Gear
We used rods and flies from our guide, Terry Peach. We took our waders and wading boots, but otherwise we used Terry’s stuff.
On Brandywine Creek we used Terry’s two-handed rods. Casting two-handed rods is a peculiar exercise. I’ve done it some, and I’m not much good at it. I don’t fish much in the rivers where they’re used, and in most rivers I use single-handed rods. Without practice, I’ll never get better, but if it’s done right you can cast a lot further than with a single-handed rod. It’s also supposed to be less strain on my aging body.
Those are good things, but the big advantage is that there’s no back-cast. To cast in front of you with a Spey rod, you don’t need to stretch the line out behind you first. Without a back-cast, you miss all those excellent opportunities to entangle your line in bank-side trees. Every fly angler has invested considerable time and effort into untangling flies from back-side brush, and if they haven’t they must fish in the desert. Even then I suspect I’d get tangled in the cacti.
Don’t get me wrong, though. There are plenty of unique and painful ways to screw up casting double-handed spey rods. With Spey casting, the technique is to put your left foot out, and then your left foot in, and after you turn yourself about your line magically puddles somewhere. I have seen good Spey casters, and it’s a beautiful thing, but with me even on my best day it ain’t so pretty.
Still. It is really fun, and just getting to Spey cast is reason enough to go to Delaware to fish for shad.
Before we fished the Brandywine with the big rodsTerry took us to a DuPont pond so that he could be sure we caught a fish. We fished single-handed 6-weights on the pond, and with a single-handed rod I can’t plead lack of practice for my screw ups. Kris used a 6-weight rod built by Waterworks/Lamson. That rod, a Center Axis, incorporated the reel into the reel seat. Kris loved it. I tried it and it made me nervous. I did get Kris out of Terry’s shop without buying a new rod, though it was nip and tuck.
Lamson recently quit making the Center Axis, and I think it almost broke Terry’s heart. I suspect he’s got a lot of the remaining stock stowed somewhere. He really likes that rod, and so did Kris.
We took our own boots and waders. When you fly somewhere to fly fish, carrying wading boots comes right after delayed flights and missed connections as a source of misery. Even without boots there’s a lot of gear. There are reels, rods, waders, nets, some more reels and rods, wading staffs, some extra reels and rods, nets, fly boxes, wading packs, and then there are boots. Here’s the thing about boots. When you pack your boots they weigh about 2 pounds, 5 ounces. They are the incredible lightness of being. Then you get them wet.
A boot will absorb 72 times its weight in water, and take two months to dry. Wet boots will inevitably boost your luggage above the checked bag limit of your air carrier. When there were still newspapers, you could stuff your boot with newspapers and that would soak up some of the water, but those days are done. Just try to find a newspaper anymore. There was something very satisfying about stuffing the style section and the news of the day into wet wading boots. It almost felt like performance art. I might like to stuff my boots with Fox News, but it don’t hold water.
In another kind of performance, I’ve driven highways at 70 mph with our boots tied to the rental car roof. It helps, but it makes Kris nervous. I guess it probably isn’t very smart. Sixty-five would be safer, and the boots might make less racket when they flopped around.
Phillies Fans
To get to Wilmington, we flew into Philadelphia, then drove to the Phillies’ stadium and watched part of a day game between the Phillies and the Diamondbacks. I like to visit baseball stadiums. The Phillies stadium, Citizens Bank Park, is relatively new, and because of the open food courts behind center field it’s oddly reminiscent of the Twins stadium. Twins fans though are among the politest people on earth. Phillies fans are not.
Kory Clemens, Roger Clemens’ son, is the current first baseman for the Phillies. I am certain that notwithstanding the DWIs he is a fine young man, and of course he’s from Houston, so we paid particular attention to him. He’s currently got an OPS of .797 or so, which isn’t scorching, but neither is it terrible. That afternoon he had one hit, a single, on four at bats with a walk and a strikeout. When he struck out, a guy behind us screamed–and I do mean screamed–“Clemens, you bum, why don’t you cheat like your old man . . .”
It was a packed stadium, which surprised Kris, but then she never snuck off from work to go to day games. We didn’t stay for all of it. On the way out we were talking about the peculiarities of the fans (and there were some mighty peculiar peculiarities, not least of which was the guy sitting next to me who kept score and performed voodoo incantations). Kris said that she was surprised that the Phillies fans let an Arizona fan heckle Kory Clemens without giving him grief.
Oh Kris. You innocent. That was a Phillies fan.
As a postscript, after the same game (in which the Phillies overcame a 4-run deficit to win), shortstop Trea Turner’s mom left him a note in the clubhouse. “Good game, except for your fourth at-bat. I was booing you.” It must be tough when your mom’s a Phillies fan.
Wilmington, Delaware
Delaware produces two major commodities, corporations—more than 50 percent of publicly-traded corporations are incorporated in Delaware—and corporate bankruptcies. If you’re a corporation and you’re going to go bankrupt, you file in Delaware.
My understanding is that you can pick up bankruptcy plans of reorganization at the Wilmington Walmart.
Hotel And Restaurants
We splurged and stayed in downtown Wilmington at the Hotel DuPont. It’s a beautiful 1913 hotel, nicely restored, and they were the friendliest of people. The place breathes Gilded Age elegance. The bathtub had a special rack just for reading, which seems to me about the peak of Western Civilization.
After we checked in we walked down to the park from our hotel. Driving around the next morning we discovered that had we turned right instead of left we would have made it to the old downtown, with lots of cute shops and many nifty bars and restaurants. It looked mildly Bohemian and very lively.
We ate dinner at Le Cavalier in the hotel. I don’t remember what we ate because I was too busy admiring the dining room.
In the morning we ate at a neighborhood diner, Angelo’s Luncheonette, which may be the best place for breakfast in the entire world. It was tiny and old, in a neighborhood of small old row houses, and everybody but us knew everybody else. A lady from across the street came in and asked if the waitress, Ann, would move the box off her porch to the back stoop when it got delivered. A guy came in from West Virginia and said he was making a special stop at Angelo’s because he had to move his mother out of the neighborhood to West Virginia. Everybody was greeted by name, and all the customers seemed to know each other. I felt like one of the chosen just being there.
We flew out again from Philadelphia, and it was complicated. We left the river late, and our flight to Houston was early the next morning. Philadelphia is at least semi-famous for pizza, so we called ahead to pick up a pizza from Pizzata Pizzaria near UPenn. It was out of the way, and then we had to fill the rental car with gas and get checked in at the airport motel. We managed all of this with only the statutory minimum of marital breakdowns.
I left Kris at the Hampton Inn and dropped off the rental car, took the rental car shuttle to the airport, took the airport shuttle back to the hotel, and devoured more than half of the pizza and a couple of beers. Even cold the pizza was delicious, but I was overeating pizza out of manic energy and nerves and by then it was almost midnight.
I didn’t sleep because of too much pizza and beer and too much muchness. We got up at 4 a.m. to go to the airport.
We had caught our fish in Delaware though.
Playlist
I put together a Delaware playlist almost two years ago, and it was short, George Thorogood and the Destroyers, David Bromberg, and the 70s New Wave band Television. That’s it. My friend Mark Marmon and I discussed it on the way to Port O’Connor a couple of weeks ago, and he said I had to have missed some jazz guy. I had, Clifford Brown.
I knew of Brown. He was born in 1930. He had tremendous tone and creativity, was a fine composer, and was the greatest trumpet talent of his generation. After he moved to New York in the early 50s he was an immediate star and played with everybody. Dizzie Gillespie and Miles Davis were admirers. He was an early member of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, and he was to be the co-leader of the Max Roach/Clifford Brown Quintet. His reputation today is of a brilliant talent, a hard worker, and an authentically nice guy. He was killed in a car wreck in 1956, before he turned 26.
Guitar
I didn’t take a guitar, which goes against my rule of playing at least one chord every day. The trip was just too fast.
