This will be our fourth year since we started trying to travel to each state to catch a fish, with 27 states completed. That’s a pretty good pace, but now I’m mostly retired, so maybe we can pick things up. I’d like to say there’s no pandemic in the way, but we’re in the midst of the Omicron resurgence, and flights are getting canceled to everyplace. Kris and I are inoculated of course, and the messages from the implanted computer chips say that it’s ok to travel if you can just find a plane. Plus I just ordered a new supply of N95 masks, just like the chip told me.
Officially I’m now of counsel, which means different things to different lawyers, but for me means I no longer get paid unless I actually work, and I’m only obligated to work if somebody needs my special expertise. Since I plan for my special expertise over the next year to involve a good bit of fishing, I’ll be happy to get paid for that. Or not.
Meanwhile, assuming that our flight doesn’t get canceled because the pilot has Covid, we’re making our second trip to Hawaii for bonefish this week. It’s our second trip because I failed to catch fish in Hawaii the first time. This time we’ll go to Molokai and Kauai, and both islands have promised me that I’ll catch fish, really, and I believed them.
Rhode Island is the smallest state, smaller than Delaware, smaller than the Island of Hawaii–though larger than Oahu. It packs in a lot of people relative to its size. It’s the 2nd densest state, with 1,006 people per square mile, beat out only by New Jersey. New Jersey is dense.
It seems like everybody in Rhode Island is a Democrat; maybe it’s required by law? There are in fact more Democratic leaning states, Massachusetts, Maryland, Hawaii . . . But based on percentage of Democratic voters, Rhode Island is about as Democratic as, say, Illinois or Washington State, but with no red rural counties. Its governor, both senators, both representatives, and both state houses are Democratic controlled. Only Kent County in the middle of the state voted for Donald Trump in 2016, and Trump only received 38.9% of the total Rhode Island vote. In Rhode Island he was trounced. As for Kent County, it was the first time a Rhode Island county had voted for a Republican since 1984. Four years later, Joe Biden carried 59.39% of Rhode Island, including Kent County.
Bernie Sanders won the Democratic Primary in Rhode Island in 2016, but by its 2020 primary Sanders had already withdrawn. It’s likely that Sanders would have won again in 2020.
Tyler Kutzbach, 2020 Election Map for Rhode Island, Wikipedia.
Rhode Island sits directly below Boston. I’ve taken the train from New York to Boston, so I must have at least passed through Rhode Island. I suppose lots of people pass through Rhode Island, but a lot of people stop for a bit too. Tourism is its second largest industry, after healthcare.
Rhode Island was founded by Massachusetts’ dissidents. This deserves pondering. In 1620 the first settlers of Massachusetts were so angry with England that they left for Massachusetts. In 1636 the first settlers of Rhode Island were so angry with Massachusetts that they left for Rhode Island. The early Rhode Island settlers were a very special group. They couldn’t get along with anybody.
Henry David Northrup, The Landing of Roger Williams, Our Greater Country, being a standard history of the United States from the discovery of the American continent to the present time, 1901, National Publishing Company, Philadelphia.
Rhode Island was the first colony to declare independence from England. They were the first to ratify the Articles of Confederation. Then they got mad at everybody and were the last to ratify the Constitution, and wouldn’t until they were promised the Bill of Rights. Like I said, a very special group.
In 1790, in connection with the new government, George Washington wrote a letter to the Jews of Newport defining religious freedom: For happily the Government of the United States gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support. The Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791.
Carey’s 1814 Map of Rhode Island, Carey’s General Atlas.
Rhode Island began as a slave state, with the highest number of slavesper capita of the New England colonies. After England got out of the trade, Rhode Islanders dominated slave shipping. They carried rum to Europe and Africa, slaves to the Caribbean, and sugar and molasses from the Caribbean to New England. Nicholas Brown, namesake and benefactor of Brown University, was a slave trader.
In 2020, Rhode Island’s population was estimated at 1,097,379, slightly larger than Montana’s. About 71.4%of the population is Anglo, 16.3% Hispanic or Latino, 8.5% African American, 1.1% Native American, and 2.9% two or more races. Ethnically the Anglo population is a jumble, and there are sizable portions of the white population with Irish, Italian, Portuguese, English, and French ancestry. Racial labels don’t tell much, and one reason is their lack of nuance.
Until 2020, Rhode Island was the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. “Plantation” had nothing to do with slavery, but after the death of George Floyd, because of the connotations of slavery and Rhode Island’s participation in the slave trade, Rhode Islanders voted to drop “Providence Plantations“ from the state’s name.It’s now just the plain-old State of Rhode Island, though apparently they haven’t changed their seal.
Before the 19th century, there were more than 20 rum distilleries in Rhode Island, but Thomas Tew is the first rum distilled there in 150 years. Westward expansion allowed grain-based whiskey to replace molasses-based rum as the American drink of choice. I’ve had the same bottle of rum for three years or so, and it only gets drunk at Christmas with eggnog. Whiskey doesn’t last so long.
Perhaps Rhode Island is best known as the playground of the ultra-rich, the Vanderbilts and Astors and Archers. In Theophilus North, Thornton Wilder describes nine different cities of Newport: the citizens of the sixth are the ultra-wealthy, the seventh are the servants of the ultra-wealthy, and the eight are the hangers-on of the ultra-wealthy. Apparently wealth takes up a good bit of Rhode Island real estate. Oddly, Newport was never known as the playground of the Boston rich, since the Boston rich have Cape Cod.
USGS, Rhode Island elevation map.
Besides rum, 13 percent of Rhode Island is water, most of it salt. You would expect with so much access to the Atlantic and to Narragansett Bay that Rhode Island would be a flat coastal plain, but away from the the ocean it rises quickly to join the New England Uplands. The highest point in Rhode Island, Jerimoth Hill, is 812 feet. The highest point in Florida, the flattest state, is 345 feet.
We’re going to Newport for the Orvis Northeast Fly Fishing School, two days, in which my fondest hope is that Kris will finally learn to tie a knot. For the 30 years we’ve fished together, she’s depended on me or guides to rig her lines. That’s ok though. I’m not sure what use I’d be to her if she could tie knots.
The fish of choice in Rhode Island are apparently stripers and bluefish. I only hope the bluefish aren’t as personable as the fish in Dr. Seuss.
Bluefish (Pomatomus saltatrix), New York (State), Fifth Annual Report of the Commissioners of Fisheries, Game and Forests of the State of New York, 1899, James B. Lyon, State Printer, 1900, Freshwater and Marine Image Bank, University of Washington.
We’ll spend one day in school on casting lessonsand hopefully knots, and one day fishing with a guide. This is a recipe for disaster, since like as not on our one day fishing it will rain, or hurricane, or have no fish, or I’ll be too chilled to cast in the middle of a New England winter. We’ll return home to Houston fishless and owe another trip to Rhode Island. Winter in New England starts in September, right?
Samuel D. Ehrhart, Puck’s greeting to the new year, 1898, from Puck, v. 42, no. 1087, Keppler & Schwarzmann, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division
We fished a bunch this year. We fished for cutthroat in Idaho and pike in New Hampshire. In Mississippi I caught my largest fish ever, a black drum, and after fishing for tiny brook trout spent an hour in a peculiarly pleasant Vermont laundromat (which still sends me friendly emails–how did it get my email address?). In the Catskills Joan Wulff told me to relax my shoulder, I jumped a tarpon in the Everglades, and we floated past suburban golf courses near Chicago. I spooked bonefish just outside the fence of the Honolulu airport, while military and commercial jets alternated use of the runway. We stood on ladders in Nevada. It was a good year for for fishing.
Honolulu with Jake Brooks. That’s Kris in the picture, not Jake.
This will start the third year for this blog. Before I kept a blog I kept journals, but a blog is harder. Someone might read it, so the writing needs to be better. My journal now consists mostly of baseball scores and random notes. The last journal entry was during the World Series, October 30. Nationals won. Dammit.
One of the blog’s sideshows is the statistics page. I can keep up with how many people are reading stuff and what country they’re from. I had more than twice the number of lookers this year than last, and I figure not all of those were me reading myself. There’s not a lot of specifics in the statistics. I can tell if someone goes onto the blog on a particular day, what they looked at, and what country they’re from, and there are daily, monthly, and yearly totals. Most visitors are from the States, with Canada a distant second. China is third, but I suspect that most visits from China have more to do with bots than reading. Namibia? Bangladesh? Jordan? I think my kids stopped reading, but I can’t really tell that from the scorecard, so they still got Christmas presents. Where is Moldova?
New Hampshire with Chuck DeGray.
It’s gratifying when someone reads several items, and it’s always fun to see something that I wrote for purely personal reasons, that has nothing to do with fly fishing, get read. Why did that South African read my post from last year about True Grit, and who in England is reading that post about Zurbarán’s Crucifixion? The most popular post for the year was about Ocean Springs, Mississippi, which is a wonderful place and a place I’d encourage anyone to go. My April Fool’s post about buying Pyramid Lake ladders got plenty of traffic.
Early in 2018 I posted a blog that included a lie a guide had told me, about his background as a Navy seal. He wasn’t. He apparently wasn’t any kind of military. In 2019 somebody who knew the guide found the post and it started to circulate. I suppose the guide told the story to work a larger tip, or maybe to justify his wacko right-wing politics. He wasn’t a bad guide, and he told a good story, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to fish with him again. I did leave him a good tip though.
With Richard Schmidt, Pass Christian, Mississippi.
Of all the places we fished last year, the place that surprised me most was the Talapoosa River in Alabama, and the fish that surprised me most was its redeye bass. I had never been on a pretty Southeastern river, so that was some of the surprise, but the fish fit the river. Redeye weren’t the river’s only fish: we caught Alabama bass, bluegill and long-ear sunfish, but it was the redeye that charmed.
They’re a small fish: they rarely weigh more than a pound, but they need clean water and, one supposes, pretty places, because they themselves are so clean-lined and pretty. They have a fine shape, well proportioned scales, fins, and jaws, and a bright iridescent turquoise belly and lower jaw balanced by smallmouth bands of warpaint on the face and olive green horizontal lines rising to their back’s dark mass. Lovely.
Tallapoosa River with East Alabama Fly Fishing
Mathew Lewis is an Auburn-PhD candidate geneticist who studies redeye and has written an excellent small book on fly fishing for Redeye Bass, titled, appropriately, Fly Fishing for Redeye Bass. I’ve fished for river bass before, smallmouth in Virginia and Illinois, Guadalupe and largemouth in Texas, and there’s a commonality to it. Cast to the banks. Cast the slackwater next to current, cast to faster current for smallmouths and slackwater for largemouth. Matthew and I traded some emails, and I meant to come back and write specifically about the redeye, but I never got around to it. I think about those fish and that river though, and it’s a place I would go again.
Catching the five subspecies of redeye should be a thing.
In addition to Matthew’s book there are good things on the web that discuss the redeye:
We spent a great two days fishing with Chuck DeGray as far north as we’ve ever been, and Silver Creek lived up to its hype, but my favorite place to fish–and I suspect Kris’s–was Everglades National Park. It is so alive, so beautiful and isolated, and I promise it wasn’t just because I jumped a decent tarpon. I did jump a decent tarpon though.
Happy New Years! I hope your 2020 is as good as our 2019!
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.
