Tag: Everglades

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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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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.

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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.