Tag: Trout

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Missouri

On Monday we decided that on Friday we’d drive to Missouri, to Branson. That’s a short turnaround, but I’ve been to Missouri plenty. My Grandmother Eva–not that Grandmother Eva, the other Grandmother Eva–was born in Missouri, in Osgood near the Iowa border, in 1890. When I was five or six, circa 1963, we took her home from Texas to see her siblings. We stayed with one of her sisters, and while the house may have had electricity, it didn’t have indoor plumbing. There was a pump in the yard for water and an outhouse for other sundry stuff. It was on a gravel country road, and at night I saw fireflies for the first time. It was wonderful.

I’ve been to Missouri some since, enough to know that Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City is as pretty as MLB stadiums get (though I don’t recommend it in August), and that the riverfront town of Hannibal has seen better days. I’ve been to Missouri enough to know that while any Texan would tell you that Missouri barbecue is mediocre stuff, the sandwiches at Gioia’s Deli on The Hill are worth the effort. On The Hill you can still imagine Joe Garagiola and Yogi Berra as children in the neighborhood’s heyday. Not so much Mark Twain and Hannibal.

Kauffman Stadium, Kansas City, 2015.

There are good fishing rivers in the Missouri Ozarks, and if we were being intellectually honest we would target native Missouri smallmouth, but we haven’t fished for trout in a while, and there are plenty of Missouri rivers stocked at one time or another with trout. In Branson there is the Ozarks’ White River at the Taneycomo Lake dam. One Missouri spring creek near Branson, Crane Creek, claims the purest strain of McCloud River redband trout in the world. They were stocked in the 1880s from eggs imported from California and supposedly dumped off a bridge by railroaders.

Records are a bit sketchy, but Crane Creek has been stocked no more recently than the 1920s. Because it was the site of the second national fish hatchery, the McCloud River redband was the original source of most of the stocked rainbow in the world. Only in Crane Creek does the original strain remain unmixed with other rainbow subspecies.

By all reports the Crane Creek trout are small, skittish, and hard to catch. The stream is narrow and overgrown, and there’s poison ivy and water moccasins. Of course that last is likely overblown, and there are more likely a lot of non-venomous northern water snakes and maybe some moccasins. It is a herpetologist’s truism that everybody thinks that every water snake is a vicious, vindictive, or aggressive cottonmouth, but they aren’t more vicious, vindictive, and aggressive than most of us, and most of the snakes you see in the water aren’t moccasins.

Anyway, it sounds like we have to fish Crane Creek.

I’ve been looking at Missouri rivers for a while, thinking we would avoid Branson. We could do it, but Branson is convenient. It’s a strange place, a tourist destination that is a distant cousin to Nashville. It is a vacation destination for devout Southern and Midwestern protestants, seemingly devoted to clean living, family entertainment, golf, lakeside condos, and fatty foods. There is fishing though, and a good fly shop. It’s about a 10-hour drive from Houston. We can take the dogs, and coming home we can spend the night in Bentonville, Arkansas. Branson eateries tend towards family entertainment and national chains. Bentonville, as the business hub of Walmart, has better places to eat.

A short note on pronunciation

Apparently there’s no correct pronunciation of Missouri. The most common pronunciations are either Missour-ee or Missour-uh, but neither is incorrect, and they aren’t even the only ones. I grew up with Missour-uh, and long assumed that since I had some Missour-uh ancestry my pronunciation must be correct, but no. Still, it’s not wrong either. Oddly, how you say Missouri isn’t governed by education, wealth, race, or even geography. It’s not a South versus Midwest thing. It’s just the luck of the draw or maybe personal taste. Some Missourans say Missour-uh, some Missour-ee, and some go back and forth between them. All things should be so accommodating.

The Missouri Compromise

The U.S. acquired Missouri in 1803 as part of the Louisiana Purchase, and St. Louis became the jumping-off point for a big part of western expansion. In 1821 it became a state under the Missouri Compromise: to maintain political balance, Maine entered the Union as a Free State, while Missouri entered as a Slave State. After the admission of Missouri, no new territory north of the 36°30′ parallel could enter the Union as a slave state.

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Julio Reis, Map of the United States c. 1849 (modern state borders), with the parallel 36°30′ north, Wikipedia, 2009.

The state lines in the map above are mostly modern boundaries. West Virginia wouldn’t exist until the Civil War. None of the grey states existed, except California. It’s the green line, the extension of the Mason-Dixon Line along 36°30′ that purportedly controlled American expansion for the next 30 years. See that far north border of Texas, and the Oklahoma Panhandle? The Oklahoma Panhandle was originally claimed by Texas, but when Texas entered the Union in 1845, that northern bit was above the line. To preserve the Missouri Compromise, it was cut off and left as part of the Indian Territory.

After the Missouri Compromise, there was a push among Southern slaveholding states to annex Cuba as a Slave State, to maintain Southern legislative power. It wasn’t going to happen. Cuba was valuable to Spain, and there was no real interest in annexation among most Cubans, but it’s amusing to guess whether Governor Fidel would have been a Republican or a Democrat.

The Missouri Compromise lasted until the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 provided that Kansas and Nebraska would enter the Union as slave or free based on the votes of Kansas or Nebraska settlers. The seemingly sensible resolution threw the now-raging national slave debate into armed war. Abolitionists came to Kansas from the north, and pro-slavery Border Ruffians raided into Kansas from Missouri, and all of them brought convictions, guns, and knives. John Brown got his bones in Bloody Kansas. Kansas finally voted to enter the Union as a free state, but allowing popular local vote to determine only made the Civil War inevitable.

In 1857, in the Dred Scott decision, the Supreme Court determined that African Americans could not be citizens, that the federal government could not prohibit slavery in its territories, and for good measure that the already superseded Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional.

Reynolds's Political Map of the United States 1856.jpg

New York: Wm. C. Reynolds and J. C. Jones – “Reynolds’s Political Map of the United States” (1856) from the Library of Congress Geography and Map Division.

Population and Demographics

In 1820, the 66,586 population of Missouri was .6% of the nation’s total population. By 1920, Missouri’s 3,404,055 population was a biggly 3% of the total. St. Louis was the 6th largest city in the U.S., and had two major league baseball teams, the Cardinals and the Browns (now the Baltimore Orioles). Kansas City was 19th. By 2020, the St. Louis metropolitan statistical area, with a population of 2,820,253, was ranked 21st. Kansas City, with 2,192,035, was 31st.

In 2020, the total Missouri population of 6,154,913 was .1% of the total U.S. population of 329.5 million. It had gone from .6% in 1820, to 3% in 1920, to .1% in 1920. Missouri still had two major league baseball teams, though one was now the Kansas City Royals. The Kansas City Chiefs won the Super Bowl in 2020. They won again this year.

Missouri’s national importance was driven in part by Mississippi River trade and Westward Expansion, and with the decline of both, the its national importance also declined. Still, Missouri is where the South and the Midwest meet, in the same way that Texas is where the South and the Southwest meet. It is a black/white population, with heavy emphasis on white. Approximately 82% of Missourians are white, with less than 5% of that population Hispanic.

About 12% of the Missouri population is black, mostly centered in St. Louis and Kansas City, and in a stretch of southeastern counties along the Mississippi River, an apparent extension of the Arkansas and Mississippi Deltas. That delta population is likely a remnant of slavery, and the population growth in St. Louis and Kansas City was fueled by the Great Migration, both from the South and from less populated areas in Missouri. Hannibal, for instance was 14.5% black in 1900, but only 6.1% by 2020. Conversely, St. Louis was 6.1% black in 1900, but by 2020 the greater St Louis area was 17% black.

Satchel Paige, Untitled Photo, between 1935 and 1942, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.

It’s worth noting that Kansas City became an African American cultural Mecca, being, along with New Orleans, Chicago, and New York, a major jazz hub. Count Basie was from Kansas City. So was Dexter Gordon, Lester Young, Big Joe Turner, Count Basie, and Charlie Parker. It was also the home of the Kansas City Monarchs, perhaps one of the greatest baseball conglomerations ever. Jackie Robinson jumped from the Monarchs to the Brooklyn Dodgers. Satchel Paige played for the Monarchs, and so did Cool Papa Bell, Turkey Stearns, Wilbur Rogan, and Buck O’Neil.

Lester Young by Ojon Mili. Time Inc. – Life magazine, Volume 17, Number 13 (page 40), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44359804

The American Jazz Museum and the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum are at 18th and Vine in Kansas City, and are worth a special trip. And did I mention that Kauffman Stadium is one of the finest stadiums in Major League Baseball? It’s just too bad that Kansas City Barbecue isn’t better.

Of course Mark Twain is from Missouri, and T.S. Eliot, and Maya Angelou.

Politics

Both U.S. Senators from Missouri and four of the six Representatives are Republican. All of the six statewide elected officials, governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, auditor, treasurer, and attorney general, are Republican, and there are sizable Republican majorities in the state senate and house of representatives.

In 2020, Donald Trump carried the state by 56.80% of the vote, compared to Joe Biden’s 41.41%. Biden carried only Boone, Jackson, and St. Louis Counties. Jackson is Kansas City, St. Louis is, well, St. Louis, and Boone, in the middle of the state, is Columbia, home of the University of Missouri. Like other states, less-populated areas vote Republican, urban centers and college towns vote Democratic.

2020 presidential election, Missouri, By KyleReese64 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=95975673

Geography

Missouri is divided into three major geographic regions, the Ozark Highlands, the Northern Plains, and the Coastal Alluvial Plain. No mysteries here. The Northern Plains are rolling, and you can grow corn and soybeans, soybeans and corn, and corn. There are lots of streams. It’s Iowa just a wee bit south of Iowa.

The smallest region, the southeast Coastal Alluvial Plain, is an extension of the Arkansas Delta, which is just like the Mississippi Delta but west of the Mississippi. It’s flat, wet, and a good place to grow rice, and cotton. Of course cotton.

The Ozarks are the Ozarks. They extend into Arkansas, Kansas, and Oklahoma. It’s a dome, cut into topography by erosion, faults, bluffs, rivers, and streams. It’s beautiful, dramatic country.

On the state’s eastern border there’s the Mississippi River. Cutting across the center of the state, roughly along the line that divides the Plains and the Ozarks, is the Missouri River. The Missouri meets the Mississippi at St. Louis.

Mark Twain’s Confederate Service

Mark Twain served as a Confederate militia lieutenant in Missouri, and he deserted after two weeks. Twain scholars have suggested that his desertion didn’t evidence opposition to the Confederacy, as much as concern as to the likely outcome of militia service in what was substantially Union-controlled territory. It’s pretty likely that Twain was dedicated to the South, and that his later reevaluation of the South and its cause was a principal source of his satirical brilliance. It’s hard to imagine Huck Finn written by someone who didn’t distrust most people’s pronouncements, including from time to time his own.

Osgood, Missouri, 2021.

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Kanektok River, Bethel Census Area, Alaska, July 3-10, 2022.

I had imagined Alaska, and not just the bears, either. I had imagined glaciers and mountains, forests and Western streams and endless fish–like Yellowstone, but better, with more of all the stuff that makes the West wild. That’s not exactly the Alaska where we fished. We spent a week on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta where the Kanektok River meets the Bering Sea, and it was both different and more interesting.

Swinging for Kings

We fished six days at Deneki Outdoors’ Alaska West camp, five miles upstream from the coastal village of Quinagak, population 856. We were where Alaska ended and the Bering Sea began, with no roads into town through the tundra. Quinagak is 72 air miles from the next largest town, Bethel. It was pretty remote.

Fishing for salmon in Alaska is about time. Arrive two weeks too early or two weeks too late and you won’t catch the salmon you want. The salmon come in from the sea on a schedule, year after year, in bigger or smaller numbers, though it seems that these days the numbers are always smaller. We chose early July for king salmon, the largest Pacific salmon. Hubris I reckon.

Fly fishing for kings differs from most other fly fishing. The rods are different. The lines are different. The flies are different.

Spey rods are long, 13 feet compared to the usual 9-foot fly rod, and heavy. You use both hands to cast, and there’s no back-cast. It’s the simplest fly cast, a roll cast, but with some complicating twists and turns and issues of timing, and the arcane lines are the heart of it. We fished with Skagit lines. There is another type of spey line, a Scandi line, but it’s the Skagit that’s used on the Kanektok for kings.

Skagit lines are short, as short as 20 feet, and thick and heavy. They’re the colors of Play-Doh so you can see them on the water, and they’re thick as baling wire, nearly an 1/8th of an inch. Skagit line weights are measured in grains. The heaviest part of a regular 9-weight redfish line, a heavy line, might weigh 330 grains. My 8/9-weight Skagit line weighs 600 grains. See what I mean by arcane? They use an ancient alchemist weight system to measure the lines, and I doubt that much of anybody knows what a grain actually is. Regardless, nearly twice the weight makes a difference, whether it’s measured in grains or in kilograms or in ounces.

The Skagit line is attached to the reel through 100 feet of thin plastic-coated running line, and then through 200 yards of braided nylon backing. We would cast some of the running line, but only saw the backing when a hot fish ran.

Skagit lines are designed to pick up and throw a sinking tip that is also heavy. A sink tip’s plastic coating is mixed with ground tungsten to sink into the river as much as 7- or 8-inches per second. At the end of that heavy ten-foot sink tip is a large, annoying fly with the added water weight of a good river baptism. And the flies are annoying. Once they hit freshwater from the sea, salmon aren’t feeding. The flies are designed for provocation, not imitation.

Learning to spey cast is not for the faint-hearted. The heavy lines, large soaked flies, and high line speed can leave a lasting impression, even if you don’t actually hook yourself. I thwacked my left ear hard, and another bad cast took my stocking cap into the river. If I hadn’t been wearing the cap it would have been bits of my scalp.

When we started on Sunday we were less than competent casters. By the next Saturday we were casting more or less in the vicinity of ok. Our guides were good teachers, and we were at it most of 10 hours a day for six days. Even I had a chance of getting better.

We waded along gravel bars, trying to fish the places the salmon might hold before another upstream push. There was enough river and few enough anglers to always have our own private gravel bar. We’d wade out in the shallows then cast across to the deeper water, maybe 70 feet, more likely 60, and let the fly and 10-foot sink tip drag down and across in the current. That arc–more of a rounded right angle, really–is the swing, arced down and across from me, the pivot. When the line and fly were almost directly below me I would let the fly hang in the current, then retrieve line back until I could cast again.

When I usually fish, I cast to fish I see, or cast to where I think fish are likely. This was more like broadcasting on the radio, casting out to as much of the river as I could cover and then letting the fly search. Cast, swing, retrieve, step downriver one or two steps, and then do it all again. Then do it all again. Then do it all again. I never really knew who was out there.

Those tungsten sink tips? Rio fly lines sells them as MOW tips, and I was told that MOW are the initials of three former Alaska West guides who developed the lines. The Kanektok has the reputation of one of the best places in the world to swing flies for kings, and whether or not you catch fish, it’s a mesmerizing business.

The River, the tundra, and the sea.

Most anybody can work up some mystical awe for a mountain, but it’s hard to work up much awe for a delta. Its beauty is more difficult to parse. I’ve probably spent more time fishing coastal marshes than most, and that’s what first struck me about the Kanektok. Out of context, if someone told you that those were mangroves, not stunted alders, and that that was marsh grass, not tundra grass, you’d like as not believe you were somewhere in Belize, or Galveston, or New Orleans.

The Kanektok flow was steady and smooth. The gravel bottom was easy to wade, though it did get deep. We stayed in the shallows, and I doubt that I ever waded in water that was much above my knees.

At the sea the mouth of the Kanektok is a tidal plain. At low tide at the outlet there were sand bars and tall, cut banks. Twelve hours later, everything we saw would be hidden under ten feet of high tide. I climbed up a bank, in part from a full bladder and in part from curiosity, and from there the tundra grass, flat and seemingly endless, was dotted with purple fire weed, white yarrow, and yellow grundsels.

I’ve read that in summer the Bering Sea hosts the largest biomass on earth, and that carries over into the Delta. Even along the relatively people-inhabited river we watched swallows attack a golden eagle, compared the glaucous gulls to our own smaller laughing gulls, saw beaver swim dragging fresh-cut alder, and watched tiny yellow warblers, maybe from as far south as the Yucatan, explore the bankside alders.

An odd factoid: the average American eats about one ton, 2000 pounds, of food each year. In Quinagak, about 700 pounds of each resident’s annual food supply comes from subsistence fishing, hunting, and gathering. Even with our annual fig crop and July okra production, plus those two or three tomatoes each year that actually ripen, I doubt that we get 25 pounds of food per year from anywhere but the HEB. And this year the figs didn’t make because of the drought. We’ve had a lot of okra though.

There’s Yup’ik archeological history near Quinagak that dates from as early as 1350, so it’s a well-established trading site, and probably a fishing site. During the year though the current residents’ ancestors would disburse throughout the region to gather food. I suppose that’s part of the legacy of the Alaskan Native Claims Act: it mandated that Native Alaskans pick their spot. Maybe there’s an anthropologist somewhere who knows.

Anyway, back to that 700 pounds. There always seemed to be Quinagakians on the river snagging sockeye. It wasn’t sporting, but then it wasn’t meant to be. It was harvesting. And from the river mouth we could watch Quinagak boats put out to sea to net fish.

On the Kanektok, the king return was down, and for the season Alaska had banned chum salmon fishing because the numbers of returning chum are way off. Global warming maybe, maybe the efficiency of gill nets, maybe both. Probably combinations of things I can’t imagine.

Fish, No Fish

The first day I caught five fish. Now mind, any day with five fish is a good day, and I caught one 15-pound king, a couple of smaller jacks, and two chum. They were bright, fast fish, only a few miles from the ocean and not yet changing to their spawning form and colors, not yet dying.

We couldn’t target chum, but when we fished for kings we couldn’t help accidentally catching chum. We landed and released them as quickly as we could. The jacks are a bit of an oddity, and are defined by Alaska law as any king salmon that’s less than 30 inches long. The two Jacks I caught the first day were big for jacks, maybe close to ten pounds. They were good fish, but they weren’t 30 inches. They weren’t kings.

Kings go out to the ocean for five to eight years before they return to their home river. Jacks are immature males, always males, teenagers, who go out to the ocean but then return to their river after one to three years. People say it’s a bit of a mystery why the jacks return early, but do teenage boys ever believe in the possibility of death? Are teenage boys everywhere not stupid for the chance to get laid? Where’s the mystery?

The first day my five fish were the best catch for the camp, and I reveled in it, certain that I had this Alaska thing down. The next day I followed it up with nothing. Nichts, nada, nil. I worked hard, and came back to camp in the evening shamefaced. Kris caught fish, Kris always catches fish. Within a couple of hours of arriving at camp she walked down to the river and caught a nice rainbow. Then she caught a jack, a chum and a rainbow on Monday, a jack and two rainbows on Tuesday, a chum on Wednesday, two rainbows on Thursday, a jack, a king and the first pink of the season on Friday, and three rainbows and two jacks on Saturday. She mostly spent her time in Alaska outfishing me.

I had imagined Alaska as a steady stream of fish, and after going nil on Monday, on the third day, Wednesday, I caught one jack.

None of this matched my imagination. On Thursday again I caught nothing. I hooked two fish and lost them after setting the hook. Once I tried to set the hook too soon after the slightest nudge.

I got plenty of practice casting.

All of this was done under lead skies, in cold and rain. Kris caught fish and I caught nada.

Besides the obvious differences in rod and line, maybe the biggest difference between swinging flies and other fly fishing is the take. So much of fly fishing is visual, or a fish attacks a retrieved streamer. You watch the line, you watch an indicator on the line, you watch the fish, or you watch the fly. You’re active, you’re looking. Swinging the fly, on the other hand, is all tactile. The connection through the line between you and the hook is direct, and it’s the only connection. We couldn’t see what was happening beneath the surface, but could only feel a nudge, a tug, and then the heavy pull of the fish on the line. If you hadn’t already blown it, that’s when you would set the hook. It is the most connected, electric thing.

On Friday, I lost a good king after a good fight, and landed another king within a mile of the ocean. There was a lamprey wound on its belly, and it still had the sea lice it would lose in freshwater. Kris also landed a king, and her fish had the beginning colors of the spawn. Late in the day I hooked a salmon, and it ran down and across the river, taking all of the 100-foot running line and a good bit of the braided backing. I saw the fish once, 100 feet across and downriver, dragging the long curve of my line and jumping upriver parallel to the surface. While I fought the fish it started to rain, the only rain of the day, big, heavy drops. When I finally landed the fish it was a huge chum, bigger than any of the kings I’d caught, and by then the rain had stopped. Alaska can be a volatile place.

Chris the Guide spent time reviving the fish, and Kris the companion snapped a photo when he took it from the net. It was nothing but a moment, a few minutes to revive the fish, and a brief glimpse of the sea, of the river, of a different place from what I had imagined.

Our last day

Our last day fishing, Saturday, was bright and clear, warm and sunny, with low tides. It was a terrible day for fishing, though of course Kris caught all sorts of fish. We fished for a bit, caught nothing, then went down to the mouth of the river at the sea, as much to see it as to fish. After lunch Chris the Guide ran the boat upriver 15 miles to fish for trout with single-handed rods. We caught some on heavy sculpin patterns, and Kris caught a couple of jacks, but we went as much to sightsee as to fish.

They were good rainbow trout, big by the standards of the lower 48, as much as 20 inches. They weren’t big Alaska trout though. Those would come later in the season, and downriver, closer to the ocean, after more salmon had spawned and died and the trout were fat with salmon flesh and eggs.

Upriver I sat bankside to change flies and was swarmed with mosquitos. They weren’t as substantial as our Gulf Coast mosquitos, more of whisps of mosquitos, but they were real enough and plenty numerous and persistent, plenty annoying, and until we left that place the swarm stayed with me. I guess that was something I hadn’t really imagined either. Just like I hadn’t imagined the tundra, or the wildflowers, or the tiny bank-side yellow warblers.

On our final sunny day I could finally see the sockeye ghosting upriver to spawn. It was a continuous line of driven fish, and I watched hundreds, maybe thousands. They coasted up the shallows where I stood, and would come within a few feet of me then swerve deliberately, out and around me, never stopping, never running, saving their energy to move upstream.

The sockeyes were fish I couldn’t catch, or at least that I wouldn’t snag. I would go again just to watch those fish.

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Alaska fishing

Next week we go to Alaska. This whole exercise–going to each state to catch a fish–is really a desperate ruse to get Kris to Alaska. For a girl who got all the way through law school inside the Houston loop, Kris has a peculiarly well-developed terror of bears. “Kris, do you want to go to Alaska?” I’ve asked that question for nigh on 40 years, and she’s consistently answered no, nope, not on a bet. “There are bears.”

That Werner Herzog movie, Grizzly Man, didn’t help any. I highly recommend it though.

She must be terrified of bears because they infested Poe Elementary and the Rice campus. She must have lost a dozen of her Lamar High School graduating class to grizzlies, and watched horrified as University of Houston law professors were snatched from the lecture hall and dragged to a polar bear’s lair. For a long time I thought it was a joke, and then I thought that maybe it was real but vague, and that she’d get over it. Nope. For as long as I’ve known her she has only been afraid of one thing: bears–Alaskan bears in particular.

Bean, Tarleton H., King Salmon (Oncorhynchus chouicha), 1889, Report on the salmon and salmon rivers of Alaska, with notes on the conditions, methods, and needs of the salmon fisheries,
Washington, DC : Government Printing Office, University of Washington Freshwater and Marine Image Bank

Ok, two things. My driving and bears. My driving isn’t horrible, and I swear, outside of the zoo, there are no bears in Houston.

Fishing finally got to her. She fishes, and if you fish, Alaska is the very thing. If I listed places I’d like to fly fish, New Zealand, Scotland, Cuba, Mongolia, Montana, Christmas Island, Norway, Chile, Iceland, the Seychelles, British Columbia, Nebraska, the Amazon . . . Ok, maybe not Nebraska. Anyway, it would be a long list, but Alaska would be at the very top. Unlike the lower 48, there are still good salmon runs in Alaska. There are still large numbers of steelhead. We haven’t yet blown it in Alaska, though that’s not without trying. The trout are not dinky little 14-inchers daintily sipping mayflies from a mountain stream. The trout are 28-inch monsters gorging on the rotting flesh of dying salmon.

There are five species of salmon in Alaska, plus sea-run steelhead trout. To plan our trip, we started from when a species of salmon would be in a river. Ok, we started from restaurant quality and when a species of salmon would be in a river. We picked a river, the Kanektok, where all five salmon species have a summer run from the Bering Sea. First, beginning in June and running through mid-July, are king salmon. King’s are the largest Pacific salmon, weighing up to 40 pounds (though they’re protected in some rivers, and can’t be killed in the Kanektok). Sockeye and chum salmon overlap the king season. Pinks have the shortest run, for a couple of weeks in late July. Silvers begin in August and run through September.

Milton Love, male sockeye salmon in spawning shape and colors, Marine Science Institute, University of California, Santa Barbara.

We’ll be on the Kanektok for king season, and also the sockeye and chum. There will also be rainbow trout, arctic char, and dolly varden. Dolly Varden, by the way, are the only fish named after a Dickens character.

When salmon enter the river from the sea they are bright and silver, and then as they move into freshwater their colors change for spawning. They spawn and die, and don’t return to the sea, and they don’t feed as they move upriver. They strike flies out of annoyance, or habit, or maybe curiosity, but not for food. By the time they spawn they are dying, deteriorating, and in the short summer feeding season the trout grow huge on eggs washed out of the spawning gravel and the flesh of decaying salmon. Everything feeds on the salmon, both live salmon and dead. Birds, other fish, bears, Alaskans. . . . There are bears in Alaska, but the usual wisdom is that the bears are too intent on fish to be interested in Texans, even plump, well-fed Texans. That’s the usual wisdom, anyway. I’m kinda counting on it.

The State of Alaska warns of two hazards on the Kanektok River: bears and bugs. Don’t tell Kris about the bears.

Five Species of Pacific Salmon Showing Relative Size and Appearance, 1921, Pacific Fisherman Year Book 1921, University of Washington Freshwater and Marine Image Bank

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The Housatonic River, Litchfield County, Ct., May 2-3

Early May we fished the Housatonic River with Bert Ouellette. We booked two days , but after 20 minutes we’d landed matched rainbow trout, and then one or the other of us really never stopped catching fish. It was dandy fishing both days.

We found Bert through Orvis, which makes finding guides easy. Deciding on the Housatonic in the first place was harder. The Farmington River is the best known Connecticut river, and while we were at the Wulff School our fellow students from Connecticut–just about every third citizen of Connecticut was at the Wulff School for casting lessons–insisted that the Farmington was the very place to fish. I started having buyer’s remorse for booking the Housatonic.

Now mind, I don’t know much about Connecticut rivers, but I’ve been looking at Connecticut as a fishing destination off and on now for three years. The impression I have–almost certainly wrong–is that the Farmington is smaller, wadeable, and very pretty, but it’s also more crowded. The upstate Housatonic, more remote and harder to fish without a boat, is less crowded. We saw some anglers wading, but it didn’t look easy. We only saw two other boats, and one of those was a couple of UConn graduate students counting radio-tagged fish.

We fished out of Bert’s ClackaCraft drift boat. Drift boats are funny looking row boats, usually around 16 feet long, 6 feet wide at the beam, and pointed at the bow and stern to move forward or backward in current. Drift boats are best known for their radical, rocking-horse rocker that lets the rower maneuver through rapids. All things being equal, if given a choice between a rubber raft and a drift boat, I’d get in the drift boat every time.

Bert was good company . . . On the other hand Kris and I badly misled Bert. By the time we got to Connecticut, we’d been practicing casting for two solid days. We will probably never be better casters than we were for the two days we fished with Bert. Bert thought we were pretty good casters, though I disabused him as quickly as I could by catching my fly in every other tree along the bank, and tangling my line into implausible knot combinations just to prove it could be done. It wouldn’t be a fishing trip without that sort of thing.

Bert rowed the drift boat, changed out flies, told stories, told us which side of the boat to fish on and how, and untangled my tangles. He tried to teach me some stuff about downstream drifts, and why I was tangling my line so often–apparently when something happened in the water, when either I caught a snag or I had a tug from a fish, I’d jerk the rod up and then suddenly stop, so that the line met itself coming and going. I did manage some world-class tangles.

The upper Housatonic is pretty big, perhaps 150 feet across, tree-lined with hardwoods, hemlock, and pine, and protected from development along one bank by a railroad right-of-way. It falls out of the Berkshire Mountains and deeper, slower water and shallow riffles break up long stretches of steady current. There are rocks everywhere, ancient metamorphic gneiss I think, pushed up along the continental plates to form the Berkshires and the rest of the Appalachians. In fast water the rock gardens jut out of the river to challenge the rower, and in the longer deeper drifts they lurk underwater to snag flies. Particularly my flies.

The weather in early May was just like fish like it, cloudy and drizzly and a bit cold. On sunny days fish are more visible to overhead predators and can be even more skittish than their norm. Overcast makes them happy. Even with the cloud cover we watched a bald eagle dive to catch a fish, and then bicker over its catch with an osprey. The eagle kept the fish. Usually it’s the other way around, and I suspect before we saw it that the eagle had already forced the osprey to drop the osprey’s fish. I think we only saw the second part of the drama.

Upstate Connecticut is second-home country, and the bank without the railroad is dotted with interesting houses. It gave us something to talk about between fish, but the houses, even the uglier houses, were surprisingly unobtrusive. Everything is tempered by the woods.

Over our two days we caught rainbow trout, brown trout, smallmouth bass, and one native yellow perch. I’d never seen a yellow perch, and it was in full spawning colors and full of eggs. Kris wanted to rush it to the maternity ward. Bert noted that it was funny that the one native fish we caught was the most tropical-looking of the bunch.

Nothing was happening on the surface of the river, so I fished with nymphs some of the time, and some of the time with streamers. Kris fished with streamers, sometimes with two on her line at once. A nymph is supposed to imitate bug life underwater, and Bert set up a drop-weight rig with clinch weights at the bottom underneath a surface bobber, so that the flies floated in the current close to river bottom and the bobber would indicate a take. Streamers usually imitate underwater baitfish, or sometimes crawfish (or in saltwater, shrimp or even crabs), and are what I’m most used to fishing. You have to let the nymphs float along with the current, and in my ideal world they would float along at the same speed as the boat. All I’d have to do is relax and watch the bobber, and that’s a job I’m probably competent to do. Of course the world doesn’t much pander to me, so nymphing usually consists of mending and adjusting the line until it drifts too far and you have to start over. It can be a lot of work.

Streamers meanwhile are retrieved across the current. Bert had us do something odd with the streamers. If you think about retrieving with a conventional rod and reel, you retrieve by cranking the reel, and unless you do something with the rod the retrieve tends to be steady. To give the lure action, you twitch the rod and hesitate or speed up during the retrieve. With a fly rod, the reel ain’t in it, and all the retrieval is done with your line hand, usually your left hand if you’re right-handed. The streamer always has a bit of up and down action because the retrieve has built-in stops and starts.

That wasn’t enough for Bert. He had us twitch the rod to impart even more motion to the streamers. No one had ever told me to twitch the rod tip on a streamer before, but it worked. It was kind of fun, too–I felt just like a real fisherman. We caught a lot of fish. Now I’m going to try it on my favorite bass pond.

Trout love mayflies of all things, and trout anglers love it when trout feed on the surface on rising mayflies. Not all mayflies are the same, and not all mayflies rise at the same time–different species will rise over the course of the spring and summer from April to October. Still, all mayflies of the same species do rise more or less together, otherwise they’d be coming off the river randomly and never hook up to party and reproduce the species. They have to plan ahead. Girl mayfly can’t text boy mayfly and say let’s us hook up on Tuesday in a couple of weeks.

Mayflies live most of their lives underwater as hideously ugly nymphs, and then emerge from the surface as pretty and delicate duns that mate, lay their eggs back in the water, and then die. Their out-of-water lives are so short that they don’t have mouths. There’s no drinkin’ at mayfly parties, though they do kinda dance. The emergence of those duns kicks off the prettiest (and most fun) kind of fly fishing, dry fly fishing, culminating during each hatch with the evening spinner fall when the spent mayflies fall dead back into the river en masse. When you talk to trout anglers, they talk a lot about which hatch is going to rise when, and what time to be on the river for the spinner fall.

Meanwhile, here in Texas, about as close as I get to fishing hatches is switching to bass popping bugs when the dragonflies show up on the bass ponds. I prefer blue for early season, and yellow as things get hot. Hotter.

The Hendrickson mayfly hatch is supposed to be the first major hatch on the Housatonic, but at least for now it’s apparently disappeared. I saw two lonely Hendricksons rising from the river in what should have been the heart of the Hendrickson season. Other mayflies will certainly hatch later, but it’s something you hear through the grapevine, that major hatches on major rivers, because of drought, climate change, whatever, are disappearing. It’s an odd thing to be worried about in these later times, but there you are.

So we fished nymphs and streamers, caught fish, and talked with Bert. What good company he was, what good fishing it was. By the end of the second day, I was worn out, and was sitting quiet at the back of the boat, watching Bert row and Kris fish. And fish. And keep fishing. Bert said that he’d never had a woman fish so hard from his boat, and I suspect Kris will think for all time that Bert says the sweetest things. Meanwhile back in Houston I reported Bert’s line to our kids and they laughed. When could Mom ever do anything she’d latched onto in moderation?