Fielding Lucas, Jr., 1817 State Map of Florida, A General Atlas, Of All The Known Countries In The World.
This will be our fourth try to catch a fish in Florida. Florida is as famous for its fishing as its sunshine and orange juice, as its bizarre WalMart behavior and its retirees. And I can’t catch a fish.
We’ve had bad luck, bad weather, missed chances, and no fish. We’ve tried. No fish. We’ve had great guides and gone to interesting places. We’ve drunk rum with escapading Midwesterners in Key West in winter. We’ve been yelled at in West Palm for casting against a bulkhead from a boat by a well-coifed New York lady in yoga pants. In Tampa we’ve watched the Astros lose to the Tampa Bay Rays at Tropicana Field and then fished all night. All night. From 9pm until 4 the next morning.
No fish.
Nothing works, and there’s no reason to think that anything will work this time. Maybe I should take up golf, or alligator wrestling.
This time we’re going to Miami Beach. Neither of us have ever been to Miami, or Miami Beach, but Kris keeps hinting that we should go to the Panhandle and fish for redfish, but I still want to go south. I want a shot at a tarpon or a bonefish or a snook or a permit, fish that are different than what we have in Galveston.
We’re fishing one day with Jason Sullivan and one with Duane Baker, both guides with excellent reputations, both completely innocent as to the lousy Florida luck they’re in for fishing with the Thomases. We may also make it to the Miami canals, finally, but there really is a lot of stuff to see in Miami, and we’ll only have one day to see something other than water. There’s water surrounding Florida. Water where people go to catch fish. Not us though. No fish.
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God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.
New Revised Standard Version, Genesis, 1:28.
I’ve been reading again about the Everglades. I’ve been rereading Marjorie Stoneman Douglas’s 1947 classic, The Everglades: A River of Grass, and the more recent The Swamp by Michael Grunwald, published in 2006. The Swamp ends with the defeat of Al Gore by George W., and lays the election of George W. at the feet of Florida environmentalists who voted for Ralph Nader. He’s probably right. Gore lost Florida by 537 votes, and when he lost Florida he lost the electoral college. Nader got 97,488 Florida votes. The environmentalists were angry at Gore because he wouldn’t scuttle the proposed Miami International Airport, the Everglades jetport, before a final Air Force report was published. When it was published, after Gore lost, Clinton killed the airport. Irony is so ironic.
I listened to another book too, not about the Everglades specifically but Florida generally, Oh Florida! by Tampa Bay Times writer Craig Pittman. The central Florida themes, flim-flam, violence, real estate cons, grotesque misadventure, transience, environmental destruction, golf, hanging chads, and over-consenting adults, bring to mind the old joke about Arkansans: that they’re glad Mississippi exists so somebody else can be last in every category. Reviewing Oh Florida!, a book by a writer who is very fond of Florida in a shell-shocked-sort-of-way, the New York Times likened Florida to America’s grease trap. It’s certainly a memorable comparison.
I’m currently reading A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf by John Muir. From what I can tell Muir’s first name was Sierra-Club-Founder, because you never see one without the other. Grunwald writes about Muir at length in The Swamp, and Thousand Mile Walk is a short, readable thing.
Muir is writing after the Civil War, only 10 years or so after Mr. Orvis opened his shop in Manchester, Vermont, and Mr. Thoreau published Walden. America’s opinion about nature seemed to have been changing, or at least in the Orvis shop’s case America had discovered it needed better dog beds. Muir walked south from Kentucky to Florida to look at plants and whatever else in the natural world he might come across, and planned to go on to the Amazon. In Florida he fell ill, probably malaria, and scuttled the rest of the trip.
Before he got sick, when he first arrived in Florida (via a short hop from Georgia by boat), his description of the Florida coast is brilliant, but it is also a bit surprised. There are plenty of mangroves, but no flowers. It’s Florida! Where are the flowers! Where are the golf courses! Ok, skip that last.
Grunwald uses nature’s malice, Muir’s malaria, to establish another theme for Florida. He posits that in Florida Muir, a religious man who sees God everywhere in the natural world, discovers that the Biblical imperative to go subdue may not be quite the thing. I’m not quite sure Grunwald is right, Muir sees no malice in nature, and he always seems to have preferred it to people. But in other ways Grunwald’s aim is true: no place better epitomizes environmental overreach than South Florida. That’s Grunwald’s real theme. As a Houstonian all I can say is thank goodness for Mississippi Florida
Meanwhile chances for progress on Everglades restoration seems to be improving. There’s a good article summing up the current state of affairs in the latest issue of Garden & Gun.
And meanwhile the weather reports for our fourth fishing trip to Florida forecast thunderstorms. Are there fish at Disney World?
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Back in Houston, it’s my favorite time of year to fish salt water in Galveston Bay. The water is high, and there’s no clarity, but the prevailing south wind has finally died and with kids back in school and college football there’s not nearly as much boat traffic. We’re blind casting, but that’s ok. Saturday I caught a small but particularly beautiful speckled trout, and a couple of weeks ago Kris caught a sheepshead–neither one of us had caught a sheepshead on the fly before. I still haven’t.
Plus the Astros finished off the Yankees for the American League pennant last night, and there are few things better than that. I’ll be ok with Florida even if we catch no fish.
And I might as well be, ’cause we’re certain to catch no fish.
From The Great Train Robbery, 1903, directed by Edwin S. Porter.
This is a blog post with footnotes. [1]
Reno Fly Shop has a podcast, and it’s good. It’s an interview format with some national fly fishing personalities and some Nevada or California locals with local knowledge. The episodes are each about an hour, which is just right for my morning stumble around Rice. The host, the shop owner Jim Litchfield, is a generous and engaged interviewer, but the podcast always gets around to Pyramid Lake and the Truckee River. That can be a bit of a stretch for some of the national fly fishing personalities, so the locals have a decided advantage.
A recent podcast was with Meredith McCord, who is not local to Reno, but like me is from Houston. She spoke at Texas Fly Fishers last year. I don’t know her, but from the audience Ms. McCord seems lively and personable, with a Southern Girl’s penchant for girly casual wear and plenty of well-coiffed hair. She also has a penchant for IGFA records.
The IGFA is the International Game Fish Association, which apparently exists to keep lists of world records and establish rules for catching big fish. Like fly fishing competitions, it has little to do with the rest of us.
On the podcast Ms. McCord was talking about her IGFA records–she holds about 9,000. [2] The talk on the podcast sooner or later got around to IGFA records for cutthroat trout, all of which are from Pyramid Lake. The IGFA doesn’t differentiate among subspecies of cutthroat trout, a cutthroat is a cutthroat is a cutthroat, so a westslope cutthroat from a tiny stream in Montana is in the same swimsuit competition as a massive Lahontan, and it’s no contest. On the other hand there are male and female records, not differentiated by the gender of the fish but by the gender of the angler. I’m pretty sure the records are kept separate so that a boy won’t need to feel bad about being beat up by a girl.
Following are the women’s records for cutthroat:
IGFA Women’s Fly Fishing Records for Cutthroat
If reports are right and ten- to 20-pound Lahontan cutthroat trout are reasonably common at Pyramid Lake, then these records are ready to be broken. [3] Even I could probably land a trout a bit bigger than two pounds on 20 pound tippet. Of course I’d have to change my self-identification, and nobody makes that kind of decision just to catch a fish.
Looking at the list, the second column is the problem. The second column represents a recent rule change that requires a minimum weight for record fish based on the weight of the tippet. The change was adopted after some records were already set, which is why some of the cells are blank: one way or another those records met the new rule requirement. The rule change might attest to the sportsmanship of IGFA rulemakers, but I suspect it probably goes more to the credibility of a 1 lb 12 oz fish being the record cutthroat for 16 pound tippet.
The change requires that for a fish to establish a record, it must weigh at least half of the weight class of the tippet. [4] You don’t put a bantam weight in the ring with a heavyweight and still call things sporting. Of course there’s a four pound tippet class for tarpon, and catching a 100 pound tarpon on a four pound tippet seems more like needless cruelty than sport, so, like I said, credibility is a better explanation than sportsmanship.
Because many of the women’s cutthroat records are oddly low, Pyramid Lake is prime for new records, particularly for women. Listening to Meredith McCord in the podcast I started wondering if Kris would like a record of her own.
The tackle side of establishing records is pretty straightforward. You can fish with any kind of rod as long as it is at least six feet long and is generally recognized as a fly rod. An Orvis Practicaster probably doesn’t cut it, but anything else sold as a fly rod is probably fine. Same goes for reels. [5]Your line can be any kind of fly line and backing. Really the tackle rule comes down to this: if you’re using tackle that’s generally recognized as a fly rod, reel, and line, then from (a) inside the knot attaching your leader to the tippet to (b) inside the knot attaching your tippet to your hook, your class tippet, the one that tests 2 or 4 or 16 or 20 pounds, has to be at least 15 inches long. That’s pretty much it: at least 15 inches inside the knots. It can be longer, but it can’t be shorter. [6]
Now once you sort out the whole gear thing, the conduct thing [7], and the species identification thing [8], you get to the real problems: the weight and length thing, and the fly thing.
Notwithstanding that I’ve got this whole list going on of fish-I-caught, I’m not a particularly ambitious angler. I want to catch a fish in Kansas, but in Kansas I’d be perfectly happy if it was a six-ounce sunfish. I also understand that from the fish’s perspective fishing is a pretty cruel thing to do. I’m not going to stop fishing, but all in all I want to play a fish quick and get it back in the water so that it can go on about its business of killing and eating stuff and fish sex. I’d kill a fish and eat it, but I don’t really like to clean fish. I’d just as soon put the fish back.
But when I put them back I want them to survive, and our notions of how to handle fish for fish survival are evolving. There are the great guidelines from KeepEmWet Fishing, most of which involve keeping the fish wet, using a net, using barbless hooks, and reducing handling.
Ernest Hemingway and family with four marlins, 1935, Bimini, Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston, Massachusetts, Public Domain.
I’ve assumed that IGFA records were all established with dead fish, and that’s not right. While there’s nothing I see in the IGFA rules that prohibits killing fish, IGFA is a partner of KeepEmWet, and has adopted its own rules, guidelines really, for releasing fish. [9] However good the angler, and however good the angler’s intentions, [10] establishing a record requires handling, and there’s a tension between any handling and keeping a fish alive. The IGFA has established procedures for handling and weighing fish aimed at release, and the pictures in my head of dangling dead fish are wrong, or at least unnecessary to establish a record. [11] Still, all in all, all of this folderol seems a lot of trouble, and I’d just as soon not bother. If sometime Kris wants a record, I’ll surely help, but I don’t think I’ll mention it to her. Don’t you mention it to her either.
In addition to the weight thing, there’s the fly thing. Saltwater anglers hate the 12 inch bite tippet regulation [12], which according to rumor is too short to effectively deal with tarpon. For freshwater anglers, the really dumb part of the IGFA rules is a prohibition against droppers. [13] Only single flies are allowed, one supposes to discourage snagging, but really? It’s not like fishing droppers isn’t one of those things done since Dame Juliana Berners, and everybody fishes at least tandem flies when they nymph. The last known person to fish a single nymph was in 2006, and that was only because he’d lost his dropper in a tree. From what I can tell all fishing in Pyramid Lake involves dropper-rigged nymph fishing or streamers, and the practice is to fish tandem streamers. The IGFA rule is inconsistent with how anybody fishes, and I’m not setting any records until the rule is changed. Hah! Showed them. Let them defend their vaunted credibility now.
The Booke of haukynge, huntyng and fysshyng, with all necessary properties and medicines that are to be kept, Tottel, 1561, http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/berners/berners.html
[1] Lawyers love footnotes of all things. Some of the best stuff is always in the footnotes. I wish I could figure out how the text notation could jump to the footnote, and vice versa, but I can’t, so there you are. If you want to read the footnotes you’ll just have to do it manually. Sorry.
[2] Ms. McCord holds a lot of records, but I made up the number 9000. It just sounded good.
[3] IGFA measures things by kilograms, but I skipped straight to the stateside pound translation. If you want to get back to the IGFA designation a kilogram equals 2.2046 pounds.
[4] If you’re paying close attention, this is probably confusing because the chart gives the minimum weight for 16 pound tippet at 8 pounds, 14 ounces. Even by my low math standards that is more than half of the weight of the 16 pound tippet class. That’s because the IGFA doesn’t use good ol’ American tippet, but some kind of European stuff measured at 8 kilograms. The 16 pounds is an approximation of eight kilograms. Eight kilograms weighs more than 16 pounds. Who knew?
[5] The exact language of the reel rule is as follows: “The reel must be designed expressly for fly fishing. There are no restrictions on gear ratio or type of drag employed except where the angler would gain an unfair advantage. Electric or electronically operated reels are prohibited.” I guess that you couldn’t use a Tenkara rod because the reel for the rod isn’t expressly designed for fly fishing. Maybe someone could argue that the absence of the reel was expressly designed for fly fishing, and that counts for reel design. This is a shame, since I reckon that all of the saltwater Tenkara anglers are out there right now trying to beat the record for sailfish.
[6] At this point you should be asking yourself how the heck do I know that my leader actually tests at that weight? There are pre-tested tippet spools you can buy from companies like Courtland, which should provide consistent break points over the length of the line. This differs from how most of us buy tippet, which actually has less to do with the break strength than the tippet diameter. We don’t really care if our .015 diameter tippet measures a bit more than 8 lbs over its length. Record setters do, and you have to send your leader and tippet in for testing with your record application. You’d think these IGFA people think that fishers are all liars, or at least poor judges of their catch.
[7] This is gross over-simplification, but the conduct rules pretty much come down to catch the fish as you normally would, don’t actually shoot it, and except for netting or gaffing in the final stage, don’t let anybody help you land the fish.
[8] Take lots of pictures of the whole fish. Take pictures of the fish from every conceivable angle. If there’s going to be any doubt of the fish’s species, The IGFA recommends you take the fish to your nearest ichthyologist for identification. I kid you not. A photo has to show the full length of the fish. A photo has to show the rod and reel used to the catch the fish. I think a photo has to show the scale used to weigh the fish, and I think I’d send in a photo of the scale in the very act of weighing the fish. Scales are notorious liars, as anybody with a bathroom scale knows.
[9] One supposes best practices for keeping fish alive doesn’t include taking the fish to the nearest certified scale. The scale certification rules confuse me, but I gather that the best scales are spring scales—not digital as one would expect—and that Boga grips are considered good scales, but not good fish handling devices if you’re using them to hang fish up by the lips. Lip hanging is both hard on the fish’s jaw and on their internal organs, which will come as a shock to us largemouth bass anglers. IGFA will pre-certify your scale for a charge and a membership fee, or will certify the scale after the fact. Then of course you run the risk of having used a bad scale, plus you still have to pay the membership fee.
[10] Now if I were a particularly devious sort of record chaser, and I’d caught a record fish, then I might conclude that if I release a fish and it lives long and prospers, then somebody could break my hard won record next year with the same fish. I don’t know how the minds of record chasers work, so maybe none are that sort of devious.
[11] Apparently the best way to weigh a fish is in a cradle or a net, so you have to establish the weight of the sling or net and subtract it. I’ve got no idea what the IGFA requires to establish the weight of the sling or net.
[12] In addition to the class tippet rule there is also a special rule for bite tippet, which is important for fish like tarpon. That’s a whole other discussion. Twelve inches.
[13] If you’ve read down to this footnote, and you don’t know what a dropper is, then I’m a more engaging writer than I thought I was, or you’re one of my children and you’re humoring me. If you think about fly #1 tied to a fly line, and then fly #2 tied to a piece of line tied to the hook bend of fly #1, fly #2 is the dropper. The whole thing together is a dropper rig.
Walter Anderson, Detail, Ocean Springs Community Center Mural, 1951.
We fished Saturday and Sunday. That seems like a small thing, we fish lots of Saturdays and Sundays, but so far this year I have caught a tiny bluegill (which was all I caught in January) and two small rainbows (which were all I caught in February). Meanwhile we’ve fished at Key West, Oahu, on the Texas Coast, and in the Hill Country. Since we were in Mississippi to try for another state things were bound to go wrong.
And last Saturday was bad even for March fishing on the Gulf. it was overcast and there was a 20+ knot wind from the south–which meant if we had just stood still and held our arms out we could have visited Memphis. To get to the leeward side of Horn Island we had to quarter the wind eight miles through three-foot slop, the kind of scary slop that in our skiff by ourselves would have left us alternately screaming at each other and clinging to each other in terror, hoping we didn’t die.
Our guide, Richard Schmidt, ran the right boat for the water, a Hell’s Bay Marquesas with a 90 hp Suzuki, and we were always perfectly safe. But Richard was pretty dubious about taking us out in that weather, and my jokes about us being casting impaired didn’t help any. The high wind coupled with the low chance of enough sun to see fish left things pretty sketchy, and when Richard suggested that sometimes his customers were casting challenged, I chimed in that he’d be well prepared for us. The joke fell flat. This was not a funny day. I was worried he was going to turn the boat around.
Instead he took us on to Horn Island. He had boiled crawfish and beer in the cooler, so whatever happened we were going to have a good day, and I would have gone to Horn Island just to see it.
Walter Anderson, Turtle Diptych, Walter Anderson Museum, Watercolor on Two Sheets of Typing Paper, c. 1960.
Horn Island is part of the Gulf Coast Islands Seashore, and it’s a national treasure because, while it’s pretty enough–eight miles of sculpted pines and sugar white sand and dune colors–it’s Walter Anderson’s subject. I kept saying it was beautiful because, well, it was, but it was also beautiful because my eye had been prepared by Anderson. It’s hard not to see Anderson everywhere on the island.
I had never heard of Walter Anderson until I read The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea. Jack Davis spends pages talking about him, and having read Davis the first thing I asked the lady at the front desk at the Walter Anderson Museum of Art was whether he was really crazy? “No,” the nice lady said, “He was just eccentric.” Mississippians being polite have eccentric, us Texans being harsher have crazy.
At dinner Friday Kris and I had talked mostly about Anderson–the lady at the desk said she personally thought he was bipolar, and that may not be crazy all the time but it’s at least eccentric. There were so many things to talk about, about how he lived apart from his family but how still from time to time new children would appear, about how he tied himself to a tree on Horn Island to experience Hurricane Betsy, about his long trips rowing the eight miles to Horn Island to live and sketch, and about his genius. Mostly about his genius. His work is so brilliant, so evocative of the place and more than a bit madly obsessive. How do we all not know Walter Anderson as well as we know Van Gogh, as well as we know Picasso? At least as well as we know Donald Judd?
And Horn Island is exactly what you see when you see much of Anderson’s work. Plus, right off the bat I caught a fish.
It wasn’t a very big fish. It was a 16-inch red that took my fly when I blind-cast to a place that to me looked fishy. The fish was silver, not red or bronze, with the bluest tail I’ve ever seen. Everything in Mississippi has the blues. After that Kris camped out on the casting platform and pretty much stayed there. I napped and ate crawfish, so I was happy, mostly. Kris hooked a redfish, too, a good 20-pounder, but the leader broke. Wind knot? probably a wind knot. There wasn’t a pig tail, so it wasn’t a badly tied connection, and anyway I’m sure that all of my knots are always perfect. The tippet was Rio fluorocarbon so even though the spool was a few years old it shouldn’t have snapped without some cause. Wind knot.
Otherwise while Kris fished I tried to take photos of the bald eagle and the ospreys on the island, and when I walked up into the dunes for a rest break I saw raccoon and seabird tracks in the sand. There was a moment when I was allowed a brief, very short stint back on the casting platform and watched hundreds of schooled sheepshead streaming down the beach, aggregating for their spawn. It is such a living place. We got some sun, and when we did we saw fish. We got some shots.
Sunday the problem wasn’t wind. There was no wind so instead we got fog, heavy fog that Kris and I wouldn’t have braved alone and that nobody else did either, and gnats. Gnats from hell. Gnats that we breathed, and ate, and that searched out every small bit of exposed and un-sprayed skin for a good feed. I was on the platform at one point and I looked down at a bit of hand I’d missed with bug spray and there were at least 200 gnats a’swarming. I have gnat bites on my bald spot. I have a raccoon-ring of welts around each eye where the Buff didn’t quite meet my sunglasses, and where I had avoided spaying bug spray for my eyes. Driving home Sunday, about the time we reached Louisiana, the gnat bites started itching. They were still itching 24 hours later.
Richard ran the boat 30 minutes through fog into the marshes out of Pass Christian, which is pronounced “Pass Christy-Anne,”with just a hint of “-ch-” between the “t” and the “y”. The water wasn’t clear, it had been better when we’d fished the day before, but Richard said that even in the marsh it usually was clear on the east side of the Mississippi. The Corps was diverting freshwater out of the Mississippi River through Lake Pontchartrain into the Gulf to avoid flooding downriver from New Orleans, and it killed the clarity. Apparently it also kills the oysters.
Richard said that beginning in May he guides mostly for jack crevalle on the flats and triple-tail near the crab traps. Kris never did catch a fish, so I’m thinking that means we need to go back. I’ve never landed a big jack crevalle. I’ve never fished for triple-tail. Plus the Mississippi Coast may be as pretty a place as I’ve ever fished.
And on the second day, late in the day, Kris let me on the platform just a wee bit more and I saw a swirl in a couple of feet of water and made a magnificent 90-foot cast to set my fly on the nose of the new world-record black drum. Ok, I’m lying, it isn’t the new world-record black drum, but it was one huge black drum–in the Gulf Coast parlance a big ugly. Richard thought it weighed somewhere between 40 and 50 pounds, so it was at least 60. And of course it’s growing.
And ok, I’m lying. It wasn’t a magnificent 90-foot cast, it was more of a rod-lenth flick. The fly was purple, with barbell eyes and it probably traced its lineage to a Clouser. I was fishing a ten weight Orvis Helios II and a Tibor Riptide (it’s probably important that you know that the Tibor was blue and that my shirt was sea-foam green). People always say black drum are blind, and maybe they are, but this drum made a six-inch rush to my fly, ate it, and I strip set. I really did. I strip-set.
Then everything stopped. The big drum pondered a bit and started to mosey away. It stopped, started moving again, realized it was hooked to something, and then it did something black drum don’t do: it ran. Their cousin the redfish will run, but black drum usually hunker down and make you pull them out. Ok, it didn’t run wild and fast like a permit or a jack, it didn’t twist and jump like steelhead, it ran like a train, straight and hard and purposeful and surprisingly fast, all the way into my backing: bubble-gum pink by the way, I’d never seen it before from that angle. Then when it stopped and figured out it was still hooked it ran some more. And then it ran some more. Richard polled in its direction which helped, but every time I started bringing it back it ran some more. It was big and it ran.
It didn’t take that long to land, less than a quarter hour, but it was some work. When I brought it boatside and Richard lipped the fish with his Boca Grip the hook fell out. We got some pictures, though they didn’t do it justice. Look at those shoulders! That color! That tail hanging halfway to the deck! It may not have been a world record, but it was without doubt the handsomest big ugly ever landed. It probably would have shown better if I’d held it up in front of us, arms extended, but I’m not sure I could have lifted it.
We fished a couple of more hours, and would be fishing still if it were up to Kris and Richard.
I loved fishing Ocean Springs. I have rarely been to a prettier place. Richard was a fine guide, plus he brought crawfish, and once you get past the Biloxi casinos the Mississippi Coast is charming. And did I mention? I caught a big fish–the black drum of the world, the most beautiful black drum ever landed and for that moment I was the handsomest gnat-infested angler who ever landed a fish. There just aren’t better places.
Florida Bay near Key West is beautiful, and in February we had the flats to ourselves.Miles of brilliant blue and green clear water, mangrove islands, three-foot sharks and 30-pound turtles and lurking barracuda and porpoising porpoises. Away in the west over the calm green and blue we could see the distant Marquesas, and behind us almost distant Key West. There was blue sky and white clouds and it was a very gentle 80 degrees.
Of course we had Florida Bay to ourselves because in February Key West is full of Midwestern drinking folk who are busy drinking, not fishing. Gauging by the number of bars per square mile it’s full of drinking folk year round, but other times of the year there might also be fly anglers. Probably drinking fly anglers, recounting tales of their fabulous Key West fish over rum drinks garnished with umbrellas. There are plenty of rum drinks in February but there aren’t any fly anglers because in February there aren’t any fish, fabulous or no.
Let me change that. There weren’t any target fish on the day we were on the water. I’m sure every other day in February there are all sorts of fish. Bonefish. Permit. Tarpon. Arctic char. Crappie. Sunfish. Giant trevaly and channel cats. One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish. You name it, any day we’re not on the water the fish are there in spades and they’ve brought their friends. You’d better bring your three weight and eight weight and 12 and both of your Spey rods, and some golf clubs and do some pushups, because you’re going to be casting and fighting fish with all of them all day long. But not on February 7 when we were on the water.
Andrew Asher was our guide, and besides having a name that sounds like a British film star he has the best guiding voice ever. In another life he will have a British accent and be the voice of the BBC. But Andrew is a guide and he’s a good guide and he knows about fish and water and the grace it takes to guide well. There. I got in my statutorily required Hemingway imitation.
Andrew did a great job. He ran a Maverick skiff with a 115 hp engine that ran easily from flat to flat at 40. He sat us up with the wind and the sun and I trusted that he saw what was there, even when we didn’t see it. He knew enough to say “fish at two o’clock,” pause while I looked left and then calmly follow with “fish at two o’clock on the right.” Then we would decide it was something he called a box fish which is apparently a kind of puffer, and I’d cast to that for a while and it would ignore me until it meandered off.
He and Kris pretty much agreed on politics though, which meant I didn’t have to worry about getting thrown off the boat.
Zane Grey said that he, Zane Grey, not Andrew Asher, was a hard-luck angler, and I think about that a lot, whether there’s just something about me that makes me unlucky at fish. I’ve been so lucky in most of my life. My career has been fortunate and meaningful, our children are grown and are good people with real jobs, and Kris likes to fly fish and seems to like me. We now own a Chihuahua. But on February 7 there were no fish near Key West. Maybe things balance out, and I deserve some fish misfortune for being the recipient of so many good things.
Late in the day Andrew suggested I cast to barracuda. I was not a natural. My attempt at casting was awkward and embarrassing, and I put a wind knot in a 40 pound wire leader. I think I amazed Andrew, who as a guide should be inured to client stupidity, but there you are: when it comes to casting I can be amazing. I certainly amazed myself.
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From Brown, Jefferson B., Key West: The Old and the New, 1912, St. Augustine, The Record Company.
As of the 2010 census, Monroe County had 73,090 residents, of which 25,478 lived in its county seat, Key West. The population is about 85 percent white folk.
By the 1760s, the Native Americans, the Tequesta or the Calusa or both, were gone from the Keys, and Key West was transferred from the Spanish to the British. In 1821, back in the hands of the Spanish, Florida was ceded by Spain to the US. In an early act of piracy (or at least real estate development) the owner of Key West, a Spanish artillery officer, sold it first for about $525 to a former South Carolina governor and then sold it a second time to John Simonton for $2000. After some string pulling Simonton ended up with it, and streets in Key West bear the names of Simonton and his cronies. When the island sold there were no permanent residents. By 1830 there were 517 residents, by 1880 there were 9,800, by 1910 there were 19,945.
Key West’s first industry was pirating, which after naval intervention (the first significant U.S. presence in the Keys) was replaced by marine scavengers (the surrounding coral reefs being an excellent provider of scavenge), smuggling (including slaves before the Civil War, rum during Prohibition, drugs during the 70s, and whatever is now the going concern), fishing, sponges, and finally, after Monroe County had become one of the poorest counties in the nation during the Great Depression (“They’re living on fish and coconuts”), tourism and real estate. It was first connected to the mainland in 1912 by Henry Flagler’s overseas train, which blew away in the 1935 hurricane, and which was replaced by the Overseas Highway. U.S. 1 runs all the way from Maine down the Atlantic Coast, and as much as anything we went to Key West to drive the Overseas Highway.
In 2016, Monroe County voted for President Trump, but the Key West part of Monroe County voted for Hillary Clinton. It wasn’t really close, Trump took the county by 54 percent, and I imagined I could see the dichotomy between the county and its county seat on the drive: the approach down the county through harder or at least more suburban living, where most contact with government is seen as an intrusion, a burden, and where there is a perceived unfairness in the distribution of all good things derived from the burdens imposed. In Key West there was greater affluence, education, urban living. Key West looks Democratic.
In 2018 the vote for governor was also Republican but very close, and Monroe County went Republican 49.59 percent to 49.18. Darcy Richardson of the Reform Party tipped the county Republican by taking 0.57 percent. It didn’t make much difference in the big scheme, but Darcy Richardson is one of those proofs that every politician thinks they’re special and that they can win, even when they’re not and they can’t.
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I really had high hopes for some memorable sights in Key West. From what I’d read it’s nigh on the most decadent place on earth, more decadent than San Francisco during the Summer of Love or Bourbon Street on the night before Lent or Las Vegas on a day that ends with a “y” or even Kansas City during revivals of the musical Oklahoma!. Maybe it’s that tropical lushness that confuses Midwesterners. I guess I’ve lived in a warm wet big city for too long, ’cause it all seemed rather tame to me. Maybe the decadence migrates in with the tarpon and the fly fishers later in the spring.
We didn’t see any memorable decadence. We hung out our first night in a nice wine bar with our new friends Mike and Bill from Michigan. We discussed politics, their house in Ft. Lauderdale and their home in Michigan and ours in Houston, places to eat, and some more politics. We talked about Bill’s work to create the River Raisin National Battlefield Park, and the Recent Republican Troubles. And then we talked some more about politics. They bought us wine, and we owe them some wine and hope someday we get to repay. I also told them the long complicated story about the steelhead fly I tied from the ostrich feather I was given at the Pride Parade and on which I caught my steelhead. I’m very proud of that fly. They politely listened, for which I’m grateful.
On night two we ate at Sole, while on Duval Street the snowbirds drank and a gregarious drag queen invited folk into a bar. We talked to a Canadian couple who obsessively followed horse racing. Lexington and Sarasota they said were prime destinations, but the Kentucky Derby is nothing but an excuse for dilettantes to drink and wear hats. There was some anger there.
Later at a different bar a woman from Pella, Iowa, had drunk too many rum painkillers and felt strongly (if very politely in an Iowan way) that I should be drinking them too. Neither she nor her husband could tell me anything about trout fishing the Iowa Driftless Region, and seemed surprised any one would want to go to Iowa to fish. Who doesn’t want to go to Iowa to fish? Iowa is heaven.
At 9 at night everyone was friendly and talkative and lubricated and if you just stood around long enough you’d find people to talk to, just like a giant cocktail party. It seemed to me that Key West was all-in-all pretty tasteful and pretty tame, though there were plenty of tacky t-shirts.
Andrew the Guide told us that he lived near Duval but for him it was rarely a destination, and when on the rare occasions he went to the bars he left long before midnight. He said that ’round midnight things on Duval changed, and that the drunks came out of the bars to punch each other and so forth. I guess we missed it. Maybe the horse racing aficionado found a Kentucky Derby fan to punch. Maybe the Iowa lady passed out on rum painkillers. Maybe somewhere near Sloppy Joe’s a tipsy Wallace Stevens threw a punch at Ernest Hemingway and Ernest Hemingway knocked him down. I guess I’ll have to wait until next time and stay awake until midnight. Even better, maybe we can find Mike and Bill and buy a bottle of wine.
