Tag: Sunfish

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I Caught My Fargo Fish, July 28-30 (41)

It took planning, skill, and ruthless cunning to find that fish. What’s more, I didn’t just catch one fish in North Dakota, I caught two fish, which is as high as I can count when I go fishing. I may have them mounted if I can find the wall space.

Because we were fishing without a guide, I had three problems. In North Dakota, there are native walleye, northern pike, sunfish, bass, and catfish. There are invasive carp. There are stocked trout. I was desperate, and would have been happy to catch any of them, but that meant I had to prepare for all of them. I put together my fly box, then showed it to my friend Mark Marmon. I also told him that I was considering a children’s pond at a federal fish hatchery.

Like I said, ruthless cunning.

Mark asked if I had any coffee bean flies for the kid’s pond. Coffee bean flies are a coffee bean glued to a hook then covered with a UV curing resin. They’ve been around since the 30s, and were originally tied to imitate beetles. For hatchery fish they’re also are a good imitation of Purina fish chow, and for Houston bayou carp they also resemble escaped solids from a sewage treatment plant. At one time Mark would have had the fly rod world record for grass carp, except that the IGFA considered the coffee bean fly to be bait.

Me? I think it’s an artificial fly,. Fish don’t drink coffee. It’s not bait. I tied a dozen.

I had to decide what rod to take, and settled on a 7-weight. Rods run in weights from size 1 to 14, depending on the size of fish you’re catching. Trout are typically caught on a 4- or 5-weight, and biggish saltwater fish on an 8- or 9-weight. A 14 is basically an 8-foot 2×4 for marlin. You don’t so much fish with them as use them as clubs.

A 7-weight would be plenty to handle a 7-pound fish, and while I wasn’t likely to see any 7-pound fish in North Dakota it didn’t matter. I wasn’t fooling around. If I caught something big in North Dakota, a pike maybe, I wanted enough rod to handle it. Mark suggested that a 6-weight would be plenty. Deep in my heart of hearts I knew he was right, but I wasn’t taking chances.

Finally there was the question of where to go. The Red River of the North is praised for its excellent catfishing, but that’s kind of a random endeavor for a fly rod, and the photos of the river weren’t very inviting. As I’ve already explained, the big lakes and walleye weren’t an option. We couldn’t fish the Missouri again without a boat, and that hadn’t been successful for us anyway.

I found a list of community ponds stocked by North Dakota Game and Fish. We left the Fargo airport and drove straight to a park pond behind an elementary school in a Fargo subdivision. There was an 11-year old kid there gear fishing, and a younger girl, maybe nine, and her dad loading their cooler with a stringer of fish. They held the stringer up to show me.

Tiny fish. Little bitty fish. The biggest stringer of the smallest fish I’ve ever seen. I supposed they would take them home and fry them up, but they’d be most useful on crackers as hors d’oeuvres. They must have had five pounds of 30 fish that turned canned sardines into monsters.

I moved down the pond bank and tied on an olive wooly bugger, which is a fly you can use anywhere to catch anything, including tiny fish, but all I caught was pond scum. The little girl came over–one side of her head was shaved but she didn’t have any visible tattoos. She offered me a gruesome severed fish tail from one of her tiny fish. She said I’d never catch anything of any size in that pond without a fish tail. I thought about it but declined. Coffee beans are one thing, but I couldn’t convince myself that fish tails weren’t bait.

The girl told me that she and her dad had caught a bunch of bluegill, some bass, some catfish, and a piranha.

To keep out of the weeds I switched out the woolly bugger for a tiny blue surface popper, about as small as bass poppers get. There were dragon flies, and I like small poppers when there are dragon flies. I could see fish slap at my popper in the water, but even the piranhas were too small for the fly. I finally lipped that tiny bluegill–I didn’t actually set the hook, but I was fast enough on the set that the fish came flying out of the water past my ear and into the bankside grass. I didn’t have a stringer, or a cracker, so I released it back into the pond.

I had my North Dakota fish. Kris bird-watched.

The next day we drove west. We drove out of Fargo off the highway to the end of the pavement and down gravel roads. We never found Mirror Pond, even though it was explained to us that the Mirror Pond we wanted (not the one we were heading toward), was back the way we’d come, a left turn at the water plant, about four miles up the road, then another left turn. How could we miss it?

The Sheyenne River at Fort Ransom State Park had steep overgrown banks and it looked like I’d suffer some major damage climbing down to it, and I wasn’t real certain what I’d find if I got there. At the fish hatchery the children’s pond was covered with scum. To top off the day we had a remarkably bad hamburger in Valley City. How does someone make a bad hamburger? We never unpacked our fly rods. What did I care? I had my North Dakota fish.

The next day, our final day, we drove north from Fargo to Turtle River State Park, near Grand Forks. There was a park ranger at the desk, and she showed me on the park map where to fish. She said that in the spring North Dakota stocked the river–it’s not much as a river but it’s a pretty stream–stocked with trout in the spring, but by July nothing would be left. They would stock it again in the fall. She said a lot of fly anglers came to the park just to stand in the stream and cast. I said fly anglers were stupid that way.

She agreed. She didn’t have to agree.

When we left Kris remarked about how cute the ranger was. She wasn’t that cute.

We drove to the stream and I went down to the dam to stupidly cast into the river–it’s a tiny dam built in the 30s by the CCC. I was fishing a pheasant tail nymph under a foam hopper imitation. Kris bird-watched.

I caught a fish on the pheasant tail. I hooked it and everything. I didn’t sling it past my ear. I think it was a creek chub, though it could have been a flathead chub, or it could have been a shiner. It was a perfect match to my park pond bluegill, almost too much fish for my 7-weight rod, and I’m going to get it mounted, too. My two North Dakota fish will look stunning together over the fireplace.

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Kentucky

Kentucky has whiskey and horses, a coal-miner’s daughter, Daniel Boone, and Muhammed Ali. I like whiskey, perhaps too much, and I wish all horses well. The legacy of coal is becoming more and more just that, a legacy. Muhammed Ali was The Greatest. He said so, and I agree.

I’ve never been to Kentucky (or for that matter its northern neighbors, Ohio and Indiana). I’ve been in Missouri across the Mississippi from Kentucky, and often enough to Tennessee, but never Kentucky. This is how Kris and I will look entering Kentucky for the first time, except that I’ll be carrying a fly rod instead of a rifle:

George Caleb Bingham, Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers Through the Cumberland Gap, 1851, oil on canvas, Kemper Art Museum, Washington University, St. Louis.

I hope we can get a horse at the Kentucky border. Otherwise Kris will have to walk.

As of the 2020 census, Kentucky has a population of 4.5 million. The population is 87.5 percent white, 8.5 percent black, and 4 percent everybody else. Less than 5 percent of the population is Hispanic or Latino. The consolidated city-county of Louisville, the state’s largest metro area, has a population of 782,969, with the city itself being 32.8 percent Black and 62.8 percent white. Consolidated Lexington, the second largest area, has a population of 322,570. The urban areas in Kentucky are seeing substantial growth, both economic and by population. The rural areas are generally suffering population losses, and they’re poor. As of 2019, Kentucky ranked among the poorest states, 44th, with a median annual family income of $52,295, just ahead of New Mexico and just behind Oklahoma.

In the 2020 presidential election, Kentucky voted 62 percent (1,326,646) to 36% (772,474) for Donald Trump. That’s pretty consistent with the other poor states, except New Mexico. The only two areas voting for Democrats were the two most populous counties, Fayette (Lexington–59.25% for Biden) and Jefferson (Louisville–59.06% for Biden). The Kentucky senators are Republicans Rand Paul and Mitch McConnell. Five Kentucky Congressmen are Republicans. The sixth, John Yarmuth, is retiring.

Kentucky Presidential Election Results 2020.svg
From Wikipedia

Interestingly, the Governor and Lieutenant Governor of Kentucky are Democrats, though nobody else in Kentucky appears to be. The Governor, Andy Beshear, won the 2019 election by fewer than 5,000 votes, and the election must have seemed a harbinger for the 2020 presidential election. Maybe it was, but not in Kentucky.

On the north, Kentucky is bordered by the Ohio River, on the east the Appalachians, on the west the Mississippi, and the south, well, nothing really. It’s just one of those arbitrary borders that separates two places, in this case Kentucky and Tennessee. The Appalachian/Cumberland Plateau takes up the eastern third of the state. Central Kentucky is apparently rolling hills covered with bluegrass pastures, while the northwest again becomes hilly. There’s some Mississippi River marshland down in the southwest, but not a lot.

There are two coal-producing areas, the Western Coal Field and the Eastern Coal Field. Butcher Holler is in the Eastern Coal Field, somewhere to the right of Lexington.

My daddy worked all night in the Van Lear coal mines
All day long in the fields a-hoein corn

Loretta Lynn, Coal Miner’s Daughter, 1969.

Kentucky coal mining, Kentucky Geological Survey, University of Kentucky

In addition to the Ohio, there are two other major rivers in Kentucky; the Cumberland wanders through Southeast Kentucky and North Central Tennessee, and the Kentucky runs from the Appalachians northwest through central Kentucky to the Ohio. There’s also a bit of the Mississippi. The Green River, the one in John Prine’s Paradise that Mr. Peabody’s coal train hauled away, is in the Western Coal Field.

The Green is supposed to be a pretty good smallmouth river.

For anglers, all of that stuff–except maybe the whiskey and the rivers–is of secondary importance to the real question: what kind of fish are there, and where. Kentucky is not a destination fishing state, at least for fly fishers, but in addition to the big three there are plenty of smaller rivers and streams. There are stocked and naturally reproducing trout, but they’re not native–though a lot of the fly fishing literature on the state is about where to find trout. Most of the guides in the state appear to be located near the Cumberland in Southern Kentucky–a dam tailwater–though there are also some guides out of Lexington. In addition to trout, there are catfish and sunfish, spotted bass, largemouth bass, and smallmouth bass. When we go next week, I hope we can try for smallmouth near Lexington, but it may still be too cold.

I recall that spotted bass used to be called Kentucky bass, but I had a hard time finding references to Kentucky bass on the internet.

Micropterus Dolomieu Small-Mouth Black Bass
John J. Baird, Small-Mouth Black Bass, 1897, Manual of fish culture based on the methods of United States Commission of Fish and Fisheries, Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office, from the Freshwater and Marine Image Bank, University of Washington.

In addition to Muhammed Ali and Loretta Lynn, Kentucky has had a penchant for producing (or being the home of) poets, especially reasonably important 20th Century poets. There are, in more or less historical order, Robert Penn Warren, Thomas Merton, Wendell Berry, and the recently deceased bell hooks. I can’t say that I’ve read anything by Warren except for All the King’s Men, which I vaguely recall is a novel, but Warren is the only person to have won a Pultizer Prize in both fiction and poetry. I’ve read a good bit of Merton, particularly The Seven Storey Mountain, which I vaguely recall is an autobiography. Reading his poetry–which isn’t always comprehensible–feels almost like reading parts of the Bible–which also isn’t always comprehensible. I’ve read almost none of bell hooks, who honestly until her recent death I hadn’t heard of. Old white Southerner, black feminist writer–I guess I’m not her target audience. I’ve reserved a couple of her books from our local library, but don’t have them yet.

Getting ready to go to Kentucky, I’ve read a good bit of Wendell Berry, who is, I think, peculiarly Southern in his dedication to agrarian values and anti-government convictions, and peculiarly un-Southern in his antiwar convictions. He also doesn’t seem to ever write a funny line, which seems peculiarly un-Southern except among evangelicals. The closest I could come to a funny line was this:

It may be that we can keep without harm some industrial comforts; warm baths in wintertime maybe, maybe painless dentistry.

From Our Deserted Country, Ten Essays.

I say it’s not funny. It’s kinda funny, but I suspect even in that Berry was mostly serious. In his photos he looks happy enough.

Berry in December 2011
Guy Mendes, 2011, Wendell Berry

Besides the poets, I am old enough to have grown up revering Daniel Boone, but probably the folk hero Daniel Boone, not the actual Daniel Boone. The actual Boone never wore a coonskin cap, and no American hero has survived more historical (and ahistorical) revisions than Boone, culminating in the 1964 TV series Daniel Boone, starring Fess Parker.

I loved that show.

The actual Boone was born in 1735 to a Quaker family in Pennsylvania. After his father, Squire Boone, fell out with local Quakers, the Boones moved to North Carolina. Daniel married Rebecca in North Carolina in 1756, but he didn’t much cotton to farming. Even after marriage he spent most of his time on months- and even years- long hunts for pelts for the fur trade. He wandered as far from North Carolina as Florida, and purchased land there. At some point he wandered into Kentucky.

In the popular imagination, Boone opened Kentucky for settlement. He first entered Kentucky in 1767, and in 1769 returned and spent two years exploring. That’s two years out gallivanting. There is a possibly apocryphal tale of Boone returning from a long hunt to find that Rebecca had a new daughter fathered by Boone’s brother. Possibly apocryphal, possibly true. If true, Boone apparently took it in stride.

Defenders In Siege Of Boonesborough H Pyle Harper's Weekly June 1887.jpg
Howard Pyle, 1887, Defenders in Siege of Boonesborough, Harper’s Weekly.

Boone famously trail-blazed the Wilderness Road from Virginia to Tennessee through the Cumberland Gap. Boone entered Kentucky during a peculiarly violent period of American history. Beginning with the Revolutionary War and continuing through the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, there was constant warfare and the threat of warfare with the British and the Northwestern tribes. Boone had the reputation of an Indian fighter, and he was certainly involved in the Northwest Indian War, but late in life Boone said that he had only ever killed three Indians. He was a brilliant pathfinder, a respected leader, a great hunter, but not the rippin’est, roarin’est, fightin’est man the frontier ever knew. He was a colonel in the state militia, at a time when because of the constant threat of local war the rank meant something.

My favorite Boone quote was that he was never lost, but that he was misplaced for a few days from time-to-time.

In 1799 Boone moved west to Missouri because he went broke in Kentucky. He had claimed a lot of land in Kentucky, but didn’t really have the temperament to be a land investor, and didn’t have the resources to hold all of his land together.

In 1820 he was 85 when he died in Defiance, Missouri. He was a legend in his own time, largely because of a contemporary popular pamphlet. Later the penny press took up Boone, and created the folk-hero that lasted through my childhood infatuation with the Boone portrayed by Seth Parker.

D. Boon cilled a bar and swung through the forest on grape vines.

Carl Wimar 1855, The Abduction of Boone’s Daughter by the Indians, oil on canvas, Amon Carter Museum of American Art

In the 1800s Wisconsin historian Lyman Draper collected Boone’s papers and the oral remembrances of his descendants and his contemporaries, so unlike many historical figures we know a lot about Boone. Boone himself wasn’t shy about telling his story, and unlike many, he was pretty reliable. Later still there would be largely discredited revisionist theories concerning Boone, that pronounced that most settlers of Kentucky came down the Ohio River, not across the Wilderness Road, or that Boone was only the lackey of real estate investors who told him what to do, or that in some other way Boone should get no credit for the settlement of Kentucky. That, apparently, is about as bad of history as the folk tales, even though it was propagated by academic historians.

Interestingly, the folk-hero Boone is the subject of an early statue removal, in this case in the nation’s capital. A marble statue of The Rescue, generally believed to be Boone rescuing his family, was displayed in the Capital from 1853 until 1959, more than 100 years, until it was removed during building work and never put back. By 1959 it was the subject of considerable controversy, and I figured that they did the building work just to get rid of the statue, along with the statue of Christopher Columbus on the other side of the stairway (which is also still in storage).

GreenoughRescue.jpg
Horatio Greenough, The Rescue, 1837-1850, white marble. It was dropped by a crane at some point, and is now in storage. I’ve never heard that it was dropped on purpose.

Boone was 43 by the time he made it to Kentucky. For my first trip to Kentucky I’m a bit older than that, but instead of founding Boonesborough, I can make a motel reservation. In any event, I’m just in it for the whiskey. I mean the fish.

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Crawford State Park, Kansas, June 18-19, 2021.

Google Maps tells me that it’s 9 hours and 51 minutes and 617 miles to Crawford State Park, near Girard, Kansas, population 2,707. Google Maps is lying. The 617 miles is true enough, but map apps don’t account for gas breaks, walking the dogs, road work, slow traffic in the left lane, and side junkets and side bets, even if you drive a reasonable five miles faster than the speed limit for most of the distance. If Google Maps tells me that it’s 23 minutes from my house to my office in downtown Houston, that’s pretty close to right. On the other hand, if Google Maps tells me its 2 hours, 45 minutes from Houston to Austin, it’s short by 15 or 20 minutes after I stop at Hruskas for gas and kolaches. It took us about 11 and a half hours to drive from Houston to Southeastern Kansas, notwithstanding the map app’s 10-hour claim.

Pro Tip #1: If you’re driving from point A to point B and you drive the speed limit or a bit over, add about 20 minutes to the app time for every 200 miles you drive. Add another 45 minutes for lunch. 

We picked Southeastern Kansas because (1) I still needed to catch a fish in Kansas, (2) the reservation site claimed that Crawford is one of the most beautiful state parks in Kansas, and (3) the dogs could go. Plus it was Juneteenth weekend; you gotta celebrate Juneteenth. I made a reservation to camp three nights at the park. We stayed one night. 

Google Maps

This was our third trip to Kansas, fourth if you count a weekend trip to Kansas City in 2016 to see the Astros play the Royals (that whole Missouri/Kansas thing with Kansas City confuses everybody who isn’t from Missouri/Kansas, but I think we drove through Kansas City, Kansas, on the way to the airport). In 2020 we drove to Wichita in the dead of winter to get donuts, and last October we drove to Mead State Park and the Cimarron National Grassland. Cimarron National Grassland is sparsely magnificent, and standing on the Santa Fe trail in Western Kansas is one of those things that everyone should do, especially if they love New Mexico. Mead State Park is also very pretty; notwithstanding the internet, I thought it prettier than Crawford State Park. Kansas was bitter cold in February though, and our October trip was unexpectedly cold and fishless. 

Crawford Lake is smallish, about 150 acres, which makes it easier for fly rods, but it was bigger than I thought it would be. We were on the upper right-hand finger of the lake, out of the wind–the wind blew hard on the lake’s main body–but it was also hot. Really hot. Even in the evening when we got there, when it was supposed to be cooling, the temperatures were in the 90s, and I was sweat-drenched by the time I’d set up the tent. I thought about fishing when we got there, but by the time I’d set up camp I was too beat to take the kayak off the roof rack.

The park was packed with campers in RVs and tents, though everybody was reasonably quiet, self-contained, and polite–this was Kansas. Still, living outside with a crowd makes me feel a bit too displayed and on-guard. 

Pro Tip #2: Nobody camps at state parks on a summer weekend. It’s too crowded. 

Early Saturday morning I put in the kayak and fished for about an hour down the sheltered bank. I started out fishing a size 8 BBB fly, and used a 9-foot 7 weight rod and a floating line with a 9 foot leader and 16 pound tippet. At least I fished a 16 pound tippet until I broke it off in a tree. Then I fished a 7 foot leader with a 20 pound tippet–I’d left the spool of 16 pound in the car. I stayed in the protected finger of the lake where we camped. I didn’t catch any bass. but I did catch this typical Kansas sunfish. 

A typical Kansas bluegill. Photo courtesy of Nick Denbow, Western Caribbean Fly Fishing School.

Ok, I lied. That’s neither a sunfish nor in Kansas. It’s not me either. This is what I actually caught:

Clearly I needed the 20 pound tippet. In an hour I caught six of them, all about the same size, one after another. I tossed the fly close to the weeds by the bank and let it sink, and the blue gill would take it. 

I love catching blue gill. I love their aggression, I love their iridescence and colors when brought to hand. When the next overlord tells me I have to give up catching every fish but one, blue gill will like as not be the fish I choose to keep. Plus if I’d glued all six of my Kansas fish together I’d have had a pretty good-sized fish.

I was off the water in a bit more than an hour. Kris didn’t want to go out in the kayak, so we packed up the car and left. We didn’t want to suffer the afternoon heat and the crowd didn’t lend itself to park exploration. 

We didn’t go straight home. We were across the Kansas/Missouri border from Branson, Missouri, and Carolyn Parker of Branson’s River Run Outfitters had been on Tom Rosenbauer’s Orvis podcast the week before. It was only 70 miles away, so we drove to Branson. 

Branson is Las Vegas for devout Southern Baptists who don’t drink, gamble, or watch cavorting showgirls. It’s is in the heart of the Ozarks, and in lieu of neon the countryside is devastated by Branson billboards. There are shows, Dolly Parton’s Stampede, Presley’s Country Jamboree, Amazing Pets, The Haygoods, Legends of Country at Dick Clark’s American Bandstand Theater, illusionists and magicians and comedians, JESUS at Sight and Sound Theater (there’s an illusionist, magician, and comedian joke there, but for once I’m exercising restraint) . . . . There’s a big lake for bass fishing, golf courses, and a tailwater. There are lots of 50s diners in Branson, and I suspect a Golden Corral.

We originally thought we’d spend the night there, so we stopped at a visitor center–there are lots of visitor centers in Branson, but I don’t know if any are official. I asked the lady at the counter to suggest a hotel where we could take the dogs, and she said what kind of hotel, and I said a hotel with a bar. She told me there weren’t a lot of bars in Branson, but she called a hotel with a bar for us. The hotel was full–she said that on summer weekends Branson is packed, but I’ll always suspect that the hotel was full because of its bar. 

Kris wanted to stay and fish, but I just couldn’t do it. We didn’t have any trout rods; we could have used the shop’s rods but I was looking for excuses. The guys at the shop told us that the river was particularly high because of dam releases, so I used that as well. Bottom line though, all those Southern Baptists on holiday made me nervous.

Pro Tip #3: On a summer weekend, if you’re a devout Southern Baptist out for a good time, Branson, Missouri, is for you. 

We drove on to Bentonville, Arkansas, home of WalMart, where I had a decidedly un-Baptist Manhattan at The Preacher’s Son, an upscale place with ties to the Waltons built in a former church. There was no show, but I guess religion was the day’s motif. 

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What’s the Matter with Kansas, Part 2, October 16-19, 2020

Here’s a tip. If it’s in the 30s and the wind is blowing hard, and you pull into a Kansas campsite at 11 at night, angry with each other because of the wrong turn you made on the farm road, and because you couldn’t decipher the instructions at the park self-pay station, and because your companion doesn’t believe that this is the right campsite (or that if it’s not screw it, it’s a campsite); and you agree you’ll just sleep in the front seats of the van because it’s cold and dark and blowing and setting up the tent is just more than you can manage, well here’s the tip: when your companion says should we get out the sleeping bags? Say yes, and do it. The car seats will be ok, they recline and you’re exhausted, but by a few hours after you park, the inside of the van will be as cold as if there was no van at all. I froze all night, and woke with one of Kris’s sweaters wrapped around my feet, with a towel wrapped around my legs, and with a small dog snuggled for warmth as close as it could get.

Here’s a second tip. If you decide at the last minute to take the wee dogs along, and the wee dog who sticks by you is not the clean living chihuahua but the miniature schnauzer that daily collects a new layer of oily dirt and dog smells, give the dog a bath before you go. Sure, she’s a sweet dog, but after two days with the dog sleeping near you for warmth, three weeks later you’ll still conjure the smell of that dog. It was bad enough the first night, sleeping loose in the car, but the second night when it got really cold, the dog and I shared my technical skin-tight ultralight Mountain Hardware down mummy bag. In that bag there’s barely space for me, much less a schnauzer, except (because she was shivering) right at the neck. To make space for the schnauzer, I left the neck of the bag unzipped. My schnoz and that schnauzer shared too much space for too long.

Just give the dog a bath. Slightly rancid schnauzer is a smell that lingers. Take the time and give the dog a bath.

Mead State Park is not on anybody’s must-see list, but it’s pretty. In warmer weather it would have been a lot of fun to fish. There were shallow flats where in summer the bass and sunfish would cluster, except that the cold nights sent the bass and sunfish into shock and deeper water and they were nowhere to be found. There was bird life, and Kris got plenty of photos, flickers, eastern bluebirds, redhead ducks . . . The park was also packed with RVs, while we had the only tent. When we got back I asked my friend Schoonover whether he had an RV, and he said I’m old and white, of course I have an RV. I guess I’m supposed to have an RV.

We have a newish tent, and a newish propane stove. I’ve got all the backpacking gear in the world, but I bought the new tent and stove for car camping. Here is another tip, or at least an insight. When you wake up in the morning and the temperature has plummeted below freezing, you’re going to be jealous of those people with RVs. It’s hard to pack camp with numb fingers.

The dogs sat in the car and were no help at all with the packing.

There’s nothing wrong with cold I guess, and after the first cold night we had one extraordinarily beautiful day followed by an even colder, windier night. The next morning after breakfast it was overcast and spitting rain so we threw stuff into the car and drove around southwestern Kansas, to Dodge City and the Cimarron National Grassland. At 5 that afternoon, after it never warmed, we drove home, across the Oklahoma Panhandle, down through the Texas Panhandle, and then east and south to Houston. We drove through the night and got home the next morning by 9.

I was the only fly fisher at Mead Lake, but there were conventional anglers, and they weren’t catching anything either. I did have a safety plan. There’s always a spillway, and at the bottom of the spillway a bit of water where you can find sunfish. I was going to fish the Mead Lake tailwater! Here was the Mead Lake spillway. There weren’t any dry-land sunfish.

Mead Lake gets stocked with trout on November 1, and at dusk Saturday, in the prettiest light in the world, we watched rise forms across the center of the lake. I’d brought a sit-on-top kayak, the kind where sit-on-top actually translates as sit-in-a-puddle, and I tried to fish the rise. I don’t know what the fish were, maybe sunfish, but I’m half convinced it was early-stocked trout. I fished a small streamer, and got a tug, and got enough of a hit to see a quick flash of silver before the fish came off the hook, but I should have thrown out a foam beetle and let it sit. Even fishless though, it was pretty, and I fished until dark.

Here’s a fourth tip. In October Kansas gets cold, and the wind blows. Maybe June’s the time to go to Kansas.