Tag: Bass

Posted on

What’s the Matter with Kansas, Part 2, October 16-19, 2020

Here’s a tip. If it’s in the 30s and the wind is blowing hard, and you pull into a Kansas campsite at 11 at night, angry with each other because of the wrong turn you made on the farm road, and because you couldn’t decipher the instructions at the park self-pay station, and because your companion doesn’t believe that this is the right campsite (or that if it’s not screw it, it’s a campsite); and you agree you’ll just sleep in the front seats of the van because it’s cold and dark and blowing and setting up the tent is just more than you can manage, well here’s the tip: when your companion says should we get out the sleeping bags? Say yes, and do it. The car seats will be ok, they recline and you’re exhausted, but by a few hours after you park, the inside of the van will be as cold as if there was no van at all. I froze all night, and woke with one of Kris’s sweaters wrapped around my feet, with a towel wrapped around my legs, and with a small dog snuggled for warmth as close as it could get.

Here’s a second tip. If you decide at the last minute to take the wee dogs along, and the wee dog who sticks by you is not the clean living chihuahua but the miniature schnauzer that daily collects a new layer of oily dirt and dog smells, give the dog a bath before you go. Sure, she’s a sweet dog, but after two days with the dog sleeping near you for warmth, three weeks later you’ll still conjure the smell of that dog. It was bad enough the first night, sleeping loose in the car, but the second night when it got really cold, the dog and I shared my technical skin-tight ultralight Mountain Hardware down mummy bag. In that bag there’s barely space for me, much less a schnauzer, except (because she was shivering) right at the neck. To make space for the schnauzer, I left the neck of the bag unzipped. My schnoz and that schnauzer shared too much space for too long.

Just give the dog a bath. Slightly rancid schnauzer is a smell that lingers. Take the time and give the dog a bath.

Mead State Park is not on anybody’s must-see list, but it’s pretty. In warmer weather it would have been a lot of fun to fish. There were shallow flats where in summer the bass and sunfish would cluster, except that the cold nights sent the bass and sunfish into shock and deeper water and they were nowhere to be found. There was bird life, and Kris got plenty of photos, flickers, eastern bluebirds, redhead ducks . . . The park was also packed with RVs, while we had the only tent. When we got back I asked my friend Schoonover whether he had an RV, and he said I’m old and white, of course I have an RV. I guess I’m supposed to have an RV.

We have a newish tent, and a newish propane stove. I’ve got all the backpacking gear in the world, but I bought the new tent and stove for car camping. Here is another tip, or at least an insight. When you wake up in the morning and the temperature has plummeted below freezing, you’re going to be jealous of those people with RVs. It’s hard to pack camp with numb fingers.

The dogs sat in the car and were no help at all with the packing.

There’s nothing wrong with cold I guess, and after the first cold night we had one extraordinarily beautiful day followed by an even colder, windier night. The next morning after breakfast it was overcast and spitting rain so we threw stuff into the car and drove around southwestern Kansas, to Dodge City and the Cimarron National Grassland. At 5 that afternoon, after it never warmed, we drove home, across the Oklahoma Panhandle, down through the Texas Panhandle, and then east and south to Houston. We drove through the night and got home the next morning by 9.

I was the only fly fisher at Mead Lake, but there were conventional anglers, and they weren’t catching anything either. I did have a safety plan. There’s always a spillway, and at the bottom of the spillway a bit of water where you can find sunfish. I was going to fish the Mead Lake tailwater! Here was the Mead Lake spillway. There weren’t any dry-land sunfish.

Mead Lake gets stocked with trout on November 1, and at dusk Saturday, in the prettiest light in the world, we watched rise forms across the center of the lake. I’d brought a sit-on-top kayak, the kind where sit-on-top actually translates as sit-in-a-puddle, and I tried to fish the rise. I don’t know what the fish were, maybe sunfish, but I’m half convinced it was early-stocked trout. I fished a small streamer, and got a tug, and got enough of a hit to see a quick flash of silver before the fish came off the hook, but I should have thrown out a foam beetle and let it sit. Even fishless though, it was pretty, and I fished until dark.

Here’s a fourth tip. In October Kansas gets cold, and the wind blows. Maybe June’s the time to go to Kansas.

Posted on

I Got Speyed, Redux

Lately I’ve had rod fever. This happens from time to time. I convince myself that there’s a hole in the universe that can only be filled by possession of. . . some rod, some rod that is newer and niftier and pretty as a happy child hunting Easter eggs on a bright spring morning and that will make me a better caster and a better catcher and a better husband and father and human being. Rod fever may happen to me more than most, but I doubt it. And it never quite works out the way I think. I’m always still just me.

Last year I got rod fever bad for Spey rods, which is a peculiar thing for a Houstonian since there’s no real Spey fishing for at least a thousand miles. Still. I bought a Spey rod, and in 2018 we fished four days for steelhead on the Deschutes River in Oregon. We swung flies with long 13-foot Spey rods, about four feet longer than normal rods, and tried to learn Spey casts, or at least enough to get through four days’ fishing.

To most fly fishers, Spey casting is exotic and mysterious. It’s not like the standard overhead cast. It’s done with two hands, not one. There is no backcast; the line never lays out behind the angler, instead there’s some flippy dippy stuff that eyesight and brain can’t quite follow. After a couple of incantations and some pyrotechnics the caster shoots the line forward, as much as twice the length of a normal cast. It is a lovely, magical thing to see, baffling and irresistible.

Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland, J. Cary, Detail from a new map of Scotland, from the latest authorities, 1801, London.

The River Spey is in northeast Scotland, and the long rods and the two-handed casts originated on Scottish Atlantic salmon rivers. Speyside single malt Scotch is also from the region of the River Spey, Glenfiddich and Macallan being the best known, so there are many good things from thereabouts. What could better define a day of manly sport than putting on a bit of tweed, spending a day casting a Spey rod, and following it all with a wee or not-so-wee dram of rich and smoky Speyside? What man or woman could want more?

The long rods have advantages. They don’t require a backcast, so you can stand by a bank in a river and cast without hanging up in the branches behind you. They cast far, so you can cover lots of ground on big water, and the rod length better manipulates the line once it’s on the water. After four days of fishing I could cast 50 or 60 feet with the spey rod, but I fished near a good caster, Louis Cahill of Gink and Gasoline. He consistently shot line twice the distance I could manage, and it was beautiful.

Spey rods have some disadvantages. They’re not particularly accurate, and casting that far usually isn’t necessary. They’re made to swing flies, and swinging flies, isn’t common. Swinging flies lets the line pull the fly down and across in an arc, with the angler as the pivot point. It’s an old method of fly fishing, arcane even, with plenty of modern arcana pitched in to make the whole business obscure and esoteric, but except in the Pacific Northwest and maybe Scotland swinging flies isn’t common. Instead we let flies drift naturally with the current, or retrieve streamers. We don’t let flies swing.

I hadn’t seriously touched my Spey rod since our trip to Oregon, but we need to catch a fish in Washington State, and the obvious play, the right color of fish, is Olympic Peninsula winter steelhead. Kris didn’t hesitate. “Of course,” she said. “Let’s go,” she said. “And bring along some whisky.” Ok, she didn’t say that last, and she didn’t spell whiskey like a Scot when she didn’t say it, but sometimes one needs to extrapolate.

So I emailed Jason Osborn at The Portland Fly Shop and asked Jason who we should fish with in Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. Jason said he was guiding in southern Washington, but that the Olympic Peninsula was a good idea. He said that for February we should check with Jack Mitchell’s The Evening Hatch.

But I also had rod fever, I wanted–no, I needed–another Spey rod, so I asked Jason to send along a 3-weight rod and a matching line because suddenly Spey fishing for trout is all the rage, and like I said, I had rod fever. This 3-weight business takes a bit of explanation. Fly rods are in weights, higher weight rods are used for bigger fish. If you want to catch a 200 pound marlin, a 14-weight would do the job. If you want to catch a bluegill, a 3-weight would be the very thing. For steelhead, the usual weight is somewhere around a 7- to 9-weight. A 3-weight is built for smaller fish.

Jason made a couple of suggestions and I took the cheapest, a Redington Hydrogen trout Spey made in China. I should say it wasn’t cheap, but for a Spey rod it was pretty reasonable. It’s a rather homely fella, with none of the design flourishes that would come with a high-dollar rod, but it’s well put together. It’s perfectly good to fool with in local waters.

And for most of what we catch in Texas rivers a 3 weight will work just fine. It would let us practice spey casts before our trip to Washington, and that’s all I really wanted. The rod came, and we drove three hours to New Braunfels to see if there were any trout yet in the Guadalupe. There weren’t, they won’t be stocked until Thanksgiving, and the flow in the river was ridiculously low, but I hadn’t forgotten everything I knew, the rod cast fine, and there were bluegill and bass. I caught a Guadalupe bass, the state fish of Texas, swinging a girdle bug. I also caught a tiny bluegill on a partridge and yellow. What sounds more manly than a partridge and yellow? Just forget that tiny bluegill part.

And then I went home and had a wee dram. Or two.

T.E. Pritt, Pritt’s Orange and Partridge, Plate 6 – Yorkshire Trout Flies, 1885, Goodall and Suddick, Leeds.

Posted on

Alabama Bass, Spotted Bass, Redeye Bass, Tallapoosa River, Alabama, May 26, 2019

We postponed Kansas because of wind and lightning. Wind and lightning aren’t abnormal for Kansas in the spring, but it was lots of wind and lots of lightning. The New York Times said there were more than 300 reported tornadoes in the Midwest over the last 30 days. Of course whenever I read now of weather that’s a bit more than it should be I wonder if it’s climate change, and whether I should be buying land in soon-to-be-tropical Minnesota instead of going fishing. Being reasonably short-sighted I went fishing.

We fished mid-state, halfway between Birmingham and Montgomery. I picked mid-state in part because I found a guide, East Alabama Fly Fishing. The obvious play for us was the Gulf, from Gulf Shores or Mobile, but we’d already fished for redfish in Mississippi and Louisiana, so we drove four hours further and fished for bass and sunfish. Of course I would have liked to fish for redfish in Alabama, but we only had three days. Choices must be chosen.

So bass. How many species of bass are there? Nine, though it’s not the most settled thing in the world. Fish species identification has a way of being uncertain, even for the best known game species. The nine that are currently agreed on? Largemouth, smallmouth, Guadalupe bass from Texas, Florida bass, Alabama bass, shoal bass from Georgia, Suwannee bass from Georgia and Florida, spotted bass, and redeye. Our guide, Craig Godwin, said we would fish for spotted and redeye on the Tallapoosa.

There’s a problem with that, and it’s a complicated problem. spotted bass, also called Kentucky bass, and Alabama bass, also called spotted bass, are almost indistinguishable. When I thought about it later I had no clue whether we’d been fishing for Kentucky bass or Alabama bass. There’s an easy test. All you have to do is count the pored scales on the lateral line. Alabama bass usually–note the usually–have 71 or more scales with holes. Kentucky bass typically have 70 or fewer. If you use a magnifying glass and don’t lose count you can be pretty certain of your fish. Usually. Since we didn’t have a magnifying glass, and since we haven’t yet been to Kentucky and will likely never go back to Alabama, I’m claiming victory and declaring our spotted bass in the Tallapoosa River as Alabama bass.

Since I’d caught a largemouth just last week, and a smallmouth last year on the Shenandoah, I’m only five species away from a Bassmaster BASS Slam! I may make something of myself yet.

Back to the river, I had never heard of the Tallapoosa. I’ve heard of a lot of rivers, but before we left for Alabama if you’d asked me to name a single Alabama River, I couldn’t have named one. I knew there was a bridge in Selma, but I had no clue what river ran under it. It’s the Alabama, by the way, formed where the Tallapoosa and the Coosa meet near Montgomery.

We met Craig at the put-in at Horseshoe Bend National Military Park, considerably north of where the Coosa and the Tallapoosa meet. Our raft float to the Jaybird Creek boat launch was five and a half miles and a bit more than five hours. It’s a big river by my lights, not Mississippi big, but except around island channels where it narrows it’s at least a football field from bank to bank, and where the river falls it’s a limestone boulder garden. And there’s plenty enough fall. There are Class II and and even Class IV rapids on the river, though thank goodness no class IV where we fished.

It’s a tailwater, with four separate power dams. We were below the H.L. Harris Dam and above Lake Martin and Martin Dam. Craig said that the level of the river was driven by power generation at H.L. Harris, and that the river elevation could vary greatly. Maybe I’m wrong, but it doesn’t seem that the dams have changed the fish in the river. These are native fish, the fish that were there before we were.

It’s a clean river too, though no river I’ve ever fished was clean enough that I could see bass in current. Ponds, sure, if a pond is clear I can see fish, but these aren’t stillwater bass. Spotted Alabama and redeye bass hunt in the current and we fished the pockets back of rocks and the lines where the speeds of the river changed, and as close to the banks as we could manage to cast.

They were clean, beautiful fish, perfect for the river. First things first. Redeyes do not have red eyes. Some we caught had a red spot on the gill plate, and that may be where the name comes from, but frankly we saw more red in the eyes of spotted bass. They also aren’t big, and the redeyes we caught in the river seemed to be in the neighborhood of a pound. But the dark green and black backs paired with the turquoise lower jaw and belly was so colorful, they’re an unforgettable fish. They also have on the edges of their fins the slightest tinge of white, a hint, a tell, a joy to discover.

The Alabama bass are larger, and frankly I’d have confused them with largemouth if I hadn’t known better. The colors, even the lateral markings, often aren’t that different. The most obvious difference is the jaw. The jaw on a largemouth extends back behind the eye, the spotted bass’s jaw is in front of the eye. Plus there’s the whole current thing. Largemouth don’t live long and prosper in current.

We both fished five weights with floating lines, and most of the float we fished poppers. It was funny popper fishing though. We cast the popper, let it drift like a dry fly, and now and again gave it a twitch. Do you know how to fish a popper on a pond? There are lots of ways I suppose, but my best luck is to cast the popper, let it sit until the ripples die, then give it a nudge. Then let the ripples die and give it another nudge. I guess this was similar but in the absence of pond ripples the popper drifted. It was like fishing dry flies on a drift, except for the now and then pop.

Sometimes the sunfish would hit it, but the poppers we were using were just a bit much for sunfish. Look, I have to admit it, and I had to admit it to Craig, give me a choice of any fish in the world to catch I’d probably catch a sunfish. I loved them as a child, and I love them now. I love to see their colors and to try to parse out the species. I love their ferocity. We were catching bass, yeah, and there’s no nobler calling, tarpon or trout-be-damned. But this year I’ve caught a paucity of sunfish. Late in the day I switched to a Barr’s slumpbuster I’d tied up for Kansas, because I knew I would catch sunfish. I caught sunfish. Craig said these were longears, and I’ll go with that.

Just a note on fishing with Craig. I’ve fished with a lot of guides. I’ve fished with well-known guides and I’ve fished with extraordinarily skillful guides. I’ve fished with guides who were too young to be guiding and guides who were fun to fish with precisely because they were old enough to have seen all they could possibly see, older even than me. I never fished with a guide who took as much joy from the place or from me catching a fish.

Late in the day a fish on Kris’s line went under a rock and couldn’t be brought up. Craig went in after it. That’s service, or maybe you just can’t keep an Alabama boy from noodling.

That’s Southern humor, and I can get away with it. Don’t you try it at home.