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Packing List

What do I take on a fly fishing trip that is not a fly fishing trip? Of course I always take too much. In rough order of importance:

Suntan lotion.  I’m heading for the Sunshine State, and I’ve got that whole swarthy northern European thing going on, without the swarthy.

Lifeproof water proof phone case.  I remember to use the waterproof phone case every other fishing trip.  I have drowned many phones, and the next time I dunk my phone in water it will be on the trip when I forget the case.  I did some research on the case when I bought it, but none of the reviews mentioned that the case makes your phone unusable. This is particularly helpful on a fishing trip because it means if anyone calls you can’t answer.

Phone. My phone is critical because it includes my Florida playlist. Did you know that if you don’t like Jimmy Buffett, there’s not much music from Florida? When you look up best songs about Florida, one-third will be rap, one-third will be Jimmy Buffett, and one-third will be songs like Gulf Coast Highway by Nanci Griffith, which I really like, but which is about bluebonnets and Texas. There are some good musicians born in Florida that I never think of as Floridian: Ray Charles, Graham Parsons, and the Allman Brothers. There are some good songs that might be about Florida by Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra. There’s a whole Lynyrd Skynyrd and 38 Special Southern rock thing that I never much cared for. There are some good musicians who I identify as Floridian: Cannonball Adderley, Tom Petty, and Arturo Sandoval. On the whole though the state’s music sucks compared to the music from Memphis. But then what state’s doesn’t?

iPad. It’s got both Google Earth and my Kindle. I found a great anthology, The Florida Reader, to read on the trip.

Reading glasses. I can still thread the eye of a size 18 nymph with a 5x leader without glasses, but it’s mostly guesswork. Ok, it’s all guesswork. I like to hang a pair of reading glasses around my neck in case I want to read a menu.

Some underwear, some socks, and a tee shirt.  I need a tee shirt to sleep in. Underwear is always a good thing.

My boat bag. That’s a whole other discussion, but do you know where I put my saltwater pliers?

Keen sandals. I bought these Keens when my 26-year old son was 13 to wear with a tuxedo jacket and swim trunks to a private school gala. I never wore the swim trunks again, and there have been years I haven’t worn the sandals. They’ve become my fishing shoes of choice however, and have been re-glued many times. I keep thinking that they’re not going to last much longer.

Some fishing pants, a fishing shirt, a fleece sweater, rain pants, and rain jacket. The low will be in the 50s and a high in the 70s. It’s supposed to rain. I have to remember, I can always buy clothes if I get it wrong, but wet is no fun.

Running shorts, polyester running shirt, and running shoes. I might get a run in. I do get runs in. I really do.

A guitar and a copy of the Sor 20 Estudios. I have a little travel guitar that’s been to Portugal and Argentina and Mexico and Arkansas and a lot of places in between. I glued it back together once. Sometimes with long layovers I’ll sit in the airport and play. It’s always good for a conversation. I’m working on Sor’s Variations of a Theme by Mozart, and when I get through it to my satisfaction I get to smoke a cigar.

Shorts and my Altuve Astros jersey with the World Series patch. This is for spring training, and did I mention that the Astros won the World Series?

A toothbrush. My nod to Jack Reacher.

A 7 weight and an 8 weight, and some bass flies. In case there’s time to get to a canal. Otherwise we’re using the guide’s rods.

Some resort casual wear. Whatever that is.  We have a reservation at the Flagler Steakhouse in the Breakers on Saturday, and that’s their dress code. I hope that includes Keen sandals. We couldn’t afford to stay at the Breakers, so I figured we’d go for dinner.

Dramamine. This will not be flats fishing, and I get seasick.

 

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Stoneman Douglas High School and Mar-A-Lago

West Palm Beach is about 40 miles from Stoneman Douglas High School, where  a 19-year-old ex-student killed 17 students on Valentines Day.   There’s nothing special about Florida in that. It will happen again, somewhere, sooner rather than later.

Mar-A-Lago, President Trump’s Florida White House, is also about 40 miles from Stoneman Douglas, 4 miles from where we’re staying in West Palm Beach. I understand that the President has polled members of Mar-A-Lago about gun control, and actually I think a little better of him for it. Most of us are looking at our friends and asking what can be done.

I still have friends saying arm teachers, bring God into classrooms, restore decency. I’m fond of my friends, but some of them are nuts. Most teachers don’t want to be armed, and either God can go where he wants or not.

As for decency, there was the story today of a 15-year old victim, Peter Wang, who was murdered while he held the door open for other students.  He was wearing his JROTC uniform. Apparently he wanted to go to West Point, and yesterday, five days after he died, he was admitted to the class of 2025.

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TroutFest!

Friday night we went to the Johnson Reagan Richards dinner for the Harris County Democratic Party.  I hadn’t been in a few years. I’ve also been to the Lincoln Reagan Dinner for the Harris County Republican Party.  At the Lincoln Reagan dinner the speakers stand on the stage and toss red meat to the ravenous.  At the Johnson Rayburn Richards dinner, the speakers mostly  talk about how the winds of change are a’comin’ to Texas. They’ve been saying the same thing for years. Nancy Pelosi was the keynote speaker.  I don’t know what kind of a Speaker she’ll make if she again gets the chance, but she’s a remarkably boring and rambling dinner speaker. Kris said she looked good though.

Saturday we drove to New Braunfels. Guadalupe River Trout Unlimited was holding its (our? I’m not a very good joiner, but I am a member) annual troutfest. There were casting instructors but I don’t know where they were instructing.   There were celebrity speakers, but I didn’t see any of them. Nancy Pelosi wasn’t one of them, which was just as well.  Mostly there were a lot of pick-ups parked in a field, some small tents, and a big tent.

We walked about for a bit.  I tried to buy a sweater from Bayou City Angler because it was cold and Kris had appropriated mine.  It might have  been too ironic to drive three hours  to the Guadalupe to buy something from Bayou City Angler,  because they lost their computer link and couldn’t sell anything. I realized later that I could have come by the shop in a day or two and paid, but none of us were thinking that way.

 

I have been to some other trade shows, not a lot but some.  They are all a bit alike I guess. I don’t want to randomly stop and pick stuff up. I did once.  I went through and collected a bunch of Koozies for the boat, but Kris thought it was a joke and threw them away. Yesterday Kris bought a line at the Tenkara USA booth.  I picked up fliers from guide services: Wisconsin, Alaska, New Mexico, Montana. We watched other people, men mostly, mill about.

There were lots of men with beards. Then we went fishing.  We were in a hurry because we had to be back for another dinner last night, but we fished for a couple of hours. I was using a bead egg with a dropper, and hooked a nice fish, but it came off the hook. This was not the fish:

It was only a fish in a tank at TroutFest. I still haven’t caught a Guadalupe trout.

Today we went late to Galveston to take out the boat.  Galveston looked like this:

The photo is a bit hazy, but that’s because everything was a bit hazy.  That’s looking across the street at fog obscuring the Gulf of Mexico. The. Gulf. Is. Gone. We only fish on the bay side of the Island, not the Gulf side, so we hung out at Benno’s eating shrimp po’boys until it cleared enough for us to take out the boat.  I wade fished behind Pelican Island, then we ran down into West Galveston Bay and I poled Kris through what might or might not have been Starvation Cove. The wind was at least 15 knots, and there wasn’t enough water in the bay to get into places, but the water was reasonably clear and it was the first time in a month we’d been able to run the boat.  This winter has been nothing but rain and wind and cold.

 

 

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Florida Canals

The highest point in Florida is Britton Hill at 345 feet above sea level, way up in Walton County in the Panhandle.  The average elevation in Houston is 80 feet above sea level, so 345 feet is pretty high. I suspect I’d have to worry about altitude sickness. Florida’s mean elevation is 100 feet.  The low point is the Atlantic Ocean which is, oddly enough, at sea level.

What that means–and I know this from recent experience with our own Hurricane Harvey–when it rains in Florida the water doesn’t necessarily drain. It sits. If it rains fast enough (and in Florida sometimes I’m guessing it rains fast enough) it piles up. To get stuff to drain you have to spend a lot of money on drainage improvements.  I bet in Denver they don’t have to spend a lot of money on drainage improvements. We do here in Houston. I bet they do in Florida.

So there is the South Florida Water Management District.  It oversees 2100 miles of freshwater and brackish canals in south Florida.  Then there are secondary canals run by cities and counties and water control districts. In South Florida there are a lot of canals that exist to move water in flat land where water don’t move.

In 1984 florida introduced peacock bass into the southern canals, both to create a game fishery and to add an aggressive fish that could control the other weird fish, and there’s some weird fish. According to the internet there are

Peacock Bass (photo from Wikipedia), baby tarpon, largemouth bass, grass carp, tilapia, snook,

oscars (from Wikipedia), jaguar guapote, Mayan cichlid, black acacia, clown knife fish,

snakehead (from Wikipedia). I have heard estimates that as many as 80 species live in the canals. Folk have to dump their aquariums somewhere.

Snakehead make excellent eating, but it may be an urban myth that you can’t catch and release.

It is somewhat of a thing in Florida to traipse or kayak along the canals to fly fish for exotics. In July Kris and I saw a presentation at Texas Flyfishers of Houston (which is sort of like the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, or the Texas Rangers of Arlington), by Jim Gray of the Austin Fly Fishers, on fishing the canals.  We walked out not intrigued so much as disgusted.  These were some ugly fish.

People fish these canals like I fish for black bass, with 6-8 weights and streamers, and I thought that maybe next week in West Palm we would look for a canal to fish. I chickened out and hired a guide.  I still thought maybe we would squeeze in an hour or so, and I asked the guide about them.  “Fire ants” he said, “moccasins” he said. “Be careful.”

Now honestly, I’ve been bit enough by fire ants to know their misery and its limits, and I have just as good a chance of moccasins hereabouts as I might have in Florida. Still, they’re ugly fish. We’re fishing salt water.