jamie Rouse was a February guest on Tom Rosenbauer’s Orvis podcast, which always inspires me. There are three year-round trout rivers in Arkansas: the White, the Little Red, and the Norfork. The trout are all below dams built for power generation and flood control. The White is the longest of the three, with its headwaters in the Boston Mountains in Northwest Arkansas. It flows first perversely north into Missouri, then turns southeast again to cross the state and meet the Mississippi near Rosedale. Rosedale, as you may know, is where you sell your soul to the devil to play the blues. I don’t know whether the White is interested in the blues, but at 720 miles, it moves a lot of water.

Rouse’s guides guide in all three rivers, though truth be told it’s 100 winding miles from Heber Springs to the main fishing on the White. For the White they may not be the most efficient guide choice. It’s ok though, fly fishing is popular in northwest Arkansas, and if you really want to fish the White, Rouse will guide there, and if not you can’t throw a rock in towns like Cotter without hitting a fishing guide. Every hamlet and holler seems to have its fly shop.

Both the Little Red and Norfork are tributaries to the White. Of course none of these rivers were originally cold water rivers, none of them originally held trout. Arkansas is in the southern native range for smallmouth bass, so before the dams they presumably held some combination of smallmouth and largemouth bass, catfish, sunfish, and plenty of other stuff: the Ozark Plateau is one of the richest areas in these United States for different documented fish species. Seventy-four different species of fish have been identified in the nearby Buffalo River.

With the steady cold water releases from the dams, the species list in the three rivers below the dams narrows until only two are ever talked about, rainbow trout and brown trout. The Little Red is an eight hour drive from Houston, even closer to Dallas and Memphis and Oklahoma City. While there are other trout streams that are closer, the three rivers are a draw for trout anglers, and they hold a lot of catchable trout. Stocked fish mostly, and the rivers are not really wadable (though I’ve read that it is possible to wade near the Norfork dam). Still, they have produced world-record brown trout, and there is reproduction of wild fish. All of the brown trout in the Little Red are wild. In any event, when your home fisheries in Texas and Kansas and West Tennessee don’t include a lot of trout, the three Arkansas rivers are a draw.

Our guide was Drew Wilson. I don’t think Kris and I are particularly hard clients to guide. We didn’t hook Drew, not hard anyway. We didn’t break anything on his boat or any of his equipment. We didn’t even get tangled more than the national average.

The first day with Drew we fished the Little Red. Kris and I had fished the Little Red once before, four years ago in summer, and it was a different fishery then. I guess every river every day is a different river. In a river where, depending on dam releases, it can rise or fall nine feet in a day, that seems especially true. When we fished with Rouse four years ago flow was low, and I threw mostly streamers, big Barr’s meat whistles and smaller clousers. I caught some big fish, and some browns. Like I said, brown trout in the Little Red are always wild.

This trip the river ran deeper, and on the Little Red we fished marabou jig flies with plenty of weight, eight feet deep on a straight six pound leader below a two foot stiff butt section and a big Thingamabobber indicator–a bobber. It’s funny. Fly anglers are language squeamish. Kris drives me crazy when she calls her fly rod a pole, and I suspect she does it on purpose. Flies are flies, not lures. But with bobbers anglers don’t let their squeamishness get in the way of the truth. We take joy in calling those big round indicators bobbers. What did we see in Arkansas? We saw a big orange bobber floating down a river.

Usually when Kris and I fish with guides, we talk with the guide about everything; children, significant others, schools and jobs and where each of us came from and where we think we’re going. With Drew there wasn’t much of that. I doubt if Drew knows that we’re both lawyers, or have children, and we don’t know whether Drew finished college or whether he has a significant other. Kris never once talked about politics (which may be a sign that at least for Kris the election is finally over). We talked about fish, about rivers, about rigging and flies and boats and rods. The conversations were easy and amusing and we liked Drew immensely. As a guide he was attentive and capable, knowing and unflappable. As a companion for two days he was fun. He even mentioned books he liked, though all of them were about fishing.

And we talked about our dogs. You can’t not talk about dogs. And we caught a lot of fish.

Northwest Arkansas is also popular with gear fishers, and the second day on the Norfork there was a spin fish armada. Out of maybe 15 boats, we were the only fly anglers I saw. The Norfork below the dam is a short river, about five and a half miles long, and because of lower flows we only got within a mile or so of the dam. By day’s end we’d been pushed even further down river, and boats were stacked at the confluence with the White. We were motoring up and floating down the same mile over and over. We started the morning with the deep-water rigs we had used on the Little Red, but ended with a tiny foam tab indicator five or six feet over, of all things, a hare’s ear nymph. It almost felt wrong using such a traditional fly, and a single fly to boot. Where’s my mop fly! Where’s my squirmy worm! Don’t you want me to catch fish?

We caught a lot of fish.

Maybe it was because of the sunshine and the afternoon’s warmer weather, maybe it was the novelty of the river or the pleasure of the lighter rigging, or maybe I just finally caught the rhythm of the fishing, but notwithstanding the crowds I enjoyed fishing the Norfork more than the Little Red. We didn’t catch more fish on the Norfork, but we caught a lot of fish.

Two fairly technical notes. First, Arkansas river boats are unique. On the three rivers gear fishers and fly fishers fish from more or less the same boats, with fly guides likely to have added oar locks and oars. They’re long, fairly narrow, shallow draft rectangles, Jon boats, built from aluminum or fiberglass. Motors are relatively small, Drew’s boat had a 40 HP, and guides favor jet motors instead of props. With their flat bottoms they’re probably more like rowing rubber rafts than the classic high-rockered drift boat, but they’re comfortable to fish from and well designed for Arkansas.

Second, the first day I fished a 10′ 4 wt Thomas & Thomas Avantt rod that I’d bought a few years ago. Nine foot is kind of the standard for fly rods, but there’s a theoretical advantage to a longer rod because they can cast farther. There’s a theoretical disadvantage in loss of accuracy, but none of the theory mattered anyway. None of our casts were much more than 20 feet.

Kris fished a 9′ 5 wt on the Little Red, but the second day she fished a 10’6″ Orvis Helios 3 wt that she’d bought herself for my birthday. It maybe the longest single-handed rod on the market. I don’t know about the other theoretical advantages of the longer rods, but they shine at managing line on the water. Most of the work fishing rivers isn’t casting or playing fish, it’s the constant adjustments to the line to achieve a drag-free drift. It is the hardest work of the day, and that extra foot, or in Kris’s case that extra foot-and-a-half, is a noticeable advantage.

Interestingly, I liked the Thomas & Thomas better than the Orvis, but I suspect it was because we had a much lighter reel on the T&T, and because I’d fished it for a day before before I tried the Orvis. Plus it was Blue. Color matters.

On our last drift of the day, down through the spin-fish armada and into the White, the fish got hot. We landed fish after fish, and when we landed a double the gear fishers in the next boat applauded. When we reached the White (at least I’m saying we were in the White–that way I can claim a fish in all three rivers), I landed my final fish of the day, and the only brown of the trip. Drew offered to take us on another drift, but why would we? How could things get better?

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Washington Playlist

What We Took

We took 7 wt and 8/9 wt. Beulah Spey rods.. We took skagit lines for both, and a variety of tips. We fished T-17 tips, whatever that means. The smaller rod was matched to a Hardy Marquis Salmon No. 2 reel, and for the larger I stripped a 12 wt floating tarpon line off of a Galvan Tournament Series Reel. They’re both pretty things. I’m a sucker for reels.

We put 8 wt Rio InTouch Salmon/Steelhead floating lines on two saltwater reels, both Tibor Everglades, and fished them on 9 foot 8 wt rods–Kris’s rods, a Helios 3 and a Helios 2. I got the Helios 2.

The Olympic Peninsula may be the last stronghold of boot-footed waders, the kind of waders with attached rubber boots instead of neoprene stockings worn under separate wading boots. Ryan the guide said that boot foot waders are warmer, and I believe it: my feet were always cold once I’d waded, notwithstanding the Darn Tough expedition socks and liners. Plus our boots never dried after we finished fishing, kicking my luggage over the 50 pound limit. “Happy Valentines” the nice lady at the Southwest Counter said when she didn’t charge me for overweight luggage.

I wore everything I had. Everything. The temperatures were warm enough, it was sunny and there was no wind, but I’m from Houston. I wore everything I had.

Victoria, B.C.

The Black Ball Ferry Line ferry, The Coho, runs from Port Angeles to Victoria. I hadn’t been on The Coho since 1962, when I was five, and my memory of it was somewhat spotty. Mostly I remember my sister being seasick, really, really seasick. So does she. We texted about it on the ferry, and I though she was going throw up by text.

We ate in one memorable restaurant, OLO, which is Chinook for hungry, and one less memorable restaurant, Little Jumbo, where I had fish in a sauce that reminded me of cream gravy. I like cream gravy. Loaded up with pepper and served on either biscuits or chicken fried steak it is the very thing, but cream gravy on grilled ling isn’t particularly successful. It was described on the menu as sunchoke cream, but cream gravy is cream gravy and you can’t fool me. It would have been better with some bacon grease.

We had afternoon tea at the Butchart Gardens, which even midwinter are beautiful, and midwinter have the advantage of no crowds. Afternoon tea is a thing in Victoria, and not having tea is punishable with heavy fines. They even ask at the border if you’ve had your tea. I suspect it magnifies their separation from the weird coffee concoctions on the other side of the border, but it also made me feel good. This was my kind of crowd. Afternoon tea is apparently a thing for the post-60s set.

In a bar, Bard and Banker, we ordered a dozen oysters that never came. Management should tell its servers that even raw oysters can’t walk from the kitchen. I watched ice hockey on the bar tv, so I knew I was in Canada. The Lightning won in overtime. I don’t know where the Lightning are from, or who they were playing.

The Royal B.C. Museum is spectacular, mostly because of the First Nation exhibits, both the past–these were pretty sophisticated people with pretty interesting stuff–and the present. Everywhere there are signs explaining that some of the objects are exhibited by treaty.

We had two very strange encounters.

I don’t smoke many cigars, but, when one can buy Cuban cigars one should buy a few, just in case any Cubans come to visit. When we were leaving the Cuban Cigar Shop the other customer was wearing an Astros cap. He was from Conroe, about 50 miles from Houston, and he was in Victoria building its first sewage treatment plant. This is a city of 350,000, and it’s never had a sewage treatment plant. It fine screens the sewage that otherwise goes straight to the ocean, trusting on currents and cold water to clean things up. I was kinda glad those oysters never got served.

Cohibas, the cigar that Castro smoked, are very good.

Victoria has its street life, it’s a walkable city with its best restaurants and shops and bars tightly packed around the port, so we walked. It’s grungier than I had expected, with a rough edge to its street life. Lots o’ street folk. Walking to OLO the first night a young guy on the street lunged at us . . .

And coughed, hacked, coughed hard, uncovered, clearly at us. It was a 21st century, post-coronavirus assault. Kris was shaken, I was angry, but if you just wanted to hassle people it was brilliant. Lunge and cough. Terrifying.

We stayed at the Best Western Plus Carlton Plaza. Nice enough, and central, but they didn’t have morning coffee in the lobby, which is unforgivable. We should have sprung for The Fairmont Empress.

Seattle, Wa.

In Seattle we had an early flight so we stayed near the airport. We walked around the Ballard neighborhood on the first day, trying to find oysters, and on our last evening ate at Matt’s in the Market, in the Pike Place Market, mostly because there were pictures of it all over the internet and it looked pretty. We wanted to see the Market, but by the time we got there from Victoria almost everything was\closed. Someday we’ll go back to Seattle for a baseball game. They did have coffee in the lobby of the Holiday Inn Express.

What We Didn’t Do

We didn’t eat at our acquaintance Jack’s barbecue place in Seattle. We didn’t spend much time in Seattle, and none in Vancouver. We didn’t see any baseball or catch a sea-run cutthroat trout. We didn’t do any yoga. We smoked no marijuana, though I started to ask the cluster of accountants outside the Pike Place Market for a toke. Really? Accountants? They had to be accountants. They looked like either accountants or lawyers, but tax lawyers.

What I Lost

I lost an Apple Air Pod, which left me with a case and a single Air Pod. Did you know that you can buy a single Air Pod from Apple? It’s not cheap, about $70, but cheaper than a new set.

I lost my Nikon waterproof point and shoot, with all the best pictures of our fishing trip. I’d decided to replace it with a new iPhone, but last night Jack Mitchell of the Evening Hatch texted that they’d found my camera. That’s a pretty good trip for me. Only one Air Pod lost. Only one fly rod broken.

Donuts

Empire Donuts in Victoria had good coffee, and a Star Wars theme. There was nothing wrong with the donuts. We went out of our way to go to Sidney Bakery, about 20 miles from Victoria but close enough to the Butchart Gardens to make it easy. It was an old-fashioned bakery, doing a great Wednesday morning business. I ordered a pecan roll so I could hear them mispronounce pee-can.

Playlist

There were 247 songs on my Seattle playlist. That’s a lot. There is a tremendous amount of great music from Seattle.

  • Songs titled “Seattle”: Sam Kim, Perry Como, Mary Mary, Felly, Public Image Ltd., Jackson Walker, Bobby Sherman. The Perry Como is a great example of bad choices. The Bobby Sherman is the same song, from a late-60s television series, Here Comes the Brides. The Public Image is the best of the lot, though I’m not sure what it has to do with Seattle. I’m pretty sure it had nothing to do with any television series.
  • Bands That Live in the Part of Seattle That’s Actually Greater Brooklyn: Band of Horses, Fleet Foxes, The Head and the Heart, Laura Love, Nieko Case, Death Cab for Cutie, the Highwomen, Brandi Carlile, Chastity Belt, Perfume Genius, Tacocat. I’m very fond of Fleet Foxes, who remind me of Bon Iver. Death Cab for Cutie is better than they should be. I thought Brandi Carlile was off of one of those tv talent competitions, but she’s not, and I was pleased to find her. Tacocat is the greatest name ever, and there need to be more bands like Perfume Genius.
  • Grunge and Post-Grunge. Nirvana, Foo Fighters, Pearl Jam. I had never listened to Pearl Jam, which seems very odd, and I may be the only person who thinks Eddie Vedder sounds exactly like Darius Rucker. I understand that the Mariners play Smells Like Teen Spirit instead of Take Me Out to the Ballgame during the seventh inning stretch.
  • Rock. Jimy Hendrix, Heart, Queensryche, the Ventures. I’ve never really liked Hendrix. At his best he’s a good blues guitarist, but usually I find him cloying. I downloaded Rod Stewart’s cover of Angel, and Derek & the Dominoes cover of Little Wing, and they’re still better than Hendrix’s originals. As for Heart, hadn’t heard them since the 70s, and listening to them 50 years later was great fun. I always thought the Ventures did Wipeout, but that was the Surfaris. The Ventures did do The Theme from Hawaii Five-0, which I’ve added to my Hawaii playlist, and Pipeline. I wish I could play that first hook in Pipeline.
  • Hip-Hop, Rap. Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, Mary Lambert (only because of her ties to Maklemore, she keeps me warm is lovely), and some song by Kanye West. We watched the Taylor Swift documentary, Miss Americana, after we got back, so I’m not talking to Kanye right now.
  • Jazz. Bill Frisell, Kenny G, Ernestine Anderson, Quincy Jones. That’s too broad a list to mean anything. I never made it through a full Kenny G. song, but I’m a fan of Bill Frisell because I’m a guitar fan. Ernestine Anderson grew up in Houston, but I’d never listened to her. It’s music that goes well with martinis.
  • Classical. John Cage, Mark O’Conner. I liked the Cage I listened to. Mark O’Conner is from Seattle, and bluegrass, but his Appalachia Waltz with Yo-Yo Ma and Edgar Meyer is wonderful.
  • Bing Crosby. I can always listen to White Christmas.
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Goodbye Joe

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.

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More Florida Playlist

Gear

We took five rods. We took my 7 weight G. Loomis Asquith with a Tibor Everglades reel and a bonefish line. When we weren’t fishing for big tarpon that’s the only rod we used in the Everglades. It’s a little known fact, but Lord Asquith was the commander of the British forces in Florida during the Revolutionary War, and made a pile selling swampland to British loyalists escaping from New York and New England.

We also took Kris’s 8-weight Helios 3 with an Orvis Hydros reel, a 10-weight Helios 2 with a Tibor Riptide reel, and a 11-weight Helios 2 with an Orvis Mirage reel. All of them had floating lines. In the Everglades we used the guide’s 11-weight H3 because we needed an intermediate line and because H3. We used the guide’s 10-weight H3 out of Key Largo because the guide didn’t like my leader and because H3. My leader was tied with lots of bits and pieces of fluorocarbon and his was a simple 40-20-40 or thereabouts.

It rained out of Key Largo, so our rain gear came in handy. I wore my Converse high tops. Kris kept wanting me to go barefoot so I’d feel the line under my feet, but I never did. Together with my blue sun gloves, blue Buff, blue cap, and blue eyes I was very color-coordinated, and going barefoot would have ruined the whole ensemble.

Unfortunately my boat bag was orange. I need to work on that.

We also took Kris’s 5-weight Helios 3 for the Miami canals. More on that later.

Flies

We only used a few. For the bonefish it was a lead-eyed root beer crazy charlie, probably size 8 or 10. The tarpon fly we used was a black toad, not very big, only a couple of inches long, tied on the the usual sized hook for tarpon, 1/0 or 2/0. For the smaller fish and the baby tarpon we switched to an orange and white baitfish pattern, size 4 maybe. it wasn’t a fly I knew, but any clouser variant or baitfish pattern would probably have done. These were all guides’ flies.

The Canals

I wanted to fish Florida canals on our first trip to Florida, but we didn’t have the time, or at least the energy. This time we did, but only for an hour because of a luggage snafu. ProTip: Don’t try to late-check a bag of food and expect TSA to get it onto your plane, and if you do be ready for the recriminations of the lady at the Southwest baggage claim who feels wronged because you late-checked luggage. Also, buy the Coke Zero when you get there. When one explodes in the plane and mixes with the instant oatmeal it’s a real mess, even when you bag is waterproof. Maybe especially when your bag is waterproof.

At the canal it was too windy for Kris’s 5-weight, and it was hot. We were fishing on the side of the road in a warehouse district. It wasn’t a transcendent outdoors experience.

Hotels

We had great luck with hotels. We stayed at The National in the heart of Miami Beach. The National was built in the 50s, and is immaculate. I wanted to spend the weekend floating by the poolside bar and drinking mai tais, and if I’d done it the other guests could have gone home and told their friends that in Florida they’d seen the Great White Manatee.

In Key Largo we stayed at Popp’s Motel. There are nine cottages with a beach. There are palm trees and hammocks. Nobody was there but us, though in-season my guess is it’s packed.

Restaurants

On the way out of the Everglades we stopped at Robert is Here in Florida City. I had the mango and strawberry milkshake, Kris had the blackberry. There is a low-rent zoo in the back where you can sit at picnic tables and watch tortoises and goats and the other customers while you drink your milkshake. There are parrots and motorcyclists with tattoos and The Great White Manatee. It’s a fine place.

In Miami we went to Joe’s Stone Crab for lunch. I had expected something close to Felix’s Oyster Bar in New Orleans, something with a formica counter and twirly stools. Instead it was white table cloths and waiters in tuxedoes. A waiter who spoke tourist gave great guidance, and there was crabmeat and key lime pie. The waiter had a good Houston story about being stuck in Houston during Hurricane Harvey, and volunteering at the George R. Brown shelter.

The guy behind us had stories too, and he announced them with unflinching gusto. Here are his stories.

  • He was raised right here in Miami, and every time he came home he came to Joe’s, and he especially wanted to bring her to Joe’s.
  • He loved her, and that story she told about her parents was funny, and her family must think he was robbing the cradle.
  • Don’t worry about how much food he was ordering, because he could eat it all. Gusto!
  • People come for the crabs, but really it was the coconut shrimp that he loved.
  • These weren’t local crabs. These were west coast crabs. He could tell, he was raised here.
  • She would love the key lime pie.
  • Ok, she hadn’t loved the key lime pie. They’d order the chocolate cake.
  • She was so funny. He loved her.
  • He loved her.

My back was to them, but while it was impossible to see I could hear him fine, more than fine, more than I wanted. Whether or not raised in Miami his accent was Jersey, and she was 25 (or at least he said she was 25) and her accent Asian. She didn’t talk much.

When we left I got my only glimpse of them. He was closer to 60 than 25, a bit rotund, a bit worn, a bit sagging. If he’d been a fish he would have been a gizzard shad. She was nondescript. She could have been 25 or 30 or 40, a bit rotund as well, and not glamorous, nor seemingly striving for more glamour than any of us might seek. Was she Korean? Vietnamese? How did these two meet? Online? Was there some sort of matchmaker? Would things end well? I wished them well if well was in the cards, but I guess didn’t really think it was.

That evening we went to The Surf Club at the Four Season’s Hotel. The blurb promised nostalgic cuisine and the Thomas Keller touch. That sounded fun, expensive what with Thomas Keller touching our bank account, but fun. And nostalgic cuisine! 50s-60s cuisine! It sounded just right for Miami.

Here is what I learned: you can’t high concept authenticity. You can high concept all you want, and if the concept is good it will travel, but if a restaurant is concept and the concept is authenticity (and that’s really what you’re at when you’re grabbing nostalgia), well, you can’t Make America Great Again. It doesn’t matter how good the service, how finely sourced the beef, how excellent the dang-that’s-really-expensive wine list, a $46 soft boiled egg is still a soft boiled egg, even if it comes with caviar and a buckwheat blini.

I was dressed in my finest fishing wear, including my bright blue Converse high tops, so I didn’t exactly fit the space, but I figured nothing said 1960 like Converse high tops. Kris told me not to get the oysters Rockefeller, but I’m a sucker for roasted oysters. It never works out though. Except for the Oysters Gilhooley at San Leon’s Gilhooley’s (cash only, you can smoke at the bar, and be sure and stop and admire the Harleys out front) I’m always disappointed. The oysters were surprisingly fine, still plump and fresh, but how do you make bread crumbs bitter? Were they scorched? And why ruin an oyster with a slather of spinach? I ate the oysters anyway, just so Kris wouldn’t know she was right. They needed some hot sauce, but so did much of the 50s.

Kris didn’t do more than taste her lamb chops and said they were over-salted and overdone. They took them off the bill. Great service, and the crudite and martinis were magnificent. They cook magnificent crudite. My steak was a steak. It was a bit over salted in pockets, but I didn’t tell Kris.

Just like lunch there was an old man with a much younger woman, and this old man was frightening–if he wasn’t Miami mafioso he had missed his calling–while Kris was certain that any woman that tall and with arms that thin was a young man in drag. She was so coiffed and painted that you couldn’t tell what she’d begun as, male, female, beautiful, plain.

She had a mass of frosted hair over a dark underlayer–there were a lot of women in the room with a mass of frosted hair over a dark underlayer, and there was a magnificence in the complexity of it. How did they do that? In more innocent places you’d just guess their roots were showing, but this was so planned, so well-executed, and so universal that it could be nothing but premeditated. Did they dye their hair dark, then dye it again light? It had to take hours, did it take days? I wondered why Kris didn’t do the same, but she’d have to add more hair to get the effect. I like her hair just fine.

I don’t think she was a young man in drag, but I didn’t ask. When I was leaving the maitre d’ asked if I’d enjoyed my golf. Our kind of place.

South in Key Largo we ate at The Fish House. Its concept was to throw fishy looking bibelots on the wall and serve the same menu they served last year and the year before and the year before that, with whatever fish was fresh that day. The couples at the tables next to us got into a heated argument about the President until one stormed out. My nose was so far into my plate that I couldn’t tell who took which side, but the remaining couple, the couple immediately to our right, lived in Manhattan on the Upper West Side, and guessed from our intro that we’d dined with Thomas Keller the night before. They were younger than us, but not by much, and said that they’d had dinner the night before at the Trump Doral, the one that had made all the headlines for the G7 conference, and that there had been a woman in a sequined Make America Great Again dress that wasn’t meant to be ironic.

At the fish house the oysters were from Texas, just like us. There was no slather of spinach. On our way out of the Keys the next day we stopped again for a second lunch.

Our final night in Fort Lauderdale we found a red-sauce Italian place, Il Mulino, and ate comfort food. We didn’t talk to anybody. We didn’t watch anybody or overhear any conversations. We split a pair of Apple Airpods and streamed the Astros beating the Nationals in World Series game 4 through Kris’s phone. Those were more innocent times.

Donuts

No donuts. We didn’t eat a single donut.

Playlist

I’ve covered my Florida playlist before, and there’s nothing more to be said except this time I liked it. I liked Mel Tillis. I liked the Adderly Brothers and Ray Charles and Arturo Sandoval and John Vanderslice. Not a single Jimmy Buffet song cycled through, and I liked that. I’ve made my peace with Florida. I’ve caught my Florida fish.