Mostly that title has nothing to do with what I’m about to write, but it’s hard to go to Savannah and not hum Moon River, or ponder the possibilities in a box of chocolates, or try to remember the story line of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. I needed to work at least one of those in somehow, but couldn’t think how. So there. Done.
The fish I caught near Savannah was not really one of my best fish. It was maybe 20 inches, so on the small side for redfish. It may have been a second year fish. It had good redfish color though, and I was really proud of that fish. For a combined full day of hard fishing, half a day for trout on Noontootla Creek in North Georgia in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and half a day in the Vernon River near Savannah, it was the only fish I caught in Georgia. Even if it wasn’t a trophy fish, it was a great fish.
I also caught it by luck. I was blind casting where the guide told me, under a bridge between the pylons, and when I picked up my line to recast there was a fish on my fly. I didn’t see that fish and cast to it. I didn’t feel the take. I thought at first I’d hung up on something, but then there it was. My Georgia fish. What a spectacular fish.
I also landed an oyster. It was also catch and release.
I could be less honest and tell you that the redfish was a bit bigger, maybe a lot bigger, and that it was all skill–my perfect cast fell exactly where I knew the fish would be, and when I began to lift the fly ever so gently–a Leisenring Lift in saltwater!–the fish slammed my fly hard and fast. It almost jerked the rod from my hands!
Did I mention it was about 24 inches?
Wait, wait, sorry, I was getting carried away, and Kris and our guide, Chad DuBose of Tall Tides Charters, would like as not call me on it. Not that I would ever tell you anything but exactly what happened, ever. Really.
And anyway blind luck is the way I catch a lot of fish. And I gotta admit I caught that fish by blind luck.
I was kinda sorry to catch that fish. I liked Georgia, especially Savannah and wouldn’t mind having to go back, especially to Savannah. I liked North Georgia, too, but our half-day was hard. We wade-fished, so we had to haul waders and boots and wading staffs from Texas. That’s heavy and bulky, and only gets heavier when wet. The stream where we fished, Noontootla Creek, was high, there were slick rocks and overgrown banks, and my new wading staff kept coming apart when I needed it.
Wading the Noontootla wore me out. I felt old.
The Noontootla is a small stream on private land, and all the fish were wild, none stocked. Normally it would have been terrific fishing, but they’d had rain and then some more rain, so the creek was running high and the fish were either sulking, dispersed, or already over-fed in the wash off. Our guide, Randy Bailey with Reel ‘Em In Guide Service, started the morning confident and ready to spend the day netting fish, and then we actually fished.
Randy must have adjusted my flies a half-dozen times trying to find something that worked. Early on I got one slap from a small fish on an indicator dry fly, and Randy caught a nice rainbow when he flipped out a streamer just to test the water. Otherwise nada. I should have known we were in trouble when the guys at the Fish Hawk in Atlanta told me we were going to catch a lot of fish. I should have knocked on wood, burnt a candle, and turned around three times and spat.
We fished nymphs. We fished dry flies. We fished nymphs under dry flies. We fished streamers. I even fished the girdle bugs they sold me at the Fish Hawk. Our friends Shelley and Mark fished a different beat with a different Reel ‘Em In guide, Chris Bradley , and Shelley caught a nice fish. She might tell you that she didn’t actually land the fish, that it came off when it was almost to hand, but if she won’t tell even a little white lie then I guess I’ll have to do it for her. Shelley caught that fish, and Mark got a photo, if not of the actual fish who’s to know?
Mark didn’t catch a fish. Kris didn’t catch a fish. I didn’t catch a fish. We fished hard. It was a beautiful day and a beautiful creek and by noon I was exhausted. When we were done I slept for about 18 hours, with no breaks except of course for lunch and dinner. I gained about eight pounds in Georgia, so I didn’t miss any lunches or dinners.
Google Maps
The next day Mark and Shelley flew back to Houston from Atlanta. Kris and I drove the half-dozen hours to Savannah, out of the mountains, through Atlanta and Macon, and into the Coastal Plain. Georgia’s a pretty big place, and there were plenty of places to fish that we missed. We didn’t even fish for bluegill in that pond behind the barbecue place, though I was tempted.
Savannah is a great vacation town. You can shop in Savannah. You can eat in Savannah and drink in Savannah, you can go to the beach, and you can just look around and see history. Best of all though, not far from the town, you can fish this.
I love coastal marshes. Sometimes I think it comes from growing up in the Great Plains–it’s flat and mostly treeless and covered with grass, just like home, and if it weren’t for all that water it could be West Texas. I lived years in Houston before I realized that there was wildness just an hour away, and that it was full of stuff no one would ever see unless they took some trouble.
Fishing for redfish near Savannah is a little different from fishing for redfish on the Texas Coast. Instead of fishing in the bay flats inside the barrier islands, Chad took us upstream on the Vernon River, away from the Atlantic into brackish tidal water. There were alligator gar and marsh grass and oysters. We could hear marsh wrens, and a quarter mile away, high in a dead tree, we could see a bald eagle. In the river, we could see dolphin fins while they cruised. The place we were, where land joins ocean, is rich with life, and while you’re there it demands your attention.
We fished out of Chad’s Hell’s Bay Professional, which is a fine Florida poling skiff. He poled the boat along the banks and called out the redfish–there were plenty of fish cruising the banks, and even if they didn’t take we got plenty of casts to cruising fish. While the water wasn’t always clear enough to see the fish themselves, the big pushes of water were unmistakeable. Even the May weather was great, sunny and warm with mild wind.
Chad knew the river, had grown up on the river, but he was also so proud of his city that it was contagious. Sure, he knew the fishing, but he also knew the restaurants, the neighborhoods, the hotels . . . It was fun just sitting back and listening.
And I’m game for more Savannah. There are more fish to catch, and Chad’s right, it’s a special place. Like I said, I’m kinda sorry I already caught that fish in Georgia. I’m ready to go back.
Scarlett O’Hara’s Bosom and Early Georgia History, in Order of Personal Significance
I figured that if we were going to Georgia I should re-read Gone with the Wind. I hadn’t read it since I was 12, and when I was 12 I liked it, or at least I liked having read it. All that Southern splendor was mighty fine, plus there was that movie poster featuring Scarlett O’Hara’s bosom. What Southern almost-adolescent boy could ignore the drama inherent in Scarlett O’Hara’s bosom? I had a copy of that poster on my wall, and I suspect it was years before I noticed that Clark Gable had a moustache.
My notion before our trip was to determine whether Gone with the Wind was anything more than a Lost Cause romance. After all, no book except the Bible has sold more American copies than Gone with the Wind. It won the 1938 Pulitzer Prize, so somebody once thought it was important literature. The movie won the 1939 Oscar for best picture, and adjusted for inflation, it’s still the highest grossing movie ever.
I downloaded a free copy of the novel on Audible, but I couldn’t listen past the second chapter. What my 12-year old self admired, my 67-year old self found dreadful. Lost Cause propaganda? Who knows–I never got that far. These characters were all of them idiots. They were annoying and unlikeable and inane. Maybe Margaret Mitchell intended that they be annoying and unlikeable, but I don’t think they were supposed to be boring. I was unmoved by the set-up, despised the dialogue, and found Scarlett, cleavage or no, to be a ninny. I wanted to waste no more of my life with Mammy or the twins or Ashley or Melanie. I didn’t give a damn about Scarlett, or for that matter about Rhett.
So I can’t really tell you anything about Gone with the Wind, except I’d advise don’t bother. It had its moment, but that was when I was 12.
Still, that’s the best movie poster bosom ever. It’s Stereophonic.
I did read a good book about Georgia, Georgia, a Short History, by Christopher Meyers and David Williams, and there was some interesting stuff to learn.
Georgia was the youngest of the Thirteen Colonies, founded by James Oglethorpe in 1732 as a second chance for British debtors and a buffer against Spanish Florida. Settlers were from England’s poorest, and Oglethorpe prohibited hard liquor, slaves, and lawyers. Land was to be owned by the colony. Each immigrant’s tract was limited to 50 acres.
That bit of social engineering lasted roughly 20 years. There was no debt forgiveness, so not only were the English urban debtors–who had likely never farmed–expected to farm successfully on small tracts in difficult coastal soil, they were expected to repay their English debts from their unsuccessful farming. Many of the debtors skipped out to northern climes, leaving both Georgia and their debts. By the 1750s there was private ownership of large tracts–up to 500 acres–by slave owners. There were probably lawyers, too.
James Oglethorpe, glam rocker and failed reformer.
What was supposed to be an agrarian yeoman farmer utopia became a utopia for wealthy planters. Before the cotton gin, the planters–the large-tract slave-owning landowners–were confined to rice farms near the coast, but with cotton production Georgia became part of the Cotton Kingdom. The Trail of Tears and railroads opened upland Georgia to white settlement, and large landowners brought slaves and cotton to the upper Coastal Plain and the Piedmont to fill the void.
Georgia also achieved land fraud on a massive scale. After the Revolution, counties and the state sold land to new settlers and speculators, but they got into the habit of selling more land than there was actually dirt. The worst offender, Montgomery County, issued land warrants for 7,436,995 acres of land, which was 7,029,315 more acres of land than Montgomery County actually contained. By 1796, Georgia county officials had issued warrants for 29 million acres. Georgia then contained only 9 million acres.
The State Assembly was good at land sales, too, and in exchange for bribes (which in addition to money included nifty stuff like land, guns, and slaves) sold 50 million acres of Indian land for about a penny an acre–a ridiculous price for land that they had no right to sell. The sales were rescinded by the next Assembly, but were then found valid by the Supreme Court under the Contract Clause. The U.S. Congress ended up buying out the purchasers for $4.25 million. No Georgian should ever complain about federal buy-outs. Their’s was one of the first, and in inflation-adjusted dollars probably rivals anything that came later.
No state’s early American history was as governed by class hierarchy as Georgia’s, and how you see Georgia’s early history really does depend on where you stand. If you look at Georgia from the planters’ eyes, by the 1850s it was an economic dynamo powering a thriving economy. In 1860 Georgia’s per capita wealth was nearly double that of New York, which is pretty impressive, but on the other hand only six percent of white Georgians controlled about half the state’s wealth, which is pretty one-sided.
A lot of plain white folk saw Georgia differently from the planter class, particularly in the northern mountain portion of the state where there were few slaves, and in the southern Pine Barrens which couldn’t support big agriculture. In Georgia cities, slaves devalued free labor, and other than the rice and cotton planters, Georgia agriculture was largely small-parcel subsistence farming. In 1860, Georgia’s slaves were valued at about $400 million, about half the state’s wealth, but only about 37% of the white population owned any slaves, and planters were a sliver of that 37%.
Carrying Cotton to the Gin, Harper’s New Monthly, March, 1854.
And Georgia slaves like as not saw Georgia differently from their owners. When Georgians voted to secede and join the Confederacy, the measure passed by about 1000 votes, 42,744 to 41,717–but remember, these voters could only be white male property-owners. Slaves, who were 44% of the roughly one million Georgians, had no votes, and while one can never be certain, I’d bet good money that the slaves would have voted en masse to stay in the Union. Lincoln may not have planned to free the slaves, but apparently slaves throughout the South were convinced–along with the secessionists–that freedom was Lincoln’s plan.
Among plain white Georgians, the Civil War was increasingly seen as a rich man’s war fought by poor men, and throughout the war there were large numbers of deserters, draft dodgers, and even Union volunteers. In Georgia there were food riots, draft rebellions, and the formation of an active and vocal Peace Society. The cotton class may have seen the War as necessary and righteous, but to support the war effort they kept planting cotton instead of corn, hence the food riots. Wealthy planters were largely exempt from the draft and generally weren’t doing the actual fighting. Whatever else can be said about the South, the Confederacy was badly managed on the home front. By the end of the War, it’s estimated that nearly half of the Confederate army had deserted.
18,250 Georgian Confederates died in the Civil war, roughly a fifth of those who served. Georgia was also a battlefield from Chickamauga in 1863 in northwest Georgia to Sherman’s March to the Sea.
Georgia Geography
Pamela W. Gore, Geographic Regions of Georgia, from the New Georgia Encyclopedia.
By area, Georgia is the largest state east of the Mississippi, and 24th overall. It divides into five geographic regions. The Coastal Plain is in the south, and the southeastern border of the Coastal Plain is the Atlantic Ocean. The Piedmont is north of the Coastal Plain, above the fall line where rivers tend to rapids and the sedimentary rock of the Coastal Plain gives way to the harder crystalline rocks of the uplands. Generally the Piedmont soils are richer than the soils of the Coastal Plain, and Georgia’s southern Coastal Plain, the Wiregrass Region, is one of Georgia’s poorest regions. The exception for richer Coastal Plain soils is the rich black soil immediately below the Piedmont, the Black Belt that stretches from Georgia through Alabama to the Mississippi Delta. Along with the Delta became the Black Belt became the cotton-producing heartland for the South. The Black Belt was named first for the color of its soil, but the identification took on a new meaning because of the concentration of slaves. Big cotton thrived on black soil and slavery.
Abbasi786786, Majority Black Counties Based on the 2020 Census, from Wikipedia.
In Georgia’s far north, the three remaining regions seem to this outsider divided by terrain but otherwise lumped together, and it’s in North Georgia where Appalachia begins. The Appalachian trail starts northward in North Georgia, from Springer Mountain, elevation 3,780 feet, and James Dickey set Deliverance on a made-up river in North Georgia. We will trout fish in North Georgia, somewhat close to Brasstown Bald, Georgia’s highest mountain at 4,784 feet. I’ll take a guitar in case we run into any banjo players, but I’ll be damned if I do any canoeing.
Georgia is water rich. It has 14 major river basins, with more than 44,000 miles of perennial rivers. Its rivers tend to have great names: the Suwanee, the Ocmulgee, the Coosa, the Llappoosa, the Chattahoochee . . . Plus Georgia has about 100 miles of Atlantic coastline. The combination of elevation, coast, and rivers makes Georgia rich fishing. In the north there are native Appalachian brook trout and imported brown and rainbow trout. There are imported stripers in lakes, and redfish along the coast. There are ten species of black bass, including great river bass like the redeye, and bass unique to Georgia like Bartram’s.
We’re going trout fishing instead of bass fishing because we’re going to Atlanta for a wedding, and our friend Shelley (who will also be at the wedding) likes to fish for trout. Still, there’s always a chance of catching a bass in those northern Georgia rivers. I hope I catch a bass. Well, come to think of it, I hope I catch anything at all.
Population
At 21,029,227, Georgia is the 8th largest state by population, bracketed by Ohio at number 7 and North Carolina at number 9. It is one of the fastest growing states since World War II, and us Houstonians see Atlanta as our Southern mirror. Anglos are 50.4% of the Georgia population, African Americans 33.1%, and Hispanics 10.5%. Everybody else is a smidgeon. Most of the population growth is in Georgia’s Piedmont, which is the industrial heart of the state.
Other than the whole slavery thing, the birth of the modern Ku Klux Klan, and Jim Crow segregation, Georgia’s civil rights history had some positives. Martin Luther King Jr. was a pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, and Georgians were leaders in the Civil Rights movement throughout the South. Savannah desegregated early, but despite active movements Albany and Atlanta were slow. In 1971, then-governor Jimmy Carter declared a new era of Civil Rights in Georgia, but particularly in the rural areas of the state Jimmy probably jumped the gun.
Valdosta, Georgia Klan Rally, 1922, Georgia State Archives.
Politics
Is any state’s recent presidential politics more interesting than Georgia’s? I don’t pretend to understand what happened in 2020, but I have no doubt that there was no theft of the Georgia election. I’ve officiated over local elections, and massive voter fraud would not be easy. Oh sure, some lone soul might vote twice, or not be registered, but everything in American elections makes massive fraud almost impossible. It certainly couldn’t be accomplished by the efforts of a handful of people. It would take a whole dance card of conspiracy, and people, being what they are, would never be able to hide it. They can’t keep their mouth shut. If there had been massive fraud in Georgia, somebody involved would have bragged about their part over beers, at Thanksgiving dinner, or in their tell-all best seller. Instead as evidence of election interference we have a phone recording of a sitting President urging a governor to manufacture votes.
When you look at how the actual vote went, Georgia’s voting patterns are just like the rest of the country. Urban areas voted Democratic, and outside of the Black Belt, the rural countryside voted Republican. Trump substantially increased his vote totals from 2016, 2,089,104 votes in 2016 to 2,461,854 in 2020, but the Democrats did even better, 1,877,963 to 2,473,633. Democrats mostly carried majorities in the urban areas (as they had in 2016), but more total voters in rural areas also voted Democratic. F’rinstance, Atlanta’s urban Fulton County turned out substantially more Democratic voters in 2020 than in 2016 (529,931 to 334,053), but that trend was true in every Georgia County, even in counties where Trump otherwise had a majority. In the numerous rural counties Donald Trump carried, his margins shrank. Throughout the state voters who would not turn out in 2016 to vote for Hillary Clinton turned out in 2020 to vote for Joe Biden, or maybe to vote against Donald Trump.
From Wikipedia, AdamG2016, Georgia Presidential Election Results 2020.
Where We’ll Fish
Our plan doesn’t involve voting. We’ll fly into Atlanta and do wedding things for three days, then drive north with our friends the Marmons to Ellijay to fish a half day for trout. We’re taking waders and boots and 5-weights. The next day the Marmons head back to Houston, and Kris and I will head south out of Georgia’s Valley and Ridge, through the Piedmont, down to Savannah on the Coastal Plain to fish in saltwater for redfish. I may not catch any fish, but I will see a lot of Georgia. We fly back to Houston from Savannah.
We took three rods, two 9-foot 8-weights with floating lines and a 9-foot 9-weight with an intermediate line, a line that sinks just a bit below the surface. Mostly we fished with the 8-weights, but I used the 9-weight some in the fog when I was blind casting in deeper water. I caught my fish on my 8-weight, and the fish was strong enough to make me think a 9-weight might have been better.
Our guide, Ray Ramos, had suggested that we bring waders and boots in the likely event that the weather stayed bad. If it stayed bad we were going to try a bit of coastline casting. The water is still pretty cold in Rhode Island, and we’re not much used to cold, so we would have needed the waders. We never used them, which is good. No matter what Mr. Simms and Mr. Patagonia and Mr. Orvis tell you, waders are a nuisance.
When we left Ninigret Pond the second day, the pretty day, a UPS driver in shorts kidded us about our cool weather clothes and asked if we thought it was cold. We told him that we were from Houston, and that it was freezing. He told us we’d never survive the winters. I’d guess that’s about right.
The first time we went to Rhode Island we were in Newport on the weekend of the boat show. Newport is an upscale East Coast tourist destination, and it is the home to The America’s Cup. I reckon it’s the center of the sailboat universe. Every recreational sailor in North America was in Newport for the boat show, and it was tough to blanch for all the tans. Because of the crowds, prices were jacked, rooms were hard to come by, and there were people everywhere. It was a terrible time to be in Newport unless you sailed, and we paid an extravagant amount of money for a depressingly mediocre hotel room.
The second time we went prices were calmer, and we found a great old refurbished motor inn, The Sea Whale Motel. It was kinda cool and not too funky, reasonably central, and so much more likable than the first place we had stayed. For this trip I booked us again for the Sea Whale.
Except I didn’t. I booked us for the Blue Whale. You see what I did there? Sea Whale? Blue Whale? See how anybody could make that mistake? Well, I certainly see it.
I was a bit surprised when we followed the GPS directions from the airport and ended up an hour across Block Island Sound from Newport. The Blue Whale was tiny, and our room was a tinier part of that tiny. It was great though, and in that tiny room I did some world class sleeping. From the Blue Whale it was a quick, calm drive to Ninigret Pond, and much more convenient than Newport would have been. Prices at the Blue Whale were even cheaper than at the Sea Whale–of course it was a bit early for beach-goers, and beach-goers are the Blue Whale’s clientele.
I’m a great planner, and from now on I’m making all my lodging choices based on whether or not there’s a whale in the mix.
Restaurants
I’ve already written about the magnificence that are clam shacks: lobster rolls, fried clams, picnic tables, chowder . . . And we ate at two that were a stone’s throw from The Blue Whale Inn, Monahan’s and Salty’s. At Salty’s, Kris asked the girl at the counter what she liked best, and the girl said the hot lobster roll, at least she sort of said that. She actually said the hot lab-sta roll. I made her say it again it was so wonderful, but I had embarrassed her and she Midwesterned her accent.
I vaguely recall that there’s some reason that we’re not supposed to be eating lobster, over-fishing probably, but I figured eating lab-sta just once was ok.
My college roommate, Robert, had sent us a photo of the Matunuck Oyster Bar, ((At least that’s what I think Robert sent us. I couldn’t find the original email, but on my possibly-flawed memory of his advice we went to Matunuck Oyster Bar and it was great, so whatever he sent Robert gets the credit.)) and we made a reservation there for our first night. We almost canceled when saw their wall of advertising in the Providence airport–airport advertising isn’t something I’m prone to trust–but the place was wonderful. Northeastern oysters are different than our Gulf Coast oysters, smaller, firmer, brinier . . . I love Northeastern oysters. Of course I also love Gulf Coast oysters, Northwestern oysters, French oysters, McDonald’s French fries, and fried bologna. You can take my judgment for what it’s worth.
We had Northeastern oysters. We had steamer clams. I had striped bass because, after all, that’s what I was in town for. The place was crowded and noisy and happy and the food was delicious. ((If you’re keeping track, that photo below is another lobster roll for Kris. We also split a lobster roll the next day for lunch. I don’t think she ate any lobster rolls for breakfast, but I can’t be absolutely certain. If the lab-sta fishery collapses, I’m blaming her.))
The next afternoon after fishing and clam shacking we drove into Providence, about an hour north of Ninigret Pond. Providence itself isn’t very big. The current population estimate is 189,692, but the population of the metropolitan area is more than 1.6 million, so there are plenty of people in the area. Providence is old, founded in 1636 by Roger Williams, and it’s the home of Brown University and The Rhode Island School of Design. It was once ground zero for New England’s Mafia.
We found a parking place where the parking meter didn’t work, but then we parked anyway. I figured that if it took them decades to clean out the Mafia, then I didn’t have to worry about a couple of hours of illegal parking. We walked around Brown and went through the excellent Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art–it’s small, but chock full of really great stuff. This, for instance, was the cover art on one of my college textbooks:
I think maybe it’s Roman, maybe older? Maybe Babylonian? I was excited to see it, but I was so worried that I had never finished my class reading that I forgot to check the signage.
Before we went back to The Some Whale Inn, we ate at Al Forno in Providence. In 1992 its chefs won one of the first Jame’s Beard awards, largely on the strength of their grilled pizza, and every few years like clockwork it gets a new nomination. Who doesn’t like pizza? And their grilled pizza is something strange and special. We ate grilled pizza. We split a roasted beet salad. We ate espresso-doused ice cream for desert. We watched the people around us eat other stuff and we envied them for what they’d ordered.
Playlist
The band Talking Heads came together at the Rhode Island School of Design, and I kept debating adding them to the Rhode Island playlist. I finally decided that each person is granted a certain measure of enjoyable Talking Heads listening, and after that the band passed their sell-by date. I think I passed my Talking Heads sell-by date somewhere in the early 80s.
You’d think that there wouldn’t be a lot of Rhode Island music to choose from, but here’s the thing; the Newport Jazz Festivals and Folk Festivals were incredibly influential, and if you just download a couple of festival compilations you’ll be set with a lot of great music. Somehow it is immensely satisfying to listen to “If I Had a Hammer” followed by Louis Armstrong singing “Mack the Knife.” I don’t care if any musician ever actually came from Rhode Island, so many musicians touched it that Rhode Island makes for a great playlist.
George M. Cohan was from Rhode Island, as were the Cowsills. On a side note, as a kid I saw the Cowsills at the Texas State Fair.
Guitar
I took a guitar, but I never played. Our hotel room was too small to open the case.
This was our third trip to Rhode Island to catch a fish. Kris caught a nice striped bass last year, but user errors have plagued me. I could hook fish, but then I couldn’t land fish. What I’ve learned though is that I really like Rhode Island. It’s good fishing, and you can’t throw a lobster roll without hitting a clam shack. Clam shacks are one of the best things going. Lobster rolls, fried things, chowdah . . . I could eat at clam shacks until my arteries clogged, which might not take long.
I may even prefer the clear Rhode Island clam chowder to the New England chowder with cream. I’m not much of a fan of Rhode Island clam cakes though–that’s the big lump of fried dough in the picture above. They are beloved by Rhode Islanders, but seem to have all the character of a sugarless donut, and I’m dubious that they include any clams. If I really need a cholesterol boost, give me a hush puppy any day.
The two prior times that we fished in Rhode Island, we fished from big boats–well, big for fly fishing–out from Newport where the Atlantic meets the Rhode Island shore. I usually fish inshore in saltwater, in shallow Texas bays with marshes and sea grass and, if we’re fishing really deep, two feet of water. Meanwhile New Englanders seem mostly to fish nearshore, and as far as I’m concerned there’s nothing nearshore about it. Fishing in Rhode Island, if you face north and look to your left, sure ’nuff you see a shoreline, but look right and there’s nothing but Atlantic Ocean between you and France. And I get seasick.
I was game to go to the big water again–we certainly saw plenty of fish on our prior trips, and last year with Captain Rene Letourneau Kris caught a fine striped bass–but Kris wouldn’t let me. She loved it, but she didn’t trust me. She had read somewhere that there was flats fishing in New England, and shallow water was the only thing she would agree to if I was along. No more mister nice girl for her, no more overdosing on scopolamine for me.
Read the directions. Don’t replace the patch with another when the first patch falls off. And that advice about looking at the horizon to calm your nausea? It’s nonsense. The horizon is tilted.
We booked two days with Captain Ray Ramos. Ray fishes Rhode Island salt ponds from a Mitzi Skiff. If you saltwater fly fish inshore, you know about skiffs: they’re the antithesis of big water boats. They’re built to fish the shallowest possible saltwater, and if you fly fish for bonefish or redfish you either wade or kayak or fish from a skiff.
Ray’s Mitzi Skiff is 17 feet long and 6 feet wide, which is pretty normal for a flats boat. Compared to most New England saltwater boats, it’s tiny. Ray estimates that there are maybe ten flats skiffs in New England, and that his is the only Mitzi Skiff.
We fished two days with Ray. Ray warned us that the weather reports were terrible, and that rain was forecast both days, but what can you do? We went, and we got lucky. The first day it didn’t rain, but there was heavy fog. I spent the morning blind casting to likely spots along the shoreline. I’d cast, then I’d cast some more, and then I’d cast some more. Kris wanted to make sure I caught a fish, so she left me on the bow to cast until my arm fell off, and it did! Ok, not really, but it was a near thing, and I didn’t catch anything either.
Conditions have to be reasonably favorable to sight fish anywhere, and none of the favorable conditions include fog. You need sun. If the sky is hazy or cloudy or if it’s foggy, it’s hard to see into the water even when the water isn’t cloudy. With fog all you can do is blind cast to likely spots and hope you get lucky. I did a lot of unrequited blind casting.
Of course as soon as we stopped fishing the fog cleared. It was clear, bright, sunny, perfect . . . And miracle of miracles the great weather held for our second day.
Where we fished, Ninigret Pond, is about 1500 acres, which is about the same as a medium-sized freshwater lake. Big lovely New England coastal homes surround a lot of Ninigret, and all those homeowners own big lovely New England boats. The mean depth is 4.3 feet, but of course the depth isn’t uniform. There are channels so the big boats can reach the big water, and there are acres of shallow sand flats, at most a couple of feet deep. In the late spring, schools of striped bass come into the ponds to eat cinder worms, and then for the rest of the season big stripers come onto the flats chasing bait.
We were after big stripers chasing bait.
You see that right there, right in that next photo? That’s a ball of a thousand sand eels in Ninigret Pond. In the water from a distance they look like clumps of weeds, except that they mosey across the flat like they know where they’re going. That’s what our flies mimicked. Striped bass believe them delicious, though I never much cared for them. I guess I’ve never had a batch fried up at a clam shack.
We were fishing floating lines on 8-weight rods with 16-pound leaders, and the retrieve was relatively short strips with a pause to let the fly dive. Stripers are picky fish though, and at least twice we got follows from good stripers that wouldn’t take the fly. We could see them follow the fly, and then just when we thought things were going to happen the fish would turn. Both times the fly had picked up a bit of grass, a tiny, insignificant, soupçon of eel grass caught on the hook, and that was enough.
But even the failures are great when you sight-fish, and we couldn’t have asked for better than Ray at spotting fish. Once he told us where to look we could see it all. We could watch the big dark stripers move across the flats, sometimes straight at us. Even when they were too far away to see in the water we could see them explode the surface crashing bait. They seemed different in the pond than nearshore, and I kept comparing them to other fish I knew. They shied from the boat and were picky about flies like permit; they crashed the surface like jack crevalle; I could watch them glide through the water like bonefish, but really big bonefish. . . .
It was thrilling. Every fish we saw in the water, every surface explosion we heard was thrilling. Frankly, I don’t know why Rhode Islanders ever fish anywhere but those salt ponds. It’s a good thing they don’t though, because if they knew what they were missing the ponds would be packed. I’ll leave them the big water, and I’ll borrow their ponds.
I finally did catch my Rhode Island fish. It was one of those amazingly stupid bits of business when you get lucky, and you can pretend that you planned it all along. A fish crashed close behind me, and I made a short over the shoulder fling, almost directly backwards, and it worked. Ray could see it all from the platform, and he said that as soon as the fly hit the water the striper hit it.
Like I said, I planned it all along. And big stripers on the flats fight like redfish.
