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Oregon and the Color of Fish

In September, after Louisiana and a quick-trip again to try for Maryland stripers, we go to Oregon to fish for steelhead on the Deschutes. We have a bit more than a month between Louisiana and Oregon, and I’ve decided there are no two places in this country further apart, if not quite physically then in most other ways that matter. Even the Oregon names, Oregon, Portland, Deschutes, ring different than Louisiana names: Louisiana, Vieux Carre, Atchafalaya.

Eugene. Acadiana.

The Deschutes is a lovely river, I’ve seen it. But its name calls out for a gesundheit.  It’s not just the brutality of the names though that make Oregon different from  Louisiana. Oregon is liberal, eccentric, and whatever its history may be it seems to have no great effect on its present.  Louisiana is none of those things, except of course for eccentric. In Oregon you can legally smoke pot and legally commit suicide. In Oregon you drink pinot noir or pinot gris and craft beer, or maybe Pabst Blue Ribbon. In Louisiana you try to drink yourself to death with drive-through daiquiris and sticky sweet hurricanes in to-go cups from Pat O’Brien’s and complex mildly bitter Sazeracs. Interestingly, based on CDC data, Louisiana ranks only 17th among states for rates of heavy drinking among adults, Oregon unexpectedly ranks higher than Louisiana at 16th. I suspect all those tea-totalin’ Baptists in north Louisiana keep it from achieving its proper place as number one, and all those winery owners boost Oregon.

Maybe I’m wrong and they’re not really different. Maybe we’ve all blended into the same thing. But can you imagine if Duck Dynasty had been made in Oregon? It would be Portlandia. And vice versa.

Evermann, Barton Warren  and Goldsborough, Edmund Lee, The Fishes of Alaska, , 1907, plate 38, Steelhead Trout

On driving trips we used to play a game naming the natural color of cars. The natural color of a car is the color of the wild car before its domestication.  The natural color of a 1980s Ford Crown Vic is brown. The natural color of a BMW five series is blue, a Honda Accord is silver, and a 1970s F-150 pickup is red.  It’s a fun game, because there are so many cars where the answer strikes everyone playing as obvious.

We picked the Deschutes for steelhead because it’s the natural color of Oregon fish. What else could we fish for? Where else could we fish? Some states don’t have a natural color of fish: Florida and Alaska have too many colors to pick just one.  Texas doesn’t really have a natural color of fish, unless it’s channel cat and they’re hard to get to take a fly. I’ve fished in Oregon before, for trout on the McKenzie out of a McKenzie boat, and even though we caught fish it was somehow unsatisfactory. I think it was unsatisfactory because we fished the wrong color of fish. In Maryland you gotta fish stripers in the Chesapeake. In Louisiana you gotta fish redfish in the coastal marsh. In Oregon you gotta fish for chromers–I think that’s what they call them –on the Deschutes. Everywhere else a chromer is a stocked trout. In Oregon it seems to be the wildest of trout.

I suspect in Oregon the natural color of fish is steelhead, not because there aren’t other perfectly good targets.  There are plenty of perfectly decent rivers in Oregon and miles of coastline, but I suspect it’s steelhead because in Oregon steelheading is at least in part about the style of the thing. Could you fox hunt without red jackets and stirrup cups? I reckon, but it ain’t quite the thing.  It ain’t quite the thing to fish for steelhead out of a drift boat with a 9 ft 7 wt and nymphs under a bobber, even though that apparently is the best way to actually catch steelhead. It’s just not done. You have to cast gaudy flies with a 13 foot spey rod that’s good for not much else. You have to use impossibly named incomprehensible line and leader combinations. It’s not just a thing to be done, it’s a thing to be done in the right way.

It seems to me that spey casting is popular in Oregon not because it’s the best way to catch fish but because it’s fun to do in and of itself, and even more fun to do in and of itself while mildly stoned. This is what happens to a perfectly good sport when you legalize marijuana.

There is certainly fly fishing in Louisiana, but talk to most of the Louisiana fly guides and you begin to suspect that there’s not much purity in the heartland of the spoon fly. “I was after a record fish, so I had five rods set up and I’d hook one fish and if it didn’t seem big enough I’d hand it off to  the guide and he’d bring it in while I took one of the other rods to cast again.”  I heard someone say that about fishing to a school of bull reds in the Louisiana marsh. In Oregon the discussion seems to be about how many days one casts from dawn to dusk before one actually catches a fish. They don’t actually wear red jackets though. At least I hope so.  I don’t own a red jacket.

Meanwhile we keep trying to fish Galveston. Kris caught a bit of redfish Saturday morning blind-casting in Green Lake mud.  I put down some tailing redfish.  I’d forgotten how skittish redfish could be on a flat on a still summer day.

That’s Kris’s fish. I only photobombed.

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More Louisiana

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Kris asked me if there was ever an end to stories about Louisiana, and I don’t think so. I haven’t written about the Louisiana Purchase, or the names in the Times-Picayune obituaries. There was the LSU chancellor who bet wrong on the market and secured his loans by printing up University bonds on the basement printing press. There is Ray Nagin’s baffling behavior during Katrina, his Chocolate City speech, and his ultimate corruption conviction. There’s Huey P. Long, Edwin Edwards and his corruption conviction, and Duck Dynasty’s fall from grace. There’s Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, and Jerry Lee Lewis.  I worry with some states that I’ll have nothing to say, with Louisiana I worry if I’ll ever finish talking.

We fish Louisiana somewhere near New Orleans August 4-5 with Captain Bailey Short. Captain Short is an Orvis-endorsed guide, so he should be a pretty safe bet. August 4-5 is less so. It’s hot in Louisiana in August, and while there may or may not be redfish, the fish won’t be the big 30+ pound bulls. Those start in October and stay through the winter.**

People from Houston love New Orleans in August.  The heat and humidity’s no worse than Houston, and there are no tourists. You can get hotel reservations. You can get restaurant reservations.  I guess we’re tourists too, but the ties are so close between the cities, like Houston and Dallas or Houston and San Antonio, that it doesn’t feel that way.

We’d originally tried to schedule Captain Short in November of last year: November is prime for the big reds. In Texas we also have bull reds, but not in the marsh. Our marsh is on the mainland side of the barrier islands. Because in Louisiana barrier islands don’t stand between the Gulf and the mainland, the bulls come in. Our bull reds stay on the surf side where I don’t trust our skiff. Maybe I should, but I don’t. Old age.

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In November it stormed or at least threatened so we delayed. We fished in Galveston in clear water on a cold day and I caught a nice red on a nice sight cast with a fly I’d made up. Sometimes things work, even in salt water. We re-booked for April, the advantage to which is that it’s not March. March is the worst month on the Gulf Coast. There’s hard wind, dirty water, and no fish. April is a smidgen better, or maybe by April I’m just used to hard wind, dirty water, and no fish. We didn’t get to go with Captain Bailey in April either. Storms.

I’ve gone fly fishing but not caught fish, a lot of different kinds of fish, a lot of times. I’ve now not caught tarpon in Belize and Florida. I’ve hooked but not landed trout all winter on the Guadalupe, and I’ve hooked and not landed two permit. More than any other fish I’ve fished for and not caught I’ve not caught redfish. I’ve caught some, but I’ve fished a lot more. In Galveston I’ve fished and failed to see redfish for days on end, so I’ve not caught a whole lot of redfish. The only other fish that might be close is sheepshead.

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Notwithstanding conventional wisdom I think redfish are hard. Maybe I’m wrong, but bonefish are a payload easier for me than redfish. Get on a good Belizean flat and sooner or later you will catch bonefish: you just have to remember not to pull the fly out of the fish’s mouth. Get on a grassy flat in Galveston Bay and sooner or later you’ll see some mullet jump 100 feet away. The sun’s not shining. The water’s off-color. The wind’s too high.  There are no fish.  Most days you won’t see redfish.

Galveston visibility is bad, and my experience in Louisiana is the same. Often you see reds just as they see you and are heading the other direction. When everything is working for me I can cast pretty well, but you know the hardest cast in fly fishing? It’s a nine-foot cast to the redfish that you just spotted as your skiff’s about to run it over.

Most weekends when we’re home we’ll take the skiff out on Saturday because we can’t resist, and we keep thinking this will be it. This will be the weekend when it all comes together. It never is. Most weekends when were home I’m likely to go bass fishing on Sunday so I’ll remember what it’s like to catch fish.

I’ve caught one more tilapia this year than I’ve caught redfish.

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**Postscript. This is one of those times I was just flat wrong, even if I was certain. There are plenty of really big reds in August, and big black drum as well. I had no clue what I was talking about.

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Fifty Shades of Fish

I’m not a horrible fly fisherman, I’m really not. My casts could be better, sure, my hook sets may not be quite the thing, and when I actually hook a fish I may not land it, but I’m not always incompetent. Some days the sun shines. Natheless I’m skunked again in Margeritaville. I’m worn out with Florida, and last weekend I failed to catch any fish.

It wasn’t my fault exactly, and it certainly wasn’t Captain Court Douthit’s (pronounce Dow-thit’s) fault. Court clearly loves Florida and the fish and the sport and he’s investing a big part of his life in it. That’s why people like me need guides: I want to learn something, I need a boat, I don’t know the water or the fish . . . That’s why you pay good guides: they make the investment to know what you don’t and have the stuff that you need that you don’t have. Our first day out what Court had was a plan, and given the weather it was a good plan, but fishing is a sadomasochistic sport, and fly fishing even more so. Some days one’s not the sado. This weekend we weren’t the sado.

We fished the Gulf side out of Dunedin (pronounced Done Eatin’, which in Gaelic means cute shops), not in Tampa Bay. Dunedin is protected by narrow barrier islands, and the other side of the barrier islands, what Court called the beach side, was where the tarpon usually cruised. We weren’t going out there though. We couldn’t have seen whales cruising and the waves were downright scary. Instead we looked for tarpon on the leeward side of the islands. All we found were crusty old guys in boats (“That’s Old Bag of Rocks. He had his driver’s license taken away because he’s blind. He carries a bag of rocks to chunk at jet skiers.”)

The weather was all wrong. For all I know there’s never any sunshine in Tampa, it’s always overcast except when it storms, and the wind always blows hard. Sunshine and calm waters in Tampa may be like hatches: a practical joke to play on unsuspecting Texans. The night before we’d gone to bed during lashings o’ rain and lightning. We figured the next morning on the water it could get bad. It got bad. Before it got really bad Court polled us across a flat looking for snook. I got some casts which landed somewhere near a snook, so of course it turned and moseyed off in the other direction. Mostly we saw a lot of mullet stacked up on the sand.

It never rained but I still got soaked. Coming back through the slop to the marina the waves were fast and high, and we had buckets of saltwater spray us with each wave. It wasn’t cold, and as spa treatments go it was fine. It would have been better though if Court had fixed us a nice cup of herbal tea to go with the salt rub.

It was obvious Captain Court felt bad, but there was no reason for it. He’d taken a risk to get us out on the water and we appreciated it. He said the forecast was the same the next day (pronounced it’s going to be crap again tomorrow and there’s no reason to try the same thing), but that if it wasn’t lightning we should try something else the next night.

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Dunedin is a pretty little town with a pretty little marina that looks like somebody set Georgetown down on the Florida coast. It was charming. At the little marina diner we ate fresh tuna and avocado carpaccio with ginger and lime, called in South Florida tuna poke. Most marina diners would have had grilled cheese or burgers with soggy fries, and the raw fresh tuna was a big improvement. So were the fresh grouper tacos. They also had local beers, and after lunch I took a nap in the car while Kris checked out the shops. Success.

Our day wasn’t done, and except for the diner and the nap it didn’t get better.  Not only did we get skunked and drenched, the Astros lost to the Rays. The Rays are a fine young team, and the Astros’ offense was dead, their defense was sloppy, and Gerrit Cole pitched subpar.  The stadium also lived down to its reputation. The crowd (pronounced the stadium was mostly empty) was friendly and the food and beer was surprisingly good. There were a lot of Astros fans, and also some Rays fans, but it was sparsely populated. I found a Tampa friend from my favorite Astros fan site just by looking. He was pretty much sitting next to us. I had prime seats that I’d bought as soon as tickets went on sale. He’d bought his tickets that morning. Not much demand.

Saturday morning there was lightning and rain. We went to the St. Petersburg fine arts museum, which was small but nice enough and which had some fine Asian pieces, and the St. Petersburg history museum which houses the world’s largest collection of autographed baseballs. By game time the weather had cleared enough to fish the underwater dock lights for snook and baby tarpon, 20 to 40 pounds. We’d have some visibility to spot fish against the underwater lights. Kris was all for it, and I’m all for Kris.

* * *

Kris asked me where we were going to eat in Tampa, and I told her Hooters. Actually, I told her that there was a famous national restaurant chain founded in Tampa and that we should go there. She asked which one and I said I can’t remember the name.

“What’s it famous for?”

“Breasts.”

“Chicken?” I hadn’t considered chicken.

“No, lady breasts.”

“Twin Peaks?” No. “Hooters?” That was the one. “I guess it’s because of all the owls in Tampa,” she said.

I know Hooters was founded in Tampa because six years ago my friend Patrick was a delegate to the Republican National Convention in Tampa. Patrick has his peculiarities.

The first day he left the convention for food, but every civic volunteer suggested Hooters. It was founded in Tampa. What good Republican wouldn’t want to go to Hooters? Patrick wouldn’t want to go to Hooters. After the third or fifteenth Hooters suggestion someone suggested a Thai restaurant.

Now I’m stealing Patrick’s story, and it is one of the best stories ever. Ever. Patrick, if for some odd reason you ever see this forgive me, but I can’t resist. It’s the best story ever.

When Patrick got back to Austin from Tampa he called me. “You won’t believe who I met in Tampa! Mark Naimus!” “Who?” “Mark Naimus!” “Who is Mark Naimus?” “What are you talking about! You know Martin Amis!”

Each Texas delegate had a straw Stetson, blue jeans, and a Lone Star Flag pearl-snap shirt. It was a handsome ensemble. Then-governor Rick Perry autographed Patrick’s Stetson on the font brim, and future-governor Greg Abbott autographed it on the back.  When he went into the Thai restaurant in full regalia Patrick spotted Martin Amis at the bar. Now think about that for a second: it wasn’t somebody you or I would recognize. It wasn’t John Wayne or Elvis Presley or Paul McCartney. It wasn’t even Stephen King. It was Martin Amis. Patrick, who’d just finished Lionel Asbo, recognized Amis and introduced himself.

Amis was covering the convention for Newsweek and The Daily Beast. Patrick told Amis that he’d just read Lionel Asbo, and then they talked about Laurent Binet’s HHhH, a French novel that had won the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman and which they both admired. It’s a very good novel which of course I hadn’t heard of. Martin Amis autographed the crown of Patrick’s hat, and I’m pretty certain it is now the only cowboy hat anywhere autographed by Rick Perry, Greg Abbott, and Martin Amis.

The next day Patrick was on the floor of the convention and a runner tracked him down. Mr. Amis was making a film of the convention for the Daily Beast. Mr. Amis was wondering if Patrick and other members of the Texas delegation would agree to an interview. Mr. Amis would come to their motel to film the interview.

So when Patrick called me bubbling about meeting Martin Amis I said Patrick, you know what’s going to happen. Martin Amis, sardonic, liberal, witty, is going to shred you. No no Patrick insisted. We talked by the pool about books for an hour!

“It was great!’ Ok, Patrick may not have said it was great, but you could tell he surely thought so.

So the video was posted by the Daily Beast, and sure enough, Martin Amis shredded the Republican Party and the convention and in the middle of the film, wearing his Stetson, is Patrick, and Amis treats a delegate to the Republican National Convention with the greatest delicacy, the greatest kindness. And who wouldn’t?

And of course there’s that hat.

* * *

The Astros lost Saturday’s game as well, with some bad luck and some sub-par pitching by Justin Verlander and more dead bats. At 9 that night we met Court in a St. Petersburg neighborhood park to fish the boat slips for snook and baby tarpon. We fished until 4 the next morning.

If you don’t fish saltwater you may not know about fish lights. Bait is attracted to light. Game fish are attracted to bait.  Any light works, but spooky underwater green lights work best of all. I figure that the bait thinks it’s natural plankton luminescence, and being planktivorish it shows up to gorge. It’s not a very good theory, and as far as I know planktivorish isn’t a word, but it’s something. Bait could just be dumb. Or maybe it just likes green.

Did we see fish? You betcha. Looking into those weird nighttime pools of green we saw snook and baby tarpon enough to make any sight fisher happy. Over the seven hours we fished, moving from dock to dock, I must have made 300 casts to fish, at least some of which were in the vicinity of fish. Kris must have made another 100 casts–She didn’t want to come back to Florida so she let me cast more than was my due. Court put us on fish and we tried every fly, small light, small dark, large light, large dark, gurglers, purple things that looked like Cookie Monster, green things, tan things, and back to small white, small dark  . . . Nothing worked until . . . Skip that. Nothing worked.

I had three hits, three, all of which I pulled out of the fish’s mouth with a trout set–don’t tell Captain Court, but I swear I have an excuse.  Nine o’clock is my bedtime. It’s not when I start fishing.

By the next morning we were punch drunk and exhausted and had caught nada, but we’d seen baby tarpon roll by the dozens, flashing up through the green glow and hitting the surface like big salmon taking a fly. Just not my fly. At least we didn’t get a sunburn. Not that the sun ever shines in Tampa.

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When you’ve got two days in a strange place to catch fish there are no guarantees that either the fish or the weather will cooperate, and there are never any guarantees fishing for saltwater fish. If we’d had longer the weather would have cooperated and sooner or later we would have landed a fish, but we ran out of sooner with no later at all. I would fish with Captain Court again in a heart beat. I just hope next time its a bit luckier day. Or a bit luckier night.

* * *

We didn’t eat at Hooters. Mostly we ate at the ballpark except for the marina diner and the first night at Columbia in Ybor City with Kris’s 34-year-ago maid-of-honor and her husband.  I bought some cigars in a random cigar roller’s shop.  I didn’t miss Hooters, and no one suggested Thai.  We didn’t see Martin Amis.

 

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Sunfish, Tarpon, and Donuts

Friday we fished the San Marcos River with Chris Adams of Go Outside Expeditions.  We’d fished on the San Marcos with Chris before, and there are few things as pleasant as repeating a river with a guide you like. Chris had a new raft, which was great, and his wife made cookies which were also great,  and we fished from 7:30 or so until almost 5, with Kris the client spending a good two hours trying to re-think Chris the guide’s business plan.  Meantime I added to my sunfish collection.

There was a nice redbreast, the most notable feature of which is that weird long opercle flap–the ear.  I also caught a long-ear, which is more boldly named but which runs a poor second to the redbreast in the long-ears competition.

Kris caught the pretty Guadalupe-largemouth hybrid in the top picture and a warmouth and some largemouths and some other stuff.  I got a nice river largemouth.

Mostly we were fishing poppers and streamers with 6 weights, and we switched flies a lot during the part of the day when things were slow.

I noticed that the river fish aren’t as dark as the pond fish I usually catch.  They seem almost translucent, less brightly colored, and better matched to the shades of the river than the fish in weedier ponds. As long as it’s not time to spawn the fish match the place.

* * *

We go to Tampa at the end of the week to fish with Court Douthit, and I’ve had a lot of conversations in Houston about Tampa. It seems that everyone but me visits Tampa or came from Tampa, and a lot of the people I talked to have fished Tampa Bay for tarpon.

In the elevator a colleague told me that she went to St Petersburg for a deposition, and thatshe had to cross the Howard Frankland Bridge. Halfway across with no other traffic she had a memorable anxiety attack. Duly warned.

At Gordy & Sons, I was buying a big game sinking line and got into a conversation with an employee and another customer. The customer said he’d fished Tampa a lot, that the bait fishermen gather to catch tarpon on their way into the bay at the Howard Frankland Bridge, and that the boat bloom was not to be missed. “You should get your guide to take you there just to see it.” The same thing happens up and down the west coast of Florida, famously at Boca Grande for abundance of tarpon and Homosassa for the size of the tarpon. The customer told me that the boats were so crowded that the guides carried knives, big knives, to slash tangled lines. I could picture guides in center consoles slashing away with sabers.

Last Thursday a client showed me his picture of a 70-pound tarpon caught in Tampa the weekend before.  We were in a medium-sized banquet room, about the size of a basketball court, and he said that in a space the size of that room there would be 100 boats. He said they were fishing 60 feet deep with crab, and that the guides were so used to the press that a path opened for his boat to follow the tarpon’s run.

I’ve been reading Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s River of Grass, and because of the conversations and the reading it finally struck me that I was missing something important.  Douglas is a lyrical writer. She describes the Rock, the limestone spine that gives Florida shape and substance, the concave shape of which creates the Everglades, and which plays out as the Keys in its final submersion. It struck me that because it shapes Florida the rock also shapes the tarpon migration up the western coast. Like I said, Douglas is pretty lyrical, and maybe I let too much rub off.

The tarpon migration, not the limestone migration, follows the Gulf Coast from the Keys as far as New Orleans. For marine biologists the number of tarpon that migrate and why they migrate, including their inshore excursions, is one of the grand mysteries. It’s probably all the usual fishy reasons: Sex and food and protection. They spawn offshore so inshore would only be a staging point for spawning, but there’s certainly food inshore.  Maybe they come in because from larvae they’re hardwired to move offshore to inshore, inshore to offshore. It’s some kind of vestigial biological instinct that plays no real purpose. Maybe.

In the 1880s anglers figured out that tarpon migrate and could be caught with light tackle at the openings of the bays, so the anglers began show up in numbers to match the tarpon. Maybe we’re as hard-wired to follow game migrations, whether woolly mammoths or salmon or tarpon, as tarpon larvae are to move inshore. Maybe the angler migration is as much a vestigial instinct as the tarpon migration.

Postcard, Tarpon Inn, Port Aransas, Texas, 1911-1924, The University of Houston Digital Library, from Wikipedia

It also struck me that I hadn’t connected Marjory Stoneman Douglas with  Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where the mass shooting occurred on Valentines.  She doesn’t deserve that connection, but no one does.

* * *

Bakeries, which in my worldview includes donut shops, are necessary to fishing, and on our way to fish with Chris from where we were staying in San Antonio we stopped at Mi Tierra’s panaderia for breakfast.  Of course what we really wanted was to have the huevos rancheros at Mi Tierra: there’s no better bacon or coffee or wait staff anywhere, but we were running late. It was doubly disappointing.  There was no pan dulce that early, only empanadas, and they were only ok.

Earlier this year driving from Houston it struck me that every donut shop on the way to the Guadalupe River seemed to have a Buddhist shrine.

There’s a large Vietnamese population in Houston, and I figured the donut shops must be Vietnamese.  Turns out no.  Cambodian.

At the Foodways Texas symposium in April there was a panel on Cambodian donut shops moderated by Rob Walsh, with David Buehrer, Houston’s hippest coffee guy, filmmaker Keely Steenson (who showed her film on Cambodian donut shops), and Samoeurn Phan, a shop owner. Turns out that most donut shops in Southeast Texas are Cambodian-immigrant owned. These aren’t hip donuts, they’re not cutting-edge donuts, and they’re not authentic kolaches (because every Texas donut shop has to have a kolache which is a sausage roll which is not actually a kolache). They’re working class cheap donuts. Joy Donuts. Snowflake Donuts. LeDonut (where I go for the boudin kolaches, which are also not technically kolaches but which are delicious).

It’s no accident, and it’s all in the business plan. A Cambodian donut entrepreneur builds out the shop then finances its purchase by a Cambodian family, as often as not relatives of the entrepreneur. There’s no bank, because no bank would finance the venture, and it’s a family affair. Mom’s in the front at the counter, dad’s at the back turning out donuts.  It’s a hard way to make a living, but it’s a way to make a living.

Steenson has a film on Cambodian donut shops which was shown at the symposium and which I hope will someday make it to the internet.  Buehrer, the hip coffee guy, had worked at Phan’s donut shop in high school. That, he said, is where he learned about customer service. And kolache. So a hip Anglo coffee entrepreneur learned about an old-fashioned Czech pastry from Cambodian donut entrepreneurs in the Houston suburbs. That’s kind of the way Houston works.