Tag: Guides

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Small Texas Interlude

Yesterday we drove our skiff from Galveston, on the Texas Gulf Coast, 250 miles west on I-10, the highway that in my world stretches from El Paso to New Orleans (but in reality goes a bit further), to a tiny community outside San Antonio, Elmendorf, where we dropped the skiff off at the builder for some work and its motor’s 100-hour service.

We keep the boat in a dry stack, and don’t trailer often. Everything from loading the boat on the trailer to towing it through Houston down the interstate to San Antonio is terrifying.  We’re still married I think, at least no papers have been served on me yet. Kris did an excellent job on that last 100 miles into the New Water Boatworks. Let me say that again. Kris did an excellent job, and I’m sorry I yelled at her. I’m even sorry I offered advice from time to time while she was driving.

We’d planned to fish the Guadalupe late in the day, but it was after 4:00 when we dropped off the boat. We drove to New Braunfels, found our motel, and ate German food and drank German beer at Alpine Haus. After dinner we went to Gruene Hall to listen to music. Chronologically we might have been the elders at Gruene Hall, but as Kris noted a lot of younger folk looked like they’d been ridden hard more miles than us. Listening to the main attraction, Uncle Lucius, was like reading a pretty good mystery novel the plot of which you’d read a half-dozen times before. The opening act, Folk Family Revival, was terrific.

A couple of months ago, three guides from Go Outside Expeditions had done a presentation at Bayou City Anglers on trout fishing on the Guadalupe. They did such a nice job that last week I emailed them about fishing the Guadalupe.  The owner, Chris Adams, said that with the warmer weather the fishing on the Guadalupe was slowing (which was a surprise to me–I never knew it was fast). He recommended fishing the San Marcos.

I was happy as could be. I like the San Marcos, and many years ago had canoed it a good 20 times and had fished it once, but that was old history. It’s a Texas Hill Country river (though not really in the Hill Country), 75 miles long from its start at San Marcos Springs to its confluence with the Guadalupe. It’s lovely, with greenish clear water and good flow and lots of descents through class I rapids. Clovis Culture artifacts have been found at its headwaters, so it’s one of the oldest continuously settled sites in North America. Bank to bank it’s small, just right for goofing around for a day, which means it’s just right for fly fishing.

Prairie Lea between Luling and the town of San Marcos used to have the best kolaches in Texas, but it’s a long way out of the way from nowhere and the shop didn’t last. My high school classmate Mark Morgan’s aunt is the last house on the right on the way from Prairie Lea to the river, and Mark met us at the river because that’s where we met Chris-the-Guide and Mark happened to be in Prairie Lea. Confused? Kris was. What’s to wonder? Mark was there to add local color, mostly orange.

I only ever remember one lazy fishing guide. A redfish guide once dropped me off the boat and told me to stand there and watch for the fish to swim by. None came. I think the guide motored off and took a nap. Chris-the-Guide on the other hand was great. He knew his river and kept us fishing, working his way through downed trees, rowing us into position to cast, ducking when I cast, and  recovering hung flies. It was hard work, dragging the raft over trees and shallow gravel and staying calm while we dropped stuff into the water, including me. The spa treatment was free.

Kris-Not-the-Guide fished most of the day with a popper, I fished most of the day with a weighted streamer, typical bass stuff. Kris fished her Orvis 5 weight, I fished my Winston 6 weight. It all worked fine, just like Chris had said. Chris-the-Guide was a Winston pro-staff guide, and we talked about how nice the Winston rods felt casting but more important how pretty they are. Chris said there were people who didn’t like their looks.  I would never have imagined someone could find those pretty rods boring. You learn all sorts of stuff from guides.

We talked a lot on the way down the river. Chris suggested places to fish in North Carolina and Georgia and Virginia. He grew up a Southern kid, in Georgia, and while his accent passed for Texan he was more polite than us, and he unfailingly addressed me as sir. With age lots of people do, but I suspect that’s how Chris always talks to clients, and that it was something drilled into him by a correct Georgia upbringing.

Nothing we caught was big, the biggest was maybe a pound, but it was lively and fun casting. We pounded the bank, putting the fly as close as we could then taking a few strips then doing it again, just like Chris-the-Guide told us.  There were black bass, Guadalupe bass, sunfish (which I found myself calling perch–I haven’t called them perch in a good 50 years), and warmouth. We caught several black bass/Guadalupe hybrids, and a few purer Guadalupe bass, and Guadalupes being the state fish of Texas, that was particularly satisfying. I like to think that Guadalupes were what Cabeza de Vaca labeled trout when he came through in the 1500s.  The Guadalupe bass behave more like trout than black bass, feeding in faster water off seams and runs in the river. Or maybe Cabeza de Vaca called all fish trout. Or maybe my memory’s faulty and Cabeza de Vaca didn’t talk about trout at all.

We probably caught 15 fish in the five hours we were on the river, which for us is something of a record.

Morgan, the local color at the top of the post and perfectly good fly fisher, had stayed put to catfish bankside where we put in. chicken liver. Doughbait. Eight pound channel cat.

 

 

 

 

 

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New Orleans’ Guides

I’ve fished New Orleans once before, two days, post Katrina, maybe seven years ago. We stayed in the Roosevelt Hotel, home of the Sazerac Bar. The hotel had just reopened, but it was already a destination for wedding parties and conventioneers, and every time I’ve tried to get a room since it’s been full.  The Roosevelt was what a good old hotel should be, rococo and redolent of a time when people traveled by train and came to New Orleans for business at the Port of New Orleans and with Huey P. Long and for the wildness, but perfectly restored and well-managed.  We ate the best food I’ve ever eaten at Restaurant August, and didn’t feel bad about it because the chef, John Besch, hadn’t yet been called out for sexual harassment. We drank sazeracs in the Sazerac. We had the worst fishing guide ever.

I don’t remember the guide’s name, and wouldn’t tell it if I did. I’d asked a Houston shop for a recommendation. Their recommended guide was booked but he passed me on to this guy. Kris was there for a conference, and I fished the first day alone. It was March, maybe the worst time to fish Louisiana: windy and overcast. The guide picked me up at the hotel and drove to a place where I bought breakfast. It wasn’t anything special. His boat was in the shop–he had a Mitzi Skiff that seemed to be permanently in the shop and he was permanently and vocally unhappy with the boat and the company. He had borrowed a Hell’s Bay for the day. We got about a mile from the dock when he realized he had no gas and we had to turn around.  He speculated the gas had evaporated.

He was from Florida, the Panhandle, and guided in Louisiana in the winter. He was a Florida guy. He told me a story about how someone in Florida had just caught a record tarpon, maybe 190, on some impossibly light set up: a 4 lb tippet, a 4 weight rod, a 4 ounce brain. I don’t remember, but the angler seemed to have fought it for nine hours and it seemed cruel to the fish and stupid.  They could have hooked a rock with a 4 weight and had as much fun.  At least the rock would have already been dead.

The Florida guy re-rigged my redfish set-up, cutting off a nail knot on fly line because in Louisiana the fish were bigger.  I could have landed a tarpon on that nail knot. I did catch a redfish early the first day. It was the only fish we caught over two days. He wanted to take a picture and it took forever, me holding a dying fish while he changed camera lenses.

The second day when Kris went with us things got worse. He took the rod out of her hands to show her how to cast. There was a point where the forward gear on the boat wouldn’t work and the guide was banging on the motor with a wrench. I thought we’d spend the next five hours backing back to Venice. When he drove us back to the Roosevelt in his truck he drove and drank beer.

He was a young guy, and I hope he grew up smarter. What I remember the night we returned to Houston was Kris on the phone telling off the guide in New Orleans who’d made the recommendation. I’ve never seen Kris so mad, not even at me.

 

 

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I’m Going to Disney World

Actually I’m not.  I’m going to West Palm Beach in 23 days, where the Astros will play the Nationals in the first spring training game of the season.  Maybe somewhere between Mickey Mouse and 331  lynchings of African Americans, between Where the Boys Are and Scarface, there may be some there there in the Sunshine State.

I like to travel, and I’m old enough to know that at best when you travel you get some passing notion of a place, and you get some interesting tales with which to bore your friends.  There’s not much method in how I choose where I go:  I go places for business, or family, or to watch the Astros play.  Sometimes I go to fish.  But how I approach the place is usually similar. I try to get ready for travel by reading some books about the place I’m going.  If nothing else I at least read a mystery novel or two. I try to put together a music soundtrack of the place. I try to stay at a hotel with some history. I find it easiest to visit cities: there are civic buildings, there are museums, there are restaurants and baseball stadiums and public transportation.  Recently I’ve made it a point to go fishing because it gets me into the landscape.

We’ve booked a guide in Florida, found a place to stay, and bought our baseball tickets.  It’s a quick trip in and out to a place I went once, many years ago.  I didn’t fish then.  I saw no museums.  I drove around, went to the beach once, and saw nick-knack shops.

Getting ready to go to Florida I’ve been listening to Finding Florida by T.D. Allman. In many ways it’s a good book.  Did you know that Florida has no metals and no igneous rock? That makes it hard to advance to the paleolithic if you’re not already there, but apparently the aboriginal Foridians did quite well with what was to hand. I gather they ate a lot of oysters and made arrowheads out of fish bones. The pre-Columbians did not do so well with disease or the Spanish, and disappeared.  The Seminoles were not natives but refugees from Georgia, and would have to wait for the Americans to be mistreated.

Ponce de Leon never searched for the Fountain of Youth, and that favorite story of my childhood was made up out of whole cloth by Washington Irving.  Andrew Jackson was a bastard, but I had suspected as much. Allman criticizes the economic and racial reality of The Yearling, my mother’s favorite coming of age YA novel about a boy and his deer.  It was published in 1938 when she was 21.

Which is the problem with Allman: his unrelenting moral outrage.  Everybody was a bastard, at least among the Europeans and their descendants. No doubt the only things ever produced out of Florida were racism, cupidity, and film-flam, though being a Texan I don’t know why that makes them so special.  But truly, I really doubt that every Floridian woke up every day thinking I’m going to go out today and do something evil, or at least really stupid. Allman can even get indignant about Stephen F. Foster’s “Old Folks Back Home” for what seems like acres of print.  It just hardly seems worth the effort about a fake sweet song about longing.  All that righteousness does get wearisome, and honestly, I don’t know what he wants me to do? Not go to Florida? Tell all Floridians whose ancestors weren’t either Seminoles or slaves that they are deeply flawed?  Of course there is Florida Man.  Maybe they are deeply flawed.

Which gets back to how hiring a guide to go fishing for four hours is just a bit like going to Disney World, but then all travel is. At worst I’ll have a thrill ride courtesy of some poor fish, at best I’ll understand just a bit more of the world. I do need to watch Where the Boys Are.  I haven’t read Allman’s criticism of Spring Break yet.

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Hiring Fly Fishing Guides

Spring training is in West Palm Beach, and the games are in the daytime, so I really hadn’t planned to go fishing, but Kris wanted to go, and there you are. I didn’t know if there would be fly fishing in West Palm Beach, I didn’t know what to fish for, so I started hunting around the internet.

The first time I ever fished with a guide was probably 25 years ago, in Idaho, with Kris.  The guide intimidated me, and I thought he would rather have guided someone who knew what they were doing. We fished the Big Wood River, outside of Hailey where Ezra Pound was born.  I knew a good bit more about Ezra Pound than fly fishing.

My second trip with a guide was in Galveston, not long after, with Captain Chris Phillips.  I picked Chris because saltwater fly fishing in Texas wasn’t that common, and in Galveston Chris was it.  I thought Chris liked me a good bit more than I deserved, and I fished with him off and on for 15 years.  He was a legend in these parts, and when he died–eight years ago?–it was the death of a sweet man.

My third trip, with another Texas saltwater guide out of Rockport, was a bust, and I felt cheated.

I’ve fished with lots of guides.  I’ve had young guides who worked hard, old guides who were lazy, and vice versa.  I’ve had knowledgeable guides who taught me a lot, and I’ve even made a few friends.  Whether my guides were good or not seemed somewhat random, but I’ve worked out some guidelines:

  • If they’re in the Orvis lists, they’re likely to be ok.  You know the list, it’s on the Orvis website, and it’s one more thing they sell.  I’m certain the guides pay to be on there, but there seems to be vetting, and I’ve never had a bad guide off the list.  Ever.
  • Local fly shops will recommend good guides.  I’ve had guides who were abrupt, or too young, but I’ve almost always had good luck with the guide if not the fish.
  • Be dubious of the recommendations in your local fly shop of a guide many miles away.  They likely don’t know the guide.
  • A guide’s boat may be a good indication of his quality, at least in saltwater.  Guides with good boats are invested.  They’ve given their craft some care, even before you get there.
  • If a guide is booked for your time slot, ask for a recommendation, but don’t immediately assume their  recommendation is ok.  Guides may fish with a fellow guide or they may only share beers, but they aren’t likely to be guided by a fellow guide.
  • Guides who don’t fly fish may put you on fish, but they may not know what fly to use.  Especially in saltwater I’ve fished from time to time with conventional tackle guys.  It’s never been bad, and they knew the water, but they didn’t necessarily know flies.  I watched thousands of black drum stream by in the 9-Mile Hole near Corpus and had no idea what to throw at a black drum.  Black drum flies are not the same as redfish flies I gather, but you’d think if the guide fly fished I could have caught more than one.
  • When you’re going somewhere, read about the fishing where you’re going.  Check the internet.  Lots of guides write as advertising, and if what they write makes sense, they’re likely to make sense as well.
  • Product endorsements are meaningless for picking guides, but if you want to try a product line fish with an endorsed guide.  It’s a great way to try out equipment.

As for that guide on the Big Wood River, we were setting up rods and he pulled out new tapered leaders and put them on our lines.  He said “I always feel rich when I put on a new leader.” Great line, and something to remember.