Is It Fall Yet? (with Sharks)

When I left my house to go fishing Sunday morning, the thermometer in my rearview mirror read 69, which was the first time I'd seen the 60s in months. I knew I was headed to a flat where I might find some redfish, and my hopes were that they'd be starting to school up with the cooler weather and water temperatures. No such luck. I drifted and paddled across a couple miles of flats, picking up only a sea trout and a mangrove snapper (not counting one overly aggressive pinfish).

I did see three reds, but not before they managed to see me. A sheepshead ignored about four casts before deciding to swim away. Overall, not much action. That is, until I turn a corner into a bay, across which I was supposed to meet my family for lunch. Here, schools of mullet and other baitfish were being harassed by predator fish, including a three-foot bonnethead and a five-foot blacktip. The blacktip was remaining pretty visible, and I had to decide whether to cast at him with the 20-pound mono leader on my rod or just turn on the GoPro and try to catch him that way. I was already late for lunch, so I chose the latter. Keep in mind, objects in GoPro are closer than they appear.

5-7-5

Too rainy to fish
Might as well write a half-assed
Haiku for my blog

Book Review: Pulp Fly

I don’t know how it is in the rest of the country, but it seems like the supply of good fly fishing literature has dwindled in recent years in my neck of the woods. When I got into the sport, in the 90s, my local Barnes and Noble had a good three or four shelves worth of fishing books, most of the titles related to fly fishing. That may have been due to the efforts of Robert Redford, but even so, it’s how I became acquainted with John Gierach, Robert Traver, Nick Lyons, and Jerry Dennis. Now, though, the same store stocks the better portion of only one shelf, mostly with how-to/where-to books.

These days, I feed my need to read (about fly fishing) with a few excellent periodicals, like The Drake and The Flyfish Journal, as well as some really great blogs and e-magazines, such as This is Fly and Southern Culture on the Fly. Still, as I sit and re-read my battered copy of McGuane’s The Longest Silence, I find myself itching for new book-length publications. 

When I recently discovered Pulp Fly, an e-book of fly-fishing-related short stories and essays, I was eager, yet dubious. Why, I thought, would it only be published as an e-book if the quality of the stories was up to snuff? Then I saw that some of the contributing authors had written for some of the periodicals and blogs that I’ve come to enjoy. So I hit the appropriate buttons and downloaded volumes 1 and 2 to my Kindle.

Upon finishing both volumes, perhaps the greatest compliment I can pay Pulp Fly is that these are not stories about fly fishing. The fishing serves as a motif, a thread to tie the very different pieces together. These stories are about people. They are all people who fly fish, sure, but the act of fishing is merely a stroke of characterization, which for me, serves to strengthen the pieces because I find myself connected to them through this shared passion. 

That’s where the similarities between stories ends, however. To call them varied would be an understatement, as the pieces cross multiple genres, such as crime and science fiction, with many striving toward the literary and one serialized piece that pays distinct homage to the genesis (at least in my mind) of American literary flyfishery: Hemingway’s Big Two Hearted River.

Pulp Fly bills itself as filling a niche occupied in the 20th century by pulp magazines -- inexpensive repositories of entertaining adventure and mystery stories churned out by young or upcoming writers, some of whom, like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Elmore Leonard, and John D. MacDonald, would go on to publish some of the most popular and enduring stories and novels of their time. I would say that on this note, Pulp Fly succeeds in its objective, had such a niche in fly fishing literature ever existed. In any case, it does now, and I’m glad Pulp Fly is there to fill it.

The Littlest Largemouth

Still, not bad on a 4-weight with 6x tippet.

Carolina Dreaming

Florida summers are hot. There’s no escaping it. It’s hot in the morning, hot in the evening, blazing hot in the afternoon, and slightly less hot in the middle of the night. The  weather warms in April and doesn’t let up until October or November. So despite loving the fishing down here, there are times, in the midst of this endless summer, when I find myself yearning to be up high up some cold mountain trickle dapping for colorful little wild brookies. 

It would be a long drive up to North Carolina to get anything like that, so I turn to the next best thing: bluegill. While we have no mountains and the temperature can’t be helped, at least I can fish for colorful little freshwater fish with my 4-weight and flies that look like bugs.  

This morning I had that freshwater feeling, so I dug out some hoppers and nymphs from my last trout fishing excursion a couple years ago, knocked the rust off the 4-weight, and headed out. I probably drove past a hundred retention ponds full of bluegill to get somewhere a little more natural -- a slow-moving blackwater creek flowing through a nearby park. It’s not exactly wild, but it’s a pretty close approximation for its location in the middle of a metropolitan area, and Fish and Wildlife did recently pull a wayward 11-foot, 700-pound crocodile out of the lake that feeds the creek. They released it 300 miles away, where it was born, near Key Largo, I guess so it wouldn’t have a bad influence on our local alligators.

I strung up my rod, tied on one of the hoppers, and on my third cast, a bluegill slurped it down with a smacking kiss. I brought it in and let it go, thinking that I would have a couple hours of fun with the little fish on surface flies. I was mistaken. I had not another bite the entire morning. I switched flies. I tried fishing on the surface, under the surface, tight to the bank, in deeper water, in the sun, in the shade, and couldn’t buy another look. So after an hour or so, when I snapped off a fly on a DO NOT FEED OR MOLEST the alligators sign, I reeled it in and drove home. But I guess I got what I was looking for after all -- the bluegill doing their best trout imitation by turning selective and tough to catch.

SweetWater

Beer number 2: Anything from SweetWater. SweetWater, out of Atlanta, puts out a line of nice beers. They sport a rainbow trout on the label, and you don't have to feel any guilt about drinking them because SweetWater is a contributor to the Waterkeeper Alliance, which works to preserve rivers, streams, and coastlines and keep them clean and free of pollution. So do your part to fight pollution and have a couple SweetWaters.

5-7-5

The humble haiku. Have you seen them? Yes. Even about fishing? Uh huh. Written them yourself? In seventh-grade English class. So why bother?

It might be fun and a way to squeeze in a little creativity in a very short amount of time. Anyway, here goes:

Mythic proportions
Through fish-eyed GoPro lenses
Become commonplace