Tag: Guides

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Redfish and Seatrout, October 21-22, 2024, Some South Carolina Tidal Area (44)

I’m almost maybe sure that in South Carolina we were fishing in the vicinity of the Kiawah River, or maybe not. I know we met our guide, John Irvin, at a public boat launch on Folly Island, and that both the Kiawah and the Stono Rivers are near Folly Island. At least I think it was Folly Island.

Coastal South Carolina is a confusing mess of rivers and streams and islands and creeks, and ins and outs and ups and downs. Look it up on Google Earth. Locate Charleston and then study the surrounding coast. It’s like the spread out pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that almost but don’t quite fit together. It’s a jumble, a hodge-podge, a physical kerfuffle . . . What I’m used to in Texas is a reasonably coherent system of big bays and barrier islands. From what I can tell coherence isn’t how South Carolina works.

In South Carolina, even if you stand in the same spot, everything changes over the course of the day. There are tides in South Carolina, tides that demand consideration, tides that changed how we fished. Today, where we keep our skiff in Port O’Connor, the tide will range from a low at 2 pm of -.03 feet, to a high of one foot at midnight. It’s a tide of about 15 inches. That’s a smallish tide, even for Port O’Connor, but add a foot and the tide would be judged large. The moon tonight is a waxing sliver so there’s less lunar pull, and late-fall tides on the Texas Coast are usually low anyway. Sometimes we might get a big tide, two feet or more, but even the small tides move bait, and the moving bait triggers fish to feed. Still, the tides are generally so small they don’t really mandate how we fish.

South Carolina is different. Today at Fort Sumter the high tide at around 10 am will be well over five feet, and the low tide at 4 pm will be just a bit over sea level. That’s a five foot tide. When we fished in South Carolina the tide was taller than me, almost seven feet. Between the morning and the afternoon the tide moved enough so that if I’d only picked a low spot and stood still then sooner or later I would have drowned. At low tide we saw mountains of oyster beds. At high tide the oysters were gone and we could fish in the grass. We could fish where six hours before there was only dry–ok soggy–land.

That South Carolina tide was surprisingly magnificent. It’s not magnificent like the Rocky Mountains or the redwood forests or the Gulf Stream waters, but every day twice a day it is the most splendid thing. I was surprised by it, sure . . . I’m used to itsy bitsy tides and this ain’t no itsy bitsy, but I was also awed by it. The South Carolina tidal flats are better than mere surprise. They are magnificent.

John told us that at low tide South Carolina folk would often harvest a bushel of oysters for home consumption. At home I see oyster beds often enough. Over the years I have lost a good dozen flies to oyster beds. I suspect our skiff’s fiberglass is scarred with oyster scrapes. I suppose that if I wanted I could harvest my own bushel where I usually fish in Espiritu Santo Bay, but in South Carolina harvesting oysters appears to be a way of life. While I might be queasy about eating an oyster I randomly harvested from a Texas bay, for Lowcountry South Carolinians it’s an expectation.

But this is about fly fishing, not oystering. I have a theory about redfish, and my theory mostly involves me not catching them. If I appear, they do not, and South Carolina held true. We fished for redfish with John for two days, and Kris caught a very nice red. I think she caught it sight-casting but I’m not completely sure. I got one hit blind-casting where John told me to cast, which hit I diligently missed. John saved the trip by taking me to an oyster reef where there were small speckled trout, spotted sea trout, and I caught a couple of those blind-casting.

I think I’m required by South Carolina law to mention that speckled trout are not trout, but I don’t think anyone would ever confuse the two. If you squint real hard, spotted sea trout resemble trout in a way that a redfish or flounder or even a black bass do not, and it’s easy to see where they got their popular name. They look troutish. I don’t think though that anyone ever thought they lived in rivers and gobbled mayflies.

Speckled trout aren’t really much fun on a fly rod, but they are the great favorites of Texas gear anglers. They’re voracious, run in packs, are excellent on the table, and are reasonably easy to find in legal sizes. And a trophy winter speck is many a Texas gear angler’s life goal.

But the specks I caught were no one’s life goal. They were pretty, and certainly they satisfied my personal goal of a South Carolina fish, but I felt like I’d left something on the table. I wanted a South Carolina redfish. On the other extreme, I had been ecstatic only a few months before with my tiny North Dakota bluegill. It’s all relative, and with my South Carolina speck I’d left things undone.

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Smallmouth Bass, Tuscarawas River, Ohio, September 20, 2024 (43)

We fished until noon on Michigan’s Au Sable, then drove eight hours south from Grayling, Michigan, population 1,917, to Coshocton, Ohio, population 11,016. Our drive required two hamburgers, two fill-ups, a shopping spree at a Krogers for our next day’s lunch, a shopping spree at a Walgreens for reasons I can’t remember, and finally two more hamburgers. In case you’re curious, at the Krogers we bought cheese, crackers, cookies, and a pear.

The drive started out in the Michigan Northwoods, then moved into flat plains, and finally at dusk we were in some of the prettiest, most bucolic, hilliest farmland I’ve seen. Then it got dark and we drove another hour. The area around Coshocton seemed well-supplied with streams, cornfields, pastures, and handsome two-lane country roads. There were lots of busy small towns and barns. We saw no Haitians, but in Ohio I figure they were immigrating everywhere, just lined up to eat our fish and irk J.D. Vance.

The next day we fished the Tuscarawas River with Katie Johnstone. We had hired Katie through Mad River Outfitters in Columbus, Ohio, after we had decided that we would fish for smallmouth. Smallmouth are a good river fish, they’re native to Ohio, and it’s not a fish we see a lot of in Texas. Also, the Cincinnati Reds were in Cincinnati, so if we fished near Columbus we could drive a bit further and see a baseball game on Saturday. The Reds beat the Pirates. I kept a scorecard.

I also vowed to taste Skyline Chili in Cincinnati. I did. Since I’m a generous spirit, I won’t say more.

Sometime in the recent past, Orvis ads pushed 50/50 on the Water for fly-fishing gender parity. If there was ever an old white guy sport, it’s fly fishing, and most fly-fishing excursions are jam-packed to the gills with old white guys. Orvis’s 50/50 on the Water was intended to expand the universe of fly fishers by tapping into the half of the population who traditionally didn’t. One could cynically wonder if 50/50 wasn’t intended to expand Orvis’s customer base, but I try to ascribe the best motives to people and institutions. I do make exceptions, especially for Skyline Chili, but 50/50 on the Water always seemed to me well-intentioned.

Our guides in Michigan and in Ohio shared a similar biography. Both were closer to 30 than 70, and had become obsessed with fly fishing as young adults. They both started guiding after giving up other jobs–one in photography and one in graphics. They had each guided full time for three years. Both tied flies, fished Midwestern rivers, and were socially skilled enough to act amused when we told stories.

The difference between the guides, of course, was that Lance in Michigan was a big-ish, guy-ish guy with a beard and a Y-chromosome, who guided from a drift boat. Katie was a petite pretty young woman with her hair in a blonde plait. She was good at wrestling her river raft. She was Y-chromosome deficient.

They were both excellent guides.

Fishing with Katie after fishing with Lance made me ponder why more women don’t fly fish. There’s nothing about fly fishing that seems particularly masculine. It’s an elegant sport, and I’ve always fished with women–my mother (and father) fished, though neither fly fished. Kris fly fishes, so I’m almost always 50/50 on the water, and while I wouldn’t admit it, Kris often as not out-fishes me. I cast better, really I do, and I tie better knots. I tie flies. Still, on any given trip she’s apt to catch more fish, not that I would ever admit it. On those trips I will only acknowledge that we caught exactly the same number of fish. On every other trip I catch more fish.

Kris claims she only fishes because I do, but when we went to Portugal, when I vowed we’d return to the States and catch a fish on the fly in every state, it was Kris who kept complaining that we weren’t fishing. I was perfectly happy drinking port and eating endless Pastels de Nata. Of course she probably saved my life. If she hadn’t distracted me with fishing I’d probably weigh 300 pounds and have no liver.

In Ohio, thanks to Katie we caught a lot of smallmouth. Katie rowed the raft, told us where to cast, switched out flies when the fishing slowed, and retrieved hung-up flies from the bankside brush. It was a pretty little river, lined with trees and tinged green. It wasn’t weedy, which is always a good thing, though drought had spurred an incipient algae bloom.

Katie fished streamers differently from the way I fish them. Hers were bigger, and she had us retrieve with short irregular strips and pauses. I would have just chunked and retrieved, chunked and retrieved, chunked and retrieved . . . Her method actually took some concentration, and with irregular strips and pauses I concentrated some. I used her retrieve for largemouth after we got home, and it worked well.

I no longer fish for trout during August in the Lower 48. Pre-global warming, August was an ok month to fish, but the major rivers in trout country are warming, and it seems that in August most rivers will now reach at least 70 degrees by early afternoon. When a river reaches 70 degrees, trout still feed, but they have trouble surviving being caught. Cold water is oxygenated water, and recovering trout need oxygen. Fifty degree water is the optimal temperature for trout fishing, and even then an angler will kill some fish from stress and mishandling. Higher temperatures pretty much guarantee death.

Hence smallmouth. Smallmouth are better suited for hotter water and will survive what trout can’t. Now instead of pushing 50/50 on the Water, companies like Orvis are encouraging anglers to go fish for smallmouth in August. Meanwhile warmer water is allowing smallmouth to push trout out of traditional trout waters. At least smallmouth are fun to catch.

It wasn’t August, but it was a hot September, even in the far northern climes of Ohio, and the Tuscarawas River was pretty, quiet, and thanks to Katie we caught and released a bunch of smallmouth. I’m pretty sure Kris and I each caught exactly the same number of fish. Meanwhile Katie was great at telling us how to fish the river, and the river was a joy to fish. It’s the kind of river I wish I lived next to. At least we got to visit.

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Lots of Trout, Au Sable River, August 18-19, 2024 (42)

Michigan’s Au Sable River has been a fly-fishing destination for a century or so, and Gates Au Sable Lodge was built on the Au Sable in 1970, so it’s a bit more than a half-century old. People go to the Au Sable to fish, or maybe when it starts to get cold they go there to hunt, but I’m not aware that there’s anything else that’s much of a draw. It’s not well-known for spa treatments.

The Lodge is a classic. When Gates Au Sable Lodge opened in 1970, “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” was the number one song. The Beatles released Let It Be in 1970, then they broke up the same year. I was a high school freshman. That’s old.

The fish we caught in the Au Sable weren’t big, most were only seven or eight inches, but they were very pretty and both of us caught a few larger rainbows. Ok, Kris caught two larger rainbows and I caught one, but who’s counting? In any case we caught a lot of fish. Michigan guides have to report fish counts to the state, so for once we kept count. Between us we caught 27 trout the first day and 15 the second half-day, more or less. Still, that’s a lot of fish, and on each day we each caught exactly the same number of fish, more or less.

The Au Sable was originally a grayling river, then the grayling died off from over-fishing and logging and were replaced by stocked trout. There’s no longer any stocking in the Au Sable, so even if today’s trout aren’t native, all of the trout are wild. We each caught brook trout, rainbows, and browns, so we each had an Au Sable slam. I guess the size of most of the fish made them more of petite slams than grand.

Our guide, Lance Nelson, guides for Gates Lodge. He had us fish a nymph dropper beneath a surface dry fly with 7x tippet, but we didn’t fish out of Au Sable boats. They’re pirogues adapted for Michigan lumbering by Louisiana lumbermen, and then re-adapted for fly fishing. Instead of being rowed or paddled they’re poled like a pirogue. The guide poles from the back seat, and the anglers sit in the middle and the front. Lance says he owns one, but that they’re not much fun for two anglers. The second angler in the center of the boat is pretty restricted, and sitting in the center makes it hard for that angler to fish.

I’m sure Kris wouldn’t have minded sitting in the center. And that varnished wood is very pretty

We fished out of a standard fiberglass drift boat, with the guide in the center and me in the worst seat regardless of where I was sitting. Kris caught more fish than me, though I’m certain we caught exactly the same number.

The 7x tippet deserves at least a passing glance. The leader goes between the fly line and the fly, and the tippet is the last bit of the leader that ties to the fly. Normally a trout guide would use 4x tippet for nymphs underwater, and 5x for dry flies on the surface. As far as I know, until the Au Sable, I had never fished with 7x tippet. It must have worked, because we caught a lot of fish. We each caught exactly the same number of fish, or maybe I caught a few more.

The leader, including the tippet, is usually about nine feet long. It gets progressively smaller from the fly line to the fly, so where it attaches to the fly line a trout leader might be 20 lb. test, and where the tippet ties to the fly it might be 4 or 5 lbs. For bass and redfish I normally fish about 16 lb. tippet, which is big stuff, but neither bass nor redfish are tippet shy. In very clear slow water trout can be very shy, and 7x tippet, which is about as fine as a fine hair, is intended for the shyest of trout. The 7x fluorocarbon is typically about 2 lb. test.

I don’t own any 7x tippet, and I don’t want to.

Michigan was our 42nd state to fish, so I ought by now to be better at describing things, but every place is different, and I really haven’t been unhappy anywhere. Still, fishing in Michigan made me very happy. Traveling state to state we’ve encountered places that surprised me, and places that were hard. We’ve fished places that met expectations, and places that inspired awe. Michigan wasn’t exactly any of those. We were in the Northwoods on an approachable river with a good guide at a good lodge and we caught fish. The leaves there were beginning to change, and the brookies were beginning to put on their spawning colors. Can something be a memory when you haven’t done it before? It wasn’t déjà vu, but more like Plato and that cave. It was like glimpsing the archetype of what fishing is supposed to be. Quiet, contemplative, friendly, a bit technical but not too technical. There was nothing between us and what God had made.

I could fish that river again and again and be happy.

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Lee’s Ferry, Rainbow Trout, June 24, 2024 (39)

Lee’s Ferry is the only place in Northern Arizona where steep canyons don’t surround the Colorado River. In 1872, John D. Lee established Lees Ferry, also known as Lee’s Ferry (with an apostrophe) and Saint’s Ferry, at the direction of the Mormon Church. Five years later, in 1877, Lee was the only person executed for the murders by Mormon militia of 120 gentile men, women, and children at the 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre.

In 1939, Lee’s Ferry was cinematically burned by Apache warriors in John Ford’s Stagecoach, though in the movie the ferry’s location had migrated to Southern Arizona. Stagecoach is a great movie, but its geography surely is imaginative.

Standing on the west bank of the Colorado and looking left upriver is Glen Canyon National Recreation Area topped by the Glen Canyon Dam, about 15 river miles away. To your right is the Grand Canyon, which continues for 277 miles. Everything left and right is steep canyon. Lee’s Ferry is the only crossing.

Lee’s Ferry isn’t usually spelled with an apostrophe, and Lees Ferry is how it appears on maps (if it appears at all). I recall that some Park Service signage uses Lee’s, but that may be wishful thinking, and Lees is far more common. I’m a stickler for apostrophes though, and its painful for me to leave it out.

Lee’s Ferry is the staging point for raft trips through the Grand Canyon, and it’s a busy place. It’s also popular for sit-on-top kayaks. Outfitters ferry boatloads of kayakers about ten miles upriver from the ferry past Horseshoe Bend, then drop off the kayakers who paddle home. This is not technical whitewater kayaking, and there’s a lot of traffic.

If you have good enough resolution on your computer, there are some little white specks in the river in Kris’s photo of Horseshoe Bend. The specks that aren’t rocks are kayaks.

Thirty years ago Lee’s Ferry was the Southwestern Mecca of big trout, lots of big trout. Wendy and Terry Gunn owned Lees Ferry Anglers and they were famous, at least among fly fishers. My friend Mark says he remembers an issue of Fly Rod and Reel–you remember magazines?–with Wendy Gunn visibly pregnant on the cover. Ladies could fly fish! Even pregnant ladies could fly fish!

Their son, who would have been in utero on the magazine cover, is now in his 20s and runs Kayak Horeshoe Bend, an offshoot of Lees Ferry Anglers. It’s a kayak ferry and rental service. He rescued us when the starter on our guide’s jet boat conked.

Glen Canyon Dam was completed in 1966, and it was always controversial. The Sierra Club hates Glen Canyon Dam, Monkey Wrenchers plan to blow it up, and its success for water storage is dubious. It does, however, let trout thrive where no trout have thriven before. Fly fishers (who tend towards the environmental side of the ledger) may feel queasy about Glen Canyon Dam, but that doesn’t mean they’re not going to fish it. Big wild trout? Lots of big wild trout? You gotta fish that.

Something happened though, and since its heyday the number and size of trout in the river have decreased. Terry Gunn speculated that trout sizes decreased because of the introduction of bad genes from stocked fish during the 90s, or maybe from the reduction of raw sewage from the Town of Page–there’s nothing like just the right dollop of raw sewage to boost insect life. Current studies posit that the drop in numbers of big fish is caused by increased water temperatures, reduced nutrients, reduced dissolved oxygen, and increased numbers of predatory brown trout. Some of the reduction may be drought related, some global warming related, or maybe those are both the same thing.

They should think about adding some raw sewage. It’d probably be good for all those kayakers too.

There are still a whole lotta fish, and fish or no fish, it’s beautiful, with clear green water surrounded by steep red canyons. I can kinda understand why most of those kayakers forgot their fly rods. By all reports there are still big fish in the river. The fish we caught were somewhere around 16 inches or a bit north, and they were solid, healthy wild rainbows. We caught plenty. I caught the first fish early, and Kris caught the last fish late, and we caught a bunch in between. We never worried we wouldn’t catch our Arizona fish.

We fished with Natalie Jensen of Lees Ferry Anglers, who started working for the Gunns in their fly shop in 1995, and started guiding at Lee’s Ferry in 2006. Weirdly Natalie was only our second woman guide. We actually delayed our trip a day to fish with Natalie.

Guides use jet boats on the Colorado. There has to be some kind of motor to get upriver, and jet boats work better than propellers in rocky water.

Natalie’s boat was big, heavy, aluminum, with a Ford inboard V-8. It had a Bimini top, because in Arizona bringing along some shade is a brilliant idea. One of us stood at the back of the boat casting and singing hey-nonny-nonny, carefree as a meadow lark, while the other stood at the front singing blow blow thou winter wind because he had convinced himself that he couldn’t clear the Bimini with his backcast. Which one of us was a walking breathing puddle of mess, unable to throw a fly line? I’m still traumatized.

Natalie would also say that I’m one of the most accomplished line tanglers who ever graced her boat. I spent a goodly part of the morning trying to untangle my line, and after I’d made the tangle worse trying to untangle it, I’d hand the whole mess over to Natalie. She’d keep the boat on track, clear my tangle, continue to give Kris advice, and make it all look easy. Good guides are born to multitask.

We were fishing a double nymph rig, with two flies under split shot and a bobber, so I might as well have been wearing my “Here to Tangle” tee shirt. Layering in my perfectly unreasonable phobia about casting over the Bimini just made things worse. I really should remember to take photos of some of my better tangles. You don’t get my full fishing experience without contemplating a really good tangle.

Natalie was patient though. By mid-morning I had settled down. I remembered that she had said to make a high lift off the water, and I changed my cast so I was making her high lift with a kind of big loop over my left shoulder instead of over the Bimini. It worked ok. I spent the rest of the day without tangles. Ok, mostly without tangles.

Early on I would try to set the hook by lifting my rod left upriver. Mostly Natalie used the oars to keep the boat drifting stern first, so on the bow I was at the back of the boat. We fished mostly to the right of the boat, and left was upriver. I don’t why, but that upriver strike seemed like a good idea, but it pulled the fly away from the fish. Natalie told me to strike straight up, which after the first few misses I managed. After that I still lost a few fish, but not many. I caught a lot more.

How many fish did I catch? Of course I have no clue. I can’t count past one fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish, and then I lose track. I caught a pretty good number of fish. Kris caught a pretty good number of fish. It was a day of a pretty good number of pretty fish on a pretty river.

Late in the day the boat’s starter died. It had been cranky all day, but it had the grace to wait to die until the day was almost over. Natalie rowed to keep us out of trouble, Kris kept fishing–now with a big foam cicada fly on the surface–and I daydreamed about the S.S. Minnow and how when we were marooned I’d have to be Gilligan. The Gunn’s son came to rescue us. We listened to the cicadas get active in the afternoon, and we could see them flying off the cliff face. We saw bighorn sheep on the shore. Kris caught a last fish, a brown trout on the dry cicada pattern. I put my rod away and managed to do it without getting tangled.