This was our second trip to Newport, and we had to go back because the first trip we didn’t catch anything. This time one of us caught a good striped bass, and one of us foul-hooked something called a chub mackerel. Foul-hooked means you accidentally snag the fish somewhere besides the mouth. Here are two truths about fly fishing: whenever you foul-hook a fish, it’s a bad thing; and whenever you catch something called a chub, it’s also a bad thing. The combination creates kinda the worst of undesirables. I would have counted the chub though, if only I hadn’t foul-hooked it.
I guess I have to go back. Kris doesn’t, not that I’m jealous, but I suspect she’ll want to go along. She catches great fish in Rhode Island.
We fished with Captain Rene Letourneau, who has spent 71 years in Rhode Island. Rene put us on fish after fish after fish. Why didn’t I catch a fish? I couldn’t keep my line untangled. I couldn’t keep from standing on my line. I couldn’t cast. I was hopeless. Now mind, I’m not usually a horrible caster, but after spending a week two-hand casting in Alaska, I guess I’d forgotten how to cast a single-handed rod.
Last Saturday back in Houston, at the Texas Flyfishers annual mini expo, Jeff Ferguson from Lake Charles told me what I was doing wrong, and I slapped my forehead and said duh. Then I mentioned that in Rhode Island I was fishing with sinking and intermediate lines, not floating lines.
“Oh, that’s different . . . ” and then Jeff tried to explain how I needed to cast a sinking line and it was too much information and I had to walk away.
Even casting badly, I got plenty of shots. We were fishing where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Rhode Island coast, so even if Rhode Island is a tiny state it’s a pretty big place to fish, and seeing from the ocean side where the Atlantic meets the rocks is in itself worth the trip. Captain Letourneau went to where he expected fish and then we watched for birds. The striped bass chase baitfish to the surface, then the birds join the feeding frenzy. The water is boiling with fish and the sky is boiling with diving gulls. It all lasts a few minutes, and then it dies until it pops up again 200 yards away. I had some hook-ups but lost them. My most exciting fish wasn’t a striper at all but a a toothy bluefish that took my fly just long enough to cut my leader.
Did I mention that one of us caught a great striped bass, over 30 inches and about 12 pounds, and it wasn’t me? Dammit.
When we were in Alaska one of our guides, Tom Schaeffer, was from Maine, and he told us about his nephew’s new bonefish lodge in the Berry Islands in the Bahamas, Soul Fly Lodge. In Rhode Island, Rene was telling us about his trip to Soul Fly Lodge in the Bahamas with Peter Jenkins, who owns The Saltwater Edge in Newport. We’d met last year the first time I didn’t catch a fish in Rhode Island. Our last day at the dock there stood Peter, who was buying a new used boat, and who told us he’d invested in Soul Fly Lodge in the Bahamas. Now I kinda feel it’s preordained that we go to Soul Fly Lodge in the Bahamas. Are the Bahamas a state? Can we fit it in after the Dakotas?
Anyway, I’m ok with going back to Newport. We found a place to stay that wasn’t extraordinarily expensive–and there are a lot of places to stay in Newport that define expensive. The Sea Whale was roughly $200 per night, which in Newport counts as a bargain. The Sea Whale had it’s own humble charm and free parking, was spotless, and was only a block from Flo’s Clam Shack.
We reconnected with clam shacks, which are the greatest invention since taco stands, and over the three days we were in Rhode Island we made it to three: Flo’s in Middletown, Tommy’s World Famous in Warwick, and the Sea View Snack Bar in Mystic, Connecticut, where we went to see the Mystic Seaport Museum. There are a lot more clam shacks to visit. Fried clams and chowder are now high on my list of great picnic table eating, though for my money clam cakes are a poor second to hush puppies. Clam cakes could be greatly improved with some green onions and corn meal, but then hush puppies could probably be improved with some bits of clam.
I had imagined Alaska, and not just the bears, either. I had imagined glaciers and mountains, forests and Western streams and endless fish–like Yellowstone, but better, with more of all the stuff that makes the West wild. That’s not exactly the Alaska where we fished. We spent a week on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta where the Kanektok River meets the Bering Sea, and it was both different and more interesting.
Swinging for Kings
We fished six days at Deneki Outdoors’ Alaska West camp, five miles upstream from the coastal village of Quinagak, population 856. We were where Alaska ended and the Bering Sea began, with no roads into town through the tundra. Quinagak is 72 air miles from the next largest town, Bethel.It was pretty remote.
Fishing for salmon in Alaska is about time. Arrive two weeks too early or two weeks too late and you won’t catch the salmon you want. The salmon come in from the sea on a schedule, year after year, in bigger or smaller numbers, though it seems that these days the numbers are always smaller. We chose early July for king salmon, the largest Pacific salmon. Hubris I reckon.
Fly fishing for kings differs from most other fly fishing. The rods are different. The lines are different. The flies are different.
Spey rods are long, 13 feet compared to the usual 9-foot fly rod, and heavy. You use both hands to cast, and there’s no back-cast. It’s the simplest fly cast, a roll cast, but with some complicating twists and turns and issues of timing, and the arcane lines are the heart of it. We fished with Skagit lines. There is another type of spey line, a Scandi line, but it’s the Skagit that’s used on the Kanektok for kings.
Skagit lines are short, as short as 20 feet, and thick and heavy. They’re the colors of Play-Doh so you can see them on the water, and they’re thick as baling wire, nearly an 1/8th of an inch. Skagit line weights are measured in grains. The heaviest part of a regular 9-weight redfish line, a heavy line, might weigh 330 grains. My 8/9-weight Skagit line weighs 600 grains. See what I mean by arcane? They use an ancient alchemist weight system to measure the lines, and I doubt that much of anybody knows what a grain actually is. Regardless, nearly twice the weight makes a difference, whether it’s measured in grains or in kilograms or in ounces.
The Skagit line is attached to the reel through 100 feet of thin plastic-coated running line, and then through 200 yards of braided nylon backing. We would cast some of the running line, but only saw the backing when a hot fish ran.
Skagit lines are designed to pick up and throw a sinking tip that is also heavy. A sink tip’s plastic coating is mixed with ground tungsten to sink into the river as much as 7- or 8-inches per second. At the end of that heavy ten-foot sink tip is a large, annoying fly with the added water weight of a good river baptism. And the flies are annoying. Once they hit freshwater from the sea, salmon aren’t feeding. The flies are designed for provocation, not imitation.
Learning to spey cast is not for the faint-hearted. The heavy lines, large soaked flies, and high line speed can leave a lasting impression, even if you don’t actually hook yourself. I thwacked my left ear hard, and another bad cast took my stocking cap into the river. If I hadn’t been wearing the cap it would have been bits of my scalp.
When we started on Sunday we were less than competent casters. By the next Saturday we were casting more or less in the vicinity of ok. Our guides were good teachers, and we were at it most of 10 hours a day for six days. Even I had a chance of getting better.
We waded along gravel bars, trying to fish the places the salmon might hold before another upstream push. There was enough river and few enough anglers to always have our own private gravel bar. We’d wade out in the shallows then cast across to the deeper water, maybe 70 feet, more likely 60, and let the fly and 10-foot sink tip drag down and across in the current. That arc–more of a rounded right angle, really–is the swing, arced down and across from me, the pivot. When the line and fly were almost directly below me I would let the fly hang in the current, then retrieve line back until I could cast again.
When I usually fish, I cast to fish I see, or cast to where I think fish are likely. This was more like broadcasting on the radio, casting out to as much of the river as I could cover and then letting the fly search. Cast, swing, retrieve, step downriver one or two steps, and then do it all again. Then do it all again. Then do it all again. I never really knew who was out there.
Those tungsten sink tips? Rio fly lines sells them as MOW tips, and I was told that MOW are the initials of three former Alaska West guides who developed the lines. The Kanektok has the reputation of one of the best places in the world to swing flies for kings, and whether or not you catch fish, it’s a mesmerizing business.
The River, the tundra, and the sea.
Most anybody can work up some mystical awe for a mountain, but it’s hard to work up much awe for a delta. Its beauty is more difficult to parse. I’ve probably spent more time fishing coastal marshes than most, and that’s what first struck me about the Kanektok. Out of context, if someone told you that those were mangroves, not stunted alders, and that that was marsh grass, not tundra grass, you’d like as not believe you were somewhere in Belize, or Galveston, or New Orleans.
The Kanektok flow was steady and smooth. The gravel bottom was easy to wade, though it did get deep. We stayed in the shallows, and I doubt that I ever waded in water that was much above my knees.
At the sea the mouth of the Kanektok is a tidal plain. At low tide at the outlet there were sand bars and tall, cut banks. Twelve hours later, everything we saw would be hidden under ten feet of high tide. I climbed up a bank, in part from a full bladder and in part from curiosity, and from there the tundra grass, flat and seemingly endless, was dotted with purple fire weed, white yarrow, and yellow grundsels.
I’ve read that in summer the Bering Sea hosts the largest biomass on earth, and that carries over into the Delta. Even along the relatively people-inhabited river we watched swallows attack a golden eagle, compared the glaucous gulls to our own smaller laughing gulls, saw beaver swim dragging fresh-cut alder, and watched tiny yellow warblers, maybe from as far south as the Yucatan, explore the bankside alders.
An odd factoid: the average American eats about one ton, 2000 pounds, of food each year. In Quinagak, about 700 pounds of each resident’s annual food supply comes from subsistence fishing, hunting, and gathering. Even with our annual fig crop and July okra production, plus those two or three tomatoes each year that actually ripen, I doubt that we get 25 pounds of food per year from anywhere but the HEB. And this year the figs didn’t make because of the drought. We’ve had a lot of okra though.
There’s Yup’ik archeological history near Quinagak that dates from as early as 1350, so it’s a well-established trading site, and probably a fishing site. During the year though the current residents’ ancestors would disburse throughout the region to gather food. I suppose that’s part of the legacy of the Alaskan Native Claims Act: it mandated that Native Alaskans pick their spot. Maybe there’s an anthropologist somewhere who knows.
Anyway, back to that 700 pounds. There always seemed to be Quinagakians on the river snagging sockeye. It wasn’t sporting, but then it wasn’t meant to be. It was harvesting. And from the river mouth we could watch Quinagak boats put out to sea to net fish.
On the Kanektok, the king return was down, and for the season Alaska had banned chum salmon fishing because the numbers of returning chum are way off. Global warming maybe, maybe the efficiency of gill nets, maybe both. Probably combinations of things I can’t imagine.
Fish, No Fish
The first day I caught five fish. Now mind, any day with five fish is a good day, and I caught one 15-pound king, a couple of smaller jacks, and two chum. They were bright, fast fish, only a few miles from the ocean and not yet changing to their spawning form and colors, not yet dying.
We couldn’t target chum, but when we fished for kings we couldn’t help accidentally catching chum. We landed and released them as quickly as we could. The jacks are a bit of an oddity, and are defined by Alaska law as any king salmon that’s less than 30 inches long. The two Jacks I caught the first day were big for jacks, maybe close to ten pounds. They were good fish, but they weren’t 30 inches. They weren’t kings.
Kings go out to the ocean for five to eight years before they return to their home river. Jacks are immature males, always males, teenagers, who go out to the ocean but then return to their river after one to three years. People say it’s a bit of a mystery why the jacks return early, but do teenage boys ever believe in the possibility of death? Are teenage boys everywhere not stupid for the chance to get laid? Where’s the mystery?
The first day my five fish were the best catch for the camp, and I reveled in it, certain that I had this Alaska thing down. The next day I followed it up with nothing. Nichts, nada, nil. I worked hard, and came back to camp in the evening shamefaced. Kris caught fish, Kris always catches fish. Within a couple of hours of arriving at camp she walked down to the river and caught a nice rainbow. Then she caught a jack, a chum and a rainbow on Monday, a jack and two rainbows on Tuesday, a chum on Wednesday, two rainbows on Thursday, a jack, a king and the first pink of the season on Friday, and three rainbows and two jacks on Saturday. She mostly spent her time in Alaska outfishing me.
I had imagined Alaska as a steady stream of fish, and after going nil on Monday, on the third day, Wednesday, I caught one jack.
None of this matched my imagination. On Thursday again I caught nothing. I hooked two fish and lost them after setting the hook. Once I tried to set the hook too soon after the slightest nudge.
I got plenty of practice casting.
All of this was done under lead skies, in cold and rain. Kris caught fish and I caught nada.
Besides the obvious differences in rod and line, maybe the biggest difference between swinging flies and other fly fishing is the take. So much of fly fishing is visual, or a fish attacks a retrieved streamer. You watch the line, you watch an indicator on the line, you watch the fish, or you watch the fly. You’re active, you’re looking. Swinging the fly, on the other hand, is all tactile. The connection through the line between you and the hook is direct, and it’s the only connection. We couldn’t see what was happening beneath the surface, but could only feel a nudge, a tug, and then the heavy pull of the fish on the line. If you hadn’t already blown it, that’s when you would set the hook. It is the most connected, electric thing.
On Friday, I lost a good king after a good fight, and landed another king within a mile of the ocean. There was a lamprey wound on its belly, and it still had the sea lice it would lose in freshwater. Kris also landed a king, and her fish had the beginning colors of the spawn. Late in the day I hooked a salmon, and it ran down and across the river, taking all of the 100-foot running line and a good bit of the braided backing. I saw the fish once, 100 feet across and downriver, dragging the long curve of my line and jumping upriver parallel to the surface. While I fought the fish it started to rain, the only rain of the day, big, heavy drops. When I finally landed the fish it was a huge chum, bigger than any of the kings I’d caught, and by then the rain had stopped. Alaska can be a volatile place.
Chris the Guide spent time reviving the fish, and Kris the companion snapped a photo when he took it from the net. It was nothing but a moment, a few minutes to revive the fish, and a brief glimpse of the sea, of the river, of a different place from what I had imagined.
Our last day
Our last day fishing, Saturday, was bright and clear, warm and sunny, with low tides. It was a terrible day for fishing, though of course Kris caught all sorts of fish. We fished for a bit, caught nothing, then went down to the mouth of the river at the sea, as much to see it as to fish. After lunch Chris the Guide ran the boat upriver 15 miles to fish for trout with single-handed rods. We caught some on heavy sculpin patterns, and Kris caught a couple of jacks, but we went as much to sightsee as to fish.
They were good rainbow trout, big by the standards of the lower 48, as much as 20 inches. They weren’t big Alaska trout though. Those would come later in the season, and downriver, closer to the ocean, after more salmon had spawned and died and the trout were fat with salmon flesh and eggs.
Upriver I sat bankside to change flies and was swarmed with mosquitos. They weren’t as substantial as our Gulf Coast mosquitos, more of whisps of mosquitos, but they were real enough and plenty numerous and persistent, plenty annoying, and until we left that place the swarm stayed with me. I guess that was something I hadn’t really imagined either. Just like I hadn’t imagined the tundra, or the wildflowers, or the tiny bank-side yellow warblers.
On our final sunny day I could finally see the sockeye ghosting upriver to spawn. It was a continuous line of driven fish, and I watched hundreds, maybe thousands. They coasted up the shallows where I stood, and would come within a few feet of me then swerve deliberately, out and around me, never stopping, never running, saving their energy to move upstream.
The sockeyes were fish I couldn’t catch, or at least that I wouldn’t snag. I would go again just to watch those fish.
Early May we fished the Housatonic River with Bert Ouellette. We booked two days , but after 20 minutes we’d landed matched rainbow trout, and then one or the other of us really never stopped catching fish. It was dandy fishing both days.
We found Bert through Orvis, which makes finding guides easy. Deciding on the Housatonic in the first place was harder. The Farmington River is the best known Connecticut river, and while we were at the Wulff School our fellow students from Connecticut–just about every third citizen of Connecticut was at the Wulff School for casting lessons–insisted that the Farmington was the very place to fish. I started having buyer’s remorse for booking the Housatonic.
Now mind, I don’t know much about Connecticut rivers, but I’ve been looking at Connecticut as a fishing destination off and on now for three years. The impression I have–almost certainly wrong–is that the Farmington is smaller, wadeable, and very pretty, but it’s also more crowded. The upstate Housatonic, more remote and harder to fish without a boat, is less crowded. We saw some anglers wading, but it didn’t look easy. We only saw two other boats, and one of those was a couple of UConn graduate students counting radio-tagged fish.
We fished out of Bert’s ClackaCraft drift boat. Drift boats are funny looking row boats, usually around 16 feet long, 6 feet wide at the beam, and pointed at the bow and stern to move forward or backward in current. Drift boats are best known for their radical, rocking-horse rocker that lets the rower maneuver through rapids. All things being equal, if given a choice between a rubber raft and a drift boat, I’d get in the drift boat every time.
Bert was good company . . . On the other hand Kris and I badly misled Bert. By the time we got to Connecticut, we’d been practicing casting for two solid days. We will probably never be better casters than we were for the two days we fished with Bert. Bert thought we were pretty good casters, though I disabused him as quickly as I could by catching my fly in every other tree along the bank, and tangling my line into implausible knot combinations just to prove it could be done. It wouldn’t be a fishing trip without that sort of thing.
Bert rowed the drift boat, changed out flies, told stories, told us which side of the boat to fish on and how, and untangled my tangles. He tried to teach me some stuff about downstream drifts, and why I was tangling my line so often–apparently when something happened in the water, when either I caught a snag or I had a tug from a fish, I’d jerk the rod up and then suddenly stop, so that the line met itself coming and going. I did manage some world-class tangles.
The upper Housatonic is pretty big, perhaps 150 feet across, tree-lined with hardwoods, hemlock, and pine, and protected from development along one bank by a railroad right-of-way. It falls out of the Berkshire Mountains and deeper, slower water and shallow riffles break up long stretches of steady current.There are rocks everywhere, ancient metamorphic gneiss I think, pushed up along the continental plates to form the Berkshires and the rest of the Appalachians. In fast water the rock gardens jut out of the river to challenge the rower, and in the longer deeper drifts they lurk underwater to snag flies. Particularly my flies.
The weather in early May was just like fish like it, cloudy and drizzly and a bit cold. On sunny days fish are more visible to overhead predators and can be even more skittish than their norm. Overcast makes them happy. Even with the cloud cover we watched a bald eagle dive to catch a fish, and then bicker over its catch with an osprey. The eagle kept the fish. Usually it’s the other way around, and I suspect before we saw it that the eagle had already forced the osprey to drop the osprey’s fish. I think we only saw the second part of the drama.
Upstate Connecticut is second-home country, and the bank without the railroad is dotted with interesting houses. It gave us something to talk about between fish, but the houses, even the uglier houses, were surprisingly unobtrusive. Everything is tempered by the woods.
Over our two days we caught rainbow trout, brown trout, smallmouth bass, and one native yellow perch. I’d never seen a yellow perch, and it was in full spawning colors and full of eggs. Kris wanted to rush it to the maternity ward. Bert noted that it was funny that the one native fish we caught was the most tropical-looking of the bunch.
Nothing was happening on the surface of the river, so I fished with nymphs some of the time, and some of the time with streamers. Kris fished with streamers, sometimes with two on her line at once. A nymph is supposed to imitate bug life underwater, and Bert set up a drop-weight rig with clinch weights at the bottom underneath a surface bobber, so that the flies floated in the current close to river bottom and the bobber would indicate a take. Streamers usually imitate underwater baitfish, or sometimes crawfish (or in saltwater, shrimp or even crabs), and are what I’m most used to fishing. You have to let the nymphs float along with the current, and in my ideal world they would float along at the same speed as the boat. All I’d have to do is relax and watch the bobber, and that’s a job I’m probably competent to do. Of course the world doesn’t much pander to me, so nymphing usually consists of mending and adjusting the line until it drifts too far and you have to start over. It can be a lot of work.
Streamers meanwhile are retrieved across the current. Bert had us do something odd with the streamers. If you think about retrieving with a conventional rod and reel, you retrieve by cranking the reel, and unless you do something with the rod the retrieve tends to be steady. To give the lure action, you twitch the rod and hesitate or speed up during the retrieve. With a fly rod, the reel ain’t in it, and all the retrieval is done with your line hand, usually your left hand if you’re right-handed. The streamer always has a bit of up and down action because the retrieve has built-in stops and starts.
That wasn’t enough for Bert. He had us twitch the rod to impart even more motion to the streamers. No one had ever told me to twitch the rod tip on a streamer before, but it worked. It was kind of fun, too–I felt just like a real fisherman. We caught a lot of fish. Now I’m going to try it on my favorite bass pond.
Trout love mayflies of all things, and trout anglers love it when trout feed on the surface on rising mayflies. Not all mayflies are the same, and not all mayflies rise at the same time–different species will rise over the course of the spring and summer from April to October. Still, all mayflies of the same species do rise more or less together, otherwise they’d be coming off the river randomly and never hook up to party and reproduce the species. They have to plan ahead. Girl mayfly can’t text boy mayfly and say let’s us hook up on Tuesday in a couple of weeks.
Mayflies live most of their lives underwater as hideously ugly nymphs, and then emerge from the surface as pretty and delicate duns that mate, lay their eggs back in the water, and then die. Their out-of-water lives are so short that they don’t have mouths. There’s no drinkin’ at mayfly parties, though they do kinda dance. The emergence of those duns kicks off the prettiest (and most fun) kind of fly fishing, dry fly fishing, culminating during each hatch with the evening spinner fall when the spent mayflies fall dead back into the river en masse. When you talk to trout anglers, they talk a lot about which hatch is going to rise when, and what time to be on the river for the spinner fall.
Meanwhile, here in Texas, about as close as I get to fishing hatches is switching to bass popping bugs when the dragonflies show up on the bass ponds. I prefer blue for early season, and yellow as things get hot. Hotter.
The Hendrickson mayfly hatch is supposed to be the first major hatch on the Housatonic, but at least for now it’s apparently disappeared. I saw two lonely Hendricksons rising from the river in what should have been the heart of the Hendrickson season. Other mayflies will certainly hatch later, but it’s something you hear through the grapevine, that major hatches on major rivers, because of drought, climate change, whatever, are disappearing. It’s an odd thing to be worried about in these later times, but there you are.
So we fished nymphs and streamers, caught fish, and talked with Bert. What good company he was, what good fishing it was. By the end of the second day, I was worn out, and was sitting quiet at the back of the boat, watching Bert row and Kris fish. And fish. And keep fishing. Bert said that he’d never had a woman fish so hard from his boat, and I suspect Kris will think for all time that Bert says the sweetest things. Meanwhile back in Houston I reported Bert’s line to our kids and they laughed. When could Mom ever do anything she’d latched onto in moderation?
Our guide in Kaua’i, Rob Arita, said that he thought Moloka’i is the best bonefishing in the world.
That’s a surprising statement, especially about Hawaii, especially about a place as relatively obscure as Moloka’i. Usually descriptions of Hawaiian bonefishing tend more towards it’s interesting, not that it’s great. I’m not a good judge. I’ve fished for bonefish some, once on Oahu when I didn’t catch fish, and a couple of times each in Belize and the Florida Keys. I caught a pretty good fish in the Keys and a lot of smaller fish in Belize, but that’s it. I haven’t been to Venezuela or the Bahamas or to Christmas Island or any of the other numerous places where the bonefishing is famous. Hawaiian bonefishing is not famous, and is usually mentioned as an afterthought.
Outside of the islands, Moloka’i is mostly famous for its historic leper colony.
Here’s what I can tell you about fishing on Moloka’i. Over two days I had at least 30 legitimate shots at bonefish, scared off some fish by hitting them on the head with the fly, had a bunch of follows with no takes, and had a dozen takes when I either failed to set the hook or lost the fish during its run. I landed two fish, one about six pounds and one close to 10 pounds. Ok, ok, I’m a fisherman. It was absolutely 10 pounds, and it’s getting closer and closer to 11. That’s a lifetime bonefish, and that’s an extraordinary bonefish trip, anywhere.
Back to Rob and Kaua’i. I haven’t been to Maui or Hawaii Island, but it would be hard to find a place prettier than Kaua’i. Kaua’i was the setting for the movie South Pacific, which is all us folk of a certain age need to know. The song “Bali Ha’i,” by the way, is the worst earworm ever. Kaua’i is pretty developed now, with a surfeit of golf courses and condos–it tends towards a Florida beach resort–and the island Bali Ha’i in the movie is motion picture trickery–there’s no such place across a tranquil bay from Kaua’i–but Kaua’i is gorgeous, and it’s famous for producing championship surfers. We couldn’t fish where Rob wanted to fish on Kaua’i’s north side because of 40-foot swells. I bet it was great surfing.
We fished the east side in the surf, which had two- or three-foot breakers. No one was surfing.
I like the notion of fishing the surf, and I’ve had some pretty good days in the Texas surf, but I’m not sure I like the reality as much as the notion. On our day fishing, I blind-cast hard until my arm fell off, saw one bonefish (well, ok, Rob saw one bonefish), may have missed one take by a fish, stayed colder than I wanted, and got slapped around by the breakers. I’m not usually much of a cursing man, but at one point I was so sick of getting hit by breakers that I would face each new wave and tell it to fuck off. None of them did, but it made me feel better.
You can’t judge Kaua’i fishing by our bad day. Sometimes there are just bad days to fish, and that’s what we hit. There was nothing Rob could do, there was nothing we could do. We fished, and then I was kinda glad it was over and went and had a mai tai. I’d fish with Rob again in a heartbeat.
By coincidence, it turned out that Rob also partnered with our Moloka’i guide, Joe Kalima, to guide from time to time on Moloka’i, and the best part of our day was talking to Rob about Joe and fishing on Moloka’i. Rob showed us pictures of his 15 pound Moloka’i bonefish. He said that he thought Moloka’i was the best bonefishing in the world. Did I mention that? I can’t tell you what an extraordinary statement that is. Saying that Moloka’i is the best bonefishing in the world is like saying that Houston is a great walkable city. In our neighborhood that’s pretty much true, but it violates most people’s notions.
I may not be a competent judge of Rob’s statement, but I’ve fished with a lot of guides in a lot of places, and I will say that Joe Kalima is about as fun to fish with as it gets, not least because he brings his dachshunds on the boat. Saltwater fly fishing usually consists of one angler fishing, while the other helps spot fish. Fishing with Joe consists as often as not of one angler fishing, while the other sneaks off to scratch Boo-Boo the dachshund’s head. It makes for a very satisfactory day.
I suspect Joe guides fly fishers because he already knew the fish, Not because he knew fly fishing. He’s all you could ask in a guide though. Joe sees fish and he calls the shot. He can tell you how to land the fish. He’s funny. And, as they say in East Texas, he knows everybody on the island and the names of their dogs. He’s got great stories.
Getting to Moloka’i isn’t easy. Unlike Maui or Oahu where you can fly direct from the West Coast, you have to take a commuter flight to Moloka’i from Oahu or Maui. I’m not sure that everyone is happy you’re there, either. Plenty of the islanders have signs in the yard telling tourists to go home, though some temper the message by suggesting you spend your money and then go home (which frankly I pretty much agree with). I don’t remember why I picked it as a destination, but I’d read somewhere that Moloka’i is more like the Hawaii of 50 years ago than anyplace else in the islands.
Moloka’i has fewer than 7500 inhabitants, and when we picked up our rental and started driving down the island (I had also read, by the way, that Jeeps are recommended), my first impression was that it was exactly like Lockett, Texas. Yeah, it was set in the Pacific. Yeah, it’s arguably prettier than Lockett, the fishing is certainly better, and there are apparently even more of Joe Kalima’s friends and relations on Moloka’i than there are Streits in Lockett, but it shares the feel of any other relatively isolated, moderately self-contained country place. It has the kind of grocery store where any country people from the contiguous states would feel right at home. People may not always be happy, and sometimes it’s likely that getting by is hard, but the best of the people really are always the best.
Rob told a story about Joe, about how Joe didn’t have an ID for years, because Joe said that whoever might stop him on the island was likely his nephew anyway. That’s Lockett, Texas.
The only way to Moloka’i from Honolulu are 12-seater commuter flights on Mokulele Air. It’s worth getting to Moloka’i though. Did I mention that I think Moloka’i has the best bonefishing in the world, and that I caught an 11-pound bonefish?
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Here’s how I lost fish on Moloka’i:
I lost two fish when my leader broke. The leader is the size-graduated bits and pieces ofnylon knotted to the end of the fly line to attach the fly. I don’t know why it broke. Maybe it was cut on coral, maybe it was nicked or had a wind knot. It couldn’t have been that my knots failed. My knots never fail.
I lost one fish because my knot failed. When you fly fish, all the beauty is in the casting, all the work is in dutifully retrieving the line from your beautiful cast. I hold the rod with my right hand, and retrieve and set the hook with my left. By the time a fish takes, I may have 20 or more feet of line puddled at my feet. For most fish, that’s no big shakes, but when you catch a strong fish that runs (like a bonefish), then if the puddled line gets caught on something in the boat, or if you stand on it, or if it’s tangled and the tangled line gets stopped by the rod guides, then your leader will snap and you’ll lose the fish. My line got wrapped around my reel. My leader snapped right in the middle of a knot. I possibly cursed.
Four fish came off the hook. That’s annoying, but that’s the fish’s goal, and sometimes it happens. I de-barb the hooks on most of my flies to make it easier to get the hook out of the fish, and on the first day I mashed the barbs on my hooks. On the second day, after losing all those fish, I didn’t. I’m sure my decision not to flatten the barbs had nothing to do with me landing that 12-pound bonefish. Or was it 13-pounds? I think it might have been 14.
For the rest of the fish, I failed to either set the hook or be quick enough to even try. It happens.
I lost one fish that wasn’t mine to lose. Hooking a bonefish is a bit like hooking an ancient Volkswagen traveling away from you at 30 mph: you think you can slow it with a rod and reel but you’re not completely certain. Kris disputes that, and says to heck with the Volkswagen, it’s like hooking a Jaguar XJ12 screaming away at 60. You just hold on and hope it breaks down.
Kris finally hooked her fish when Joe poled us toward the take out. She saw the fish, cast and spooked it, then recast and it ate the fly. Meanwhile I was busy scratching Boo-Boo’s head. The last time we’d switched places she hadn’t bothered to pick up her rod and was fishing with mine, and as soon as the fish started to run she was yelling for me to take the rod before she lost either the rod or her fingers or most likely both. Of course I was a little worried about her fingers getting caught in the line, but I was more worried about my rod, and worried most of all that we’d never manage a hand-off. We did, and 40-feet further out the fish came off the hook.
When Joe stopped laughing, all he could say was did you see her face? I had. It was a memorable face, a shocked face, a horrified face, and accompanying that horror was the excitement of the puppies, the whir of the line coming out of the reel, and Kris’s demands that I take the rod.
Kris asked later if I got her picture playing her fish. I didn’t.
