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.
Ok, ok, I know, it’s not one of the 50 states. It almost was, almost being a bit strong, but like the more successful annexation of the Republic of Texas, it was one of those bits of early American expansionism that seem so obvious if successful and so completely whacko if not. The annexation of Cuba is definitely in the completely whacko category, like those times we tried to invade Canada. The United States made offers twice to buy Cuba from Spain, once in 1848 under the Polk administration, and again in 1854 under Franklin Pierce. It wasn’t just a shopping spree either. There was a political motive for the Southern Democrats who supported the purchase. Adding Cuba would have added at least one and maybe more slave states and would have strengthened Southern interests–the preservation of slavery–in Congress.
We were not trying to buy Cuba in Support of the Cuban People.
After the 1898 Spanish-American War, Cuba was an American occupied protectorate, and for the first half of the 20th century the Cuban Constitution allowed the United States to intervene pretty much at will in Cuban affairs. Cubans resented U.S. authority, and that residual anger helped Castro turn the revolution anti-U.S.
The U.S. embargo against Cuba has now lasted 60+ years, with a brief period of better relations under President Obama. Currently there are 12 reasons a United States citizen can legally travel to Cuba, including journalism, religious missions, family, education, and support of the Cuban people. I went in support of the Cuban people. I fished a lot. Unlike President Polk I didn’t try to buy Cuba.
I did buy some cigars and a bottle of rum. I smoked some cigars. I drank some rum. Ok, I drank too much rum. We were in Cuba, and to support the Cuban people you have to buy some cigars and rum. Strictly speaking, you can’t bring cigars or rum home, so what can you do? You have to drink it and smoke ’em.
For most people, Cuban sport fishing brings to mind Ernest Hemingway’s drunken forays for marlin in the Gulf Stream. That’s deep sea fishing, well, that’s deep sea fishing and heavy drinking. That’s not what we did. We were on the Zapata Peninsula about two hours southwest of Havana, in the Ciénaga de Zapata National Park–the Shoe Swamp National Park. We stayed in a small private hotel, Casa Frank, in the village of Playa Larga on the edge of the Bay of Pigs.
Our rooms had air conditioning and were clean. There was no bedside table, or dresser, or water pressure, but the water was hot, and there was laundry service. The power went out every afternoon if it rained, and it rained most afternoons. Getting on the internet was hit or miss, mostly miss, but it wasn’t any worse than the camp where Kris and I had stayed in Alaska. There was no water pressure there, either, and the showers were alternately freezing and scalding, so all in all the Cuban showers were better.
Sometimes in Cuba I could get cellular service on my phone, but AT&T sent me the following:
AT&T Free Msg: Welcome to Cuba! Please note Cuba is not covered by your international roaming package. Your international rates in Cuba are: data $2.05/MB, talk $3.00/min, text $0.50/text msg sent, $1.30/photo or video msg sent. You may turn off data in your device Settings.
I use megabytes of data just breathing, so I turned off my cellular and would only turn it on once a day. I sent Kris and our kids some texts. I didn’t talk on the phone. I ignored any emails that smacked of business because I’m now retired and what the hell do they expect? I ignored my fantasy baseball team and they moved up from last place to 13th, but it’s ok. The Houston Grackles are back in last now that I’m actively managing.
We fished either in the saltwater flats at the bottom of the peninsula, skinny bits of water too shallow for anything but skiffs, or in a river, the Rio Hatiguanico, in a mangrove jungle deep in the park. There were 11 of us fly fishing the flats for bonefish, tarpon, and permit, and in the river for tarpon. Kris didn’t go. She said this sounded like a guy’s trip.
There was one non-angler in our group, the wife of one of the anglers, and she took great photos of birds. Birding and beaches are the other reasons tourists go to Playa Larga. There are 27 species of birds that live only in Cuba, and birders at our hotel told me that in the park they had seen 22 of the 27 species. That included the Cuban national bird, the tocororo. That’s how it sounds, tocororo, and when I heard it I asked if it was some kind of dove.
It’s not a dove. Its breast and head are the the colors of the Cuban flag.
Temminck, C.J. and Laugier, Meiffren, Baron de Chartrouse (1838), Nouveau Recueil de Planches Colorieés D’Oisseaux v. 3, Couroucou, plate 526, Paris, F.G. Levrault.
𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱
The first day fishing, my guide, Julio, yelled at me. It was deserved, because I was yelling at the bonefish. He insisted they took offense. “Take the hook, dammit!” I yelled. They were offended and skittered away.
“Shut up!” Julio was getting to know me.
“I can’t shut up Julio, I’m a lawyer.”
That day I caught four bonefish. “It’s normal,” Julio told me. Julio also told me about all the fish that I was missing. The problem was that I couldn’t see the fish. For bonefish, the angler stands on the casting deck at the front of the boat and stares into the water, ready to cast. The guide stands on a platform at the back and poles the boat and stares into the water. When the guide sees a fish, he calls a clock direction and distance, 12 o’clock, 20 meters; 3 o’clock, five meters; 11 o’clock, 10 meters; whatever . . . ideally, the guide isn’t just messing with you and the angler looks in the right direction, spots the fish, and casts, hopefully leading the fish a bit and not putting the fly either behind it or on top of it’s head (or into the guide, which also happens).
Julio apparently saw fish a’plenty. I didn’t. Part of the problem is that the damned old fish don’t stand still. They don’t politely wait for me to see them. They don’t even just mosey. They move along with intent and determination. When everything works right though, the guide gives the position, the angler sees the fish, and the fish takes the fly.
I couldn’t see the fish. “It’s normal,” Julio kept telling me, right after he yelled “do you see it! Do you see it! Do you see it!” Of course I didn’t see it. Some of the fish I caught that first day I caught blind, just lucky enough to follow Julio’s directions.
Do you see that water? It’s about a foot deep and there are miles of it. Do you see that fish? That’s the problem. It’s hard to see those fish against that bottom. That’s how they’re designed. If God really loved my fishing he would put a bright orange stripe down each bonefish’s back
The second day something clicked and I could see the bonefish. I was seeing fish that the guide, José, hadn’t seen yet. I could make my casts. I could keep the fish on the hook. It was one of those days when I could do no wrong, and I thought that I was now almost certainly the greatest saltwater angler who ever cast a line. I caught fish after fish after fish. I could do no wrong.
The next day I fished for permit.
𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱
I started getting ready to go to Cuba almost a year ago. I took Spanish lessons on Duolingo, and then took a Spanish course at Rice. I tied a bunch of flies. I had long discussions with Mike and Bob and Mark, my three friends who were also going, about what rods we were taking, and what reels, and what lines. We were going to Cuba, and if we didn’t bring it, we wouldn’t have it.
This gets a bit technical, but bear with me. There are going to be a lot of numbers, but they’re all about size variations. Just think of it as a discussion about buying a pair of pants. Look at the numbers as the equivalent of waist measurements and forge on through.
I first decided to take four rods, two 8-weights (in case one broke), a 10-weight, and an 11-weight. Then I started changing my mind, which over the course of the year’s preparations I did about 56 times. I finally settled on one 8-weight, two 10-weights, and an 11-weight, the 8 for bonefish, the 10s for river tarpon, permit, and barracuda, and the 11 for migratory tarpon.
Of course that’s not what I arrived with. I had switched out rods in my luggage so often I apparently lost track. I arrived with one 8 (the wrong one), one 10 (but no backup as planned), one 11, and one 12, a mix I had never in my wildest dreams imagined.
During the year the group of us would meet at lunch and discuss the trip, or we would meet with the Houston fly fishing writer Phil Shook (who’d made this trip last year). We’d discuss flies and leaders and fly lines and fly rods, and I would go home and tie a bunch more flies and imagine new variations of rods and lines to take. I spent hours searching the internet for a tropical 30-foot sink-tip line, and finally found one from AirFlo, a British fly line company. I never knew that there was such a need for tropical fly lines in British rivers.
The biggest controversy was tarpon leaders. Other kinds of leaders only set off fisticuffs, but tarpon leaders really whipped up the passions. Tarpon ain’t leader shy, and our outfitter, Jon Covich, said that the local guides recommended six feet or so of straight 60-pound fluorocarbon for tarpon leaders.
I know what you’re thinking, that’s easy. what’s the problem? Oh, you innocent. There is a well-known 302-page fly fishing book about tarpon obsession, Lords of the Fly (Get it? Get it?), about 30 pages of which are about interesting stuff like philandering and drug abuse and drinking and divorce, and 102 pages of which are about the far more engaging dramas of tarpon leaders. This is serious stuff.
We discussed them one night over after-dinner rum. You’d think with a bunch of guys on holiday we would have had salacious discussions about women and partying and whatnot, or at least with a bunch of old guys we would have discussed viagra and artificial joints, but no. We discussed tarpon leaders.
I posited that you had to have a break-off point somewhere in your rigging, and that meant tying a bit of 16-pound tippet between the 60-pound butt and the 60-pound bite guard. Otherwise the breaking point in your rig is going to be either your fly line (which I insisted had a 30-pound test and which cost somewheres north of $100 pesos, American), or your rod (which in my experience has the breaking strength of a slammed car door or a ceiling fan and costs upwards of $1000 pesos, American).
Ron disagreed. “Neil, you idiot,” see? He was getting to know me, “your fly line has a breaking strength of 180 pounds.”
Well, just like the Virgin I treasured up all these things and pondered them in my heart, and in that rare moment three days later when we had internet, did I call Kris or reset my fantasy baseball team lineup? No. I looked up the test strength of fly lines.
Of course I was wrong, but not completely wrong. The best information we could get was that the common breaking strength of freshwater fly lines is 30 pounds, and the common breaking strength of saltwater fly lines is 40 pounds. I was closer to right than Ron, not that I would gloat. Someone in the group rustled up the box for a Rio Leviathan billfish sink-tip, a big game saltwater line, and it promised a breaking strength greater than 50 pounds. I would have ever-so-diplomatically pointed this out to Ron, but the Castros were conducting a counter-revolutionary purge on his insides, and that evening he was otherwise disposed. After four days he finally felt well enough to fish. He had probably suffered enough, so I never mentioned it. And I never will.
Meanwhile I’ll stick with my bits of light leader tied between a butt section of 60 pounds and a bite guard of 60 pounds.
As a postscript, I’ll add that on the one day we fished the river, I used that sink-tip fly line I had ordered from AirFlo, with a leader with 25-pound tippet tied in as a breaking point. I got snagged on something on the river bottom and was going to break off the fly. I’m a pretty big guy, 190+, and reasonably strong, but I could not break that leader. I pulled. I yanked. I pulled and yanked when the boat was backing away. I wrapped the fly line around my reel and yanked and pulled, and I hollered which always helps. The leader won. I could not break 25-pound tippet. Next time I’m tying in some 5X trout leader as the class tippet. I can always break that.
𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱
Back to permit, which are a kind of pompano. My roommate for the trip, Ken, is permit-obsessed. I have never caught a permit. I’ve hooked two, in Belize, and lost them both. Ken says that over 20 years of fishing in the Florida Keys, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean he’s caught about 120 permit, but here’s the thing: six permit a year for even the most permit obsessed is a mighty fine batting average. For three days while Ron was dealing with the Castros the rest of us let Ken have his own boat. Fishing with a permit devotee ain’t exactly the very thing. Permit obsession is a lonely business for a reason.
Cuvier, M. le B.on and Valenciennes, M. (1828), Histoire Naturelle des Poissons v. 6, plate 209, Paris, F.G. Levrault. This may in fact be a common pompano and not a permit, or may be a mishmash of both. The yellow belly is all pompano, but the fins seem closer to permit. The 22-volume Histoire Naturelle des Poissons was the most ambitious treatment of fish of its time, and was the standard reference for ichthyologists for the nineteenth century, but it was compiled in Paris from specimens, and sometimes the results vary. It doesn’t matter. The plate is magnificent and for that reason alone it should be a permit.
There is a brilliant essay about permit obsession, the novelist Tom McGuane’s “The Longest Silence.” I wouldn’t have wanted to fish for permit with Tom McGuane, either.
I think that Ken said his biggest permit ever was about 40 pounds, but it’s not the weight of the thing or its length that matters, a permit is a permit, and if you’re permit obsessed every permit is a permit, though some permit may be more equal than others. Our companion Alan accidentally caught a small permit blind casting into a bit of muddy water. We all kidded him, Jeff quipped that Alan had caught a learner’s permit, and then it struck us that Alan had actually caught a permit, and we hadn’t. Then we all just sorta coveted our neighbor’s possessions. A permit is a permit.
Notwithstanding Ken’s over-the-top obsession, all saltwater fly fishers are just a little bit obsessed with permit. More than any other fish (except maybe Atlantic salmon), they’re our Holy Grail, our Great White Whale. Most folk wouldn’t know ’em from a dishwasher, and they should count their blessings. Permit are a curse.
I chased permit on this trip off and on for a couple of mornings, once with the guide José and once with Roberto. José is Cuba’s champion distance caster, which means that without much effort he can cast more than 100′, which is about 30′ further than I can cast when there are no fish around to mess up my game. José found me a school of permit, about 200 meters away–200 meters being a lot further than 100′, and a whole lot further than 70′. What we saw were wakes in the water and permit tails waving in the wakes. It is a stunning sight that for some people produces the exultation of the hunt, and for me produces waves of self-doubt.
José said that to get close I had to get out of the boat and wade. I was wearing socks but no shoes when he went over the gunnel, so sock-foot wading it was. After about ten miles he put me into position to cast, but all I could think about was that my passport in my pants pocket was getting soaked. I wrapped the fly line around my head. The permit moved off, laughing.
I moved my passport to my shirt pocket.
We waded another 15 miles and I got off one more cast. It wasn’t terrible, but the permit ignored my fly. They swam right over my damned fly, and sneered at it as they passed. I watched them, and I hated them. And then they went away, laughing.
Ken caught a permit this trip. One, and I’m pretty convinced that he even snuck out of our room at night to get in a little more permit fishing. He told me that I had brought the wrong permit flies–well of course I’d brought the wrong permit flies. I had barely had time to prepare for this trip. He gave me a flexo crab.
Ken was fishing with Roberto, who had only guided for a bit more than a month, but Ken said that Roberto spotted a school about 400 meters away–1200 feet. Ken finally saw the school at about 300 meters, and when they were in range he got off two casts that the permit ignored. Roberto told Ken to cast into the middle of the school, which Ken believed to be heresy, but he did it and he caught his permit.
It was Roberto’s first permit as a guide, and both Ken and Roberto kissed the fish before they let it go. I’d guess the fish didn’t care for being kissed any more than it cared for being caught, but I’m sure it was meant in kindness. The next day Ken gave Roberto a fly rod, and he said that he thought Roberto was going to cry.
Damn. I’m going to cry.
𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱
Roberto is 31 and new to guiding. His English is about as good as my Spanish, but his guide English is great. For other conversations we kept switching back and forth. At one point he told me that before guiding he had been a commercial fisherman, which paid too little and which kept him away from his family for three weeks at a time. Guiding was better because with tips it paid better. Now every day he could see his wife, his 3-year old son, and the “novio de mi esposa,” the boyfriend of his wife.
About the boyfriend, I was heartbroken for him. Later he told me that in Spanish the sharks we were seeing were tiburónes, and after working out that cousins were primos I tried to make a joke about abogados, tiburónes, and primos. When he didn’t laugh I asked him how to say joke, and he told me it was una broma, “like my line about the novio de mi esposa, but not that thing you tried to tell me about sharks being your cousins.” I felt a lot better, even if my joke was a failure.
With Roberto as guide on our last day, I shared the boat with Raymond, and at one point there were about 15 separate pods of permit spread across our flat. I was supposed to share a boat with Mike Green, but ended up fishing with Raymond. Raymond said that he had caught a permit once 20 years ago and he graciously let me stay on the casting deck, which was just as well because I’d otherwise have thrown him off the boat. I’m glad I was fishing with Raymond because Mike Green is bigger than me.
I could hear Roberto gasping while he worked to get me into position, but every time we started to get close the permit shied away. I got off one cast which the permit disdained. It was heartbreaking stuff, and I believe there would have been a movie in it, one of those stories of failure and redemption, if I could only have caught a permit.
No permit, no movie. I didn’t get to kiss the heroine.
𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱
Our drivers drove 20-year old Dodge vans with Russian diesel motors. We spent a lot of time in the taxis. It was two hours from Havana to our hotel in Playa Larga. To get to the river from Playa Larga took about an hour and a half, and then an hour and a half home. To get to the salt flats took about an hour each way. The drivers spoke very little English, so Alan and I practiced our Spanish a lot. Alan was more fluent than me, but both of us managed some. The drivers politely talked very slowly and with lots of explanatory hand gestures and repetitions. I’m still not sure though whether flamingos flock like chickens or taste like chickens.
I talked a lot to our driver Chino. I asked Chino about his family and he showed me a picture of his wife, a microbiologista, and his daughter. His daughter was stunningly pretty. I don’t mean just a normal sort of youthful pretty, I mean really, really beautiful, without any artifice or device. He told me she was 17, very smart, and would go the next year to University in Havana.
The next day our guide, Felipe, said that Chino was his neighbor. He told me that I had only seen his daughter’s face, and that all of her was beautiful, and that she was very very smart, and very good, and that all the young guides were in love with her. All I know is that proud papas everywhere are proud papas.
𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱
Mark Marmon had dragged me into this thing, but Mike Frankoff had put our trip together. He found the outfitter, rounded up the suspects, coerced Phil Shook into telling us in detail about his trip, and played a major leadership role in our collective agonizing over fly rods and flies. Mike and I both keep skiffs in Port O’Connor, and I got to know Mike pretty well over the past year.
I fished with Mike one day on the trip. Our guide was Felipe, who runs a free school to teach young Cubans how to guide. The guides work for the Cuban equivalent of Texas Parks and Wildlife, and get paid the standard $35 a week for their 60-hour weeks, but guides get tips, and the tips from fly fishers are a lifeline. Felipe trains all of the young guides in his school.
Mike made a Hail Mary cast to a bonefish that Felipe had spotted 65 feet away, and unlike what the rest of us mortals would have managed, Mike made the cast and the bonefish took the fly. Then the bonefish started messing with him. It wrapped Mike’s line around a mangrove. While I lay on the bow getting his line untangled from that mangrove the bonefish went through the roots of another, turned back and went underneath the boat, and then wrapped itself around a third mangrove. Mike went off the boat one direction, Felipe the other, and I stayed on the boat to laugh. Somebody had to do it.
They landed that fish. It was a good fish, too. And the boat didn’t drift away with me.
Late in the afternoon, Felipe poled us along a thick mangrove bank, and it was like visiting an aquarium. Along the roots there were snappers and a big brown and white striped grouper and tiny baitfish by the hundreds. Mike pulled out a big popper, and for once in my life I cast beautifully. We kept moving further and further from the mangroves, 55, 60, 65 feet, and I would lay every cast into the base of the trees.
Retrieving the popper, mangrove fish would slam it as if the defense of their homeland relied on their ferocity. I was catching small jacks and snappers, trash fish for most salt anglers, and they were magnificent. The day was perfect and full of joy. Did I go all the way to Cuba to catch jacks and snappers? You betcha. For that and for the cigars.
𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱
Last year the State Department reported that nearly 250,000 Cubans left Cuba for the United States, and that doesn’t include Cubans who left for other countries. It’s the largest out-migration from Cuba since the Revolution, fueled by a combination of deprivation, repression, and the internet. Many of the U.S.-bound Cubans are stuck at our Mexican border, not allowed into the U.S. Those 250,000 Cubans represent more than 2% of the total Cuban population, and it’s immigration of the young. The population left in Cuba is increasingly aging.
The combination of Covid travel restrictions and then-President Trump’s reinstatement of embargo restrictions have severely damaged tourism, which is now a mainstay of the Cuban economy. Since 2020, Cuba has suffered from electricity outages, food shortages, gas shortages, supply chain issues, and civil unrest. It’s hard to buy a bottle of aspirin, or a razor, or a sanitary napkin. To preserve his Senate Majority, President Biden hasn’t eased the Trump-imposed restrictions because it would offend New Jersey’s powerful Democratic senator, Robert Menendez. Meanwhile the average salary in Cuba is less than $150 a month, or less than $2000 a year. Government pension payments are about $10 a month.
Havana, especially Old Havana, is beautiful, with magnificent Colonial architecture, but there’s little money for restoration or preservation. A beautiful building may be half occupied and half collapsing. It’s easy to imagine that if relations were open there would be a massive influx of dollars and materials and machines to turn the wrecks into vacation condos, or hotels, or something, and that the economy would roar. The City has great bones.
There are hardly any stores, hardly even any tourist trinkets. I brought back no souvenirs. Now and then on our tour of Havana we’d pass a grocery store, or foreign luxury clothing stores in a tourist hotel, or a small tourist shop, but not many. The advertising is all for the Revolution.
Amnesty International reports that in 2022 food shortages and electricity outages were frequent. Hundreds of people were still in prison after 2021 protests. Human rights advocates are in prison for crimes like “insulting national symbols.” It’s almost as if they’d protested guns in the Tennessee legislature.
Cuba is a mess.
𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱
Cuba is beautiful. The people want you to be there, and the fishing is better than I am a fisherman, even with the Ernest Hemingway beard I grew for the trip.
We only spent one day on the river. The fishing was off, and apparently it was just as well. It was hard getting enough gas and diesel to send our group to two places.
I fished on the river with Alan, which was great because, after all, he’d caught a permit. With me, Alan also caught a tarpon, and he’s such a nice guy that I hardly even resented it. I hooked three but stupidly lost them all. From time to time our guide, Bryan, pronounced as Bree-on under Communism, had to remind us we were there to fish, not chat.
Bryan complimented us on our Spanish, which for me was really stretching it, and Alan mentioned the current flood of Cuban immigrants. Bryan told us that it was ok, that a lot of Americans were coming into Havana to work in the restaurants. He told us that with our Spanish the government would easily pay us $35 a month.
Skills.
𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱
Food was generally great during the trip, as long as you don’t count the lunches. They were supplied by the government hotel in Playa Larga, and consisted of meat and buns. The guides brought mustard and hot sauce, and sometimes fresh fruit and tomatoes and cucumbers. Otherwise it was meat and buns.
But other than the lunches, the food at the private restaurants was delicious. Mango and papaya with toast and eggs for breakfast, land crab cooked in tomato sauce, black bean and vegetable soups, gently stewed calimari and grilled spiny lobster, fresh snapper, steamed pumpkin, rice, cucumber . . . Why cucumber? I don’t know, but there was always cucumber. I ate everything. Well, everything but the lettuce. I didn’t want the Castro’s revenge.
On our last night the guides came to Casa Frank to join us for dinner. Ken gave a beautiful speech, and just like any good fisherman he expanded Roberto’s extraordinary spotting of his permit from 400 meters to 4000. I drank too much rum and tried to play guitar with the band, but I couldn’t remember anything to play. The guitarist tried to teach me La Bamba.
We had all brought stuff for the guides. Jeff had gone on a spree at Costco, Mark at Academy Sporting Goods. I think Alan had brought a spare suitcase full of stuff, and left the suitcase. Everybody brought something, and there were piles of stuff. Fishing pants, fishing shirts, coloring books and crayons and soccer balls, aspirin and Astros hats. . . Our friends needed everything. I was angry at myself for not bringing more, spare fishing pliers, spare rods and reels, socks and shirts and sun gloves. Spare watches. Pepto-bismol. Spare anything. They need everything and I could have done so much more.
They were so gracious and kind to us. They are so witty. They’re good people, Cubans, and good people to support. I would go to Cuba again in support of the Cuban people. If governments got out of the way and left it to people who love the salt flats, we’d all be fine.
We took waders and wading boots. It was March and still cold, so we also took sweaters and rain jackets and gloves and knit caps. We took long underwear. We needed the sweaters, and long underwear helps when you wade in cold water, but the gloves (and the mukluks) were a bit of overkill.
I used a Hardy Duchess reel, which is a newer reel that harkens back to designs from before the last World War, or maybe the one before that. It’s handmade in England, is very pretty, and most of all it looks right with a bamboo rod.
You don’t really use a reel when you fly fish for freshwater fish. To bring the fish in you just pull in the line by hand and let it pile up at your feet, so honestly the reel has a lot in common with ear rings or the color of a car’s paint job. It’s meaningful but not essential. That means that for no rational reason your reel needs to be as pretty as possible. The Hardy is very pretty.
I caught my wee trout on a dry-dropper rig, a dry fly floating on the surface so that I could see it and a trailing nymph underwater. The dry fly was a #14 Royal Wulff, which seems to be my go-to dry these days, and the nymph was a random #14 pheasant tail mayfly nymph that caught my eye when I poked through my fly box. I watched the dry fly so that when it went under, I knew the fish had taken the nymph.
Whiskey
By law, when you go to Kentucky, you are statutorily required to visit at least one whiskey distillery for each day you’re in the state. Kentucky makes it convenient by locating a distillery every 37 feet. We were in Kentucky three days and met the statutory minimum for distillery visits.
What is or is not bourbon is defined by statute. It must be corn-based, and it has to meet certain standards during distilling and aging. Whiskey taxes were a significant source of revenue for the federal government in the 19th century, and 1897 laws regulating bourbon pre-dated the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act. By 1900 if you were buying bonded bourbon, you were buying something that didn’t contain lead, or wood alcohol, or any number of other things that shouldn’t be in the bottle. Not that it was good for you, it just wasn’t as bad as it might be.
Other than being American, bourbon doesn’t come from a particular place. It doesn’t have to be made in Kentucky. There are bourbon distilleries located in places like Indiana and Ohio and Texas, but Indiana bourbon just doesn’t trip off the tongue. When one thinks of bourbon, one thinks of Kentucky.
There is a side-note here, about water. A waitress in Southern Kentucky apologized to us for Kentucky’s lousy drinking water. I’m guessing that she was saying that her local water was poor quality, but the area where bourbon historically comes from, the area of North-Central Kentucky west of the Appalachians, actually has great water. That’s one of the reasons that bourbon is made in Kentucky. Well, great water and corn. Well great water and corn and money.
When we fished the Driftless in the Midwest I learned that what makes the Driftless special is its karst topology. Karst is characterized by relatively porous sandstone, dolomite, and limestone lying close to the surface and from time to time poking through. In Kentucky, the rock is mostly limestone. Water that seeps underground fractures the rock–Kentucky’s caves, including Mammoth Cave, are the products of fractured and hollowed limestone. Water literally runs through the fractures and seeps through the pores, and the pressure from rain forces clean and mineralized water out at springs. There are springs everywhere. For fly fishers, it’s one of the best things going. The resulting spring creeks, clean and enriched, support plenty of bug life, which in climes further north support trout and should support smallmouth in Kentucky. It’s also one of the best things going for whiskey.
Kentucky Geological Survey, Karst Topology of Kentucky. The dark blue is the heaviest karst areas, the light blue less so.
Over the course of a couple of days with an additional day fishing, we toured the Buffalo Trace, Makers Mark, and Woodford Reserve distilleries. At Woodford Reserve, the tour guide distilled (get it? get it?) whiskey making for us: whiskey making is making beer and then distilling the beer to clean out the mess and concentrate the alcohol. It’s not, he told us, very good beer, but I guess bad beer makes pretty good whiskey. To be bourbon, it has to be at least 50% corn-based and and the distilled beer must be barrel-aged in new oak barrels. There’s no minimum time for aging, but the longer it ages, the better it should be, but the longer it ages the more loss there is from evaporation, the longer it has to be stored, and the more expensive it all becomes.
There are few things that smell better than a warehouse full of aging bourbon in oak barrels.
Where We Stayed
We stayed in the 21C Hotel in Louisville. It’s the third time we’ve stayed in a 21C. The other times were in Bentonville, Arkansas, and in Kansas City. They’re a bit pricey, but they are unbelievably friendly to pets, have interesting art everywhere, and lurking red plastic 4-foot penguins that you can move around in the hallways to disturb your neighbors. The first of the 21C Hotels were in Lexington and Louisville.
Louisville is not a rich city. Kentucky is a poor state generally, and I guess it always has been. After all, Daddy sold a hog each fall to buy us kids shoes. On the flip side, there’s a lot of wealth–just drive down a horse-farm back road. Those splits, poverty/wealth, whiskey/conservative Protestants, urban/country, they all seem harder in Kentucky than in other places, at least harder than I’m used to. Kris thinks I’m making it up. She thought Louisville was great.
Where We Didn’t Go
I never made it to the Louisville Slugger Museum. It was two blocks from our hotel, and I never made it.
We never made it down by the Green River where Paradise lay. We never saw Appalachia from the Kentucky side (we’ve been to West Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania), or Mammoth Cave.
Restaurants
I wouldn’t write home about the donuts or the barbecue, but Louisville has pretty good restaurants. We ate at the hotel one night, at Proof on Main, and the next night at a very good interior Mexican food restaurant, Maya Cafe. The last night we ate at at Everyday Kitchen, and to my eye its menu had a lot of East European food. East European food is to me mighty exotic, it’s just not something I’ve seen very much of, and at the same time it’s completely comprehensible, like Mom’s home cooking. My brushes with East European food in Milwaukee and Chicago and Louisville may be one of the things I like most about the Old Northwest.
I had stuffed cabbage.
The most remarkable thing about the restaurants in Louisville was the amount of whiskey on the menus. There were moderately priced whiskeys by the barrel, and expensive whiskeys that made fly reels look cheap. There were pages of whiskeys, regiments of whiskeys, whiskeys waiting in the wings just to get on stage. I didn’t know there were that many whiskeys in the world.
Mind, that picture only starts with the letter “O”. There were 13 letters of the alphabet preceding. Those aren’t bottle prices either.
Route
Going out we drove from Houston to Nashville; coming home we left early and drove straight through. There are more eighteen-wheelers on the road from Little Rock to Memphis than there are distilleries in Kentucky. If I ever drive to Kentucky again, I’ll drive through Louisiana.
Music
What a lot of music there is from Kentucky. There’s not a lot of jazz; Les McCann and, if you stretch it as to the jazz, Rosemary Clooney. There is a lot of bluegrass and country. Besides Loretta Lynn, there’s the Monroe Brothers, Tom T. Hall, Crystal Gayle, The Judds, Rickey Skaggs, Merle Travis, and Dwight Yoakum. “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” isn’t nearly as bad as I remember it.
I looked forward to Sturgill Simpson and My Morning Jacket coming up on the playlist. Simpson put out Metamodern Sounds in Country Music in 2014, and a A Sailor’s Guide to Earth in 2016, and both albums astonish me, as much for the lyrics as the music. “Turtles all the Way Down” is a country song about Jesus, or Buddha, or LSD, or the turtle that holds up the world. Or something.
My Morning Jacket always satisfies.
Main Street, Paradise Kentucky, 1898. From Wikipedia.
And then there are the 37 versions of John Prine’s “Paradise.” John Fogarty, Johnny Cash, John Prine, Tom T. Hall, Dwight Yoakum, Jackie DeShannon, John Denver, Roy Acuff, Tim O’Brien . . . And Sturgill Simpson. Everybody’s recorded “Paradise.” I think if you are from Kentucky, you have to record a cover of “Paradise” before you’re allowed to open a distillery.
Guitar
I took the Kohno, and played a good bit. I’ve been working on the first movement of Bach’s 4th Lute Suite, but I can never get much past page 2, and it’s a lot longer than two pages. I’ve also been working on songs I once knew but don’t know any more–an arrangement of Summertime, some Tarrega, some Sanz, and a transcription of Albeniz’s Cadiz. That’s gone a lot better.
