Tag: Bonefish

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Happy New Year and Redeye Bass

Samuel D. Ehrhart, Puck’s greeting to the new year, 1898, from Puck, v. 42, no. 1087, Keppler & Schwarzmann, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division 

We fished a bunch this year. We fished for cutthroat in Idaho and pike in New Hampshire. In Mississippi I caught my largest fish ever, a black drum, and after fishing for tiny brook trout spent an hour in a peculiarly pleasant Vermont laundromat (which still sends me friendly emails–how did it get my email address?). In the Catskills Joan Wulff told me to relax my shoulder, I jumped a tarpon in the Everglades, and we floated past suburban golf courses near Chicago. I spooked bonefish just outside the fence of the Honolulu airport, while military and commercial jets alternated use of the runway. We stood on ladders in Nevada. It was a good year for for fishing.

Honolulu with Jake Brooks. That’s Kris in the picture, not Jake.

This will start the third year for this blog. Before I kept a blog I kept journals, but a blog is harder. Someone might read it, so the writing needs to be better. My journal now consists mostly of baseball scores and random notes. The last journal entry was during the World Series, October 30. Nationals won. Dammit.

One of the blog’s sideshows is the statistics page. I can keep up with how many people are reading stuff and what country they’re from. I had more than twice the number of lookers this year than last, and I figure not all of those were me reading myself. There’s not a lot of specifics in the statistics. I can tell if someone goes onto the blog on a particular day, what they looked at, and what country they’re from, and there are daily, monthly, and yearly totals. Most visitors are from the States, with Canada a distant second. China is third, but I suspect that most visits from China have more to do with bots than reading. Namibia? Bangladesh? Jordan? I think my kids stopped reading, but I can’t really tell that from the scorecard, so they still got Christmas presents. Where is Moldova?

New Hampshire with Chuck DeGray.

It’s gratifying when someone reads several items, and it’s always fun to see something that I wrote for purely personal reasons, that has nothing to do with fly fishing, get read. Why did that South African read my post from last year about True Grit, and who in England is reading that post about Zurbarán’s Crucifixion? The most popular post for the year was about Ocean Springs, Mississippi, which is a wonderful place and a place I’d encourage anyone to go. My April Fool’s post about buying Pyramid Lake ladders got plenty of traffic.

Early in 2018 I posted a blog that included a lie a guide had told me, about his background as a Navy seal. He wasn’t. He apparently wasn’t any kind of military. In 2019 somebody who knew the guide found the post and it started to circulate. I suppose the guide told the story to work a larger tip, or maybe to justify his wacko right-wing politics. He wasn’t a bad guide, and he told a good story, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to fish with him again. I did leave him a good tip though.

With Richard Schmidt, Pass Christian, Mississippi.

Of all the places we fished last year, the place that surprised me most was the Talapoosa River in Alabama, and the fish that surprised me most was its redeye bass. I had never been on a pretty Southeastern river, so that was some of the surprise, but the fish fit the river. Redeye weren’t the river’s only fish: we caught Alabama bass, bluegill and long-ear sunfish, but it was the redeye that charmed.

They’re a small fish: they rarely weigh more than a pound, but they need clean water and, one supposes, pretty places, because they themselves are so clean-lined and pretty. They have a fine shape, well proportioned scales, fins, and jaws, and a bright iridescent turquoise belly and lower jaw balanced by smallmouth bands of warpaint on the face and olive green horizontal lines rising to their back’s dark mass. Lovely.

Tallapoosa River with East Alabama Fly Fishing

Mathew Lewis is an Auburn-PhD candidate geneticist who studies redeye and has written an excellent small book on fly fishing for Redeye Bass, titled, appropriately, Fly Fishing for Redeye Bass. I’ve fished for river bass before, smallmouth in Virginia and Illinois, Guadalupe and largemouth in Texas, and there’s a commonality to it. Cast to the banks. Cast the slackwater next to current, cast to faster current for smallmouths and slackwater for largemouth. Matthew and I traded some emails, and I meant to come back and write specifically about the redeye, but I never got around to it. I think about those fish and that river though, and it’s a place I would go again.

Catching the five subspecies of redeye should be a thing.

In addition to Matthew’s book there are good things on the web that discuss the redeye:

There should be more.

We spent a great two days fishing with Chuck DeGray as far north as we’ve ever been, and Silver Creek lived up to its hype, but my favorite place to fish–and I suspect Kris’s–was Everglades National Park. It is so alive, so beautiful and isolated, and I promise it wasn’t just because I jumped a decent tarpon. I did jump a decent tarpon though.

Happy New Years! I hope your 2020 is as good as our 2019!

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The Everglades and Key Largo, October 25-26, 2019.

It’s easy to make fun of Florida, it’s such an attractor of poor judgment and other shenanigans, but this trip I liked Florida. I don’t know if I liked Florida because I caught fish, or caught fish because I liked Florida, but it was our first trip where nothing else drove the show: no Disney World, no baseball, no conferences. We were going to see Miami and the Everglades, and when I got there I liked them. I liked driving around Miami Beach. I liked where we stayed in Key Largo. I could have spent days poking around the National Park.

And I jumped a tarpon, a big tarpon, the tarpon of the world. And while we were in Florida the Astros tied the Nationals two games to two in the World Series. Ok, that last had nothing to do with being in Florida, but it certainly affected my mood.

We’ve now fished twice in the Keys, once out of Key West, and this time with Duane Baker out of Key Largo. It was uncommon windy, more like March than kinder, gentler October. We fished Duane’s heavy 10-weight rods instead of our lighter gear, not because of the fish but because of the wind. Kris spent as much time as she wanted on the casting deck, which was fair since I’d held the deck for tarpon most of the previous morning. If we’d been home I’d have made a mess of poling the boat and given up, but Duane was poling and I was happy enough to drift along and watch the big boats heading east to blue water. I napped some, daydreamed some.

Duane’s Maverick had no GPS, but I guess over 30 years you can learn a place pretty well. Duane certainly knew the place pretty well. We were at the edge of the Atlantic over foot deep flats, a mile or so from developed shoreline, protected from breakers by the Florida Reef. Duane let the skiff drift in front of the wind over hard sand and turtle grass while he watched for fish and we tried to watch for fish.

Duane would say 30 feet, three o’clock, or 20 feet or 40. He had started the day with a lecture on what his directions meant, and while usually he was soft-spoken and quiet, when there were fish his directions were urgent, intense. Maybe we’d make that 20- or 30- or 40- foot cast in the right direction or maybe we’d wrap the line around our head, but what we usually wouldn’t do was see the fish Duane saw. Between the urgency and the wind and line management Kris had trouble casting, some days are just that way, but I caught my bonefish casting to where Duane told me to cast, retrieving the fly the way Duane told me to retrieve the fly, playing the fish the way Duane told me to play the fish.

And while I’d caught bonefish before, I’d never caught so large a bonefish, so fine a bonefish, and just like it was supposed to do it ran the line on my reel into the backing. Few things in this life are as good as advertised, but that fish was as good as advertised. This was a fish built for getting out of the way of sharks and it was doing all it could to get out of my way. Thank goodness for all those pushups.

Maybe after the cast and during the retrieve I saw the fish follow my fly, but then again maybe I convinced myself later that I had seen the fish. It didn’t matter. I followed directions and caught my bonefish. Earlier in the day I had hooked another, and that time I saw the fish and saw the take, but it was small and immediately came off the hook. Except for the couple of times I hard-smacked the back of my head with the fly I cast well enough, certainly as well as any fish could have reasonably expected, and no one was injured, not badly anyway.

The Keys are a crowded place, but October is the slack time and I suspect that maybe it’s the best time. Even if Kris insists she never saw a fish there were fish a’plenty. There was boat traffic, but on a Saturday we only saw one other boat on the flats. I can’t imagine what those flats must be like with crowds. No wonder that in every novel about Keys fishing, guides end up in violent encounters. No wonder Duane is so low key. If other anglers get on your nerves then in the crowded season urgency could be dangerous.

The day before we’d fished the Everglades, and if the Upper Keys were as advertised, then the Everglades were a revelation. We fished with Jason Sullivan out of Flamingo, as far south as you can go on U.S. soil without either getting in an airplane or island hopping down the Keys. From the Hotel National in Miami Beach we drove 90 miles, two hours, through the dark down and around South Florida, into the National Park, nearly from the Atlantic to the Gulf of Mexico. To get there by the 6:30 put-in we left Miami Beach at 4:30. That’s 3:30 central.

Jason seemed astonished that on our earlier trips we had failed to catch Florida fish. He said there’s so much life in the water. Of course that’s a problem with somewhat random fishing. We’d snatched days or parts of days, and fishing days and parts of days can always be ruined by weather, the wrong bit of beef or blot of mustard, or just bad luck. We’d had some of all of that, even with so much life in the water.

But the Everglades is such a miracle, it’s no wonder Marjory Stoneman Douglas waxed poetic and then became its defender, and it’s not a miracle because I caught a fish, or at least not only because I caught a fish. It’s a miracle because it is. It just is.

Jason ran us north and west out of Flamingo, all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. He ran a Hell’s Bay skiff with a 90 HP Suzuki, running at times 38, 39 mph on protected water. Over the course of the day we covered what must have been 70 miles, maybe more. If Jason had told me we’d covered twice that I’d have believed him.

We ran fast through the mangrove channels, narrow curving rivers of dark water bordered by densely packed roots and trees, and then the channels would suddenly open into saltwater lakes—Jason called them bays—still outlined with the same 15-foot mangrove walls. These were big open areas of water, thousands of acres of flat water. On that day the water wasn’t clear, but Jason was right: it was full of life. I cast and caught my first fish, what we Texans call a skipjack and everyone everywhere else calls a ladyfish. It was a raggedy little fellow, but after three fishless trips to Florida it was the best beloved fish in the world, the noblest, grandest, trophiest fish ever. Take that IGFA. I know what the world record ladyfish looks like.

And then in a few more casts I had my second fish, a Spanish mackerel, and now I was jaded. Florida is the easiest place in the world to catch fish. Anybody can catch fish in Florida.

We spent most of the rest of the morning following big tarpon using Jason’s 11-weight Helios 3 with an intermediate line, a line that sinks under the surface of the water, on an Orvis Mirage reel. Good stuff. We floated at the opening to the Gulf, now on the west coast of Florida, watching for the big fish to roll. I have to admit, I hogged the platform, but Kris was ok with it. Her previous tarpon experience had not been a good one, there was some terror and a lost thumb nail involved, so she was happy enough sitting on the ice chest and giving me directions. I had one hard pull that I failed to set, and one jumped tarpon that I didn’t set well enough.

The jumped tarpon took the fly and ran and then came out of the water, fast and explosive, determined to be rid of both the hook and me. I was thinking how do I play it? Can I? Then it came out of the water twice more so fast that I couldn’t think any more—maybe 50 pounds? It will certainly grow larger in my head in time; even now I’m thinking it was 60 pounds, minimum, maybe closer to 70. The tarpon was standing, four feet vertical to the surface out of the water. Then it shook the hook. Then it was gone.

I get it now. Tarpon. I jumped a tarpon.

In the afternoon we fished baby snook hard against fallen trunks and the tangled red mangrove roots. The small snook were everywhere, like sunfish. Jason said that if we caught one we would fish the same place because others would head to the commotion, and maybe we’d have a chance at bigger fish. We were fishing my 7-weight with a floating line, and after wearing out the baby snook we fished baby tarpon against silty, deoxygenated banks. We found them when they rolled into air above the surface to fill their swim bladders, protected from predators by the silty water. Their odd lung-like bladders let them take oxygen from air, and even the big tarpon breach the surface and roll for air. These were two and three pound fish, but just as certain as their elders to come out of the water when hooked. I hooked four, brought two to the boat before they came off, and finally late in the day landed one.

Even baby tarpon, there’s nothing like tarpon. Kris landed her own juvenile tarpon and then I think she wanted nothing more in the world than to go back after the big guys. I may never get to fish for anything else again. I may never get to stand on a casting platform again. Kris will be out chasing tarpon every time we fish.

That afternoon we drove east over the park road that we’d driven west that morning. In the daylight we saw what we’d missed: the dwarf cypress, the great glades of sawgrass, the walls of mangroves along the road, the birds . . . Just like in the bays it was full of life. There were signs announcing the elevation above sea level: one said four feet, one said five. You can get headaches because of the change in elevation.

Driving past an expanse of grass I said to Kris: that’s all covering water. She didn’t understand me until we stopped at the visitor center and could see the water everywhere. At the visitor center I read the captions on the placards a little carelessly, a little reverently. It didn’t matter. Everywhere there were details to forget but something big to remember: it is all full of life. Even the grass grew from the water, and all of the water is full of life.

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Florida Triplex

This will be our third trip to Florida in a year. Friday week I have to be in Hollywood, the Florida Hollywood on the Atlantic Coast between Fort Lauderdale and Miami, so we’ll go two days early and drive south to Key West for a day. The guide, Andrew Asher, says that for February we’re unlikely to see bonefish, which means we won’t catch bonefish; that if it warms up we might fish for baby tarpon, the 20-40 pound fish, which means it will almost certainly be freezing; and that it’s a good time of year for permit. I’m not convinced that anyone ever actually catches permit. I suspect that we will have a five-hour drive and Kris will catch something just to taunt me. She’ll probably catch a permit. Blind casting.

I have an excellent if dated tourist guide for the Keys, The Florida Keys: A History and Guide, Tenth Edition, by the fiction writer Joy Williams. From time to time over the last year I’ve read bits of it because Williams’ observations are so wry and entertaining. It’s dated, it was first published in 1987 and my edition dates from 2003, but it’s very readable. I can’t remember when I bought it, or why.

There’s also a bit of magical thinking on my part. In my prior three days’ Florida fishing I haven’t caught a fish because I snubbed Key West, and I won’t catch a Florida fish until I go there. Funny thing is that whatever happens now that’s true.

If the Florida Peninsula is a long limestone spine covered with sandy soils, the Keys are the dribbling exhaustion of that spine, a 180-mile archipelago extending in a southwesterly crescent from the Everglades. The islands dot and cluster, with 106 miles accessible by car via Route 1 ending at Key West, and once you finally get there there’s no parking. One supposes that in places like Marathon there are plenty of roadside convenience stores to buy the road trip necessaries, Fritos and bean dip, or at least Cheetos. It is Florida, and there has to be roadside stuff, even on a bridge.

Before convenience stores, before the last ice age, the Keys were underwater, covered with coral in the Upper Keys and sand in the Lower. They popped out of the sea (along with the Bering Strait land bridge) about the time that Greenland froze and the oceans sank. Geologists estimate that the current Keys date from about 15,000 years ago, which makes them older than the Bible but younger than North America’s first human settlers. Key West is the southernmost outpost of the Keys (though the Marquesas Keys and Dry Tortugas are further west and a bit north), so of the continental states the Florida Keys are as far south as we can go, further south even than Brownsville (which I hardly knew was possible). The Founding Fathers wrote into the Constitution that you can’t legally mention Key West without saying it’s only 90 miles from Cuba. There. Done.

The Keys will soon have a chance to be underwater again.

Google Maps

Key West isn’t in the tropics, but under the Koppen climate classification system it’s tropical. This gets confusing, but the tropics aren’t the tropics because of temperature or flora and fauna, the reasons I would expect, but because of a celestial moment. In the northern hemisphere on the summer solstice, at 23°26’12.5″ latitude north, the sun is directly overhead. That’s the Tropic of Cancer, and as the earth tilts on its axis it is the northern limit of where the sun can sit directly overhead and establishes the northern boundary of the tropics. The southern boundary is the Tropic of Cancer’s southern counterpoint, the Tropic of Capricorn.

At a latitude of 24°33’2.51′ Key West is a bit more than a full degree north of the tropics, and is considered tropical not because of its latitude but because of its warm climate–it has never recorded a frost. It has a wet season from May to October and the rest of the year is the dry season. It has an average of fifty-five 90 degree days per year, and the hottest month is July. Houston averages 74 days, New Orleans 56. Houston (a good bit north of Key West at 29°45’46”) and New Orleans (a good bit north of Houston at 29°95′) are subtropical because of summer heat and humidity and mild, generally frost-less winters, but we are all New England Yankees to the Conchs.

All of Key West, Houston, and New Orleans share hurricanes, though not usually the same hurricane..

Somebody probably has a reckoning of how many islands comprise the Keys, and I’ve read that the number is over 800, but it wouldn’t be a simple calculation. Is that wee bit of mangrove hummock over yonder an island? Are those two tiny bits of sand and mangrove a single island or two? Even without a number though there is a list of names that we know. From the Everglades, and the Upper Keys southwesterly through the Middle Keys and the Lower Keys, there is Key Largo, Islamorada, Marathon, Big Pine Key, Key West, the Marquesas Keys (which is different from the Polynesian Marquesas Islands), the Dry Tortugas . . . Facing south and moving down those names the Atlantic is on the left, with the Gulf Stream, blue water with blue water fish, separated from the Keys by a long coral reef, the Florida Reef. To the right is Florida Bay opening onto the Gulf of Mexico, a bay that hopefully we haven’t irreparably damaged by diverting freshwater flow from the Everglades.

There is a plan in place to restore the Everglades and to improve the Florida Bay water quality, but it takes money and political will. Florida politics is strange and fascinating stuff, and November’s election was textbook Florida, but the president of the Bonefish and Tarpon Trust has sent out a letter stating that the new Republican governor has made it a priority to restore the Glades. “[H]e delivered clear, unwavering messages about the environment and his intent to protect it. Sweeping actions announced by his administration include a $2.5 billion commitment over the next four years for water resources and Everglades restoration, a directive to [the South Florida Water Management District] to immediately begin design of the EAA Reservoir, a commitment to expedite other important Everglades restoration projects, and a call for the immediate resignation of the entire SFWMD governing board.” Whatever else Governor DeSantis may do, if he moves restoration of the Everglades forward that’s big and admirable stuff, and $2.5 billion is a start. A billion here, a billion there, it can add up to real money.

As for the Keys disappearing under the deep blue sea, most of the Keys is less than five feet above sea level. The Keys are already losing land to water, and have been for decades, but the process will accelerate as temperatures rise. The United Nations projects global temperatures will rise by 3 degrees Celsius by 2100, which will submerge the Keys, Miami, and the rest of coastal Florida. They could be under water faster if the polar ice melt accelerates. Big Pine Key, home of the key deer, is projected by the Land Conservancy to be underwater in a matter of decades. It’s probably not the place to do any long-term real estate lending. That mortgage isn’t going to be very good security.

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N’o’io and Mantis Shrimp, January 11-12, 2019

I didn’t catch a Hawaiian bonefish, an o’io. I saw plenty, especially the first day we fished, and I cast pretty well too, sometimes right where I wanted. That was the problem. Where I wanted wasn’t where the casts needed to be. My casts would land nice and close and then the fish would explode, not onto the fly either. It couldn’t have been more violent if I’d thrown a rock. Or a grenade.

Sometimes I’ve watched fish mosey away from my flies, dismissive and haughty. Sometimes I’ve watched them turn quick and quiet and run for the wild. I don’t ever recall watching so many huge fish blow ups. They were big fish, and big sudden flushes of water, and zoom, gone.

This was not exactly a wilderness experience. The first day we fished flats just off the Honolulu airport runways, near the port at the edge of the city, so there was a line of military jets and passenger jets taking off from the shared runway. Every 15 minutes there would be another jet taking off. Sometimes in deeper water our guide, Jake Brooks, poled the boat and one of us fished the bow. In shallower water we waded. It didn’t matter. I mostly couldn’t see the fish. Jake could, but especially after the first day I couldn’t.

The first day though I did see fish, at least some of the time, plus that first day there were tailing fish and you could see both their dorsal fins and tails above the water. They didn’t stand still, and Jake had me move to intercept them at an angle. As often as not when the fish were moseying away Jake called me off. He said we’d never get close enough for a cast.

And when I did cast there were fish explosions. 

I’ve read about delicate presentations for trout, but for the most part they aren’t useful for bass or redfish, and you have to cast even closer for black drum. Most days you put the fly a foot or so away, hope the fly makes just enough noise to get the fish’s attention, and then things are dandy: one sees fish, one casts near fish, one catches fish. It’s a simple game. Not so Hawaiian bonefish. They won’t belong to any club that would let them in.


Emerton, J. H.; Smith, S. I.; Harger, O. illustrators, from Goode, George Brown, Fisheries and Fishery Industries of the United States: Section I, Natural History of Useful Aquatic Animals, 1884, Government Printing Office, Washington D.C., The University of Washington Freshwater and Marine Image Bank

And mantis shrimp flies are heavy, with big lead eyes to weigh them down. I thought the heavy lead eyes were overkill, but there’s a reason for the weight. Hawaiian mantis shrimp aren’t delicate swimmers. They don’t spurt through the water column or snap above the surface. Both creatures are crustaceans, but shrimp (and also crabs, crawfish, and lobsters) are of the order decapod. What Hawaiian flies mimic, mantis shrimp, are stomatopoda. These are mean critters, living angry, mean lives in holes along the sea bed. They don’t swim, they scuttle, and you fish the fly with slow short strips along the sand. You need that weight to get them down. They’re predators, and it’s thought that they have the most complicated eyes in the world. Each eye is on a separate stalk that can move independent of the other. Those are pearls that were their eyes.


Mantis Shrimp, Todd, H.L. illustrator, from Goode, George Brown, Fisheries and Fishery Industries of the United States: Section I, Natural History of Useful Aquatic Animals, 1884, Government Printing Office, Washington D.C., The University of Washington Freshwater and Marine Image Bank

They hunt. They have a pair of raptorial claws that depending on the species can be either sharp spears for slashing or blunt clubs for smashing. They can break aquarium glass. They can break through oyster shells. Sometimes they’re called thumb splitters, because they can break through you.

Mayer, Alfred Goldsborough, Sea-Shore Life : the Invertebrates of the New York Coast and the Adjacent Coast Region, 1905, A. S. Barnes & Company, New York, New York, The University of Washington Freshwater and Marine Image Bank

So my predisposition for close casts and indelicate casting wasn’t helped by the heavy flies. By the time I got my best shot I had figured out the problem with close casts. I watched two fine fish happily eating down a line of mangroves 30 feet away. I made a perfect cast, five feet in front of them, and watched two fish explosions. Plop. Boom. 

“Ten feet,” Jake said. “You can’t get closer than ten feet.” Then I reckon you let the fly sit and wait for the fish to come to you. I reckon that, but I wouldn’t know for certain. It could be that you lead them ten feet and still don’t catch them, but at least you don’t shake them up. Jake said they weren’t leader shy, they were just generally shy.

Jake had grown up fishing near Tampa, where I’ve also failed to catch fish. He’d grown up playing baseball, a catcher–it’s a city ordinance that everyone who grows up near Tampa has to play baseball–and was injured his freshman year at Tennessee. He’d come to Hawaii to make surfboards. Everybody we talked to in Hawaii was from someplace else.

This fellow drove:

Jake was great to fish with, though I did worry that he and Kris were going to start talking politics and we might have to walk home. Jake was pretty conservative, which in Hawaii is an endangered species. I did tell him that nobody in Texas wants a wall, which isn’t strictly true, but is probably more true than most non-Texans think. For my $30 billion, if 900 miles of South Texas scrub and Chihuahuan Desert aren’t going to keep people out, a bit of wall isn’t either. I’m holding out for RoboCop.

The last day we fished with Jake he said Hawaiian bonefish were the hardest fish he’d fished for, because even with the right casts the fish have to cooperate. The fish have to continue in the same general direction and not go for a frolic before they get there. Jake said other redfish anglers have my problem: we ain’t delicate. We ain’t prone to ten-foot leads. His were consoling words, meant to make me feel better. I felt rotten.

I had one other good shot at a fish on day two with Jake, a puffer.  I saw it, I cast to it, and I felt it take the fly.  I didn’t feel it take enough of the fly though. I jerked it out of its mouth, and even at the time I half wondered if I jerked it out on purpose. I didn’t want a puffer. I wanted a bonefish. I wanted an o’io.

To’au (Lutjanus fulvus), blacktail snapper.

Kris managed to catch fish on the two days we fished without Jake. That’s because she’s not too proud to blind cast, and walked along casting.  Kris loves to blind cast, and would blind cast in a rain puddle in a parking lot. They weren’t bonefish, sure, and they were pretty little things out of a Disney movie, but there you are: for me they were colorful fish but not the right color of fish. Still, she caught fish and I didn’t. I felt great for Kris. Really. She only has to go back to Hawaii if she wants to.

Weke peuk (Upeneus taeniopterus). Nightmare fish, bandtail goatfish. Consume with caution: the head may cause hallucinations. Really.