La Mosca Tournament

I have to admit that I have enjoyed fishing in a few catch-and-release tournaments over the past 20 years. I have spent most of my on-the-water time poling clients, and helping them catch trout and redfish, so flyfishing for fun is rare, and flyfishing competitively is even less common in my life. Indeed, I don't really like to compete with friends and families when we are fishing for fun.

At this point in my life,  I thought that I would perhaps help Ryan and his buddies do well in tournament opportunities that might arise in the next years, either as a non-fishing guide or consultant. But Ryan made his best pitch for us fishing the invitational La Mosca tournament together, which will be held on Nov. 7-8. I finally consented, and then we were surprised and pleased to find out that our good friend Henry Bone of Austin was interested in joining us. Henry was one of my first clients, has become a special friend over the years, and stars in two of my favorite YouTube flyfishing videos. Henry is a master saltwater flyfisher.

The last time I flyfished a tournament with Ryan, it was 2001, and he was 12 years old, and had barely begun to flyfish. 

That was the morning that I was stung by a sting ray before the sun rose. The stinger almost passed through the narrow area in front of the Achilles tendon, but stopped just short of breaking the skin on the other side. I grimaced through the next four hours until the pain stopped, not realizing that wading with the open wound invited a life threatening infection of vibrio vulnificus. As one reader once told me, "The thing that impresses me about your story the most is how stupid you were!" Indeed. But it made for a pretty good story. I've written about the ordeal in Healing the Fisher King: A Flyfisher's Grail Quest. 

That memorable event has not not deterred me from flyfishing in a couple of tournaments since; but Ryan and I have never flyfished a tournament since that day, even though we were hoping to fish the TIFT together this year before it was cancelled. Ryan, Henry, and I are getting pretty psyched up about joining forces, and I know it's going to be a blast.

The La Mosca Tournament's entry fees will benefit Flatsworthy, the organization that supports fishing ethics and conservation on the flats. 

Flyfishing in the Age of the Corona Virus

The weekend forecast predicted a decent Saturday, and a rainy Sunday. Having been housebound from the corona virus for the better part of two weeks, I knew I could use a day on the water. The stay-at-home restrictions allowed for some outdoor activities, but it wasn't clear if driving from McAllen to our trailer in Arroyo City to go fishing was permitted. Ryan said he'd heard that it was permitted, but a good night's sleep is hard to beat, so I elected to stay home and sleep in late on Saturday morning. Julie and I walked Rosie down the greenway at 9 am, and I sent a text to Henry Bone from Austin, who had texted midweek with a vague suggestion that we might do some fly fishing, but our communications went dark after the forecast predicted a piss-poor weather weekend. Henry did indicate, however, that he might come for Sunday through Wednesday. So halfway through our walk, I texted him, "Are you coming down?" To my surprise, he responded with, "I'm in West Dunkins..." That is, he was on the bay! This was the second time in a little over a month that Henry had come down from Austin trailering his own boat, after our plans had fizzled! I got on the phone and called Ryan. Two hours later, we were heading out to fish the Sand with Henry.

But whoa, let me confess to my earlier ass-dragging episode in February, when Henry and I planned to fish on a weekend. At the last minute, I consulted Weather Underground, and I determined that the forecast called for rain, most likely. I suggested we call it off, and Henry agreed. But come Saturday morning as I walked with Rosie and Julie along the greenway in McAllen under a cloudless sky, the imprecision of the forecast became clear. So I texted Henry to confess: "I screwed up. I'm sorry." To which Henry replied, "I'm here. I came down and I'm at the launch."

Stirred to life by the prospect of fly fishing for big trout under a cloudless sky,  I roused Ryan from his usual Saturday am slumber, and suggested we go out for big trout. He was up and on his way before I could leave the house.

Actually, the day turned out to be nearly perfect--full sun, low wind, and super low tides. Ryan and I headed for an area known for hosting giant trout in the winter--South Cullens Bay, and found Henry fishing along the channel spoils. He'd already caught a couple of tailing reds, so we decided to try something else--to go further west, and see if we could find the monster trout. Coming off plane in a foot of clear water, I poled Ryan toward the west shoreline. After seeing several reds and big trout, and spooking them from the boat, we finally staked the boat and prepared to wade wet in the chilly water. I texted Henry and informed him that we'd seen big trout, but then turned my attention to the task at hand. 

Wading slowly away from the Stilt, I began to spot big trout, cruising slowly or parked in the middle of "potholes," where a big trout can hunt effectively by hugging the bottom of the grass-free area, waiting for a hapless piggy perch whose time has come.

I was amazed that I was able to spot several trout in the six- to eight-pound range, and get good casts to two or three before a pair approached from the north. In the glare, all I could see were the black tips of the tails of two trout. Casting my size 8 Mother's Day Fly, one of the trout seized the fly without hesitation. I didn't realize the fish was so big, but fortunately, I yielded to her initial run and managed to keep the fish on the line. Twenty minutes later, fighting the big trout gently and slowly so as not to tire her, I lifted her out of the water briefly to measure her--a solid 29 inches, and probably about 8 pounds. She was in her pre-spawn splendor--fat and healthy and full of color.

Ryan came over the took a couple of pictures before I released her. I texted Henry, and urged him to come over. A few minutes later, he arrived and joined us wading slowly in the knee-deep clear water. Later, when he joined us at the boat, he had stories to tell--of hooking a giant trout briefly, and having several shots. Ryan, too, was wide-eyed and energized by the close encounters that he'd had while wading toward the mangrove-covered shoreline of South Cullens Bay. 

The next day, my brother Chip joined Ryan and me, while Henry took his boat out, too. Needless to say, we headed south again, and after a 40-minute run in the chilly morning air, we were soon wading in south Cullens, hoping to find the giant trout, once again. Alas, the tide was just turning when we arrived, so the trout had not arrived in the shallow water of South Cullens. However, we found tailing reds spread out in the glassy water, and managed to land a couple before relocating to the east in slightly deeper water, thinking that the trout would be in the deeper water, but starting to head our way. Sure enough, Ryan, Chip and I all had head-to-head encounters with 8+ pound trout that were heading west into shallower water. Chip had three strikes on a sparsely tied (by me) Dahlberg Diver from the "largest trout I've seen in years," he said. Ryan was stalking a tailing red when I saw a huge trout heading his way. I called to him, and at first he seemed annoyed that I would interrupt his stealthy approach to the visible redfish. But I yelled to him, "This is a rare opportunity. Get ready." A huge wake bore down on Ryan, and he made the cast, only to have the fish reject the fly. Very typical for big trout! Before we headed in, I, too, had my mano-a-mano encounter with a 7-9 lb trout, only to have it disappear after my fly landed "perfectly," or so I thought.

Fast forward to last Saturday, when Henry roused me from my homebound status once again. Two hours after discovering that Henry had come down from Austin, we joined him in our Stilt and headed east to the Sand. Henry had been down south, and had already landed six reds in one of our favorite west-side venues. They's been tailing pods earlier in the day.

Under a full sun, Ryan and I headed for the "shelf" which is the far east side of the LLM, where the water suddenly become a foot shallower. I didn't see anything on my first wade, but Ryan had three shots, as it turned out.  As I walked back to the Stilt, Henry came up from the south and parked alongside our boat. I joined him and shared one of our Lone Stars with him, as we watched Ryan stalking reds 200 yards away.

Henry had been out longer than we had, so he headed in, while we opted to our favorite late afternoon venue. Last year, I caught a 33" red there just at sundown, and I hoped we'd see pods of oversized reds pouring into the area before dark. Sure enough, single terns and gulls were working over a large area, so we waded toward them to see what they'd found. My first shot reaped a hookup with a 29" red. Ryan, meanwhile, had waded to the north, and I couldn't get him on the phone to tell him that reds were suddenly appearing under birds as far as I could see to the south. I stopped fishing after landing the big red, hoping that Ryan would eventually join me. Finally, I reached him by phone, and said, "Come here now!" Half an hour later, Ryan was stalking tailing pods that were spread out in the off-color water, working under Forester terns and Laughing Gulls. After he's landed his red, we headed back to the boat to celebrate a wonderful afternoon.

Fly tying and the Mind of God: Imitation vs. Innovation

I have flyfished now for 56 years, beginning on a small artesian pond in the Texas brush country. I started tying flies in my teens, and have always found flytying to satisfy my creative impulses. When I started fly fishing the Blue Ridge, I tied my own patterns, hoping that they would succeed. And they did, with the tiny brook trout that populated the streams in the upper elevations of Shenandoah National Park. They had survived over the millennia by being willing to seize the moment. But when I had the opportunity to flyfish Henry's Fork of the Snake River, I struck out entirely with my motley collection of homespun flies. The fish wouldn't touch them. For the first time in my life, I did what most flyfishers do as a matter of course when fishing new waters: I visited a fly shop and purchased a dozen flies, most of which were variations on a single bluewing olive hatch. That day, I learned that no matter how inventive you are, you must still muster the humility to look at what's going on around you.

When I began to flyfish my home waters of the Lower Laguna in my early 20s, I was able to unleash my creativity, mainly because the fish didn't care. I created poppers from deer hair, discovered that they would sink after a few casts, and began experimenting with various ways to keep them afloat. I ended up discovering closed cell foam, and married foam with spun deer hair to create the earliest iterations of the VIP popper, the subject of the second article I wrote for Fly Tyer. It's been one of my top three flies ever since, mainly because the fish don't care much about how the fly looks, as long as it doesn't misbehave. Many anglers, who have tied the VIP, agree. 

In fisheries such as the LLM, a fly is successful mainly because of how it performs; that is, its castability in wind, how it lands on the water, its sink rate, how it performs in seagrass-filled water, and its hookup rate. But in a cold water fishery populated with wild, spawning populations of trout, these variables don't matter as much. Instead, the fly is usually effective if it imitates a naturally occurring insect that the fish are keying on at that particular moment. Tying flies to match the hatch takes considerable discipline and "imitativeness," as opposed to inventiveness. Of course, there are non-imitative flies that are successful, too, such as the Wulff patterns, and Western attractors such as the Stimulator. Attractor patterns are, by definition, invented by anglers who are willing to think outside the box of imitative fly tying, and conceive of a synthesis of qualities that may not occur in Nature. In a sense, the inventive tyer taps into an archetype that has no literal physical expression, at least as yet, but somehow appeals to the fish's sense of propriety, or provokes its indignation. We really don't know what a fish thinks when it sees what is clearly divorced from all recognizable life forms.

Inventiveness comes at the beginning and the end of an angler's learning curve. When I fished the Jackson River in western Virginia, I learned that attractor patterns were, by and large, ineffective on that tailwater fishery. I learned one day from flyfishing guru Harry Steeves, who happened to be fly fishing below Gathright Dam one morning, that I had to know precisely the size and shape of a particular midge pupae in order to hook the largest trout I'd every enticed the following day. But while fishing in the same spot one day not long after this humbling lesson, it suddenly occurred to me--don't ask why--that a particular synthesis of two popular dry fly patterns would prove successful, even though the pattern did not match any natural insect on that difficult fishery. I went to my hotel and tied the pattern that night, and it became the "Jackson River Special." My buddy Bill May and I caught a lot of trout the next day on that pattern, and it continued to be my most effective fly for that fishery.

The difference between the novice fly tier and the seasoned one had to do with several things, including: the countless days of immersion on my Virginia home waters, the humility to learn from masters such as Harry Steeves, and the willingness to listen to what Nature was whispering to me. When you embrace all of those ingredients, then you become eligible on the far end of the learning curve to innovate effectively. Houston Smith, who wrote Forgotten Truth, and was known for his books on comparative religions, came up with a concept that resolved the conflict over Darwinian evolution and Creationism. Pointing to events in nature that cannot be reduced to the forces of natural selection--such as nonadaptive coloration among birds--he coined the term, "the descent of the archetype" to explain the playful creativity of the divine expressing itself in the world.

I believe that inventiveness at the fly tying vise can be, at the pinnacle of one's learning process, a moment of an archetype's descent into expression. It can be the fly tying equivalent of a Coppery Tailed Trogan or a Painted Bunting, both of which make no sense in a world governed in large part by survival of the fittest. It can mirror a pattern in the mind of God, which exists only as a creative expression capable of arousing an answering response in the mind of fish. Flies such as Bud Rowland's Numero Uno, and perhaps my own VIP Popper, look strange and idiosyncratic, but are endowed with something beyond the rational, imitative mind. When the VIP made the cover of Guide Flies several years ago, I was admittedly embarrassed to have the VIP pictured beside Harry Murray's Mr. Rapidan, a fly that has become immortalized as a Blue Ridge classic. I have always realized how odd the humble fly looks, but how effective it can be. In one sense, it wasn't my creation as much as a gift of momentary inspiration informed by years of failure and yearning. It was the utterance of another realm finding a fertile place in my imagination.

The other day, Ryan said, "I want to invent a new fly." As a relatively old man, I thought, as all fathers do, "Learn more first." But then I remembered the endless winter nights of inventiveness at the tying vise as a young man. So I said nothing, knowing that Ryan's creativity would, in time, merge with prodigious on-the-water experience to spawn original creations, the broad shape of which had been known for all eternity in the one mind we share.

Karma and fly tying

When I used to live in Virginia, and would come home to south Texas once a year for two weeks, I would spend part of almost every day on the water, fly fishing with my brother, Chip. I suffered from "saved up" intensity that sustained me through two weeks of low calorie, gung ho, don't-bother-me sheer craziness. I would fall asleep at family get-togethers in the evenings, and I looked like a raccoon in reverse with white-out eyes, and a roasted face.

My poor brother would fish with me each day for a while, then head back to the boat where he would sit like a statue watching me, sometime for hours more. No smartphone, no nothing to mitigate the boredom of waiting. I'm surprised he didn't complain more.

Fast forward to now, when my son Ryan has taken up the family angling and guiding torch. Two weeks ago he hammered on my wall of rationality and convinced me to believe the obviously erroneous weather report that said we'd be happy to have gone fishing even though another report accurately predicted a miserable day. I ultimately agreed to go, giving in to Ryan's incessant recitation of the fake weather news. We awoke at 6, and the wind was already howling. We were there, so we went, and it was horrible. The winds were up to 30 mph by the time we crabbed down the Arroyo, head down, chewing on blowing sand. Ryan admitted that from now on, he would yield to my assessment. We will see.

The next week was quite different. It was my turn to take the lead. I studied the tide chart, the NOAH wind and sunlight forecast, and realized that nature was offering us a rare triple positive readout for winter fishing: Super low tides at dawn, with an incoming tide afterward; full sun; and low winds. That's the prescription for winter fly fishing, and if you have the courage to tolerate an early morning boat ride in upper-40s to low-50s temps, you will find yourself in the midst of a veritable dream.

Still it's hard for me to get out of bed at 4:30 and drive 55 miles on a chilly morning. I called Ryan on the way and got no answer. I pictured him in bed unresponsive the to screaming alarm, and thought to myself, "If he doesn't respond soon, I'm heading back to bed!" But my fears proved unfounded when he rang me up a few minutes later saying he was already on the water getting the Stilt ready for launch. I don't know if I was more relieved or disappointed.

Ryan took the helm while I wrapped myself in my fleece and windbreaker, head down. Unfamiliar with the area during extreme low tides, he turned the boat over to me when we got to Cullens Point. I took the Stilt through one of the passes in the Intracoastal spoils, and planed toward the shallow northwest end of south Cullens. The turtle grass is so thick that the water looks much shallower than it is, but nonetheless we ran with the jack plate all of the way up to minimize the damage to the seagrass. The Yamaha prop fits entirely within the Stilt tunnel, so the damage is minimal.

We began seeing big trout and reds moving away from the boat as we moved away from the central trough of south Cullens into the shallower expanse of the west side. I shut down and poled further west to get away from the disturbance we'd created by our noisy intrusion. We were both eager to fish, and opted to wade rather than pole. Poling would normally have been great in the early light, but the turtle grass was so think that the boat would have rubbed against the grass so much than the friction would have tested even the strongest guide. So we decided not to struggle with the grass, and to wade. While we'd brought our waders, the sun was starting to warm the water, and except for an initial shock from the water temp, it turned out to be warm enough to wade wet without the threat of hypothermia. Indeed, within an hour, the air temp was comfortably in the 70s, the sun was direct, and the water was warming quickly.

I had not tied any flies the day before, but had plenty of Mother's Day flies in my fly box...that I'd left in McAllen! So I had to rummage through Ryan sparse collection. Not wanting to deprive him of the "most likely to succeed" flies, I opted for a Mother's Day Fly tied on a much heavier hook than appropriate without a weed guard. Poop, I thought. But I wasn't there to wup up on reds. A couple of good shots on big trout was my only intention, and a single fly, more or less appropriate to the occasion, was good enough for me. I figured I could adapt to the demands of the moment. I admit there's something about winter fly fishing catches me unprepared, and it was one of those days when I had failed to check my gear beforehand.

We encountered big reds that were spread out in the thick grass, showing their tails and backs as thy snaked along with hardly enough water to submerge them. They were alone and in small groups. The grass got thicker and thicker as we waded west, but the fish were increasingly visible, tempting us to continue our westward wade. After casting my overly heavy fly into thick grass, only to blow up the feeding reds, I headed back to deeper water, hoping to see reds and big trout over pot holes, or openings in the grass. Sure enough, with the rising sun I was able to see the fish in deeper water. Ryan hooked up on a nice red, about then and so did I, but the most memorable moments of the day consisted of encounters with 7-8 lb trout. Alas, casting my heavy fly defeated me. It was too heavy to land quietly, so I offended the trout and kicked myself for approaching such a demanding context with such nonchalance.

We moved around some, and in each scenario Ryan promptly waded away from the boat while I hesitated, wondering if we'd seen enough to justify the wade. I'd taken Rosie with me on our earlier wades, and knowing that she was tired I stayed aboard the skiff, rubbing her wet ears, and thinking of my brother 30 years ago who sat for countless hours watching me spewing a year of angling intensity onto my home waters. Ryan has become the new crazed angler, and I the one who lingers, coaching, and waiting for a compelling reason to join him. 

If you can bring yourself to do it, winter fly fishing in Cullens Bay offers the best opportunity for world-class trout than any other place or time of year. I have seen literally hundreds of trout from 4-10 pounds in schools or pods cruising the low, crystal clear water. But it's not for everyone. You have to show up at a time of year when the days dawn clear and often cold. I am lucky that, at my advancing age, I have a son whose sheer enthusiasm helps to keep mine alive.