Pound for pound, the most vicious predator in our household.
Everyone’s heard of catfishing, especially here in the South. Not many people know though how superior fly fishing for cats is when compared to conventional tackle. I have to admit, until this year I had never taken up cat fishing. I had plenty of excuses: I didn’t have the right gear; I didn’t know where to go; I didn’t know how.
Early in the pandemic, I spent a lot of time fishing local bass ponds, and on one of our trips a dumped kitten came out of the barn. We tried to catch it but my 7 weight wasn’t up to the task. We finally returned with a can of cat food. There I was, an accomplished fly angler, reduced to fishing bait.
Sight casting on a local cat flat.
This year I finally invested in serious equipment for cat fly fishing, and I have to say, while it works like a charm, it’s really not up to the challenge of fighting big cats. For all the money Orvis makes on its cat beds and annual cat catalogue, you’d think that they could come up with more durable catfishing gear. And Orvis isn’t alone. All of the manufacturers need to go back to the drawing board.
You don’t need a hook for cats. The lines are fluorescent green, and the leaders another few feet of level white or fluorescent orange. Cats will attack the line and leader from as far away as 10 feet, so you don’t need to cast all that well, though the retrieve can be critical. It’s a little bit like the whole discredited business of fishing for gar with shredded nylon rope. You tangle the cat up in the line and then you land them with a net.
A destroyed Orvis Helios 3 cat rod and shredded premium line.
If you can get close enough, dapping works well. For catch and release, be careful to spend as little time as possible with the cat in the water.
Here’s my first complaint with the manufacturers: the lines and leaders, which are braided polyester yarn, don’t last. These are toothy critters. I doubt that our first leader lasted more than a week before it was shredded and swept up by the Roomba. The line was destroyed within a month. Maybe wire leader would work? Maybe the line could be made out of Kevlar?
You’d think that the manufacturers would know that house cats are vicious predators, and that they represent a challenge to the very best equipment. Tooth and claw, pound for pound, the typical house cat can do more damage than a barracuda. Just look at our couch. A barracuda never did that to our couch.
A follow!
And cat rods are very specialized. A lot of cat fishing is done indoors, so the standard 9-foot rod doesn’t work unless your indoors is bigger than ours. The specialty cat rods are short and whippet thin to achieve a decent cast, and that means there’s no room for a fighting butt. They cast great, but they’re wholly inadequate for fighting and playing the target species. When it hits, a cat can destroy even the best rods. It’s heartbreaking to see a valuable Orvis Helios 3 cat rod shatter after a violent take.
A new Scientific Anglers rig.
We’ve used Scientific Anglers cat rods as well, and are on our second SA rig. The first was just as much a failure as the Helios. Within a month the tip had broken and the line was shredded. You want to know something odd? I could swear that the SA line is exactly the same as the Orvis line. It’s like they colluded or something. If I knew any antitrust lawyers, I’d feel obligated to let them know.
A refusal.
Still, I’m sure Orvis will honor it’s 25-year guarantee on the rod, and I’ve got to say, there’s just nothing more fun than cat fishing. If the conditions are right, I can even roll cast to a cat from my bed before I go to sleep at night, though I haven’t been able to land one yet. I think I need to keep a landing net on my bedside table. When this whole catching a fish in every state thing is done, I may have to go back to every state to catch a cat.
Dogs, by the way, aren’t nearly as good of prey as cats. You can put the fly right on the dog’s nose and they only look at you perplexed. My dogs look at me perplexed a lot.
We didn’t fish much in Kentucky. We ate a lot, drove a lot, and we saw a lot of whiskey being made. We bought a lot of whiskey because a gallon of whiskey was cheaper than a gallon of gas, so we filled up the car with whiskey.
Not really. Almost, but not really.
It was cold in Kentucky, and getting colder, and it was wet. This matters because I wanted to fish for smallmouth bass. Smallmouth are native to states west of the Appalachians and east of the Great Plains, and north from Arkansas into Canada. That includes Kentucky. Trout are kind of a mystery to me, bass less so, and I wanted to catch a home-grown Kentucky fish. Native wild fish–as opposed to an introduced wild fish or a stocked fish–are my beau ideal, and trout aren’t native to Kentucky.
In early March there are stocked trout all over Kentucky. In most streams they’ll die out in the heat of the summer. In the Cumberland River below the Wolf Creek Dam trout are stocked year-round. Absent drought, the dam-released water is cold enough for trout, but it’s not really a wading river, and we didn’t have a boat and I hadn’t hired a guide.
Like the other black bass, smallmouth hunker down when it’s cold, and for anything fishing is almost impossible when streams are churned and fast with runoff. When we got to Kentucky, there was water standing in the fields, and the streams we saw from the road were dark grey and ugly. The lady at the gift shop at the Trappist monastery told us there had been five inches of rain in two days. Ladies at Trappist monastery gift shops surely don’t mislead, at least about rain.
I did make a weak effort for smallmouth. We had planned on two days fishing, Tuesday and (if we didn’t catch a fish on Tuesday) Thursday. I’d found two creeks that promised wading for smallmouth, Otter Creek near Louisville and Elkhorn Creek near Lexington. On Tuesday we drove the 30-odd miles to Otter Creek, but I didn’t get to see the creek. The Recreation Area is always closed on Mondays and Tuesdays.
I had a back-up plan, but it involved trout, and a particularly peculiar trout stream.
If you think about Kentucky, it’s shaped a bit like a frying pan lying on its side, with the panhandle on your left. Louisville, where we were staying, is at the very top of the pan on the north. The south along the Tennessee border is buried in sand so it’s flat, and the weird stream, Hatchery Creek, is almost due south from Louisville on the other side of the state. What did we care? There was plenty of whiskey for the gas tank.
Before I tell you about the weird stream, I have to tell you about my new fly rod.
I have all the fly rods that I will ever need, and plenty of extras just in case, but a few weeks ago my friend Mark Marmon texted and asked if I wanted a bamboo fly rod. Mark’s texts sometimes get me into trouble. I have a new used Schaeffer jazz guitar because of a text from Mark, and next year I’m going to Cuba to fish because of a text from Mark. In addition to being an Episcopal priest and fly fishing guide, Mark is a great scavenger. He regularly makes the rounds of the pawn shops and estate sales, he studies Ebay, and people–especially fly fishing people–give stuff to Mark.
Mark said that he had too many bamboo fly rods, and asked if I wanted one. If you don’t fly fish, this takes explanation. From roughly 1870 through 1960, the best fly rods were made by splitting bamboo into six pieces, shaving the pieces into tapered wedges, then gluing together the wedges. There were legendary bamboo fly rod makers like Leonard and Garrison. There were fine company makers like Orvis and Winston and Hardy–Hemingway famously fished with English Hardy rods. There were very good rods, Heddons and Shakespeares, South Bends and Pflueggers, made for sale to the common man at his local hardware store.
There was also junk, but there’s always junk.
In bamboo’s heyday, anglers used silk fly lines and sheep gut leaders. I don’t think they used bone hooks, but maybe. Unlike silk fly lines and sheep gut leaders, bamboo rods are still popular, though not common. They’re organically beautiful in a way that modern graphite rods can’t be. They feel different, slow and soft and heavy, and some people, especially trout anglers, really like how they fish. And they’re collectible. An antique Garrison in great condition might go for $10,000. An antique Heddon in good condition might sell for several hundred dollars. A new bamboo rod–and there are very good rods being made–might cost several thousand dollars.
Mark wasn’t offering a several thousand dollar rod. He was offering a fine hardware-store quality rod, a Heddon Thorobred. I grabbed it, because, after all, one ought to fish a Thorobred in Kentucky. I did buy Mark lunch at Blood Brothers Barbecue. It was a very good lunch, but not as good as the fly rod.
According to the internet, Heddon stopped making bamboo rods in 1956, the year I was born. By the markings on the rod, it was probably made after 1933 but before 1939. I’m no expert, and that’s a pretty wild guess based on an hour or so of internet browsing, but the gift rod is possibly a couple of decades older than me, and is at least as old as me.
It’s really old.
That’s the rod I took with me to Kentucky, a #14 Heddon 9′ split bamboo rod for an HCH line, whatever that is. It’s a lovely thing.
Now I have to tell you about that weird Kentucky stream.
Hatchery Creek where we fished in Kentucky is one mile long, about 20-feet wide, and completely man-made. It’s a stream that before it opened in 2016 never existed in nature. I knew it wouldn’t be blown out because it’s not fed by rain; it’s fed by releases from the Wolf Creek Dam at a constant 25-35 cubic feet per second. Some combination of engineers and fish biologists planned every foot of Hatchery Creek. They planned the bends in the stream, the twisting channels, and the placement and the depth of the big rocks. They hauled in the fallen timber. Not only that, the creek is directly below the Wolf Creek National Hatchery, so there’s a ready supply of stocked trout.
Did I say I wanted wild, native fish? The first 100 feet or so of the stream is a put and take fishery. Anybody can reach it, and short of batteries or dynamite, anybody can fish with whatever they want. Anglers can keep up to five fish. There were people there completing their grocery list, and I suspect they had their five fish after 20 minutes.
Then there’s a fish dam, and below the first 100 feet the fishing is catch and release, artificial lure only. The fish presumably come up from the Cumberland, though maybe there’s some stocking going on to. Here’s the really weird part: if you didn’t know the area below the put-and-take was man-made, you wouldn’t be able to tell. I knew in my head that somebody had placed that streamside log to jut into the stream just so, but it’s still a jutting log, and it’s still a stream. It looks completely natural. Still. It just ain’t natural.
At least that day I was the only person who walked downstream from the put and take fishery. Well, Kris walked down, but she didn’t stay long. She stayed at the put-and-take and talked to people, and watched hatchery trout perform synchronized swimming routines around her fly.
I did do all the things necessary to make my time on the stream as authentic as possible. I lost my flies on a rock in the river and had to re-rig. I got my flies hung in trees, and then got them hung in the creekside brush when I pulled them out of the trees. I had to sit down creekside and work through a mare’s nest of hooks and monofilament. I lost my landing net, then I found my landing net hung in creekside brush where I’d half-climbed to release my snagged line.
It was a complete fishing experience, and after about an hour I caught an 8″ rainbow and called it a day. That’s when I discovered I’d lost my landing net. At least I caught my stocked rainbow on a non-existent Kentucky stream using an 80-year old rod. The rod was pretty cool.
We went to Hawaii two years ago and didn’t catch a fish, so this is my second Hawaiian packing list. This trip was different enough that it’s worth the effort.
Gear
We took 9 weight rods again, with big Orvis and Tibor saltwater reels. This is heavy-weight stuff–we normally use 8 weights (which are considered heavy); this was heavier, but when the first bonefish ran I was scared that the 9-weights were too light. They weren’t, but I wouldn’t have minded a 10-weight.
In addition to the bonefish, I saw three giant trevally, and with only the 9-weight, I was kinda glad they ignored my flies. The 9-weight really isn’t enough for giant trevally.
Our flies were weighted–they weren’t just a hook and fur and feathers. They had barbell eyes so that the flies sank as soon as they hit the water. Barbell eyes are also a spur to better casting, because they hurt more when you blow it and the fly whacks the back of the head. The first day I fished with weighted EP mantis shrimp. I lost both heavy shrimp flies I’d brought, and the second day fished with a similar fly donated by our guide, Joe Kalima.
EP mantis shrimp
Joe wanted us to use 30 pound leaders to tie the fly to the line, which is crazy heavy, but maybe he wanted the heavy line because it’s harder to lose in the coral. Because of leader breaks I lost enough fish the first day that the second I used one of his. On Kauai we went back to 16 pounds.
The Molokai Ferry
There used to be an inter-island ferry from Maui to Moloka’i, but it seems to have shut down in 2016 (though there’s still a website). Now you have to take a plane or drive, and driving between islands really doesn’t work that well.
There’s something about flying on a pond hopper that makes every adventure better, even if the flight itself isn’t really adventurous. It sure feels adventurous when I walk across the tarmac to that bit of a plane. When I get on a pond hopper, I know I’m heading someplace out of my ken.
Traveling between three islands we took a lot of planes, so I likely raised the earth’s temperature a couple of degrees. Sorry. We flew to Honolulu on Delta, took the Mokulele Airlines flight to Moloka’i the next morning, flew back from Moloka’i to Honolulu a few days later, and then immediately flew Southwest from Honolulu to Kaua’i. We flew back to Houston direct from Kaua’i. The only flight we couldn’t cover with mileage points was the flight on Mokulele Airlines, and it wasn’t cheap, maybe $300 by the time we paid added luggage fees. That’s about $10 per minute for the flight.
There was no in-flight meal, but there was a black lab puppy.
Hotels
We spent the first night in Honolulu at the Equus Hotel. On our trip to Honolulu two years ago, we rented an AirBnB for three nights, and spent our last night in a dank dark motel near the airport. I wouldn’t stay near the airport again. The Equus is a bit off of the Waikiki strip, and it’s a $40 cab ride from the airport, but it’s also well priced (for Honolulu). Our room was small and the hotel needs another elevator, but I’d stay there again.
Because we had to fly out early the next morning, we paid the extra $15 per person for the hotel breakfast. I assumed it would be the typical hotel buffet, but instead the Hungarian barmaid at the Paniolo Grill made us bagels and lox. It was lovely, and she gave us her recipe for pickled red onions.
On Molokai, we stayed at the Hotel Molokai. There wasn’t any real choice for hotels on the island, and I’d guess the Hotel Molokai was built in the 60s. The rooms are scattered about the grounds in separate clusters, which gives it a nice open feel. The rooms and grounds are well-maintained, the staff was helpful, and the island’s best restaurant and bar are at the hotel. Internet service kinda sucks, but every room comes with its own rooster.
North Kauai seems to specialize in family condo vacations near a golf course. We stayed at The Westin Princeville Ocean Resort Villas. It was fine, and on a beautiful part of the island, but there were no chickens.
Food
On Kauai, we went to a luau. Tourist luaus are commoditized Hawaiian traditions, but how do you go to Hawaii without sooner or later going to a luau? The mai tais were good, there was a pineapple appetizer, and the poi was surprisingly purple. The music and dancing reminded me of a Ballet Folklorico, or that evening in Spain when we went to see flamenco, or in Lisbon when we went to see fado. The performers took pains to educate the audience, and there was a Tahitian fire dancer. I think it’s Hawaiian law that you can’t have a luau without a Tahitian fire dancer.
On Moloka’i, we ate dinner every night at Hiro’s Ohani Grill at the Hotel Moloka’i. Just like the hotel choices, there aren’t a lot of restaurant choices on Molokai, and the grill had excellent poke, the bar had martinis, and the tables were on a veranda that overlooked the Pacific. There were table cloths. The last night the sun was setting and I thought, “they’ve done a really good job copying a tropical bar,” and then realized it was a tropical bar.
There is a national park on Moloka’i, Kalaupapa National Historical Park. Beginning in the 1860s, about 8,000 Hawaiian lepers were exiled to the Kalaupapa Peninsula. It was an active leper colony until sulfa drugs were available to control leprosy, and there’s still a remnant resident population. Ironically, the peninsula is currently closed to tourists because of Covid. There’s an overlook though, on the cliffs a couple of thousand feet above the peninsula, and on the walk back we talked to a lovely woman who had retired to Molokai from Eugene, Oregon. She was originally from Lake Charles, Louisiana, about 90 miles from Houston. I told her that I had tried the saimin–the Hawaiian version of Japanese noodle soup–at the Ohani Grill, and that it was bland and that I had to ask for hot sauce. The Louisianan in her came to the fore and she said that a lot of Hawaiian food needs hot sauce. She was pretty much right.
When we were planning, I found an internet post on where to eat in Hawaii, and on Kaua’i we followed its recommendations. We ate at Hamura Saimin, which is a working folks soup joint in a warehouse district. It was better saimin than on Moloka’i, and there was sriracha on the table. There weren’t any table cloths though.
The luau was at the Tahiti Nui, a restaurant and bar in Princeville near where we stayed at the Westin Villas. Our first night on Kauai we also ate there, when there was no luau and it was only open as a restaurant. Like the Ohani Grill on Moloka’i, the Tahiti Nui did a good job mimicking a tropical bar by being one, and to celebrate its authenticity we drank mai tais. They didn’t have little umbrellas.
Where We Didn’t Go.
We fished on Moloka’i’s coral reef, but didn’t snorkle. We never saw Moloka’i’s southern beaches, and we couldn’t go to the the Kalaupapa Peninsula. I would like to, and I’d like to visit the Catholic chapel dedicated to Saint Damien of Moloka’i. Damien was a saint in anybody’s book, and I should have stopped at the chapel, at least to pay my respects.
We didn’t visit Mau’i, or the Big Island, or The Four Seasons Resort on Lana’i (though at $1500 a night, it’s out of my price range).
We haven’t eaten at Helena’s or Ahi Assassin in Honolulu. I keep missing Helena’s, and I suspect it’s a real failure on my part.
Covid
You can’t travel to Hawaii without parsing through its Covid regulations. Unless you plan on a 14-day quarantine, you can’t enter the state from the mainland without either proof of vaccination or a negative test within two days of entry. Those are the liberalized rules as of November. Before November there was no entry, vaccinated or unvaccinated, without a negative test. Before testing, the state effectively shut down outside travel. Testing requirements are still in effect for foreign travelers, but those are federal rules for foreign entry to any state.
You can’t enter buildings in Hawaii without a mask, and most people are wearing masks on the street. The grocery store on Moloka’i would only allow one family member inside at a time. Kris guessed that was enforceable because everyone knows everyone else’s family on Moloka’i.
Meanwhile every place was packed. The plane from Houston to LA was packed. The LA airport was packed. The plane from LA to Honolulu was packed. The plane from Honolulu to Molokai was packed (though since it only carried 12 of us, that’s relative). Restaurants were packed. Given the spike in infections, it was nuts. Everybody should have cleared out for us.
You can’t travel in crowds without exposure, and I’m sure we were exposed. We tested negative before we left and we tested negative when we got home. We’re vaccinated, boosted, and we wore masks, but we were lucky.
Once you’re in Hawaii, you can fly from island to island without additional documentation. Returning to the mainland doesn’t require documentation either.
Music
A lot of stuff in Hawaii has to be imported: most of the food, building materials, cars, gasoline, tourists . . . For that matter most residents are imported.
Music is an exception, and Hawaiian music is everywhere, all the time. When you unload from your arrival plane, there’s Hawaiian music playing in the airport. When you get to your departure gate there’s Hawaiian music playing in the airport. At restaurants there will be Hawaiian musicians, really good musicians. When we got into our rental car in Moloka’i, the radio was tuned to a Hawaiian music station.
Michael Keale, Tahiti Nui
If you think about what Hawaiians gave us musically, the steel-stringed guitar, the ukulele, the slack-key guitar . . . If you think about their lovely vocals and gracious melodies . . . Ok, ok, it can get cloying after a while, but then I find Jimi Hendrix cloying. I’m fairly easily cloyed.
But any guitarist has to be fascinated by Hawaiian slack-key guitar tunings. Ry Cooder is the most famous mainland student of slack-key, and Gabby Pahinui and Keola Beamer are famous Hawaiian players. Meanwhile I found this YouTube recording of Chet Atkins playing slack-key, and making it sound a good bit like Delta Country Blues, which is a pretty peculiar bit of cultural fusion. It’s great stuff, but it would have been perfect if he’d been playing a sitar.
Guitar
I took my old Kohno, and sat on the veranda at the Hotel Molokai and played to the chickens. I don’t remember what I played, but it wasn’t Hawaiian. The chickens didn’t seem to mind.
William Brigham photographer, 1889, Saint Damian of Moloka’i, shortly before his death.
We fished five weights mostly, 9 foot with floating lines and 4x leaders. The Driftless streams would have been perfect for bamboo rods, but I’m done with rod buying I think.
At least until I buy another rod.
Reading
I re-read Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead to get ready for Iowa. In our plane trip to Rhode Island, I kept reading excerpts to Kris out loud, because so much of it deserves pondering. I hope the people around us didn’t mind.
I re-read Shoeless Joe (and of course re-watched Field of Dreams). There is a surprising amount of good writing tied to Iowa, mostly because of the University of Iowa creative writers workshop. There’s Jane Smiley, W. P. Kinsella, Flannery O’Connor, W.D. Snodgrass, Wallace Stegner, T. C. Boyle, Sandra Cisneros . . . Frankly, I don’t see how anyone ever wrote a word without going to Iowa first.
I had such success with cooking in New Mexico, I bought a copy of The Flavor of Wisconsin by Harva Hachter and Terese Allen with the plan to try some of the recipes in our Air BnB. I didn’t. It’s a wonderful book, the kind of historic/cultural study of food culture that every state deserves, with a general survey of the food history of the state and then a lot of recipes. The problem is that Wisconsin food is kinda, I don’t know, unappealing in the abstract. Maybe I’ll go back and make that recipe for beef and kidney pie. I’m going to go to my grave though without having eaten the potato and turnip whip.
I’ve written about the Driftless Cafe already, and about trying to find Frito pie in Iowa. There are, I’m sure many good things to say about Midwestern food (and face it, Midwestern food is what we’re talking about here), but the only good thing I can say about those breaded pork tenderloin sandwiches in Iowa is that if you covered them with cream gravy and left out the bread, they’d be a reasonable substitute for chicken fried steak.
You can find 20-year old cheddar in Wisconsin, for obscene amounts of money. They take their cheese seriously.
What We Didn’t Catch
Muskie. Notwithstanding how much I liked the Driftless, I still regret not catching muskie in Wisconsin.
Where We Didn’t Go
We talked about driving to Minneapolis/St. Paul for a Twins game, but we didn’t. I’ve been to Minneapolis; Kris hasn’t.
I’d like to have canoed in the Boundary Waters.
I really wanted to drive through the Amana region of Iowa. I’d been once before, a long time ago, and I liked it. Because of a flat in Missouri we ran out of time. By the way, the family minivan doesn’t have a jack and a spare, but instead has a flimsy fix-a-flat kit, which notwithstanding my distrust, worked fine. Did you know that all the tire repair shops in rural Iowa close on Saturday afternoon? We had a nervous 100 mile drive to Dubuque where we found a Discount Tire that fixed the flat for free. I love Discount Tire, but I’d still rather have a spare tire.
Corn
We crossed Iowa, south to north, in late fall, and the corn stalks were ready for harvest, I suppose for feed? There didn’t appear to be any actual ears of corn. I grew up around wheat and cotton and sorghum and cattle pasture, but I have never seen such monoculture as Iowa corn. There is a lot of corn in Iowa, and that doesn’t even come close to a description. There is more than a lot of corn. There is a plethora of corn, the universe of corn, the place where corn is born and goes to die. No wonder corn fields show up in movies as the place the supernatural comes from; the amount of corn is spooky.
I realized that despite my rural upbringing, I had only the vaguest notion of what silos are for; they could be guard towers, to protect from roving bands of children of the corn? There sure are a lot of them.
Missouri
We were probably in as much of Missouri as anyplace, though we didn’t fish there. We spent a night in Kansas City on the way, at the 21c Museum Hotel. They’re great hotels and pet friendly, but more often than not located in peculiar places–at least if you’re not from there. Louisville and Lexington, Kansas City, Bentonville, Oklahoma City . . . they’re opening a new one in Des Moines. We also drove by the hamlet in north central Missouri where my grandmother was born in 1890, Osgood. I visited Osgood as a child in the early 1960s, and stayed with a great aunt who had no indoor plumbing, and visited a great uncle who kept horse feed in the spare bedroom. It was an adventure. There’s not much of Osgood left, if there ever was much of Osgood. Certainly there’s no tire repair shop.
Osgood, Missouri
On the drive nome we paralleled the Mississippi, and stopped in Hannibal to walk around. I’m not sure we saw the best of Hannibal, or if there is any best of Hannibal.
We spent two nights in St. Louis, took our picture under the arch, visited the Feather Craft fly fishing store (I’ve bought mail order from them for 30 years, but in person it reminds me most of a plumbing supply), and saw a Cardinals game. I hate the Cardinals, but they were playing the Cubs, who I also hate. The Astros played too long in the Central Division of the National League for me not to have strong feelings about the Cardinals and the Cubs.
Music
Iowa. The Everly Brothers are from Iowa, and Glen Miller, and Bix Beiderke. Glen Miller got me through law school. Big Band music was the only music I could listen to and still concentrate on reading.
Minnesota. We listened to a lot of Bob Dylan. I’m not a big fan of Prince (who is of course from Minneapolis or St Paul or whatever), but then we listened to a lot of Bob Dylan.
Wisconsin. I’ve been through this list before. It’s still pretty much the same list.
