New Orleans’ Guides

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Guadalupe River Triple Redux

I finally caught my trout today. Off and on I’d fished the Guadalupe since the Super Bowl was in Houston, a bit more than a year ago. I fished two days then and came up blanked. I started this year in December, and finally caught my fish today, March. It was nothing special, a 12-14″ rainbow that spit out the hook after it came into the net.  I’d hooked another earlier, and had a hit later, and foul hooked and landed a carp, a big carp, much later.  Because of their mouth carp always seem to foul hook.

I knew what I was doing though with the trout. I set up the rod with two droppers below an egg, with an indicator two feet up from the egg, no weight other than the weight of the brassies on the top dropper.  The fish stayed on the hook.  I didn’t take a picture. I wanted the fish back in the water, and I was worried about fumbling my phone.

Earlier, before the fish, I fell into the river, and tonight the muscle pull in my left calf hurts because of the fall. A half gallon or so of water came over the top of my waders, and when we left the river we stopped at Gruene Outfitters to buy dry clothes.  I bought a pair of Patagonia Guidewater pants, grey because even though I wanted tan Kris told me to get the grey.  They will be go-to’s for future travel, fishing and otherwise, but I’m sorry I had to buy. On future river trips I need to bring extra clothes.

On the way out of the store though I saw one of the great objects of men’s fashion, a Howler Brothers Gaucho Snapshirt, with embroidered alligators.  I’d first seen Howler Brothers shirts in Belize, where the younger guys at the bar compared their Howler Brothers shirt embroidery.  The embroidery then was great, the yellow rose and the shrimp and the blue crabs are works of art, but more important their shirts had pearl snap buttons, which for me is always the height of male fashion.  I came back to Houston and bought one sans embroidery, and you know what? When you roll up the sleeves of a a fishing shirt with pearl snap buttons they stay up. They don’t need those sewn-in goofy straps that seem like good design but aren’t. Pearl snap buttons have purpose.    There’s no sleeve creep when you roll up your sleeves.

So I caught my trout and got a great pair of pants and the work-of-art shirt I need to wear to Louisiana. I wish I had a photo of the trout.

It was windy today, and overcast, and the day on which daylight savings time started so we were already tired and late when we left Houston. I got water down my waders. On the way to the river we checked out donut shops in Seguin. Apparently like all donut shops in Central Texas they were Buddhist donut shops. The Donut Palace had a pretty good glazed, but no kolache, sausage rolls but no kolache. It was packed more or less. I wouldn’t recommend anything but the glazed, but I would recommend the glazed.

Top Donut had a good cat, but the donuts were only good efforts.

At three when we came off the river I wanted to go to Black’s in Lockhart for Barbecue, but it would have added two hours and Kris didn’t want to make the investment. We found a place in New Braunfels for German food, Uwe’s Bakery and Deli, that made its own bratwurst, and I suspect its own pickles and sauerkraut. It was outstanding. If I lived in New Braunfels, I’d go to Uwe’s every Tuesday for chicken and dumplings, and every Saturday for the goulash, and I’d be happy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Louisiana

We fish out of New Orleans in late April. We fly in early on the day April 21, and fly out late in the day on April 22.  Quick trip, but we had booked the guide in November for the big redfish moving into the marsh to feed, but had to postpone because of weather. We had our best weekend ever fishing in Galveston.

It’s cheap to fly from Houston to New Orleans because Houston and New Orleans are physically close, it’s only a six-hour drive, and they’re close in other ways too, like siblings who love each other but are a little astonished at the craziness their sister’s up to. If Houston is the great melting pot, the place where whites and blacks and Asians and hispanics are jumbled into the little engine that’s not little that thinks it can, New Orleans is the pot that never exactly melted, and where the most foreign folk of all may be the local white people.

What we share: The energy industry. the Gulf. Food. What we don’t share: Ambition (for Houston), history (for Louisiana).

I used to think there were two kinds of Texans, Texans who went to Santa Fe and Texans who went to New Orleans. For me growing up in West Texas New Mexico was only a long car ride away, as was everything else, and I know it and love it. What I first remember from New Orleans was walking past the strip bars on Bourbon Street, eating Beignet and drinking chicory coffee heavy with cream at the Cafe du Monde, and tasting crawfish etoufee. I think I was 14.  I thought at the time the etoufee was bland. I’ve never quite figured Louisiana out.

Houston’s got the ambition, New Orleans the history. Oil and the Gulf may be self explanatory, maybe, but Etoufee is no longer anything extraordinary. There is a Brennan’s in Houston, and it was here long before me.  I can get good red beans and rice or etoufee by walking from my office across the sky bridge and standing in line at Treebeards.  Every seafood place in Houston sells a pretty decent gumbo.

It’s easy to look at Louisiana and feel self-satisfied. Our education system, sorry as it may be, is better. Our politicians may be crazy but they’re not corrupt or as incompetent. Our history, incredibly blemished as it is, is not the slave block or the quadroon ball or Storyville. On the other hand we weren’t the birthplace of jazz.

A young friend of mine is a lovely young woman, Princeton for undergrad and Harvard for law school, a Houston city council member. Someday she will be in at least Congress, and she is one of our city’s stars. We went to lunch a few months ago, before Hurricane Harvey I’m certain because the restaurant, Reef, hasn’t yet reopened.  She shook what I swear was a half bottle of Tabasco–she said she preferred Louisiana but they didn’t have it–into her gumbo.  “You know my family’s from Louisiana?” It surely would have perked up that Etoufee. I think us Texans just never quite get it.