Tag: Leaders

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Three Rivers, Trout, Montana, September 14-20, 2025 (49)

Montana was supposed to be our final state, but I screwed up. I kept delaying New Jersey, so now it’s our last state. We may not make it to New Jersey this year, so we may not finish all 50 states until 2026, but it doesn’t matter. Like the baseball pundits say, this is a marathon, not a sprint. Short of Divine Intervention, Global Warming, or the Department of War, we will finish, but when we finish is a bit up in the air.

It’s ok. After all, I’m sure that if I’d really thought about it, I would have chosen New Jersey as our final state over Montana. Who wouldn’t rather go to New Jersey? There’s no Real Housewives of Montana. The pizza is better in New Jersey. Montana doesn’t have the Sopranos, though to quote Tony Soprano, chi sono in Montana molti altos. 1

Montana does have really beautiful rivers loaded with fish flowing through really beautiful valleys surrounded by really beautiful mountains, and I’m sure if you looked hard enough you could find some ok pizza.

If you don’t fly fish, you might not know that Montana is a fishing Mecca. The 2020 census counted 42 residents of Craig, Montana. For those 42 residents I counted three fly shops all packed wall to wall with interesting and costly fly-fishing bibelots.2 In 42-resident Craig I counted at least 43 drift boats, maybe 72 if you throw in the rafts. You can’t cast a wooly bugger in Montana without foul-hooking a drift boat, fishing guide, fly shop, or craft beer with a fishy name. You could spend a week just traveling from Montana fly shop to Montana fly shop, and you could spend enough dinero shopping in those fly shops to earn your dedicated angler badge with nary a line cast.

Kris did some shopping. She bought a scarf in rainbow trout colors, and some stickers for my guitar case.

We did cast lines, too, in three parts of the Madison River–twice in the upper Madison above Ennis Reservoir3 and once below. We fished the Jefferson River and then the Missouri below Craig. We fished five days in a row, pretty much all day long every day, and then on the sixth day we rested.4 You could almost say we spent those five days fishing the same river, since the Missouri starts where the Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin Rivers meet. We were always fishing the Missouri, more or less.

On previous trips we had fished the Missouri in North Dakota and at least crossed it in Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and Missouri . . . In fact, the only state where both us and the Missouri wandered but failed to meet was South Dakota. From the Black Hills it was always to our north and east, cutting a line through the state’s dead center and then twisting east. In all those not-Montana states the Missouri is usually big and fat and cloudy, as if it were working up enough grit to join the Big Muddy. In Montana it is clear and clean and fresh from mountain snow.

All through the Missouri’s path there were the reminders of Lewis and Clark, who travelled the Missouri from St. Louis to its source in Montana before they crossed the Rockies.5 Lewis and Clark got to Montana before us, and they probably caught more fish than us, too.

Sacajawea Hotel, Three Rivers, Montana

But we caught plenty. We fished with Montana Angler, on a strange and expensive week in RVs. It was supposed to be the finale, so expense be damned, and for me it was also my chance to seriously fish the Montana promised land. Montana Angler would choose five rivers to fish, choose campsites, provide the RVs, a cook and drivers,6 drift boats, flies, leaders, and fishing guides. We would show up. We didn’t even have to bring rods if we didn’t want to, though of course we did. It’s stupid, but over time rods become very personal, plus you should never miss an opportunity to lug a fly rod through an airport. It is such a manly thing to do.

On the days we fished we were up in the morning around six, were given coffee and fed breakfast, and then carted off by a guide with a drift boat to fish a new river for the day. They brought lunch. They brought flies. They brought us. After a day’s fishing we were brought back to a different campground in the evening and they gave us appetizers, drinks, and then fed us dinner. It was serious glamping, and we were really only left to our own devices for showers and getting into bed at night. It was strange not because it wasn’t a great adventure, but because for six nights and five days it was stress-free travel. Lewis and Clark should have had it so easy.

Mheberger, map of the Madison River created with Global Watersheds web app, Wikipedia. At the top of the map is the confluence of the Jefferson and Madison (and just a bit further north the Gallatin) to form the Missouri.

Our friends, Shelley and Mark Marmon, went with us. Mark is well-known among Houston fly fishers as a casting instructor and freshwater guide, particularly for carp–a current it-girl for fly fishing–and we’ve known Shelley since law school. Shelley only wants to fish for trout, and every other fly fisher we know in Houston seems mostly to want to fish saltwater. Saltwater is where only a relative few freshwater trout go for their gap year. This was Shelley’s chance for a week of unremitting troutiness.

Whatever the fish, there are lots of different ways to travel to fly fish. You can drive to a farm pond and spend a pleasant hour catching bluegill. You can drive twelve hours, spend an unpleasant night trying to sleep in the the front seat of your car, and then the next morning wade into a strange river hoping you’ve picked the right spot. You can fly first class and spend a lot of money to stay at a five-star lodge and be driven or boated or flown to a river or saltwater flat to fish. We’ve done all of those things. This trip was like a lodge on wheels, or even more like a river tent camp on wheels, and Montana Angler did a great job putting it together.7

Kris and I have talked a good bit about buying an RV–I suspect it’s impossible to love road trips and be of a certain age and not consider buying an RV. Who hasn’t coveted an Airstream, and what adventure isn’t promised by a Winnebago Revel? What we learned from a week in RVs was that I am not cut out for the Van Life. RVs are either manageable on the road but a bit cramped inside, or if not a bit cramped should only be driven by retired long-haul truckers. Frankly, I figure that I’ve spent at least a year of my life sleeping in tents, and if I need to stay in a campground tents are just fine by me. Tents are cozy. You don’t have to insure a tent.

That said, there are surely people who would love the mechanics of staying in an RV, and for anyone who fly fishes who is also considering an RV, I would highly recommend spending a week on the Montana Angler trip. If you haven’t RV’d before (as we had not), I suspect you would fill in the blanks, good and bad. And then at the end of the week you could either just walk away or head toot sweet to your nearest friendly RV dealer.

I suspect our next trip will likely involve a fishing lodge. You can meet a lot of interesting people in a fishing lodge.

Shelley and Mark in Tim’s drift boat, demonstrating the proper Houstonian huddling technique for the freezing 60° weather.

We had brought along our own interesting people, but we met some too, including our guides, Carter Capute and Tim Patella. Both were young, fishy guys.8 We fished four days with Carter, and one with Tim. The Marmons, on the other hand, fished four days with Tim and one day with Carter–funny how that worked out. There was no preference involved, unless it was on the guides’ part, or maybe poor Carter had pulled the short straw. Both guides were great, knowledgeable, and both were good company in the camp and on the river.

The Rivers were each different. The Missouri was wide,9 mossy, and crowded. The Jefferson was small, less than 30 yards across I think, and on the day we fished the Jefferson we saw no other boats. We caught the most fish on the Madison, both the lower and the upper, and on the day we got out of the drift boat to wade in the Madison I reconfirmed that wading is my favorite way to fish. There is just something about wading in a river that is so childlike, purposeless, and mesmerizing. Fishing from a drift boat has the virtue of being lazier, there’s someone else to do most of the work for you, and it’s safer for us old folks, but walking into a river is just the completest thing.10

All four of us caught fish. As I mentioned, Mark discovered long ago that you could catch carp on the fly in Houston bayous, so he had a special affinity for mountain whitefish. Like carp, whitefish are often considered a trash fish. Historically trout anglers have hated whitefish, and I have never understood why. They are plentiful, fun to catch, are a salmonid just like the beloved trouts and chars and salmon, are native to their waters, and are a predictor of environmental quality. I stood in the Madison and caught eight whitefish in a row, some up to 20 inches, and I caught them with glee. After all, eight whitefish in a row was certain to put me well ahead of Mark for the week’s unofficial whitefish tourney. Not that Mark knew there was a whitefish tourney, and not that I was counting.

We fished with a bead-headed nymph under a crawfish imitation, often with added weight to get the flies deep. I thought about using what I use at home to imitate crawfish, but could never work up the nerve–guide-confidence is a big part of my confidence when I’m fishing new places. The leaders were 5x or so, and were variants from anything I’d ever fished with. In addition to a large floating indicator/bobber, they included a bright orange two-foot bit of monofilament at the fly line that served as an additional indicator.

Because the rivers we fished are fed principally by snowmelt and by September were seasonally shallow, the guides told us not to mend, but to let the fly line belly in the current to stay tight to the fly and to impart dibs and dabs of movement to the big crayfish patterns. After 30 years of being taught to mend to keep from dragging the fly, it was almost painful to leave the line alone. Don’t tell Carter and Tim, but most of the time I went ahead and mended anyway, especially when I was in the back of the drift boat out of their direct gaze. I’m certain they didn’t notice, and never once thought why can’t that idiot follow my instructions.

We never fished dry flies. I had expected in early fall that we’d be able to fish grasshopper patterns on the surface, and I’d brought a small box of my favorites. Carter and Tim told us though that this fall there weren’t enough hoppers for the trout to key on them. Apparently there had been a late freeze in June, and this year’s crop of grasshoppers was decimated by the freeze. It was a shame, because I love to fish with grasshopper flies. They’re big and I can see them, and I had purposefully chosen September because of the likelihood of hoppers.

This week in the journal Nature11 there was an article about the changes in fish populations caused by warming rivers. Every angler knows that rivers are warming. For fly fishers global warming is measured in higher afternoon water temperatures, and it has changed the months when we fish. July and August, which used to be prime, are now often confined on cold water rivers to mornings. In rivers like Montana’s, the study reported that with warming, fish populations were diminished overall, and while the fish were often larger, there were fewer smaller fish.

Whether it was because of Montana, good guiding, or climate change, that was consistent with what we saw. We didn’t catch a lot of small fish, but plenty of fish that I considered large, 18 inches or larger. We didn’t just catch mountain whitefish, either. We caught plenty of browns and rainbows. In fact we caught everything we might have wanted except for a native cutthroat. We even caught native whitefish.

Now if we could just get to New Jersey, where the real fishing happens.

  1. Properly it’s chi sono in Montana molti alti, “in Montana there are many highs,” not chi sono molti altos, but then it wouldn’t be a stupid joke about Tony Soprano. You’ll just have to suffer for my art, and also for my Italian. ↩︎
  2. I have only seen the word bibelot in print once, 40 years ago in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. I’ve wanted to use it ever since, this was my chance, and I took it. Sorry. ↩︎
  3. There were at least five fly shops in the town of Ennis, population 917. ↩︎
  4. The seventh day we went fishing again, but that’s a different story. ↩︎
  5. It was Lewis and Clark who gave Montana rivers their governmental names. Jefferson, of course, was President, Madison Secretary of State, Smith Secretary of the Navy, and Gallatin Secretary of the Treasury. The political names came in a rush, just before they got to the Rockies, It was as though they suddenly recalled that they were on one of the first governmental boondogles, and that they needed to pay homage to the politicos back home. Before Montana, Lewis and Clark had relied on whim, Indian names, events, members of the Corps of Discovery, and crushes on girls back home to pick place names. The political sops came in one great gush, and its fun to work out what river is who. ↩︎
  6. In addition to our drivers, Justin Helfer was our camp manager and cook, and Tyler Orszulak was the chief factotum. The food was always great, our beds were always made. ↩︎
  7. From what I can tell Montana Angler is one of the largest (if not the largest) Montana angling operations, and the RV trip is only one of many ways they put people onto Montana water, including tent camps on the Smith River, lodges, horse pack trips, and day trips. They also have a nice flyshop in downtown Bozeman, but every Montana resident has a flyshop stashed somewhere. ↩︎
  8. In the 2020 census, a bit over 33% of Bozeman’s population were young fishy guys. ↩︎
  9. I can’t mention the Missouri River without setting off “Oh Shenandoah” as an earworm, and mentioning the wide Missouri certainly isn’t helping. There are recorded versions of “Oh Shenandoah” by the jazz guitarist Bill Frisell, Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Bobby Darin, Jerry Garcia and David Grisman, Jerry Reed, Kansas, Bruce Springsteen, and, I kid you not, Tom Waits with Keith Richards. I hope Keith Richards is supplying the guitar solo, and not the background vocals. ↩︎
  10. The day after we waded we both needed Tylenol, but President Trump said it was ok because as far as I know neither of us is pregnant. Part of the completeness of wading is the exercise of muscle groups you had forgotten. ↩︎
  11. That’s the way you’re required by law to refer to the journal Nature. You can’t say this week in Nature, and even if you were so inclined in some states you might be arrested for saying this week in the magazine Nature. You have to say the journal Nature, like it was one word. Vaughan, Ian P., Climate change is reshaping fish communities in the United States, the journal Nature, September 24, 2025, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02826-x. ↩︎
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Lots of Trout, Au Sable River, August 18-19, 2024 (42)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Georgia Packing List

Gear

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.

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Fall River, California, Rainbow Trout, July 7, 2023

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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.

  1. 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. [↩]