Tag: Guides

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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.

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Arizona

(June 23, 2024)

We’re in Northern Arizona, near Lee’s Ferry below the Glen Canyon Dam. I texted the guide to find out whether we meet at 6:30 a.m., Mountain Daylight Savings Time (which is the time that my telephone says it is), or 6:30 a.m., Mountain Standard Time (which apparently is the actual time). She’s texted back to say that Arizona doesn’t observe daylight savings time, which is kind of true because the state doesn’t, but the Navajo Nation does, as do other tribal areas. Driving across nonconformist Arizona is weirdly disorienting, the GPS time jumps each time we cross a state or reservation border, and I have to check the internet to figure out what time it should be. The applicable time zone (and the time displayed in our GPS) seems to change at whim.

We would meet the guide at Lee’s Ferry on the Colorado River, and on one side of the river, the non-Navajo side, it is 4:10. On the other side of the River, the Navajo side, it is 3:10. Or is it the other way around? My phone says it’s 3:10. My phone apparently agrees with the Navajo Nation, even though reality differs. I figure it’s one of those mystic things the Navajo picked up from the Hopi.

It’s the end of June, and it’s 102° at 3:10 (or 4:10, depending on where one stands), which is serendipitously the same time that the Yuma train is famously scheduled to arrive. It’s dry and sunny, which covers a lot of Arizona weather. I will only note that Willis Carrier invented central air conditioning in Houston. I’m not certain Arizona has invented shade.

The Colorado River below Navajo Bridges.

Getting ready for this trip, I finally read Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang. It’s a fun-filled romp by a romantic band of fictional 70s eco-terrorists who have gun battles, sabotage big machinery, destroy bridges, dislike almost everybody, have hot sex, and make plans to blow up the Glen Canyon Dam. I had read Abbey’s Desert Solitaire many years ago and admired it, but reading The Monkey Wrench Gang I realize that today the eco-terrorists’ methods would like as not be used by Bundy’s protesting the BLM. Mr. Abbey’s means make me queasy, and worse seem unproductive.

Some History

Arizona gained statehood in 1912 as the 48th state. Until 1821, Arizona was Spanish, and then Mexican after the Mexican Revolution. It was ceded to the United States in 1848, after the Mexican-American War. What a successful real estate deal that was.

Besides The Monkey Wrench Gang, I started reading a terrific history of Arizona, Arizona, A History, by Thomas Sheridan. At least what I read of it was terrific. It was dense and long, over 500 pages, and I only managed about 200 pages before we left for Arizona. That was enough to get me through the Civil War and into the late 19th century, when railroads, cattle, mining, and cotton spurred Arizona development, at least a bit. Arizona didn’t really get spurred until the U.S. government stepped in with massive water projects. Water transfers let Arizona boom, hence the Monkey Wrencher’s plans to blow up the Glen Canyon Dam.

By the 17th century, long before the United States took over, the Colonial Spanish had started early missionary settlement in Arizona, but they (and then the Mexicans) never really did much until the late 18th Century. Then they bought off the Apache with food, other supplies, and guns. The Mexican Revolution brought chaos, and the Mexican government couldn’t continue the Spanish payoffs to the Apaches. The Apache again went to war.

Arizona was on the furthest fringe for Spain, and even with the Apache payoffs Spanish settlement was sparse and precarious. The Pre-Spanish native populations, on the other hand, were complex and well-established. The prehistoric Ancestral Pueblo, Mogollon, and Hohokam developed complex civilizations, though they didn’t have much respect for state borders. The Mogollon and Hohokam developed water control systems for farming, and the Ancestral Pueblo, née Anasazi, built complexes throughout the Southwest, including Mesa Verde, Keet Seel, Canyon de Chelly, and Chaco Canyon. Meanwhile the Hohokam built ball courts similar to the courts of Mesoamerica, and the Mogollon created Mimbres pottery.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mogollan Mimbres pottery, 10th to 12th century and 850-1050, public domain.

The Hopi, Zuni, and O’odham are thought to be descendants of the prehistoric groups.

The Apache and Navajo came to Arizona and New Mexico from the Rockies as a single language group as late as the 1500s, but then split, with the Apache moving further south from Arizona to Texas. The Navajo/Apache language group, Athabaskan, stretches through Alaska and Western Canada, then makes a big jump to the American Southwest. They apparently didn’t like Washington or Idaho.

The Navajo are great incorporators, and took religious practices from the Hopi and Zuni, sheep from the Spanish, and weaving from the Pueblos. The Apache meanwhile waged brutal battles with the Spanish and Mexicans in both Arizona and northern Mexico. It’s estimated that about 5,000 Mexicans were killed by Apaches between 1820 and 1835, and then they continued to fight with the Americans. When they were finally subjugated, they were just lucky that our Indian policies were so peaceful, fair, and equitable. Just kidding.

The U.S. had 5,000 troops in the field in 1886 to accomplish the surrender of Geronimo and 30 other Apache warriors. The Apache and Navajo are now reunited as part of the Navajo Nation.

C.S. Fly, Apache warriors, Arizona Historical Society, 1886. Geronimo is on the far right.

Under U.S. control, Arizona was the Wild West. Kit Carson decimated the Navajo in Canyon de Chelly in a war of attrition and starvation. The U.S.-Apache Wars were nearly continuous for a half-century. Arizona mining boomtowns came and went, and the Earps, Doc Holliday, Cochise, Fort Apache, the OK Corral, Geronimo, Tombstone, the Buffalo Soldiers, the Hashknife, and the Range Wars are as much touchstones of our culture as Generals Grant or Eisenhower, or Lexington and Concord, or the passage of the 19th Amendment. They trigger a mental image that we immediately recognize.

And Arizona gave us mythology. The 3:10 arrived in Yuma not once but twice, and both times it was on time. The gunfight at the OK Corral continues to be fought on screen every few decades, with variations that explore either the Earps’ thugishness or their nobility. Before we left for Arizona, we watched John Ford’s 1939 Stagecoach starring the young John Wayne in his first major role. Watching it now, it was like seeing Star Wars for the first time. I realized why every boy child for the next two generations–including me–would wear a cowboy hat and pack a six gun as he entered the frontier range of his neighborhood. It was all you could ask for imagination.

Climate

Arizona is dry and hot. Statewide average annual rainfall in Arizona is 12.26 inches. In Yuma, bordering California and Mexico, average annual rainfall is a whopping 3 inches. Summer in the southern desert can average highs of 115°. We traveled in the High Desert, at the higher elevations of far north Arizona, but it’s still hot, still dry, just not as hot or as dry as the south.

Population

It seems like everything in Arizona is south, and then a bit further south, and then crammed right up to the border with Mexico. Ain’t true. Physically about two-thirds of the state is north of Phoenix. Still, it is true that most of the population is crammed around Phoenix and Tucson in the south. There are towns north of Phoenix–Prescott (47,603), Winslow (9,005), Sedona (9,790), Flagstaff (75,907)–but the further north you go the fewer people there are. The population of Page, the northern town of any size closest to Lee’s Ferry, is 7,440.

By population, Arizona is the 14th largest state, with a total population of 7,151,502. Almost 70% of that population, 4,845,832, is in the Phoenix Metropolitan Area. Another 1,057,597 is in the Tucson Metro Area, southeast of Phoenix. Phoenix is the nation’s fifth largest city by population, trailing Houston (2,314,157), but leading Philadelphia (1,550,542), but it also represents the bulk of Arizona’s population.

Arizona map of population density, from Wikimedia Commons.

In 1860, Arizona’s non-native population was 6,482. By 1910, two years before statehood, the total population was only 204,354. As late as 1950 the population was still less than 1 million. Since 1950 Arizona has boomed. It’s a relatively diverse state, though most of the population is either Anglo or Latino. Anglos are 53.4% of the population, Latinos 30.7%.

Native Americans are about 3.7% of the population, giving it the third largest indigenous population by state–California and Oklahoma are numbers one and two. After English, the most common languages spoken in Arizona homes are Spanish, Navajo, and Apache.

Geography and Fish

There are three geographic regions in Arizona. The Basin and Range region covers most of Southern Arizona, and also most of Nevada, Western Utah, and parts of mainland Mexico west of the Sierra Madres. It’s the corduroy geography of interspersed flat basins or valleys and narrow mountain chains that John McPhee describes in Basin and Range. We didn’t make it to the Arizona Basin and Range.

The Colorado Plateau where we spent our time is named for the Colorado River, the “Colored Reddish” River, and the Colorado River cutting through the Colorado Plateau formed the Grand Canyon. It is the nation’s 5th largest river, and famously it is used up for urban water supply and agricultural irrigation by the time it reaches the Gulf of California. The Plateau is high country with a mean 6,352′ elevation, centered on the Four Corners Region. The Plateau is drained by the Colorado River, the San Juan, and the Green.

Map of the Colorado Plateau, from Wikimedia Commons.

This trip I would fish the Colorado River, the San Juan, and the Green, the San Juan in New Mexico with my great niece, and the Colorado in Arizona and the Green in Utah with Kris.

The Mogollon Rim is the third major Arizona geographic region, and is the transition zone between the Colorado Plateau and the Basin and Range. There is an escarpment, and in places it rises as high as 8,000 feet from a basin to the Plateau . We didn’t make it as far south as the Mogollon Rim either.

There are two major rivers in Arizona, the Colorado and the Gila (which is a tributary to the Colorado). There are two native trout, the Apache trout and the Gila trout, both native to waters located along the New Mexico border. The Apache is endangered (though it is proposed for delisting), and the Gila threatened. Their restoration is part of the wider movement to restore native trout. Restoration a good thing, though it means the removal of transplanted rainbows and browns, and they’re awfully fun to catch.

In the Colorado River in Glen Canyon we would be fishing for rainbow trout, which survive and reproduce because of the cold water releases from the Glen Canyon Dam. There appear to be no current stocking programs. Fortunately for our fishing we got there before the Monkey Wrenchers blew up the dam.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Apache Trout.

Politics

Since World War II, Arizona politics has been pretty consistently inconsistent, with 10 Democratic governors and 8 Republicans. For President, the only Democrats who have carried Arizona were Harry Truman in 1948, Bill Clinton in 1996, and Joe Biden in 2020. The current governor, Katie Hobbs, is a Democrat. U.S. Senator Mark Kelly is a Democrat, and U.S. Senator Kyrsten Sinema is nothing at all, other perhaps than a nutcase. The Congressional delegation is currently six Republicans and three Democrats.

There is a slight–two vote–Republican majority in both houses of the Arizona legislature: two votes in the senate, two votes in the house. Overall Arizona is considered to lean Republican.

Joe Biden carried Arizona in the 2020 election by about 10,000 votes, and Arizona is an exception to most states in that the Democrats carried several areas that are largely rural, particularly in the tribal areas of the far northeast. in 2016, Donald Trump carried Arizona by about 90,000 votes, including Phoenix’s Maricopa County which then flipped in 2020. Total turnout in 2020 increased by more than 700,000 votes, with both Trump and Biden benefitting from the increased turnout. Biden benefited a wee bit more.

2020 Election Results in Arizona by County, Wikipedia, by AverytheComrade.

Where We’re Going

This is an ambitious trip. By trip’s end I will have fished the three major drainages on the Colorado Plateau: the San Juan in New Mexico, the Colorado in Arizona, and the Green in Utah. That’s also the three major Southwestern tailwaters–rivers that exist as destination trout fisheries because of the cold water flowing through dams from deep lakes. By the end of the trip we will have driven about 1500 miles and floated about 25 miles of river.

We’ve already caught our New Mexico fish, and Kris didn’t fish the San Juan. She’s fished it before, and I took my 16 year-old grand-niece fly fishing for the first time. I booked the guide, James Brown, “JB”, through Duranglers in Durango, but he also runs his own guide service. He couldn’t have been a better choice to guide Eva. Before we went I was going to try to teach Eva how to cast, and after nearly an hour got as far as showing her how to hold the rod. I didn’t get as far as showing her how to hold the line with her left hand. JB had her throwing flies in about 30 minutes.

Because JB thought Eva would catch fish all day, we fished the lower heavily stocked catch-and-take section of the river instead of the flies-only trophy water. Quantity trumped all, and we mostly had the lower half to ourselves. She landed a bunch of fish, missed a bunch of fish, and may or may not have taken a nap. Half the time I think JB was as excited as she was, which made the day fun for all of us. Believe it or not he and I talked a lot about fishing. I caught a bunch of trout, both wild browns and stocked rainbows, and I’m not going to complain about catching a bunch of trout, wild or stocked. I’m not proud, and I can use the practice.

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Daytime in the Garden of Good Fish, Bad Fish: Savannah Redfish, May 28-30, 2024. (38)

Mostly that title has nothing to do with what I’m about to write, but it’s hard to go to Savannah and not hum Moon River, or ponder the possibilities in a box of chocolates, or try to remember the story line of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. I needed to work at least one of those in somehow, but couldn’t think how. So there. Done.

The fish I caught near Savannah was not really one of my best fish. It was maybe 20 inches, so on the small side for redfish. It may have been a second year fish. It had good redfish color though, and I was really proud of that fish. For a combined full day of hard fishing, half a day for trout on Noontootla Creek in North Georgia in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and half a day in the Vernon River near Savannah, it was the only fish I caught in Georgia. Even if it wasn’t a trophy fish, it was a great fish.

I also caught it by luck. I was blind casting where the guide told me, under a bridge between the pylons, and when I picked up my line to recast there was a fish on my fly. I didn’t see that fish and cast to it. I didn’t feel the take. I thought at first I’d hung up on something, but then there it was. My Georgia fish. What a spectacular fish.

I also landed an oyster. It was also catch and release.

I could be less honest and tell you that the redfish was a bit bigger, maybe a lot bigger, and that it was all skill–my perfect cast fell exactly where I knew the fish would be, and when I began to lift the fly ever so gently–a Leisenring Lift in saltwater!–the fish slammed my fly hard and fast. It almost jerked the rod from my hands!

Did I mention it was about 24 inches?

Wait, wait, sorry, I was getting carried away, and Kris and our guide, Chad DuBose of Tall Tides Charters, would like as not call me on it. Not that I would ever tell you anything but exactly what happened, ever. Really.

And anyway blind luck is the way I catch a lot of fish. And I gotta admit I caught that fish by blind luck.

I was kinda sorry to catch that fish. I liked Georgia, especially Savannah and wouldn’t mind having to go back, especially to Savannah. I liked North Georgia, too, but our half-day was hard. We wade-fished, so we had to haul waders and boots and wading staffs from Texas. That’s heavy and bulky, and only gets heavier when wet. The stream where we fished, Noontootla Creek, was high, there were slick rocks and overgrown banks, and my new wading staff kept coming apart when I needed it.

Wading the Noontootla wore me out. I felt old.

The Noontootla is a small stream on private land, and all the fish were wild, none stocked. Normally it would have been terrific fishing, but they’d had rain and then some more rain, so the creek was running high and the fish were either sulking, dispersed, or already over-fed in the wash off. Our guide, Randy Bailey with Reel ‘Em In Guide Service, started the morning confident and ready to spend the day netting fish, and then we actually fished.

Randy must have adjusted my flies a half-dozen times trying to find something that worked. Early on I got one slap from a small fish on an indicator dry fly, and Randy caught a nice rainbow when he flipped out a streamer just to test the water. Otherwise nada. I should have known we were in trouble when the guys at the Fish Hawk in Atlanta told me we were going to catch a lot of fish. I should have knocked on wood, burnt a candle, and turned around three times and spat.

We fished nymphs. We fished dry flies. We fished nymphs under dry flies. We fished streamers. I even fished the girdle bugs they sold me at the Fish Hawk. Our friends Shelley and Mark fished a different beat with a different Reel ‘Em In guide, Chris Bradley , and Shelley caught a nice fish. She might tell you that she didn’t actually land the fish, that it came off when it was almost to hand, but if she won’t tell even a little white lie then I guess I’ll have to do it for her. Shelley caught that fish, and Mark got a photo, if not of the actual fish who’s to know?

Mark didn’t catch a fish. Kris didn’t catch a fish. I didn’t catch a fish. We fished hard. It was a beautiful day and a beautiful creek and by noon I was exhausted. When we were done I slept for about 18 hours, with no breaks except of course for lunch and dinner. I gained about eight pounds in Georgia, so I didn’t miss any lunches or dinners.

Google Maps

The next day Mark and Shelley flew back to Houston from Atlanta. Kris and I drove the half-dozen hours to Savannah, out of the mountains, through Atlanta and Macon, and into the Coastal Plain. Georgia’s a pretty big place, and there were plenty of places to fish that we missed. We didn’t even fish for bluegill in that pond behind the barbecue place, though I was tempted.

Savannah is a great vacation town. You can shop in Savannah. You can eat in Savannah and drink in Savannah, you can go to the beach, and you can just look around and see history. Best of all though, not far from the town, you can fish this.

I love coastal marshes. Sometimes I think it comes from growing up in the Great Plains–it’s flat and mostly treeless and covered with grass, just like home, and if it weren’t for all that water it could be West Texas. I lived years in Houston before I realized that there was wildness just an hour away, and that it was full of stuff no one would ever see unless they took some trouble.

Fishing for redfish near Savannah is a little different from fishing for redfish on the Texas Coast. Instead of fishing in the bay flats inside the barrier islands, Chad took us upstream on the Vernon River, away from the Atlantic into brackish tidal water. There were alligator gar and marsh grass and oysters. We could hear marsh wrens, and a quarter mile away, high in a dead tree, we could see a bald eagle. In the river, we could see dolphin fins while they cruised. The place we were, where land joins ocean, is rich with life, and while you’re there it demands your attention.

We fished out of Chad’s Hell’s Bay Professional, which is a fine Florida poling skiff. He poled the boat along the banks and called out the redfish–there were plenty of fish cruising the banks, and even if they didn’t take we got plenty of casts to cruising fish. While the water wasn’t always clear enough to see the fish themselves, the big pushes of water were unmistakeable. Even the May weather was great, sunny and warm with mild wind.

Chad knew the river, had grown up on the river, but he was also so proud of his city that it was contagious. Sure, he knew the fishing, but he also knew the restaurants, the neighborhoods, the hotels . . . It was fun just sitting back and listening.

And I’m game for more Savannah. There are more fish to catch, and Chad’s right, it’s a special place. Like I said, I’m kinda sorry I already caught that fish in Georgia. I’m ready to go back.

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Brook Trout, Libby Camp, North Maine Woods, September 9-14, 2023

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We didn’t drive to Libby Camp the obvious way. If we’d stayed on the highway we could have driven on paved roads a good bit longer, so of course we didn’t do that. We drove the back way, west and then north around the back side of Baxter State Park. Kris drove and I napped.

I napped because I was sick, having been blindsided with a cold on the flight to Maine the morning before. I worried that it might be Covid, but it felt so purely like a cold that I didn’t worry much, and anyway there were no tests handy. I had been fine the day before we left. When I got onto the flight the next day I felt awful, but by then I was committed. By our second day in camp I was tired but mostly recovered. And anyway by then it was Kris’s turn to be sick, and she was doing an exemplary job of it for both of us.

So for me the cold was short-lived but rife with misery. The morning we drove to Libby Camp from Bangor I felt so bad that I didn’t even pretend I wanted to drive. I alternately dozed, blew my nose, and displayed manly stoicism, manly stoicism being the same as frequent and bitter complaining. I was particularly whiny when I woke up after lunch and had no clue where we were. Kris wasn’t real sure either, so I didn’t accomplish much except to increase her angst.

Kris at least was following a downloaded route, and it wasn’t her fault that the map app had gone on a backroads buying spree. We had only wanted to see Mount Katahdin when we left the highway. What we got was a tour of the Great North Maine Lumber Roads.

There are roughly 3.5 million acres of land in the North Maine Woods, and most of what isn’t water is a mix of second- or third- or more-growth mixed timber. Most of those 3.5 million acres are privately owned by lumber companies, and all of those dirt roads exist for the happiness of lumber company lumber trucks. By both the rules of the North Maine Woods and simple physics Nissan Rogue rental cars must yield.

I’m guessing returning a flattened rental car to National would have raised questions.

Back to that first day, at the Telos Road checkpoint on the backside of Baxter State Park we paid our $100 entry fee for a week in the Great Private North. Had we been 70+, our passage would have been free, but all in all we got our money’s worth. I’m not in any hurry for free passage. It’ll get here soon enough.

Jeffrey Labree, not Neil Thomas

Libby Camp has been in the North Maine Woods for somewhere north of 100 years. They cater to hunters, fishers, and winter snowmobilers. In addition to those field sports they offer family adventures–hiking, orchid hunting, canoeing, staying in a cabin in the woods with no TV or internet . . . It sounds wholesome and unforgettable. When I was 10 if my parents had taken me there I’d have been in heaven. I was pretty much in heaven six decades down the road.

We had signed up for Orvis Week, and there were three other anglers with us for the week: Bruce from South Carolina, Mike from upstate New York, and Paul from Tampa via Austin. Off and on while we were there we also met other anglers. There was a nice downstate Maine couple who interpreted many things Maine for us, and who called the state game warden at Bar Harbor to make sure we’d be safe notwithstanding the projected arrival of both the Thomases and Hurricane Lee. And the first night at dinner there was a strong personality who complained that while he had caught plenty of fish, he hadn’t caught anything big. Outside of politics I’ve rarely met someone with such a strong grasp of missing the point, but he was amusing, and his friend was along for the ride. After dinner they left for Portland, five hours south. I hoped they wouldn’t hit a moose. I’m rather fond of moose.

Did you know that in South Carolina they apparently mispronounce both crappie and pecan? All I’ve got to say is that since they kicked off the Civil War and repeatedly elected Strom Thurmond, South Carolinians shouldn’t be allowed the final word on anything.

At the heart of Libby Camp is a lodge building where we all hung out and ate communal meals. Libby’s guest cabins and work buildings surround it. Everything faces onto Lake Millinocket, where Libby keeps its float plane, a trio of small motorboats, and a passel of canoes and kayaks. The lodge building has both electricity (thanks to a generator) and internet (thanks to Mr. Musk’s Starlink), but the cabins don’t have either. Light in our cabin was from propane lanterns, which were wholly admirable for producing warm glows, but were maybe not the completest thing for finding lost socks. Heat in the cabins was from a wood stove and piled quilts. Air conditioning in the cabin was from opening the windows and deconstructing piled quilts.

There was a point, probably when I was admiring one of the mounted moose heads, when I thought what a mighty fine job Libby Camp had done mimicking a backwoods fishing lodge. Then I realized I was a mighty fine idiot. I had experienced this weird sense of dislocation once before in Hawaii, in the bar at the Hotel Moloka‘i, when I caught myself admiring what a fine job they’d done copying a tropical bar. Sometimes you get lucky enough to stumble into the real deal.

I was supposed to fish five days but fished four, with one day off to look after Kris, sleep off cold remnants, and play the guitar. Kris fished three days and slept two. Of the four days I fished, I spent two of the days floating in canoes on ponds while our guide, Jeffrey Labree, moved me into position so that I could look good casting. Two other days we waded rivers. The ponds involved a bit of hiking. One of the rivers involved a 30-minute trip in a Cessna float plane, and the other needed four hours of driving and being on watch for lumber trucks.

There’s a lot of the North Maine Woods.

There were also a lot of fish, and I didn’t catch many larger than ten inches. Jeffrey said that one of my missed hits was easily a 20-inch landlocked salmon, which would have been a fish of a lifetime. I missed it. I’ve missed enough fish-of-a-lifetime by now to know that’s ok. The fish aren’t hankering to participate in my obsession, and just knowing they’re there and being lucky enough to spend some time in their vicinity is plenty good for me. And the memory of that hit from that fish is its own good thing. Sitting here days later and a thousand miles away I think I can conjure everything about that instant in my mind’s eye.

Landlocked salmon.

On the day I fished without Kris, I spent a day on Brown Brook Pond in a canoe, throwing dry flies that I’d tied, an elk-hair caddis and a Goddard caddis, and Jeff’s streamers until I was tired of catching fish. Jeffrey guessed I caught somewhere north of 40 brook trout and maybe as many 50, lovely tiny perfect things, and I must have missed an equal number because, well, that’s what I do. I rarely keep count of fish, not because I’m too proud to know, but because I lose track. I’ll trust Jeffrey’s number, mostly because I want to, but also because it felt like a 50-fish day. Whether it was or not doesn’t matter.

You know the best thing about fishing in Maine? The entire week we only fished with dry flies on the surface and streamers. We never fished with nymphs underwater. I know that if you want to catch fish, you have to fish underwater with nymphs, and I have done it from west to east, from here to Alaska, but truth be told I kinda hate them. Fishing with streamers–baitfish imitations–is most of what I do here in Texas, and fishing with surface dry flies is just a joy.

Fishing on the ponds you could just throw the fly any old place and the fish were like as not to be there. Fishing the streams we fished mostly downstream–which is not by any means the norm with dry flies. With the streamers you would let the streamer swing while you retrieved upstream. With the caddis dry flies–and we fished caddis dry flies and nothing else–you’d sometimes let the flies drift and sometimes skate them across the surface. It was all very satisfying.

Brook trout.

Our final day we went to Webster Pond in the float plane, and it was the first time Kris and I could really see how big things were. At the pond outfall Kris stood in one place for the day casting one of Jeff’s flies, a candy caddis. It was named by his granddaughter because it looked like candy, and Kris suspected there may have been actual candy involved. Jeff told me a story about his own childhood which I will shamelessly steal, about fishing at 10 with his aunt and uncle for Atlantic salmon, and while the party let Jeff cast to a salmon he was supported in the river current by another angler. The other angler was Ted Williams.

That last day I moved up and downstream around Kris, fishing some with the candy caddis, some with a black ghost streamer that I had tied. I picked the black ghost because it was pretty and, well, with me and flies pretty will always do it. Jeff told me later that they fished black ghosts mostly in ponds, and while I wasn’t in a pond, like I said, it was pretty. I caught some fish, and some of them were brook trout.

Neil Thomas, not Jeffrey Labree.

Kris said that day that without moving much she had caught 19 trout and asked me how many I caught. I asked her if I could count fall fish and she said no–fall fish are considered a trash fish not worthy of notice. Honestly though my judgment’s not that refined. Of course counting them or no, I had no very precise idea how many fish I had caught, and I didn’t lie, either. I told her that with fall fish it was certainly more than 19, but without, no, I hadn’t caught 19 trout.

And I think that’s true. Between you and me though, I’m counting the fall fish.

Fall fish.