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Flies, Leaders, and Devil Rays

At the end of the month we fish two days with Captain Court Douthit somewhere near Tampa. Captain Douthit inherited us, so I hope his Zen or at least his sense of humor is on. He’ll probably need it. Three or four months ago I tried to book with the Orvis-endorsed guide in Tampa.  I’ve had luck with Orvis guides, but no luck here: he was booked.  I found another guide with a boat I liked, booked the dates, and sent in the deposit.

Turns out I tried to pick a guide by his boat and instead picked a movie star.  In May he canceled our trip because of his schedule with Animal Planet. Who knew? It’s probably for the best, since on fishing videos you have to yell at your fish like Vikings taking scalps. We’re not much good at that.

Anyway when he canceled he was nice enough not to just drop me: I guess I’m not quite that prom date. He passed us on to Captain Court, and it looks ok. Captain Court has a cool boat, a 1994 Hewes, with a relatively new engine, and I like his website. I like that he took off a summer to hang out with his kiddo, which seems a long way from taking scalps, and he doesn’t seem to require that the clients in the photos on his website yell at their fish.

* * *

As it happens I’ve tied a lot of tarpon flies, all tied on 1/0 hooks for the smallish resident tarpon of Belize. That may be small for Tampa, or maybe not. I have no idea what fish want in Tampa, or what we may fish for.  To be honest I’d be perfectly happy puttering around mangroves looking for snook in the roots or redfish in the grass. Are there mangroves? Is there grass? I don’t know.  As to flies though I gather that if you put a fly into a tarpon’s zone, the tarpon’s not real selective about the fly. Maybe even a McGinty would work.

Of course there’s that whole casting-into-the-zone thing which is a problem, and so far even when I’ve had lucky casts the tarpon haven’t taken my fly. Maybe the casts weren’t lucky enough.

Dimock, Anthony Weston, The Book of the Tarpon, 1911, at 108.

Like the tarpon, tarpon folk don’t seem overly concerned with fly selection. Bill Bishop in High Rollers says he only carries three patterns in shades of dark and light, dark for clear water and light for cloudy. Or was it the other way around?  On a quick internet survey everybody seems to push at most four or five flies. Even by bass and redfish standards that’s sparse. For bass I’ve got more than three different kinds of poppers, not to mention various streamers, woolly buggers, frogs, and McGinties. You probably can fish for tarpon with a McGinty, but nobody knows it yet.

I tied a lot of tarpon flies during Hurricane Harvey.  I like tying tarpon flies because they’re big, and even in these late days I can still see them, and we were going back to Belize in November after Harvey. Our house didn’t flood, and we never lost power, but for three days our street was a storm drain.  There was nothing to do but watch the weather, watch the water rising, tie flies, and joke on Facebook that I was waiting for the tarpon to show up in our yard.  They never did. After a day or so even I stopped joking on Facebook.

What tarpon people are concerned with are leaders. On the internet you can find a dozen ways to tie a tarpon leader, and each leader’s proponents seem certain as to their efficacy. I didn’t know there was so much righteousness in the cause of leaders.

First off there’s the whole IGFA leader standard. Everyone agrees a 12-inch bite tippet is too short. I’m sure that somewhere deep in the heart of the IGFA tower in downtown Nantucket there are sincere discussions among high-level executives of how, if the bite tippet were lengthened, it would treat all those prior 12-inch tippet record holders unfairly. Get over it. Remember Roger Maris.

Meanwhile in Belize guides recommend a straight 6-foot 60-pound leader.  It’s not a good  idea. Tarpon are the prey of bull sharks and hammerheads, and sometimes you want to break the fish off.  That’s not going to happen with a 60-pound straight leader. You also want the leader to break if the line is wrapped around your leg, your neck, or your guide. Getting pulled into the water with the bull sharks and hammerheads seems a particularly bad idea.

Plus fly lines have a breakage strength of less than 40 pounds. I’d rather break my leader than a fly line, or a fly rod. So I’ve settled on a 20-pound class tippet. I’ve considered 16 pounds, but that seems pretentious. Anything less than 16 is just cruel.

I used a 60-pound nylon butt section because that’s what the guys at Bayou City Anglers wanted me to buy.  I went to Bayou City in the first place to buy hard 30, but I follow instructions. The whole leader’s about nine feet, +/- 12 inches. The six-foot 60-pound nylon butt is attached to the fly line with a perfection loop, and to the 20-pound fluorocarbon class tippet with an improved blood knot. The twenty-four inch 60-pound fluorocarbon bite tippet is attached to the fly with a Kreh loop knot and to the class tippet with an improved blood knot. All those knots seem impossibly small. I’m sure it’s a total failure, but not because I didn’t think about it.

Who wouldn’t be fascinated by such stuff? Who says fly fishing is arcane?

* * *

Monday we went to Minute Maid Park at Union Station, pronounced MUM-puss, to watch the team formerly known as the Tampa Bay Devil Rays play the Astros.  I wanted to  see the Rays before we went to Tampa. In 2008 the Devil Rays banished the devil, changed their name to the Tampa Bay Just Rays, and got rid of the fish logo and replaced it with a little patch of sunshine.

See that glimmer in the eye of the R? On Monday the Astros played the Tampa Bay Glimmers in the Eye.

I liked the old Devil Ray mascot, but hated their uniforms, now I like their uniforms but I’m dubious as to the little patch of sunshine. I also liked the way Tampa Bay Devil Rays fell off the tongue, though many people thought it clumsy. Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim is clumsy. Dallas Rangers of Arlington is clumsy.  Tampa Bay Devil Rays has some Latin rhythm.

Turner-Turner, J., The Giant Fish of Florida, 1902.

As a team, the Tampa Bay Rays née Devil Rays are perennially a hard-luck lot. since their first season in 1998, they’ve won 1,500 games and lost 1,738, for a .462 winning percentage. The Astros have played since 1962 and have won 4,391 and lost 4,552 for a .493 percentage.  The ‘Stros were in striking distance of breaking .500 a few years back, but then went into their three 100-loss-season tailspin.  Did I mention that the Astros won the World Series last year?

The Astros at .491 are now about the median, with only nine teams at .500 or higher. The Rays lead only the San Diego Padres for the very bottom.  Of course they’re stuck in a division that includes the Red Sox and the Yankees, so life isn’t fair. They’re also in Tropicana Stadium, which is in St. Pete and apparently inconvenient to get to from Tampa.  Along with the Oakland Coliseum, Wrigley Field, and Fenway Park it’s judged one of the worst dumps in Major League Baseball. The Rays consequently don’t outdraw the Tampa Bay Lightning of the NHL. They don’t even play baseball in the NHL.

The Rays did have some great seasons ten years ago, when Andrew Friedman, now with the Dodgers, was their VP of baseball operations. I don’t know Andrew, but he’s a Houston boy, and I know his dad, Kenny. The Rays even made it to the World Serious, and Andrew got a lot of the credit. The Dodgers pay Andrew a lot of money for the lot of credit, but who don’t the Dodgers pay a lot of money? And if he’s anything like his dad he’s a bargain.

As is more common than not, this season is not going well for the Rays. Through Juneteenth they’re 33-39 for fourth in the AL East. They’re also doing some weird rotation maneuvers, starting relievers for two or three innings, because part of their rotation is weak. Monday’s game they had a great start, getting four runs early on Gerrit Cole. Cole came into the game 8-1 with a .240 ERA, and has pitched this season like a Cy Young winner.  Those four runs to the Rays may have been his worst three innings as a Stro.

Cole kept the ‘Stros in it though, finishing seven innings with no more runs. The Rays lost in the bottom of the 9th when their closer, Sergio Romo (with a 5.0 ERA but a pretty good June) gave up a two run walk-off double to Alex Bregman.  Heartbreaking for Rays’ fans, great stuff for Astros’ fans.  If you don’t know baseball know this: a team with a closer with a 5.0 ERA in a one-run game’s got a problem.

Of course the next night the Ray’s fine young pitcher, Blake Snell, pitched a gem against the Astros fine old pitcher, Justin Verlander, to take a one-run game and snap the Astros’ 12-game win streak. The previous evening’s goat, Sergio Romo, now with a 5.46 ERA, got the final two outs. That’s the other thing, if you don’t know baseball know this. The Baseball Gods are cruel, vicious, and capricious, and what goes around comes around.

 

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Tarponesque Physiques.

Michaelangelo, detail of the Prophet Jonah (with tarpon) from the Sistine Chapel, 1508-1512.

Tarpon are big girls. They’re big boys too, but the lady tarpon are generally bigger and can reach lengths of more than eight feet and weigh more than 300 pounds. The males are smaller. Females live longer than males, as long as 50 years. Lucky males may make it to 30.  Tarpon obtain sexual maturity at seven to 13 years.  By the time a tarpon reaches 100 pounds it’s 10 to 13 years old.

In their larvae stage tarpon absorb nutrients direct from seawater.  Small juveniles start eating smaller fish, but primarily they’re planktivores and live on  zooplankton. As they grow juveniles eat more fish and add shrimp and crabs to their diet. By maturity they are strictly carnivorous. Sub-adult and adult tarpon eat shrimp, crabs, mid-sized fish like mullet, pinfish, and needlefish, and apparently have a soft-spot for sea horses.  I’ve never fished a sea horse fly, which is probably why I haven’t caught a tarpon.

Tarpon swallow prey whole, which explains the forward placement of the hooks on tarpon flies.  Short takes aren’t a problem.  I’m told that what is a problem is setting the hook Their mouths are hard and strip-strikes are de rigueur. Hooks must be sharp, though whether hooks should be barbed or de-barbed is a controversy. A guide in Belize rejected my tarpon flies because I’d flattened the barbs. Bill Bishop’s High Rollers: Fly Fishing for Giant Tarpon suggests partially flattening barbs, but that seems like neither fish nor fowl. At least the de-barbers have the argument that it’s easier to set the hooks, and it’s easier to pull the hook out of your guide when you makes that special cast.

Bite tippets are needed because tarpon have small densely-packed sharp teeth, villiform teeth, and writers universally criticize the IGFA 12-inch standard for bite tippets. Big tarpon will swallow flies deeper than 12 inches. Twenty-four inches appears to be common practice among anglers, IGFA be damned. There goes my record.

Tarpon have draw bridge jaws and knight-in-armor gill plates. Their silver sides are as straight and thick as walls. They attack prey from below. Look at those eyes. Look at that jaw. That’s no carp, that’s no bottom feeder.

Their scales are as large and bright as half-dollars.

Other than the Indo-Pacific tarpon, the tarpon’s closest relative is the skipjack, wrongly called ladyfish by everyone but Texans. Skipjacks, like eels,  bonefish, and of course tarpon spawn offshore and come inshore as larvae. Like tarpon the skipjack leaps when caught and shreds leaders. They’re just a lot smaller.

Catching skipjacks in saltwater is kinda like catching bluegills in fresh: universally frowned upon by conventional tackle folk but universally loved by fly fishers.

* * *

If I had to pick a fish to hang out in the Mos Eisley Cantina, I’d go with a tarpon. They appear intelligently malevolent, aloof, violent. They look alien.  Maybe Admiral Ackbar’s ancestors evolved from tarpon.

Ok, maybe I’d pick a gar for the Mos Eisley Cantina.  Gar are tarpon’s distant cousins: they share soft rayed fins.

State of New York Forest, Fish, and Game Commission, 1901

Of all the traits of tarpon though, the one that may be the most defining (and another trait shared with gar) is its air-gulping, lung-functioning swim bladder.  On two separate trips I’ve fished rolling tarpon off the South Padre Island jetties, but they were coming up to gulp air for fun, not necessity. Juvenile tarpon mature along mangrove shorelines in stagnant backwaters The absence of oxygen-rich water keeps out most predators. Because juveniles can roll and grab oxygen from air, they can live where other fish can’t.

As an aside, there’s nothing more startling than being on a bayou on a hot summer day, mildly conscious of alligators, and have a four-foot gar pop-up to roll next to your canoe. I don’t think they’re after air. I think they just want to hear me yelp.

* * *

We took the skiff out yesterday.  There’s a tropical disturbance in the Gulf, and it was blowing 20 offshore and picking up fast inshore. It wasn’t bad when we left, but we couldn’t find any water clarity, and the wind made things miserable. We didn’t last long.

Don’t get confused by the photo: our boat’s the one in the front. When we left the Marina we had to pass the cruise liner in the Galveston Channel, and there were Coast Guard cutters running interference.  They waived us further out, to the far side of the channel. It’s the first time I can recall being told what to do by a guy with a mounted machine gun.  I followed instructions.

Today, Father’s Day, we fished a bit for bass at Damon 7 Lakes. The photo doesn’t do the fish justice, though it does a nice job on me.

 

I caught a textbook bluegill while messing around with a Tenkara rod.  I was listening to Zane Grey’s stories about battles with monster tuna and swordfish and tarpon and stuff, but I couldn’t stretch the bluegill into a five-hour epic struggle of man against fish. Still, the blue on the gill plate complimented my shirt.

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Tarpon Parties, Tarpon Sex

Hornaday, William Temple, The American natural history : a foundation of useful knowledge of the higher animals of North America, Vol IV, Reptiles, Amphibians, and Fishes, at 246, 1914. Drawn by J. Carter Beard.

I’ve been reading about tarpon. There are more alien things, eyeless lizards that live in the depths of caves, big-eyed large-toothed fish at the bottom of the sea, sloths, but I haven’t been reading about sloths.  I’ve been reading about tarpon. And one shouldn’t fly fish for sloths.

Hornaday, William Temple, The American natural history : a foundation of useful knowledge of the higher animals of North America, Vol IV, Reptiles, Amphibians, and Fishes, at 246, 1914, at 279. Drawn by J. Carter Beard

There are two species of tarpon, our tarpon, Megalops atlanticus, and the Indo-Pacific tarpon, Megalops cypnrinoides. The Pacific tarpon ranges from the east coast of Africa to the Indian Ocean or thereabouts–my geography gets a bit vague.  Atlanticus, our tarpon, ranges down the Atlantic Coast  from Virginia to Brazil. They move through the Panama Canal to the western coast of Panama.  There are populations in the eastern Atlantic on the west coast of Africa ranging from Senegal to the Congo. Wherever they are, Atlantic tarpon aren’t made up of genetically distinct populations.  They may only be cousins, but genetically they’re kissing cousins.

Everyone who fly fishes admires all things anadromous: Salmon, steelhead, striped bass, even the lowly shad. These are fish that do it up right. They’re spawned in freshwater rivers, go to sea to grow, and then in their turn return up-river to spawn. It’s a perfectly reasonable life cycle.  Join the navy, see the world.

There are other ways to do it though.  The counterpoint to anadromous is catadromous, which is how the Chesapeake drainage American eel reproduces. Catadromous is peculiar, at least to my ears. True eels are born in saltwater, then the larvae drift with currents into freshwater and grow into adulthood upriver.  When it’s time the eels migrate back to the ocean to spawn.  It’s just wrong. Not that it takes much for eels to seem wrong.

Uwe Kils, eel larvae of Anguilla rostrata, 2003

Tarpon are not considered catadromous, but are often compared to eels because of the larvae stage.  Like eels, tiny tarpon larvae migrate via currents inshore. Unlike eels, tarpon can develop as juveniles in any estuarine environment, salt, fresh, or brackish, and as adults they move back and forth  between salt and estuary, and even upriver into fresh.  Twenty years ago we didn’t know much about tarpon: I’ve read old stuff that says we don’t know if they spawn inshore or offshore. Now folks know more. They spawn offshore, maybe as far offshore as 100 miles. They broadcast spawn, so there’s not a lot of close and personal, but there’s at least got to be some vicinity. The lady tarpon flings out her lady stuff and the boy tarpons fling out their boy stuff and the eggs get fertilized in the deep blue sea. There’s no eHarmony for tarpon, so without spawning grounds, how would tarpon meet up? How would they get to the same place at the right time to fling their stuff?

Identifying and protecting spawning grounds would be a good thing.  Tarpon are considered a vulnerable population by the International Union of Conservation of Nature. Some folk eat tarpon, particularly in Central America, Columbia, and the Caribbean, and they’re killed as by-catch in commercial fisheries. Juveniles require relatively specific habitat to mature, and that habitat is shrinking with coastal development and damage to water quality. They’re also killed by anglers, both intentionally and as a by-product of catch and release. The IUCN reports that over-exploitation of tarpon by sport fishers is a particular problem in southwest Florida, and neither Mississippi nor Louisiana have tarpon catch limits. Absent predation by sharks, the IUCN estimates post-catch mortality of adult catch-and-release tarpon at 5 percent. In a 2005 study in Tampa Bay, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission estimated that with shark predation figured in, tarpon mortality after release was about 10 percent.

Populations of adult tarpon are thought to be both migratory and resident. Migratory Texas tarpon have been tracked from the middle Texas coast nigh on to Quintana Roo.  Researchers track Floridian west coast tarpon up the Florida coast (with the height of the season in Tampa from May to July) on around the Gulf Coast to Louisiana–these are travelin’ fish–but lodges in Belize and Nicaragua routinely advertise resident tarpon. As tracking studies get more sophisticated, researchers hope to get better population numbers by figuring out how and how many fish migrate.  And maybe someone will let me know where the tarpon hide in Galveston Bay.

Being strange and witchy creatures, it’s fitting that the tarpon spawn is linked to moon phases, the new and full moons.  That must be why their eyes are up top on their heads. One wouldn’t want to miss a good spawn because one wasn’t looking up at the moon (or absence thereof). If I were a tarpon, it would be just my luck to be caught looking at my shoes while the other tarpon were out on the town.

NOAA, Southeast Fisheries Science Center

 

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Where We’re Not Going: The Keys

I’ve read a lot of trashy novels, real dreck. I’ve read stuff that no one would admit to reading, from Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour to all of the Game of Thrones novels (well before the television production–I didn’t have that excuse), and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed much of it. I think though that if I had to come up with a list of the ten worst novels I’ve ever read, Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, set in Key West, would be right at the top of the list. It’s the story of an unlikeable fishing guide, Harry Morgan, who does increasingly unlikeable things and then gets shot and dies, and as far as I was concerned his death came 200 pages late. There are also plenty of unlikeable minor characters doing unlikeable things: I remember disliking particularly the drunken playboy based on John Dos Passos.  As a reader I had no empathy for the Haves, sure, but as a reader I didn’t have any empathy for Hemingway’s Have Nots either. As a matter of fact, in addition to the characters, I didn’t like the place, the plot, or the author. I didn’t even like the boat.

EH 8124P Ernest Hemingway fishing, Key West, 1928.
Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.

 

And generally I like Hemingway. I fly fish now in large part because of Big Two-Hearted River and A Farewell to Arms. Generations of young men wanted to go to Spain to drink wine and run with the bulls at Pamplona because of A Farewell to Arms.  Not me.  I wanted to go to Spain to drink wine and catch a trout with a McGinty. Not that anyone’s caught a trout with a McGinty in the last century.

Not much of a McGinty, but you get the general notion: It looks like a bee, for the bee hatch. It’s at least as good of a McGinty as To Have and Have Not is a novel.

Like  1920s Paris and Cuba, Key West is forever tied to Hemingway, but plenty  of other writers  also passed through Key West. It’s a Bona Fide Cultural Mecca: Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Annie Dillard, John Dos Passos, Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost . . . Key West was the place where the Haves could go to drink and sleep around and in later times do drugs while the Have Nots could go to Key West to drink and sleep around and in later times do drugs. Piracy and smuggling was available to all, or at least real estate development was available to all.  Long before Vegas, Key West like New Orleans was where in the popular imagination everybody could skirt the edges of propriety. Somehow though I suspect fried conch in Key West isn’t as good as the turtle soup at Commander’s Palace.

The Keys are also one of the places, maybe with the Bahamas one of the two places where modern saltwater fly fishing developed.  It’s where Ted Williams had his Florida house and where bonefish and tarpon and permit became a thing. Thirty-six years after To Have and Have Not was published Thomas McGuane would publish his own fishing guide novel, Ninety-Two in the Shade.  It was a much better novel than To Have or Have Not, if a much lousier movie. Peter Fonda isn’t Humphrey Bogart. Margot Kidder isn’t Lauren Bacall. Tom McGuane isn’t Howard Hawks as a director or William Faulkner as a screenwriter. Tom Skelton, the rather hapless anti-hero of Ninety-Two in the Shade, plans to make his reputation as a guide on permit. And then of course he gets shot and dies. If I were a Key West fishing guide I’d be concerned that death by gunshot was part of the job description.

As for Keys’ guides, it’s a running joke that they excel mostly at rudeness. In the popular imagination they give you the opportunity to buy them breakfast, pack your own lunch, and pack their lunch. They will yell at you for missing casts, and then will expect a decent tip for your troubles. So far my exposure to Florida guides has been 50-50, I had a very good Florida guide in Palm Beach and a very bad guide from Florida in Louisiana, and it may be the stories about Keys’ guides are urban mythology. Island mythology? Still. High-handedness could explain the gunshot wounds.

Maybe I’m all wrong about Key West. I haven’t been there, and the only thing more treacherous than long distance-judgments are the close-up kind, but if you read the current crop of Florida writers, the Carl Hiassens and Dave Barrys and Randy Wayne Whites, they ramble through the Keys in the midst of amusing decadence and unamusing debauchery.  Maybe I’m just old, but it doesn’t sound like that much fun to me. Plus there’s no baseball. I think I’ll save the Keys for the next life.

Ok, maybe it sounds like some fun.