Pound for pound, the most vicious predator in our household.
Everyone’s heard of catfishing, especially here in the South. Not many people know though how superior fly fishing for cats is when compared to conventional tackle. I have to admit, until this year I had never taken up cat fishing. I had plenty of excuses: I didn’t have the right gear; I didn’t know where to go; I didn’t know how.
Early in the pandemic, I spent a lot of time fishing local bass ponds, and on one of our trips a dumped kitten came out of the barn. We tried to catch it but my 7 weight wasn’t up to the task. We finally returned with a can of cat food. There I was, an accomplished fly angler, reduced to fishing bait.
Sight casting on a local cat flat.
This year I finally invested in serious equipment for cat fly fishing, and I have to say, while it works like a charm, it’s really not up to the challenge of fighting big cats. For all the money Orvis makes on its cat beds and annual cat catalogue, you’d think that they could come up with more durable catfishing gear. And Orvis isn’t alone. All of the manufacturers need to go back to the drawing board.
You don’t need a hook for cats. The lines are fluorescent green, and the leaders another few feet of level white or fluorescent orange. Cats will attack the line and leader from as far away as 10 feet, so you don’t need to cast all that well, though the retrieve can be critical. It’s a little bit like the whole discredited business of fishing for gar with shredded nylon rope. You tangle the cat up in the line and then you land them with a net.
A destroyed Orvis Helios 3 cat rod and shredded premium line.
If you can get close enough, dapping works well. For catch and release, be careful to spend as little time as possible with the cat in the water.
Here’s my first complaint with the manufacturers: the lines and leaders, which are braided polyester yarn, don’t last. These are toothy critters. I doubt that our first leader lasted more than a week before it was shredded and swept up by the Roomba. The line was destroyed within a month. Maybe wire leader would work? Maybe the line could be made out of Kevlar?
You’d think that the manufacturers would know that house cats are vicious predators, and that they represent a challenge to the very best equipment. Tooth and claw, pound for pound, the typical house cat can do more damage than a barracuda. Just look at our couch. A barracuda never did that to our couch.
A follow!
And cat rods are very specialized. A lot of cat fishing is done indoors, so the standard 9-foot rod doesn’t work unless your indoors is bigger than ours. The specialty cat rods are short and whippet thin to achieve a decent cast, and that means there’s no room for a fighting butt. They cast great, but they’re wholly inadequate for fighting and playing the target species. When it hits, a cat can destroy even the best rods. It’s heartbreaking to see a valuable Orvis Helios 3 cat rod shatter after a violent take.
A new Scientific Anglers rig.
We’ve used Scientific Anglers cat rods as well, and are on our second SA rig. The first was just as much a failure as the Helios. Within a month the tip had broken and the line was shredded. You want to know something odd? I could swear that the SA line is exactly the same as the Orvis line. It’s like they colluded or something. If I knew any antitrust lawyers, I’d feel obligated to let them know.
A refusal.
Still, I’m sure Orvis will honor it’s 25-year guarantee on the rod, and I’ve got to say, there’s just nothing more fun than cat fishing. If the conditions are right, I can even roll cast to a cat from my bed before I go to sleep at night, though I haven’t been able to land one yet. I think I need to keep a landing net on my bedside table. When this whole catching a fish in every state thing is done, I may have to go back to every state to catch a cat.
Dogs, by the way, aren’t nearly as good of prey as cats. You can put the fly right on the dog’s nose and they only look at you perplexed. My dogs look at me perplexed a lot.
Critics generally agree that this is the best photo Joe Rogers will ever take:
Ok, that’s if you confine critics to the two people in the photo who live at our house. Joe took photos at our wedding. He also took photos of our children when they were small. My parents hired Joe for both, because they thought the world of Joe. They told me that very thing so often, frankly, that I was just a wee bit jealous.
Joe has a photography business. He takes photos of weddings, and of families, and if we needed an important photo, we went to Joe. He is a photographer in a pretty small town. There are other photographers there, but we went to Joe.
Joe is older than me, somewhere fewer than 10 years older, somewhere more than five. He was enough older that while I knew of him, I didn’t know him. I knew Joe’s wife, Becky, better than Joe. She was only a couple of years older than me, and we overlapped both in high school and at the University of Texas. As I recall, she worked for a time in Austin television news after she graduated. How did I know this? We were from a pretty small town, and you just know things. She was a smart, personable, pretty girl, and I’m certain she still is. When Becky married Joe it was a bit of a topic among my friends.
Joe Rogers, image copyrighted, used with permission.
At some point long ago I realized that Joe was taking photos of cowboys. This wouldn’t make sense in a lot of places, but out of my small high school class, I always say that three of us ended up lawyering, and three of us ended cowboying, but I’m probably undercounting the cowboys. Ranching and beef production in that part of the world make cowboys real. On ranches, at large animal vet clinics, at the stockyards and sale barn, there are cowboys. I expect that our high school is still turning out as many cowboys as it turns out lawyers.
Joe’s cowboy photos were ranch photos. To me they aren’t romantic photos, they’re not nostalgic photos, but photos of what most draws me to any photo of men doing hard physical work; their intensity, their effort, their skill . . . As often as not Joe’s photos seem like glimpses of a larger picture: a glove, a group of men on a rail, a man’s back in a steel pipe corral, all of those bits in the photo speaking to everything going on when the photo was taken.
Just to be clear, photos of guys lawyering don’t have nearly the same punch as photos of guys cowboying.
Joe Rogers, Taos Pueblo, New Mexico, image copyrighted, used with permission.
I assume no one paid Joe to take cowboy photos, though I hope he’s made some money from them, and that he’s received recognition for them.Me, I have no skill for photography, even though like everybody else with a smart phone I take too many photos. What I realize, though, is that my rare decent photo is mostly luck. That’s less true for Kris, she has a pretty good eye, and most of the photos I steal are Kris’s. Joe though makes a living taking photos. He has not just a good eye, but honed skill.
During a now long-ago Houston mayor’s race, the race when Annise Parker was first elected mayor, a friend suggested that I get on Facebook so I could follow the campaign–Facebook was still new for most of us, and in those earlier days there was a lot of useful information, or at least gossip. Political campaigns largely run on gossip. I was on Annise’s finance committee, and was more intensely engaged than I probably should have been, so I signed up for Facebook. Funny thing though, not long after I signed up I had 50 or 60 friends, most of them not from Houston, but from my far away and long-abandoned hometown.
Joe Rogers, Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, image copyrighted, used with permission.
That reconnection has been for me a joy. I don’t really have any ties there now, but thanks to Facebook Ican see my classmates’ grandkids,keep track of their anniversaries and birthdays, and too frequently mourn their losses. I can also time the arrival of Houston’s next cold front by watching for snow photos from Vernon. It’s usually about a 24 to 36 hour lag, but the snow doesn’t often make it this far.
Through Facebook and mutual friends I somehow connected with Joe, and I liked him. I usually agree with what he says, and he posts great photos. Most are of the Southwest: Utah, Colorado, and of course New Mexico. At one point Joe posted a photo of doorways in Pueblo Bonito at Chaco Canyon. I had been there twice. I had looked through those doorways. I could not have imagined that photo.
Shiprock, New Mexico, Joe Rogers, image copyrighted, used with permission.
Joe is a professional photographer, but he also takes photos as an avocation. I’ve been amused at the number of my friends and colleagues who have recently published books, or have announced that they’re writing books. Lawyers suffer under a curse. We write for a living. The best lawyers are excellent writers, and care for the craft. At the same time, most of our writing is ephemeral and narrowly confined both as to audience and purpose. I suspect that this rash of literary output by aging lawyers–and I’ll throw this blog into the rash–is in part because old habits die hard and in part because we want to leave something behind besides a finely crafted and long-forgotten contract clause. That and we find it hard to stop talking.
I think Joe’s impulse though is different. Getting ready to drive to New Mexico, I’ve thought a lot about Joe’s photos of the West, photos of red sandstone slot canyons in Utah, of a solitary fly fisher on the Frying Pan near Aspen, of those doorways in Chaco Canyon. I say too often that there are two kinds of Texans, Texans who vacation in Santa Fe and Texans who vacation in New Orleans, and Joe is clearly on the Santa Fe side of the ledger. Maybe a part of that difference arises from a small town sensibility, that for small town and country folk the difference between, say, New Orleans and Oklahoma City, is too subtle for us to be strongly drawn to one over the other. They’re both cities, and their charms, difficulties, and mysteries are, frankly, more of a kind than folk more attuned to urban subtleties can imagine. The difference between driving a country road in Western New Mexico and in the Panhandle, now there’s variety. Landscapes are something to ponder and appreciate.
Joe Rogers, colorized detail of a New Mexico church, image copyrighted, used with permission.
And for Westerners, the western landscape is infinitely magnificent. I guess that Joe’s impulse is different in part because Joe’s not merely trying to beat the clock. He’s taken his photos for most of a lifetime. I’m sure like all of us he’s imagined other lives, of writing a novel or cowboying or lawyering or whatever, but as a town photographer he’s taken not just excellent wedding photos, but he’s stayed close to the places that define the West. His eye is on the West, and he’s been kind enough to share what he sees.
You may not know this, but it’s a peculiar time. On a Saturday back in April, the first time I’d left the house after my office shut down, I went to Houston Dairymaids and they delivered cheese curbside. I ordered barbecue from Pinkerton’s and they delivered curbside. We picked up a curbside order at Houston’s big liquor store, Spec’s. We were out of Four Roses bourbon, and running low on gin. It’s that kind of time.
It’s been too windy this spring for the Bay, so except to fish on our local bass ponds that day’s trip from one curbside delivery to another is about as much as I’ve traveled. I haven’t been to a restaurant except to pick up take-out. I’ve been into a grocery store, but even for groceries I usually order online and pick up curbside.
I continue to work, though it feels odd, disconnected, like working on holiday. My firm laid off some employees and reduced salaries for most employees. Those decisions were beyond my pay grade, and my heart ached for affected friends and colleagues. I completed a project for a bank, advised a client whose rental car and hotel revenues had suddenly stopped, and participated in a lot of conference calls. Kris cut my hair. She needs to cut it again.
I postponed our trip to Arkansas. We were supposed to go April 4, to fish the Little Red. I offered to pay the guides for the delayed trip when I canceled, but they said come when we can. I’ve prepaid our guides for our July trip to North Carolina. I worry about how my guide friends are doing.
This is not a warbler.
The warbler migration has come and gone.
I wear a mask when I go into stores or the office, but not when I run. I wash my hands more than before. I’ve cooked a lot, and I try to keep my daily workout schedule, with more discipline than enthusiasm, but that’s always been the case. I don’t read books as much as I should, and play the guitar constantly, working through all the jazz method books I’ve collected over the years, filling notebooks with diagrams of chords with strange names like G7(b9) and Ab m7b5. I’ve been working through the songs in the sixth edition of the Real Fake Book, most of which are jazz standards that I’ve never heard. Did you know that Airegin by Sonny Rollins is Nigeria spelled backwards? I didn’t know the song at all.
I read a funny quote about jazz guitarists, that they make a living playing wrong notes.
At least once a day I read the Houston Chronicle, The Texas Tribune, The Washington Post, The New York Times. I haven’t watched TV much. There’s no baseball, so what’s the point? I did watch videos of George Floyd’s death. The Floyd protests in Houston came past our office building, and I half-heartedly planned to go downtown and stand on the street in support, but they closed our building for the big march and the stationary part of my half-heartedness won. My daughter went. If I’d known she was going I’d have gone with her. My Houston neighbors reacted to the death with surprising restraint and civility. I was worried about coronavirus, and Kris was sick from some other bug that we thought might be coronavirus, so I stayed home.
It wasn’t coronavirus, but man was she sick, and it frightened us.
There are now two Black Lives Matter yard signs on our block. It’s a pretty diverse block, with both doctors and lawyers. There are no African Americans. There are Asians, Middle-Easterners, a Scot, a couple of gay households, an Austrian professor of mathematics, plenty of everyday garden variety white folk, and a Chinese-American geophysicist who is Kris’s go-to expert on local birds. . . I’m proud that two of my neighbors have signs.
Meanwhile my friend Melvin posted on Facebook that as an adult black man he’d been stopped a dozen times by police for no cause. Was it a dozen, or was it ten? One was too many for one of the best men I know. A black work colleague told us that he never ran in his neighborhood without a baggie with a drivers license and a business card. Someone wrote that responding to Black Lives Matter with a statement that All Lives Matter is a bit like responding to your wife’s query about your love for her with a statement that you love everybody. It might be true, but it’s not relevant.
Two acquaintances, maybe three, died of the virus, one black, two white. My friend Peggy told me her brother had died.
I’ve thought a lot about Colin Kaepernick. In the immediate aftermath of Kaepernick’s knee, I was disappointed that something important, continued institutional violence against blacks, was trivialized into something unimportant, whether it was acceptable for a football player to take a knee during the National Anthem. It was actually two players, Kaepernick and Eric Reid, who took the knee, and there was an article in the Chronicle last week interviewing Reid’s brother on the Texans, Justin, who said the same thing, that the narrative got twisted from a protest against police violence to an uproar about flag disrespect. There was a difference though between my reaction and Justin Reid’s. My reaction was to blame Kaepernick for the twisted message. I was wrong. I guess it just goes to show, it’s easy to blame the victim.
Did I mention that I’ve been through lots of Four Roses?
I’ve spent some hours most weekends drifting in a canoe on the lakes at Damon’s. I have a solo Wenonah, a lovely little thing, made for travel, and I’ll sit in the canoe and drift across a pond while I cast. I caught a four or five pound catfish one day, a four pound bass another, both on a six weight Winston with a Hardy Marquis reel. I’ve caught a lot of smaller bass and sunfish, bluegills and greens, and they always bring more joy to me than any other fish. My cast right now is very good, and I’ve tied a lot of flies too, variants on BBBs, with possum dubbing and long soft hackle guinea hen collars that I’d bought for steelhead flies. Don’t tell anyone, but while I’m home I can tie during conference calls.
Looking at the photos of me holding the big bass and catfish with a boga grip, the results aren’t good for catch and release. I’ve decided to use a net from now on, even for warmwater fish.
My mother loved guinea hens. She always said they were better farm guard than dogs. Maybe I’ll get some guinea hens for our yard, during the pandemic there’s not as much traffic on my street as there used to be. Maybe I’ll get a Black Lives Matter sign.
I’ve known the coffee bean fly for a while, decades really, and a long time ago I tied a few and fished them. They were simple to tie.
Size 8-10 dry fly hook
Brown thread
Coffee bean
Super glue
Five-minute epoxy
Wrap thread from the eye to the bend to lay down a base. Score the coffee bean down the center line of the flat side with a hack saw, then Super Glue the bean onto the thread along the scored line. Cover the bean with epoxy. Let dry. Done.
I suspect that now I’d cover the bean with an ultraviolet resin instead of epoxy, but to tie any I’d still need to find my hacksaw. Most internet discussions recite its origins as beetles generally, and invasive Japanese beetles particularly. It’s rough justice that a fly for an invasive Asian fish imitates an invasive Asian bug. Palmered hackle is sometimes added for legs, though we don’t bother with that down on the Bayou.
Bruce Martin, Adult scarab beetle, Popillia japonica, commonly known as the Japanese Beetle, 2006, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en
I learned to tie the fly from a friend and guide, Mark Marmon, and Mark was the first person I knew who fished the fly. I thought for years that he had created it, but if so he was probably not its only creator–pre-foam beetles it’s a pretty obvious choice, at least among coffee drinkers. There are reports on the internet of the fly used for trout as early as the 30s, and not even Mark and I are that old. He did start fishing the fly for carp on Brays Bayou 30 years ago. That’s long before the current carp craze, long before Orvis published a book on carp and long before there were Internet forums on fly fishing for carp. Shoot, this was before there were Internet forums. Mark discovered carp early, particularly grass carp, and he figured out that they take flies, sometimes nymphs, but also sometimes a coffee bean fished as a dry.
Brays, also spelled Braes or Brae’s, runs 30-odd miles from west to east through Houston and then empties into Buffalo Bayou, which in turn empties into Galveston Bay. The Corps of Engineers channelized large parts of Brays 50 years ago for flood control. Brays was once probably slow and meandering, at least during low flow, but prone to flooding. Straightened and lined with concrete Brays water never moves slow but it still floods, and maybe floods more as concreted Houston has spread west and global warming has increased our severe rain events. Harvey, Tax Day, Imelda . . . In the rash of recent 500-year Houston floods Brays has done its part, and more than its part, to flood the city. Two years after Harvey I can still find boarded windows and cleared lots along the Bayou.
Aerial view of Hermann Park, Harris Gulley and Brays Bayou looking north. 1925, John P. McGovern Historical Collections and Research Center, Houston Academy of Medicine-Texas Medical Center Library: https://hdl.handle.net/1911/36730Courtesy of Photograph Collection at the McGovern Historical Center, HAM-TMC Library, 1133 John Freeman Blvd, Houston, Texas 77030, 713-799-7141, mcgovern@library.tmc.edu.
Only the Corps could come up with the verb “channelized,” and only the Corps could think concrete was our best drainage solution. Channelized Braes isn’t pretty, at best you can say its a fine example of 50s Brutalist Architecture, and is part of the excess of concrete that gives a good city an ugly reputation. The walls are maybe 15 feet high and slope at 30 degrees, but they don’t meet to form a V. At the base there is a flat, 50 feet across, gently sloping towards a narrow deeper center channel. Even at low flow there is always flow in the center channel, partly from upstream sanitary sewer plant effluent. After a few days’ rain Brays can rise 15 feet and run 100 feet from bank to bank. At lower flows the water doesn’t look particularly dirty, though there is an odd ozone scent in the air, and downwind from the City’s Braes Bayou treatment plant the odor can be decidedly rich. I wouldn’t recommend contact recreation.
On the Bayou Purel is part of any smart angler’s kit.
There are always enough runners and bikers along Brays to make me feel conspicuously foolish approaching the water with a fly rod, or even a camera, and I’m always conscious that I’d just as soon no one I knew saw me. It’s one of the reasons I stopped going. If this is glamorous fly fishing, it’s decidedly perverse glamorous fly fishing.
For the first few coffee beans I tied I didn’t coat them with epoxy. A glued bean is secure and they look fine, but because the roasted beans are brittle and the banks are hard, unless you cover the bean with epoxy the flies don’t last. One slap against the concrete slope and the bean is crushed. When I long ago fished Brays somewhat regularly I wasn’t a very good caster, and in addition to not casting where I wanted I couldn’t keep the fly from slapping the slope. I coated the next batch, and that’s probably the last batch I tied.
Brays runs not far from our house, and this year for the first time in a decade I’ve been down there a few times. Originally Kris wanted to go for carp and I went along. I don’t really like carp: I’m old enough to think of them as an undesirable trash fish, and ugly, with coarse scales, ragged fins and tales, and unrefined features. Plus I’ve been told all my life that carp are inedible, and notwithstanding Czech Christmas traditions I’m good with that. I’m not eating anything I pull out of the Bayou, even if it is Christmas.
Plecostomus, Braes Bayou
When I first fished Brays I hired Mark as a guide. It’s sight-fishing, walking along the concrete liner to look for feeding fish. At low flows–you don’t get near the Bayou at high flows–you can see the fish, both pods and singles, and if you’re a good enough caster the idea is to lead the fish by a few feet when they coast onto the shallow flat to feed. There are more fish than carp in the Bayou; there are supposedly largemouth, certainly mullet, gar, and the occasional rogue koi. One night late after an Astros game we boarded the train downtown with a guy with a spinning rod and a catfish in a five-gallon plastic bucket, caught in Buffalo Bayou. I talked to him, and he said he fished the Bayou often. He seemed . . . simple, sketchy, but I don’t know if his deficiencies began before or after he started eating Bayou fish.
Maybe I caught a carp that day with Mark; I don’t remember. What I remember was catching two mullet on the coffee bean fly. When I went with Kris to the Bayou last spring I cast for a while in the general direction of a seven or eight pound carp holding in shallow water. I’ve seen osprey this winter on the Bayou, so carp holding in the shallows to sun may be a summer avocation, and anyway in the Bayou feeding carp are moving carp. This fish was just sitting, from above looking all the world like a dark tumorous lump, and it was something I was decidedly ambivalent about catching. In any event it ignored me. It finally got tired of my fly slapping around its head and moved into deeper water.
Plecostomus, Braes Bayou
Recently I’ve thought a good bit about the coffee bean fly, in part because I opened an old box of flies and found a couple, and in part because of the rash of perfect tiers I follow on the internet. It’s apparently the golden age of fly tying, where everyone but me is artful, creative, and careful. I’m not. I mostly follow recipes and hope that the end result is useable. On my bench I keep a razor blade to scrape off failures and salvage hooks, and I use it often. Even if tied well the coffee bean fly, along with San Juan worm variants, beaded salmon eggs, and spoon flies, is as far from artful tying as one can get (though it takes some skill to tie a decent spoon fly). Even in its day it was controversial. Mark would have the record for grass carp on the fly except that the bean has a scent, and therefore doesn’t meet IGFA standards. Who knew carp drink coffee?
In the same box where I found the coffee beans was a brown spun deer hair fly shaped to look like a coffee bean. I guess that’s Artful, Creative, Careful. I didn’t remember when or where I got the fly, but it was certainly something I had bought. Like I said, my tying is none of those things.
According to Benjamin Gosset at Bayou City Angler the Braes fish have moved out of the channel for winter, into the wider, deeper water where the concrete ends, but at least once recently I saw a few large carp stacked in a plant outfall on the far bank. I gather that both the grass carp and mullet are essentially vegetarians, so when 20 years ago an otherwise forgotten fly shop clerk said he wouldn’t fish with a coffee bean fly because he wouldn’t fish with something designed to imitate shit–that’s the alternate explanation to a Japanese beetle–his denunciation had the ring of truth, even if it also rang of arrogance.
I tried a couple of times to cast to the stacked fish in the outfall. There were four or five, and they were big: I could see their tails and their backs, and who wouldn’t try to make that cast? I had to cast across the center channel current and there was too much drag on the fly, but about the fifth stubborn cast I snagged a fish, and it ran out into the current and upstream until I was left with nothing but a smashed coffee bean hooked through a thick ugly scale. I suspect that both of us, me and the fish, were ok with that result. I didn’t want to snag fish and the fish didn’t want to be snagged. After it came off the hook I went back to my car and dug the Purel out of the center console. Down on the Bayou you can’t have enough Purel.
Mark still guides, and I hope we fish trout together on the Guadalupe over the Christmas holiday. There was another young guy guiding carp for a while, Danny Scarborough, but I heard that Danny moved to Dallas. Here in Houston carp are now Chosen Ones, and there’s even a local carp tournament in the spring, because carp are now a lifestyle choice. Bayou City Angler is always good for advice on carp. It’s magic having a destination fishery so close to home.
