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.
For trout in North Georgia we took 5-weight rods with floating trout lines. We used long 9-foot 4X fluorocarbon leaders with weighted nymphs. I took an Abel disc drag reel, kinda the pinnacle of obsessively over-built trout reels, but it didn’t get much of a workout. For all the trout I caught I could have used a spool of bright yellow sewing thread, or kitchen twine, or bailing wire, with any of them tied to a stick I picked up on the riverbank. It would have been harder to cast, but I would have caught just as many fish.
In saltwater we fished with 8-weight rods and floating redfish lines, with 7-foot 16 lb leaders. We used the guide’s flies, which if you squinted real hard looked a bit like tarpon toads. They were prettier flies than what I use at home for redfish. My redfish flies look like deformed bits of cotton plucked straight from the boll and colored brown with a Magic Marker. I forgot to take a photo of the guide’s redfish flies.
We could have used the guides’ rods instead of hauling our own to Georgia, but how could we ever amortize their cost if we didn’t haul them with us? We gotta get our money’s worth.
Barbecue
I found a list of Georgia barbecue places on the internet, and on the way to Savannah we stopped at one. Because I didn’t particularly like the barbecue, I’m not going to mention it’s name. Just remember, it’s somewhere between Ellijay, Georgia, and Savannah. I’m sure there are better places than the one I chose, but Georgia being Southern I expected anything that made a list to be quality barbecue. This wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t good either. Maybe I’ll try again someday.
We did get a pretty good Cuban sandwich in Blue Ridge, but as a Texan I have strong barbecue opinions but am mostly ignorant about Cuban sandwiches. I thought it could have used some pickles, but what do I know?
Donuts
We stayed in the northside Atlanta suburbs for wedding festivities. Two mornings we ate Atlanta suburban donuts, once at a utilitarian donut shop next to a gas station, Marietta Donuts, and once at an artisanal donut shop, Doughnut Dollies. Both had good donuts, and Doughnut Dollies managed to walk that fine line between too much imagination on the one side and boredom on the other. That’s not easy to do when you’re hawking artisanal doughnuts. I especially liked the frosting on Doughnut Dollies’ strawberry and orange doughnuts. All that fruit made me feel healthy.
Restaurants
Ok, so the barbecue we tried wasn’t great, but we otherwise ate a lot of good food in Georgia. In eight days I gained eight pounds.
The first night we went to a Korean place, Woo Nam Jeong Stone Bowl House, on Atlanta’s Buford Highway. Atlanta seems mostly to be either Anglo (50.7% in the metro area) or black (32.4% in the metro area), but that’s mostly. There is a Hispanic and Asian population, and Buford Highway is this strange culinary accident where a lot of Asian and Hispanic mom and pop restaurants have landed. I could have gone back to that Korean place for every subsequent meal. The food was so elegant but at the same time so homey and delicious that it was impossible not to be happy. All those dishes of pickled stuff couldn’t have been more beautiful. And all the bowls matched, which is more than you can always say at our house.
I suspect I could eat for days on Buford Highway.
Lunch Saturday we ate at Mary Mac’s Tea Room. It’s an Atlanta meat-and-three African American institution that serves huge–and I mean really really huge–portions of Southern food. Covering the walls they had photos of famous people who’d eaten there. There were several of Jimmy Carter and, of all people, the 14th Dalai Lama. I guess the Dalai Lama knows a good meat-and-three when he sees it. They didn’t ask for my photo for the wall, but I suspect that’s only because I couldn’t clean my plate.
Sunday evening we ate at a Vegan Mexican/Cuban place, La Semilla. Vegan Mexican/Cuban seems to me a strange combination, more because of the Mexican/Cuban than the vegan, but it was completely successful and very hip. I’m sure some of that hipness rubbed off, and you’re now reaping the benefit. Our friend Shelley can’t eat dairy, and she declared the vegan queso the trip highlight, because queso.
In Savannah we ate at The Grey, which is one of Georgia’s best-known restaurants. They priced accordingly, but it was worth it. If nothing else, it’s located in the old Savannah Greyhound Bus station, and who can resist repurposed 1930s streamlined modern art deco architecture? We couldn’t decide what to eat, so we copped out and ordered the tasting menu. They also had the greatest cop-out martini ever, named for one of the owners who could never decide what she wanted. It was advertised as a mix of curated gins and vermouths, with both a twist of lemon and olives. It was the perfect martini for the indecisive, and could only have been improved if they’d both shaken and stirred it. It was excellent, and if I’d drunk two it would likely have been more excellenter. I only had one and I could still barely speak English.
We ate at Common Thread, which was also highly recommended, expensive, and excellent, and we got ice cream at Leopold’s because we were walking down the street and there was a line. Who can resist a line at an ice cream parlor, and if you can, why would you want to? There’s a lot of good food in Savannah. There’s a lot of good food in Georgia, though the jury’s out on the barbecue. Did I mention I gained eight pounds?
The Civil War
Georgia was the industrial heart of the Confederacy. From 1863 to War’s end, Georgia was the final focus of the Union’s Western campaign. After the Confederates under General Bragg defeated the Union under General Rosecrans at Chickamauga, Ulysses Grant took charge of the Western campaign. Grant changed the War. Under Grant, General Sherman led the Union in two of the most important campaigns of the War, the Battle of Atlanta and Sherman’s March to the Sea. I had three great-great grandfathers at Atlanta, two Confederate, one Union. Those Union victories cut off the Army of Northern Virginia, and with Grant’s Virginia campaign the War ended.
Chickamauga, September 18-20, 1863, was a major Union loss, and the War’s second bloodiest battle. There were more than 34,000 Union and Confederate casualties, and more than 4,000 deaths. That means that over three days, 34,000 Americans, Southern and Northern, were shot, stabbed, or blown up, and more than 4,000 of them died. The Union fought at Chickamauga to capture the Chattanooga railroad hub and open Georgia for Union invasion. The South fought to destroy the Union’s Army of the Cumberland. The South won the battle, but under Bragg they didn’t cripple the Union army. Because the South failed, two months later at Missionary Ridge Chattanooga fell to the Union under Grant. That defeat at Chattanooga may well have ended the South.
We visited the Chickamauga battlefield, and weirdly it’s in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Congressional District. It’s odd that one small region could produce two such catastrophes.
Chickamauga National Battlefield. Apple Maps.
Back to Atlanta. In addition to wedding festivities and eating, we visited the Botanical Garden and the High Art Museum, but best of all we visited the strange Battle of Atlanta Cyclorama at the Atlanta History Center. The History Center has a solid presentation about the Battle of Atlanta, of which the Cyclorama is only a part, but the Cyclorama is its own attraction. It’s a 358′ x 49′ hand painted canvas, which is a painting longer than a football field. It may be the largest oil painting in the world.
Some interesting tidbits about the Cyclorama. According to the history center, Southern troops at the Battle of Atlanta outnumbered Northern, but the Cyclorama was painted in the 1880s in Ohio, a Union state. In the painting the South is vastly outnumbered. When the Cyclorama was first moved to Atlanta in 1891, many of the Union soldiers were repainted with grey uniforms to show the South winning the battle. It’s a problem with history. It’s hard not to slant the presentation.
Where We Stayed
In Atlanta we stayed in the Roswell DoubleTree. It was fine, but where we stayed was less important than that we were in the suburbs, and (except for the Atlanta Brave’s Truist Park), a lot of Atlanta eateries and attractions seem to be located centrally within easy driving range of downtown. Every time we went somewhere–well every time we went somewhere other than Total Wine, REI, or the wedding–we had to drive 20 miles. If I ever go back to Atlanta, I’ll stay somewhere central.
In North Georgia we stayed at a B&B, the Overlook Inn. If you’re going to some relatively remote mountain destination, you’re statutorily required to stay in a B&B. It was pretty, and on our second night we ate dinner there. Kris always complains about B&Bs because on the mornings we fish we never get to eat the breakfast, but she didn’t complain about this place, maybe because our friends the Marmons were there. And the dinner we ate there–all four of us had the smoked trout–was great. The Georgia mountain views were also great.
In Savannah we stayed at a restored 1960s motor lodge, The Thunderbird Inn. Who doesn’t like a restored 1960s motor lodge? This one had everything you could want except Magic Fingers, a swimming pool, and free parking. The turndown service was a Moon Pie and RC Cola, and there was 24-hour coffee and popcorn in the lobby. The rooms were small, the colors bright, and the sign was neon, so it was almost perfect in every way. It was also very central, but everything in Savannah seems reasonably central.
Where We Didn’t Go
When we fished in North Carolina we stayed with our friend Bryan, and his family had given him a week in Blue Ridge, Georgia, for his birthday. We went to Blue Ridge, and we had a good Cuban sandwich there, but Bryan didn’t go to Blue Ridge for the Cubano. Bryan went to Bill Oyster’s six-day bamboo rod building class. He hadn’t been yet when we stayed with them, but later he sent me pictures of the classes and the rod he built.
Now I can’t find Bryan’s pictures. They’re on my computer somewhere, probably under my virtual bed, or in a virtual drawer in my virtual closet. They were great photos, and I was jealous. Bryan made a beautiful rod.
Bill Oyster is famous for his rod-building class, and maybe more famous for his bamboo rods and his metal engraving. Bamboo rods aren’t explicable. They’re best compared to an old Jaguar E Type, or a 1956 Martin D-28, or a first edition of Absalom, Absalom. It may not be the most useful thing in the world, but it’s so . . . irreplaceable, beautiful, timeless . . .
One of Bill Oyster’s bamboo rods built for Jimmy Carter. Photo shamelessly cadged from OysterBamboo.com
And Bill Oyster makes some of the most beautiful bamboo rods in the world. He made two for Jimmy Carter, who was a serious fly fisher. They were gorgeous things, with gorgeous engraving. Oyster told a story to the American Fly Fishing Museum about how he made the first rod for President Carter, and how Carter was going to fish it a bit, sign it, and then it would be sold as a fundraiser for the Carter Presidential Library. Carter fished it a bit and then told the Library that they’d better buy another because he wasn’t giving back the first.
I remember talking to Kris after Bryan went to Blue Ridge, and she just didn’t get it. Why would somebody pay good money to build something, when for the same money they could buy a rod from a real builder? I’m still baffled by her response. Why wouldn’t you want to build your own bamboo rod? And also the prices aren’t the same. The rod class currently costs $2,950–and almost all the classes for 2024 are full. Oyster also has some fly rods listed for sale online, and an 8′ 5 weight lists for $5,760. The cheapest rod listed is a 8′ 9 weight saltwater rod for $3,320.
8 5-weight Bill Oyster Master, photo shamelessly cadged from OysterBamboo.com
Isn’t that rod-building class a bargain?
I don’t know though. That 8′ 5 weight looks pretty sweet. I might have to get a prettier reel though. And I might have to give up some stuff, like food.
Benedetto Guitars are made in Savannah, but I’m afraid they’re out of my league. I guess Oyster fly rods are also out of my league.
Playlist
Georgia had a great music playlist. Blind Willie McTell, Gnarls Barkley, Harry James, R.E.M., Cat Power, James Brown, Trisha Yearwood, Gladys Knight, Little Richard, Fletcher Henderson, Otis Redding, The Allman Brothers, The B-52s, Ma Rainey, Indigo Girls, Jessye Norman, Robert Shaw, Robert Cray, Kaki King . . .
There’s also Atlanta HipHop, plus there all those great songs about Georgia. I could listen to Rainy Night in Georgia once a day from here on out, and never get tired of it. There’s Georgia on My Mind, I Been to Georgia on a Fast Train, Midnight Train to Georgia, The Devil Went Down to Georgia, and if you get tired of those there’s Moon River and Skylark.
That playlist is good enough to keep me happy on a six-hour drive, through Georgia, on a rainy night.
Blind Willie McTell
Guitar
I took the Kohno and practiced some. I should have found a transcription of Moon River.
In California we fished for rainbow trout in three separate rivers, the Fall River, the McCloud, and the Lower Sacramento. We could have picked other places to fish in California. There’s a guide who fly fishes for big sharks out of San Diego, there are steelhead in the coastal rivers, golden trout in the Sierras, and carp in LA parks. There were even other well-known trout rivers close to where we fished.
But we picked our three rivers, and they were good choices. Redding, California, is the gateway to Northeastern California’s trout rivers. It sits at the northern edge of the flat California Central Valley, and from Redding things can only go up.
We flew into Sacramento, 30 feet above sea level. To put this in perspective, Houston at 79 feet is universally envied for its flat terrain and low elevation. Sacramento is lower than Houston and equally flat. I bet it can’t match us for humidity though.
Redding, 165 miles north of Sacramento, is at roughly 500 feet. Driving there from Sacramento shares all the scenic wonder of a drive from Houston to Dallas, which is also roughly 500 feet. That change in elevation doesn’t really do justice to the flatness of the three-hour drive from Sacramento to Redding. It’s flat, really flat, or close enough to make no difference.
Then things change quickly. Where we spent the first night, the town of Fall River Mills, is 70 miles northeast of Redding at an elevation of 3,323 feet. Mount Shasta dominates the region north of Redding at 14,180 feet. The Cascade Range was formed by volcanoes (including Mount Shasta), and volcanic rock and debris are everywhere. Snowmelt and rain seep into the porous volcanic rock, and then after percolating underground for some years the water reappears at springs, cold and clean, and begins its run south to the Sacramento River, south to Redding, and then on to the City of Sacramento and the Central Valley.
Fall River is a tributary to a tributary of the Sacramento River. It’s fed by a huge conglomeration of springs. It flows slowly, and its surface is glass. It’s a perfect spring creek.
The river meanders roughly 22 miles through a high flat agricultural valley nestled between the Cascades and the Sierras. They grow wild rice in the valley–the kind of grass seed I thought only came from Minnesota–and cattle, but the landowners appear to take good care of the river. The cattle are fenced away to limit bank and bed damage.
Fall River is not all flat and meandering. There are falls on the Fall River, but not in the valley. We could see them from a highway overlook south of Fall River Mills, right before the Fall River joins the Pitt River. The Pitt flows south and joins the Sacramento at Lake Shasta.
Private ownership both protects the Fall River and makes it difficult to access. You can’t get there from here. You have to fish from a boat, and to get a boat with access you pretty much have to hire a guide. The guide puts in on private land, floats downstream, then motors back up to the put-in. On the way down and back he works you into the river.
Fall River is as pretty as a trout stream gets. Meanwhile the towns near the river aren’t exactly reaping the benefits, I guess because of the difficulty of access. You want to buy a vacation home or business in a prime trout location? Go to Fall River Mills. I think everything’s for sale, and nothing seems to be selling very fast.
We fished with Maciel Wolff,1. He met us at Glenburn Community Church at the country crossroad of Glenburn, then we followed him to the put-in. He told us that he had previously guided full time for a lodge, but that the lodge had shut because of fire risk. The owner could no longer afford property insurance. Who knew there were wildfires in California?
We booked Maciel through The Fly Shop. The Fly Shop sends its catalog to every fly fisher in North America. When I would tell one of my Houston friends that we were going to fish near Redding, the response would always be “I get The Fly Shop catalogue . . . ” There is supposed to be a famous hexagenia mayfly hatch on the Fall River, but that assumes that hatches–the point when hideously ugly mayfly nymphs under water transform into things of beauty and go on a short-lived aerial sex spree–actually exist. Having only ever seen a couple of hatches, I’m still dubious, but Maciel assured us it was true.
Meanwhile we were nymphing, which meant we were fishing flies that imitated the underwater life phase of mayflies, or caddis flies, or midges. As far as I can tell nymphs just imitate the ugly life stage of aquatic insects when they live underwater, and as flies go they’re relatively fungible. Dry fly anglers–anglers who might fish the mythical hexagenia hatches–talk endlessly about the specific insect and the specific life-phase that their fly is tied to imitate. Nymph fishermen seem to talk mostly about size (ranging from mighty small to ridiculously tiny) and color (the choice of which seems to be about as fickle as haute couture).
We were fishing two tiny weighted bead-headed nymphs below a swivel which was in turn below a bobber. At one point I did a rough measurement of the leader. Below the swivel the tippet was a long six feet designed to fish well below the surface of Fall Creek. Above the swivel there was a bit more than six feet of butt section. Neither the butt section nor the tippet was graduated, so the butt was something like one solid piece of 15 pound leader, and the tippet one solid piece of 6x fluorocarbon. I’ve rarely fished with a leader so specific to a place.
Maciel told us early that we wouldn’t really cast, we’d let the line touch the water behind us to create tension then then flop the flies ten feet in front of us, close to the boat. Theoretically that cast would reduce tangles by keeping everything open and in a line, but “reduce” is the key word in that sentence. All leaders I cast are prone to Gordian tangles, and once I get two flies involved then tangles are specifically required by my fishing licenses. According to Maciel the fish wouldn’t be particularly bothered by the boat, so the boat would be pretty close to our bobber. I know in my head that he was right, but both Kris and I cheated some with our casts. It’s hard not to believe in your heart of hearts that the water 30 feet away is oh-so-much-better than the water 10 feet away. Maciel was patient with us though, and he put us in position to fish, managed the boat to help with our drifts, adjusted our bobbers for depth, changed out our flies when he thought some new color was all the fashion, and untangled our tangles. He coached us through landing fish.
But truth is I am a terrible trout fisherman. The more I fish for trout, the more I realize how bad I am. The fly fishing things I’m actually moderately good at, casting fairly far, retrieving a streamer fly, and setting the hook with a strip set, the things I do all the time in saltwater and for bass, are largely–not completely but largely–useless in trout rivers. And the biggest problems I have in my usual fishing–keeping fish on the hook and releasing the fish–seem magnified.
Worse, because of the water clarity we were fishing with 6x tippet.
Size 6x tippet may take some explanation. Tippet is the final connection between the fly line and the fly, and 6x tippet is in fact a split hair. There are supposedly even smaller diameters of tippet, 7x and 8x, but I suspect anything smaller than 6x is a scam, and that all you’re actually buying is an empty spool. It makes sense sometimes to use 6x tippet, especially in spring creeks like the Fall. The leader should be harder for the fish to see, should let flies sink faster, should allow flies to drift more naturally, and should immediately break when you do something stupid. I guess that last part’s not a reason to fish it, but it’s certainly true. I caught two fish, and I probably broke off three, and all three were lost because I did something stupid. I held onto the line when the fish ran. My finger nudged the line when the fish ran. I breathed heavy when the fish ran.
Size 6x tippet has a diameter of .005 inches, and has a breaking strength of about 3 pounds. What I usually fish with, 16 pound tippet, has a diameter of .013 inches and a breaking strength of, well, 16 pounds. You can break size 6x tippet with just plain ol’ stupid, but 16 pound tippet takes really extraordinary stupid to break.((I can do that too, but not quite so often.)) Maciel would tell me how to land the fish, and then I’d go and do something different.
So I’m terrible at setting the hook with a trout set, I’m terrible at line management, I’m terrible at keeping the fish on the hook, and I’m terrible at releasing the fish if, by chance, I land it.
Still all that doesn’t really bother me. We were in a beautiful place. Maciel brought along great sandwiches from Ray’s Food Place grocery in Fall River Mills, and he coached us well. We watched barn swallow acrobatics over the water, and listened to red-winged blackbirds. We talked about hawks. We caught some fish and we lost some fish. It was lovely. Maciel and Kris made for good company, and the place was perfect. Fishing was exactly what it should be. I may not be much of a trout fisherman, but I’m pretty good at hanging out with trout.
Mossy works contract with The Fly Shop and other Redding guide services, and also has his own guide service. His email is macielwolff@gmail.com or phone 831-278-2439, or contact The Fly Shop. [↩]
Ok, ok, I know, it’s not one of the 50 states. It almost was, almost being a bit strong, but like the more successful annexation of the Republic of Texas, it was one of those bits of early American expansionism that seem so obvious if successful and so completely whacko if not. The annexation of Cuba is definitely in the completely whacko category, like those times we tried to invade Canada. The United States made offers twice to buy Cuba from Spain, once in 1848 under the Polk administration, and again in 1854 under Franklin Pierce. It wasn’t just a shopping spree either. There was a political motive for the Southern Democrats who supported the purchase. Adding Cuba would have added at least one and maybe more slave states and would have strengthened Southern interests–the preservation of slavery–in Congress.
We were not trying to buy Cuba in Support of the Cuban People.
After the 1898 Spanish-American War, Cuba was an American occupied protectorate, and for the first half of the 20th century the Cuban Constitution allowed the United States to intervene pretty much at will in Cuban affairs. Cubans resented U.S. authority, and that residual anger helped Castro turn the revolution anti-U.S.
The U.S. embargo against Cuba has now lasted 60+ years, with a brief period of better relations under President Obama. Currently there are 12 reasons a United States citizen can legally travel to Cuba, including journalism, religious missions, family, education, and support of the Cuban people. I went in support of the Cuban people. I fished a lot. Unlike President Polk I didn’t try to buy Cuba.
I did buy some cigars and a bottle of rum. I smoked some cigars. I drank some rum. Ok, I drank too much rum. We were in Cuba, and to support the Cuban people you have to buy some cigars and rum. Strictly speaking, you can’t bring cigars or rum home, so what can you do? You have to drink it and smoke ’em.
For most people, Cuban sport fishing brings to mind Ernest Hemingway’s drunken forays for marlin in the Gulf Stream. That’s deep sea fishing, well, that’s deep sea fishing and heavy drinking. That’s not what we did. We were on the Zapata Peninsula about two hours southwest of Havana, in the Ciénaga de Zapata National Park–the Shoe Swamp National Park. We stayed in a small private hotel, Casa Frank, in the village of Playa Larga on the edge of the Bay of Pigs.
Our rooms had air conditioning and were clean. There was no bedside table, or dresser, or water pressure, but the water was hot, and there was laundry service. The power went out every afternoon if it rained, and it rained most afternoons. Getting on the internet was hit or miss, mostly miss, but it wasn’t any worse than the camp where Kris and I had stayed in Alaska. There was no water pressure there, either, and the showers were alternately freezing and scalding, so all in all the Cuban showers were better.
Sometimes in Cuba I could get cellular service on my phone, but AT&T sent me the following:
AT&T Free Msg: Welcome to Cuba! Please note Cuba is not covered by your international roaming package. Your international rates in Cuba are: data $2.05/MB, talk $3.00/min, text $0.50/text msg sent, $1.30/photo or video msg sent. You may turn off data in your device Settings.
I use megabytes of data just breathing, so I turned off my cellular and would only turn it on once a day. I sent Kris and our kids some texts. I didn’t talk on the phone. I ignored any emails that smacked of business because I’m now retired and what the hell do they expect? I ignored my fantasy baseball team and they moved up from last place to 13th, but it’s ok. The Houston Grackles are back in last now that I’m actively managing.
We fished either in the saltwater flats at the bottom of the peninsula, skinny bits of water too shallow for anything but skiffs, or in a river, the Rio Hatiguanico, in a mangrove jungle deep in the park. There were 11 of us fly fishing the flats for bonefish, tarpon, and permit, and in the river for tarpon. Kris didn’t go. She said this sounded like a guy’s trip.
There was one non-angler in our group, the wife of one of the anglers, and she took great photos of birds. Birding and beaches are the other reasons tourists go to Playa Larga. There are 27 species of birds that live only in Cuba, and birders at our hotel told me that in the park they had seen 22 of the 27 species. That included the Cuban national bird, the tocororo. That’s how it sounds, tocororo, and when I heard it I asked if it was some kind of dove.
It’s not a dove. Its breast and head are the the colors of the Cuban flag.
Temminck, C.J. and Laugier, Meiffren, Baron de Chartrouse (1838), Nouveau Recueil de Planches Colorieés D’Oisseaux v. 3, Couroucou, plate 526, Paris, F.G. Levrault.
𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱
The first day fishing, my guide, Julio, yelled at me. It was deserved, because I was yelling at the bonefish. He insisted they took offense. “Take the hook, dammit!” I yelled. They were offended and skittered away.
“Shut up!” Julio was getting to know me.
“I can’t shut up Julio, I’m a lawyer.”
That day I caught four bonefish. “It’s normal,” Julio told me. Julio also told me about all the fish that I was missing. The problem was that I couldn’t see the fish. For bonefish, the angler stands on the casting deck at the front of the boat and stares into the water, ready to cast. The guide stands on a platform at the back and poles the boat and stares into the water. When the guide sees a fish, he calls a clock direction and distance, 12 o’clock, 20 meters; 3 o’clock, five meters; 11 o’clock, 10 meters; whatever . . . ideally, the guide isn’t just messing with you and the angler looks in the right direction, spots the fish, and casts, hopefully leading the fish a bit and not putting the fly either behind it or on top of it’s head (or into the guide, which also happens).
Julio apparently saw fish a’plenty. I didn’t. Part of the problem is that the damned old fish don’t stand still. They don’t politely wait for me to see them. They don’t even just mosey. They move along with intent and determination. When everything works right though, the guide gives the position, the angler sees the fish, and the fish takes the fly.
I couldn’t see the fish. “It’s normal,” Julio kept telling me, right after he yelled “do you see it! Do you see it! Do you see it!” Of course I didn’t see it. Some of the fish I caught that first day I caught blind, just lucky enough to follow Julio’s directions.
Do you see that water? It’s about a foot deep and there are miles of it. Do you see that fish? That’s the problem. It’s hard to see those fish against that bottom. That’s how they’re designed. If God really loved my fishing he would put a bright orange stripe down each bonefish’s back
The second day something clicked and I could see the bonefish. I was seeing fish that the guide, José, hadn’t seen yet. I could make my casts. I could keep the fish on the hook. It was one of those days when I could do no wrong, and I thought that I was now almost certainly the greatest saltwater angler who ever cast a line. I caught fish after fish after fish. I could do no wrong.
The next day I fished for permit.
𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱
I started getting ready to go to Cuba almost a year ago. I took Spanish lessons on Duolingo, and then took a Spanish course at Rice. I tied a bunch of flies. I had long discussions with Mike and Bob and Mark, my three friends who were also going, about what rods we were taking, and what reels, and what lines. We were going to Cuba, and if we didn’t bring it, we wouldn’t have it.
This gets a bit technical, but bear with me. There are going to be a lot of numbers, but they’re all about size variations. Just think of it as a discussion about buying a pair of pants. Look at the numbers as the equivalent of waist measurements and forge on through.
I first decided to take four rods, two 8-weights (in case one broke), a 10-weight, and an 11-weight. Then I started changing my mind, which over the course of the year’s preparations I did about 56 times. I finally settled on one 8-weight, two 10-weights, and an 11-weight, the 8 for bonefish, the 10s for river tarpon, permit, and barracuda, and the 11 for migratory tarpon.
Of course that’s not what I arrived with. I had switched out rods in my luggage so often I apparently lost track. I arrived with one 8 (the wrong one), one 10 (but no backup as planned), one 11, and one 12, a mix I had never in my wildest dreams imagined.
During the year the group of us would meet at lunch and discuss the trip, or we would meet with the Houston fly fishing writer Phil Shook (who’d made this trip last year). We’d discuss flies and leaders and fly lines and fly rods, and I would go home and tie a bunch more flies and imagine new variations of rods and lines to take. I spent hours searching the internet for a tropical 30-foot sink-tip line, and finally found one from AirFlo, a British fly line company. I never knew that there was such a need for tropical fly lines in British rivers.
The biggest controversy was tarpon leaders. Other kinds of leaders only set off fisticuffs, but tarpon leaders really whipped up the passions. Tarpon ain’t leader shy, and our outfitter, Jon Covich, said that the local guides recommended six feet or so of straight 60-pound fluorocarbon for tarpon leaders.
I know what you’re thinking, that’s easy. what’s the problem? Oh, you innocent. There is a well-known 302-page fly fishing book about tarpon obsession, Lords of the Fly (Get it? Get it?), about 30 pages of which are about interesting stuff like philandering and drug abuse and drinking and divorce, and 102 pages of which are about the far more engaging dramas of tarpon leaders. This is serious stuff.
We discussed them one night over after-dinner rum. You’d think with a bunch of guys on holiday we would have had salacious discussions about women and partying and whatnot, or at least with a bunch of old guys we would have discussed viagra and artificial joints, but no. We discussed tarpon leaders.
I posited that you had to have a break-off point somewhere in your rigging, and that meant tying a bit of 16-pound tippet between the 60-pound butt and the 60-pound bite guard. Otherwise the breaking point in your rig is going to be either your fly line (which I insisted had a 30-pound test and which cost somewheres north of $100 pesos, American), or your rod (which in my experience has the breaking strength of a slammed car door or a ceiling fan and costs upwards of $1000 pesos, American).
Ron disagreed. “Neil, you idiot,” see? He was getting to know me, “your fly line has a breaking strength of 180 pounds.”
Well, just like the Virgin I treasured up all these things and pondered them in my heart, and in that rare moment three days later when we had internet, did I call Kris or reset my fantasy baseball team lineup? No. I looked up the test strength of fly lines.
Of course I was wrong, but not completely wrong. The best information we could get was that the common breaking strength of freshwater fly lines is 30 pounds, and the common breaking strength of saltwater fly lines is 40 pounds. I was closer to right than Ron, not that I would gloat. Someone in the group rustled up the box for a Rio Leviathan billfish sink-tip, a big game saltwater line, and it promised a breaking strength greater than 50 pounds. I would have ever-so-diplomatically pointed this out to Ron, but the Castros were conducting a counter-revolutionary purge on his insides, and that evening he was otherwise disposed. After four days he finally felt well enough to fish. He had probably suffered enough, so I never mentioned it. And I never will.
Meanwhile I’ll stick with my bits of light leader tied between a butt section of 60 pounds and a bite guard of 60 pounds.
As a postscript, I’ll add that on the one day we fished the river, I used that sink-tip fly line I had ordered from AirFlo, with a leader with 25-pound tippet tied in as a breaking point. I got snagged on something on the river bottom and was going to break off the fly. I’m a pretty big guy, 190+, and reasonably strong, but I could not break that leader. I pulled. I yanked. I pulled and yanked when the boat was backing away. I wrapped the fly line around my reel and yanked and pulled, and I hollered which always helps. The leader won. I could not break 25-pound tippet. Next time I’m tying in some 5X trout leader as the class tippet. I can always break that.
𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱
Back to permit, which are a kind of pompano. My roommate for the trip, Ken, is permit-obsessed. I have never caught a permit. I’ve hooked two, in Belize, and lost them both. Ken says that over 20 years of fishing in the Florida Keys, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean he’s caught about 120 permit, but here’s the thing: six permit a year for even the most permit obsessed is a mighty fine batting average. For three days while Ron was dealing with the Castros the rest of us let Ken have his own boat. Fishing with a permit devotee ain’t exactly the very thing. Permit obsession is a lonely business for a reason.
Cuvier, M. le B.on and Valenciennes, M. (1828), Histoire Naturelle des Poissons v. 6, plate 209, Paris, F.G. Levrault. This may in fact be a common pompano and not a permit, or may be a mishmash of both. The yellow belly is all pompano, but the fins seem closer to permit. The 22-volume Histoire Naturelle des Poissons was the most ambitious treatment of fish of its time, and was the standard reference for ichthyologists for the nineteenth century, but it was compiled in Paris from specimens, and sometimes the results vary. It doesn’t matter. The plate is magnificent and for that reason alone it should be a permit.
There is a brilliant essay about permit obsession, the novelist Tom McGuane’s “The Longest Silence.” I wouldn’t have wanted to fish for permit with Tom McGuane, either.
I think that Ken said his biggest permit ever was about 40 pounds, but it’s not the weight of the thing or its length that matters, a permit is a permit, and if you’re permit obsessed every permit is a permit, though some permit may be more equal than others. Our companion Alan accidentally caught a small permit blind casting into a bit of muddy water. We all kidded him, Jeff quipped that Alan had caught a learner’s permit, and then it struck us that Alan had actually caught a permit, and we hadn’t. Then we all just sorta coveted our neighbor’s possessions. A permit is a permit.
Notwithstanding Ken’s over-the-top obsession, all saltwater fly fishers are just a little bit obsessed with permit. More than any other fish (except maybe Atlantic salmon), they’re our Holy Grail, our Great White Whale. Most folk wouldn’t know ’em from a dishwasher, and they should count their blessings. Permit are a curse.
I chased permit on this trip off and on for a couple of mornings, once with the guide José and once with Roberto. José is Cuba’s champion distance caster, which means that without much effort he can cast more than 100′, which is about 30′ further than I can cast when there are no fish around to mess up my game. José found me a school of permit, about 200 meters away–200 meters being a lot further than 100′, and a whole lot further than 70′. What we saw were wakes in the water and permit tails waving in the wakes. It is a stunning sight that for some people produces the exultation of the hunt, and for me produces waves of self-doubt.
José said that to get close I had to get out of the boat and wade. I was wearing socks but no shoes when he went over the gunnel, so sock-foot wading it was. After about ten miles he put me into position to cast, but all I could think about was that my passport in my pants pocket was getting soaked. I wrapped the fly line around my head. The permit moved off, laughing.
I moved my passport to my shirt pocket.
We waded another 15 miles and I got off one more cast. It wasn’t terrible, but the permit ignored my fly. They swam right over my damned fly, and sneered at it as they passed. I watched them, and I hated them. And then they went away, laughing.
Ken caught a permit this trip. One, and I’m pretty convinced that he even snuck out of our room at night to get in a little more permit fishing. He told me that I had brought the wrong permit flies–well of course I’d brought the wrong permit flies. I had barely had time to prepare for this trip. He gave me a flexo crab.
Ken was fishing with Roberto, who had only guided for a bit more than a month, but Ken said that Roberto spotted a school about 400 meters away–1200 feet. Ken finally saw the school at about 300 meters, and when they were in range he got off two casts that the permit ignored. Roberto told Ken to cast into the middle of the school, which Ken believed to be heresy, but he did it and he caught his permit.
It was Roberto’s first permit as a guide, and both Ken and Roberto kissed the fish before they let it go. I’d guess the fish didn’t care for being kissed any more than it cared for being caught, but I’m sure it was meant in kindness. The next day Ken gave Roberto a fly rod, and he said that he thought Roberto was going to cry.
Damn. I’m going to cry.
𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱
Roberto is 31 and new to guiding. His English is about as good as my Spanish, but his guide English is great. For other conversations we kept switching back and forth. At one point he told me that before guiding he had been a commercial fisherman, which paid too little and which kept him away from his family for three weeks at a time. Guiding was better because with tips it paid better. Now every day he could see his wife, his 3-year old son, and the “novio de mi esposa,” the boyfriend of his wife.
About the boyfriend, I was heartbroken for him. Later he told me that in Spanish the sharks we were seeing were tiburónes, and after working out that cousins were primos I tried to make a joke about abogados, tiburónes, and primos. When he didn’t laugh I asked him how to say joke, and he told me it was una broma, “like my line about the novio de mi esposa, but not that thing you tried to tell me about sharks being your cousins.” I felt a lot better, even if my joke was a failure.
With Roberto as guide on our last day, I shared the boat with Raymond, and at one point there were about 15 separate pods of permit spread across our flat. I was supposed to share a boat with Mike Green, but ended up fishing with Raymond. Raymond said that he had caught a permit once 20 years ago and he graciously let me stay on the casting deck, which was just as well because I’d otherwise have thrown him off the boat. I’m glad I was fishing with Raymond because Mike Green is bigger than me.
I could hear Roberto gasping while he worked to get me into position, but every time we started to get close the permit shied away. I got off one cast which the permit disdained. It was heartbreaking stuff, and I believe there would have been a movie in it, one of those stories of failure and redemption, if I could only have caught a permit.
No permit, no movie. I didn’t get to kiss the heroine.
𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱
Our drivers drove 20-year old Dodge vans with Russian diesel motors. We spent a lot of time in the taxis. It was two hours from Havana to our hotel in Playa Larga. To get to the river from Playa Larga took about an hour and a half, and then an hour and a half home. To get to the salt flats took about an hour each way. The drivers spoke very little English, so Alan and I practiced our Spanish a lot. Alan was more fluent than me, but both of us managed some. The drivers politely talked very slowly and with lots of explanatory hand gestures and repetitions. I’m still not sure though whether flamingos flock like chickens or taste like chickens.
I talked a lot to our driver Chino. I asked Chino about his family and he showed me a picture of his wife, a microbiologista, and his daughter. His daughter was stunningly pretty. I don’t mean just a normal sort of youthful pretty, I mean really, really beautiful, without any artifice or device. He told me she was 17, very smart, and would go the next year to University in Havana.
The next day our guide, Felipe, said that Chino was his neighbor. He told me that I had only seen his daughter’s face, and that all of her was beautiful, and that she was very very smart, and very good, and that all the young guides were in love with her. All I know is that proud papas everywhere are proud papas.
𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱
Mark Marmon had dragged me into this thing, but Mike Frankoff had put our trip together. He found the outfitter, rounded up the suspects, coerced Phil Shook into telling us in detail about his trip, and played a major leadership role in our collective agonizing over fly rods and flies. Mike and I both keep skiffs in Port O’Connor, and I got to know Mike pretty well over the past year.
I fished with Mike one day on the trip. Our guide was Felipe, who runs a free school to teach young Cubans how to guide. The guides work for the Cuban equivalent of Texas Parks and Wildlife, and get paid the standard $35 a week for their 60-hour weeks, but guides get tips, and the tips from fly fishers are a lifeline. Felipe trains all of the young guides in his school.
Mike made a Hail Mary cast to a bonefish that Felipe had spotted 65 feet away, and unlike what the rest of us mortals would have managed, Mike made the cast and the bonefish took the fly. Then the bonefish started messing with him. It wrapped Mike’s line around a mangrove. While I lay on the bow getting his line untangled from that mangrove the bonefish went through the roots of another, turned back and went underneath the boat, and then wrapped itself around a third mangrove. Mike went off the boat one direction, Felipe the other, and I stayed on the boat to laugh. Somebody had to do it.
They landed that fish. It was a good fish, too. And the boat didn’t drift away with me.
Late in the afternoon, Felipe poled us along a thick mangrove bank, and it was like visiting an aquarium. Along the roots there were snappers and a big brown and white striped grouper and tiny baitfish by the hundreds. Mike pulled out a big popper, and for once in my life I cast beautifully. We kept moving further and further from the mangroves, 55, 60, 65 feet, and I would lay every cast into the base of the trees.
Retrieving the popper, mangrove fish would slam it as if the defense of their homeland relied on their ferocity. I was catching small jacks and snappers, trash fish for most salt anglers, and they were magnificent. The day was perfect and full of joy. Did I go all the way to Cuba to catch jacks and snappers? You betcha. For that and for the cigars.
𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱
Last year the State Department reported that nearly 250,000 Cubans left Cuba for the United States, and that doesn’t include Cubans who left for other countries. It’s the largest out-migration from Cuba since the Revolution, fueled by a combination of deprivation, repression, and the internet. Many of the U.S.-bound Cubans are stuck at our Mexican border, not allowed into the U.S. Those 250,000 Cubans represent more than 2% of the total Cuban population, and it’s immigration of the young. The population left in Cuba is increasingly aging.
The combination of Covid travel restrictions and then-President Trump’s reinstatement of embargo restrictions have severely damaged tourism, which is now a mainstay of the Cuban economy. Since 2020, Cuba has suffered from electricity outages, food shortages, gas shortages, supply chain issues, and civil unrest. It’s hard to buy a bottle of aspirin, or a razor, or a sanitary napkin. To preserve his Senate Majority, President Biden hasn’t eased the Trump-imposed restrictions because it would offend New Jersey’s powerful Democratic senator, Robert Menendez. Meanwhile the average salary in Cuba is less than $150 a month, or less than $2000 a year. Government pension payments are about $10 a month.
Havana, especially Old Havana, is beautiful, with magnificent Colonial architecture, but there’s little money for restoration or preservation. A beautiful building may be half occupied and half collapsing. It’s easy to imagine that if relations were open there would be a massive influx of dollars and materials and machines to turn the wrecks into vacation condos, or hotels, or something, and that the economy would roar. The City has great bones.
There are hardly any stores, hardly even any tourist trinkets. I brought back no souvenirs. Now and then on our tour of Havana we’d pass a grocery store, or foreign luxury clothing stores in a tourist hotel, or a small tourist shop, but not many. The advertising is all for the Revolution.
Amnesty International reports that in 2022 food shortages and electricity outages were frequent. Hundreds of people were still in prison after 2021 protests. Human rights advocates are in prison for crimes like “insulting national symbols.” It’s almost as if they’d protested guns in the Tennessee legislature.
Cuba is a mess.
𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱
Cuba is beautiful. The people want you to be there, and the fishing is better than I am a fisherman, even with the Ernest Hemingway beard I grew for the trip.
We only spent one day on the river. The fishing was off, and apparently it was just as well. It was hard getting enough gas and diesel to send our group to two places.
I fished on the river with Alan, which was great because, after all, he’d caught a permit. With me, Alan also caught a tarpon, and he’s such a nice guy that I hardly even resented it. I hooked three but stupidly lost them all. From time to time our guide, Bryan, pronounced as Bree-on under Communism, had to remind us we were there to fish, not chat.
Bryan complimented us on our Spanish, which for me was really stretching it, and Alan mentioned the current flood of Cuban immigrants. Bryan told us that it was ok, that a lot of Americans were coming into Havana to work in the restaurants. He told us that with our Spanish the government would easily pay us $35 a month.
Skills.
𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱 𐫱
Food was generally great during the trip, as long as you don’t count the lunches. They were supplied by the government hotel in Playa Larga, and consisted of meat and buns. The guides brought mustard and hot sauce, and sometimes fresh fruit and tomatoes and cucumbers. Otherwise it was meat and buns.
But other than the lunches, the food at the private restaurants was delicious. Mango and papaya with toast and eggs for breakfast, land crab cooked in tomato sauce, black bean and vegetable soups, gently stewed calimari and grilled spiny lobster, fresh snapper, steamed pumpkin, rice, cucumber . . . Why cucumber? I don’t know, but there was always cucumber. I ate everything. Well, everything but the lettuce. I didn’t want the Castro’s revenge.
On our last night the guides came to Casa Frank to join us for dinner. Ken gave a beautiful speech, and just like any good fisherman he expanded Roberto’s extraordinary spotting of his permit from 400 meters to 4000. I drank too much rum and tried to play guitar with the band, but I couldn’t remember anything to play. The guitarist tried to teach me La Bamba.
We had all brought stuff for the guides. Jeff had gone on a spree at Costco, Mark at Academy Sporting Goods. I think Alan had brought a spare suitcase full of stuff, and left the suitcase. Everybody brought something, and there were piles of stuff. Fishing pants, fishing shirts, coloring books and crayons and soccer balls, aspirin and Astros hats. . . Our friends needed everything. I was angry at myself for not bringing more, spare fishing pliers, spare rods and reels, socks and shirts and sun gloves. Spare watches. Pepto-bismol. Spare anything. They need everything and I could have done so much more.
They were so gracious and kind to us. They are so witty. They’re good people, Cubans, and good people to support. I would go to Cuba again in support of the Cuban people. If governments got out of the way and left it to people who love the salt flats, we’d all be fine.
