Tag: Damon 7 Lakes

Posted on

I went fishing

You may not know this, but it’s a peculiar time. On a Saturday back in April, the first time I’d left the house after my office shut down, I went to Houston Dairymaids and they delivered cheese curbside. I ordered barbecue from Pinkerton’s and they delivered curbside. We picked up a curbside order at Houston’s big liquor store, Spec’s. We were out of Four Roses bourbon, and running low on gin. It’s that kind of time.

It’s been too windy this spring for the Bay, so except to fish on our local bass ponds that day’s trip from one curbside delivery to another is about as much as I’ve traveled. I haven’t been to a restaurant except to pick up take-out. I’ve been into a grocery store, but even for groceries I usually order online and pick up curbside.

I continue to work, though it feels odd, disconnected, like working on holiday. My firm laid off some employees and reduced salaries for most employees. Those decisions were beyond my pay grade, and my heart ached for affected friends and colleagues. I completed a project for a bank, advised a client whose rental car and hotel revenues had suddenly stopped, and participated in a lot of conference calls. Kris cut my hair. She needs to cut it again.

I postponed our trip to Arkansas. We were supposed to go April 4, to fish the Little Red. I offered to pay the guides for the delayed trip when I canceled, but they said come when we can. I’ve prepaid our guides for our July trip to North Carolina. I worry about how my guide friends are doing.

This is not a warbler.

The warbler migration has come and gone.

I wear a mask when I go into stores or the office, but not when I run. I wash my hands more than before. I’ve cooked a lot, and I try to keep my daily workout schedule, with more discipline than enthusiasm, but that’s always been the case. I don’t read books as much as I should, and play the guitar constantly, working through all the jazz method books I’ve collected over the years, filling notebooks with diagrams of chords with strange names like G7(b9) and Ab m7b5. I’ve been working through the songs in the sixth edition of the Real Fake Book, most of which are jazz standards that I’ve never heard. Did you know that Airegin by Sonny Rollins is Nigeria spelled backwards? I didn’t know the song at all.

I read a funny quote about jazz guitarists, that they make a living playing wrong notes.

At least once a day I read the Houston Chronicle, The Texas Tribune, The Washington Post, The New York Times. I haven’t watched TV much. There’s no baseball, so what’s the point? I did watch videos of George Floyd’s death. The Floyd protests in Houston came past our office building, and I half-heartedly planned to go downtown and stand on the street in support, but they closed our building for the big march and the stationary part of my half-heartedness won. My daughter went. If I’d known she was going I’d have gone with her. My Houston neighbors reacted to the death with surprising restraint and civility. I was worried about coronavirus, and Kris was sick from some other bug that we thought might be coronavirus, so I stayed home.

It wasn’t coronavirus, but man was she sick, and it frightened us.

There are now two Black Lives Matter yard signs on our block. It’s a pretty diverse block, with both doctors and lawyers. There are no African Americans. There are Asians, Middle-Easterners, a Scot, a couple of gay households, an Austrian professor of mathematics, plenty of everyday garden variety white folk, and a Chinese-American geophysicist who is Kris’s go-to expert on local birds. . . I’m proud that two of my neighbors have signs.

Meanwhile my friend Melvin posted on Facebook that as an adult black man he’d been stopped a dozen times by police for no cause. Was it a dozen, or was it ten? One was too many for one of the best men I know. A black work colleague told us that he never ran in his neighborhood without a baggie with a drivers license and a business card. Someone wrote that responding to Black Lives Matter with a statement that All Lives Matter is a bit like responding to your wife’s query about your love for her with a statement that you love everybody. It might be true, but it’s not relevant.

Two acquaintances, maybe three, died of the virus, one black, two white. My friend Peggy told me her brother had died.

I’ve thought a lot about Colin Kaepernick. In the immediate aftermath of Kaepernick’s knee, I was disappointed that something important, continued institutional violence against blacks, was trivialized into something unimportant, whether it was acceptable for a football player to take a knee during the National Anthem. It was actually two players, Kaepernick and Eric Reid, who took the knee, and there was an article in the Chronicle last week interviewing Reid’s brother on the Texans, Justin, who said the same thing, that the narrative got twisted from a protest against police violence to an uproar about flag disrespect. There was a difference though between my reaction and Justin Reid’s. My reaction was to blame Kaepernick for the twisted message. I was wrong. I guess it just goes to show, it’s easy to blame the victim.

Did I mention that I’ve been through lots of Four Roses?

I’ve spent some hours most weekends drifting in a canoe on the lakes at Damon’s. I have a solo Wenonah, a lovely little thing, made for travel, and I’ll sit in the canoe and drift across a pond while I cast. I caught a four or five pound catfish one day, a four pound bass another, both on a six weight Winston with a Hardy Marquis reel. I’ve caught a lot of smaller bass and sunfish, bluegills and greens, and they always bring more joy to me than any other fish. My cast right now is very good, and I’ve tied a lot of flies too, variants on BBBs, with possum dubbing and long soft hackle guinea hen collars that I’d bought for steelhead flies. Don’t tell anyone, but while I’m home I can tie during conference calls.

Looking at the photos of me holding the big bass and catfish with a boga grip, the results aren’t good for catch and release. I’ve decided to use a net from now on, even for warmwater fish.

My mother loved guinea hens. She always said they were better farm guard than dogs. Maybe I’ll get some guinea hens for our yard, during the pandemic there’s not as much traffic on my street as there used to be. Maybe I’ll get a Black Lives Matter sign.

Posted on

Island Kingdom

Catskill Mountain House Hotel, opened 1824, ”View From The Mountain House” by W.H. Bartlett, 1836. Engraving by R. Branford, published in “American Scenery”, London 1838.

I have been to New York City just enough, and I could live the rest of my days without returning. How often? I don’t know. A half dozen times? A dozen? But the number of times I’ve actually been there isn’t really the point, is it? Most times I’ve turned on the television or listened to the radio or read a book I’ve likely as not been on a trip to New York City, or at least someone’s idea of the place.

Getting ready for the Catskills we’ve been watching The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and yes, she is Marvelous, and because of the tv show I’ve been reading about why the great Jewish Catskill resorts died: greater mobility, mismanagement, dispersion from the City by the New York Jewish community, air conditioning, and assimilation.

I have a favorite movie moment, ok I have a lot of favorite movie moments but one is when Cary Grant is abducted from the Plaza Hotel’s Oak Room in North by Northwest. Everything in that sequence, the room, the martini, Grant’s suit and perfect shirt and tie, were meant to show the rest of us New York City. Becoming a man who takes a phone call in the Oak Room and begins an adventure was at least one of the things that I could aspire to. It was as exotic as Tahiti, and just as appealing.

North by Northwest (1959)

When we were getting ready for Louisiana I read a book by Shane K. Bernard about the Cajuns, called, fittingly enough, The Cajuns.* The premise of the book was that until after the World War II mobilization the Cajuns were culturally isolated, and that after World War II and the advent of television the Cajuns were assimilated into a national culture. Not completely: we still thank God have red beans and rice and boudin and spring crawfish, but a Cajun boy born in the 50s or 60s or 70s no longer looked solely to Lafayette or New Iberia or Lake Charles for his only point of reference. The television beamed New York and Los Angeles and London into his home every evening, and what it beamed was inordinately influenced by New York City. As much as any place it came from New York City.

It worked both ways though. If New York had more influence on the national culture, the rest of the nation was more accessible to New Yorkers. New Yorkers also assimilated. Air travel opened the nation physically and at the same time old prejudices declined. New Yorkers were no longer confined to the Castskills. The Catskill resorts died.

Getting ready to go to New York, I’ve been reading a history of Catskill fly fishing by Ed van Put, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 by Burrows and Wallace, “Rip Van Winkle”, E.B. White’s short essay “Here is New York“, a book of New York geology (orogeny, glaciers). But whatever I read now, whatever I might try to read before we go, much of my reading life has already involved New York, and I give up. It wins. Just to name a few important books to me: The Last of the Mohicans; The Great Gatsby; The Summer Game; The Emperor’s Children; Netherland; How the Other Half Lives; Bright Lights, Big City; The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York; Eloise; Washington Square; Kaddish; Enter the Goon Squad; Veronica; The Pushcart Wars; Breakfast at Tiffany’s; Lunch Poems; The Boys of Summer; The Poems of Hart Crane; Brooklyn; Catcher in the Rye; The Poems of Charles Reznikoff; Motherless Brooklyn; Leaves of Grass; The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay; The Age of Innocence; The Bonfire of the Vanities; it wins. It wins.

Spider-Man lived in New York City.

I suspect though that New York doesn’t win in the same way any more. There was a time when a good part of our notions were bundled and delivered from New York, but our notions now come from Fox News or CNBC or what our friends, defined as the people we haven’t unfriended, post on Facebook. We have so many media choices that we only need to see the things that affirm our own prejudices. We can happily return to alienation and separation.


The Oak Room closed in 2017.

Maybe it was always really this way, but it seems that every man is now his own island kingdom of inclinations and prejudices. I’ve been to New York City plenty enough, but at least I’ve been, and it has always changed me in ways I didn’t expect. While there are other places I’d rather go, I don’t at all mind going again, or another half-dozen or dozen times. Mrs. Maisel is still Marvelous. And each time I ‘ll likely come back a little different, a little surprised at what else there is.

* * *

There are roughly three weeks each spring when Houston is the best place in the world to be. Home-grown tomatoes ripen, the largemouths move onto and off of their spawning beds, the reds and the flounder return to the bays from the Gulf, baseball returns, the last of the winter northers come into town not for revenge but gently, sweetly. It is always green in Houston, but for that three weeks it could be no other color. Best of all the walls of climbing star jasmine bloom and add their scent, a scent less cloying but as lovely as a roomful of lilies, and you smell the scent of jasmine on every walk or bike ride or run.

We went Sunday to Damon’s Seven Lakes to catch post spawn bass, and I caught three of these on my new five weight rod. The rod is a Winston Pure, and Trout Unlimited sent it to me because I am kind, handsome, and amusing. It was very good of them. I also saw, cast to, and caught a six or seven or eight pound catfish, which for various reasons neither Kris nor I got a picture of, mostly because she thought I was taking the picture and I thought she was taking the picture. Anyway I caught a trophy catfish and three good largemouths on a rod that, if you look carefully at the picture, is inscribed “Trout Unlimited.” It’s not inscribed “Bass Unlimited,” and certainly not “Channel Cat Unlimited,” but “Trout Unlimited.” It’s not just any trout rod either: according to R.L. Winston it’s Pure. That must mean it’s probably too pure for bass, and certainly too pure for a big channel cat. I hope Trout Unlimited and R.L. Winston don’t find out. They might take the rod back because I abused it, and it really is sweet.

Since I didn’t get a picture of the catfish, I took a picture of a half-eaten plate of cheese enchiladas from Ninfa’s on Navigation to show you. They were delicious, and you’ll have to let that serve in the catfish’s stead. In a Texas sort of way it seems an appropriate trade. Probably because of that fish I had the catfish at Brennan’s of Houston on both Monday and Tuesday, but it’s just not my week to take pictures of catfish, live or fried. The Brennan’s catfish was good though, and the Damon’s catfish was magnificent. Just don’t tell the folk at Winston.

*Actually the name of the book was The Cajuns: Americanization of a People, but the shorter title works better in the paragraph.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

Tenkara-san

Kris gave me a Tenkara Sato outfit from Orvis for Valentines Day.  I gave her more or less the same thing, a Temple Fork Outfitters SH 11’6”. She tried hers on the Guadalupe but didn’t catch anything. I tried mine for the first time Sunday, fishing along the banks at one of Damon’s 7 Lakes for sunfish.  I only had about an hour, and kept meaning to switch to a popper but never did. I didn’t see many sunfish, but I caught one small bluegill and three smallish bass.

It took me a while to set up the rod and line, and my set up was . . . creative. Ignoring the instructions I tied some perfection loops and stuck things together. It was close enough to the picture, with the line that came off the rod dangling off the rod tip and a bit of standard leader attached to that. The booklet informed me that Tenkara was fly fishing, not dapping or cane rod fishing. From what I could tell it was about as much like dapping or cane rod fishing as it was like fly fishing, but I fished with a Damon’s owner’s favorite fly, a BBB. “BBB” stands for something, of which “bitchin” and “bream” are part, but I never have had it straight. They’re pretty easy to tie though, and they catch fish.

For me the 10’ rod had a range of 10-15 feet from the rod tip, plus or minus, but it was easy to cast and reasonably accurate.  Tenkara rods don’t lend themselves to long stillwater retrieves, but in a way they’re perfect for spring bass and bream in shallow water.  Every fish I caught hit while the fly was sinking through the water column, not while it was moving.  Toss, wait, toss again, wait. it’s intimate, visual, almost as good as dapping: all but the sunfish was caught when I set the hook after watching the fish take. If I hadn’t just  blundered down the bank not paying much attention, if I’d used just a modicum of stealth, I probably could have done much better, and caught more fish. Of course if I’d switched to a popper I might have caught more fish.