Sea Kayaker's Shallow Trouble

If you paddle a kayak and haven’t read volumes 1 & 2 of Sea Kayaker’s Deep Trouble, then I suggest you stay on land until you’ve had a chance to read a few of the stories they contain.  These are true stories of kayakers in trouble, some of whom live to describe what happened to them, and others whose last paddles require forensic analysis. To read the stories is chilling, instructive, and essential.

But what about less deadly kinds of trouble?  So far – thankfully – I’ve encountered only mild trouble in 15 years of mostly solo paddling. Here are a couple of those tales of troubling but fully survivable outings.

Deflated on the Pacific coast of Baja California

Ten years ago, a wee bit before I started regularly consulting wind and swell forecasts while road-tripping in Baja, I stood on a beach at dawn, and paused.  Even at a nice protected little launch near a small fishing village, 4-foot waves were breaking loud on the sand.  These breaking waves were definitely within bounds for a kayaker trained in surf launches (which I was), and they seemed to present no problem for the lobster fisherman launching their pangas.  But it’s Baja – a foreign country where risks to safety tend to run a little higher than gringos are accustomed to.  It’s hard to say whether anyone monitors channel 16 in that area, and the nearest (very small) hospital was a 20-30 mile drive away, so extra caution was in order. 

However, I launched.  The prospect of staying on land was a picture of idleness and boredom; the prospect of paddling was fresh fish on the line, possibly a big juicy yellowtail.  And the conditions weren’t awful, they just weren’t great, with 5-6 foot swells out on the open water.  My newish Feathercraft Wisper XP was fully outfitted with a spare paddle, bilge pump, and paddle float, and the pocket of my PFD had a proper PLB zipped up safe where it rides every time I ever go out, period.

None of that equipment was any help when I stopped in the lee/swell shadow of a small island a few miles offshore to blow some air into the sponsons, and the rubbery blow tube suddenly detached from the left-hand sponson. 

If you don’t know what a sponson is or what it does, here’s Feathercraft’s description. Basically, they are inflatable chambers on either side of the boat that a) stretch the skin tight over the frame and b) vastly improve your primary stability.  

To suddenly lose one sponson is to quickly become VERY unstable. It took me a few seconds to realize that unless I wanted to keep bracing constantly on one side, I needed to deflate the right-hand sponson too.  I let half the air out and started eyeing the shoreline in that part of the island: all rock and cliff, and even on the lee side, the landing situation looked foamy, splashy, and unsafe. 

I pointed the crippled kayak back toward the launch and made a little progress.  Once I was back out in the full force of the swell, it became clear that I needed to completely deflate the right-hand sponson in order to have predictable control over the kayak.  But I must say, predictable control wasn’t easy control: my stable Feathercraft now had the primary stability of the sleekest high-performance boat in existence, it seemed, and I felt like I was bracing with every stroke.  My abs never had such a workout!  But yes – after an hour of hard paddling I made it back to the launch, thought about kissing the sand after stepping onto it, and devoted the rest of the day to drying the boat and gluing the tube back on with aquaseal.

The main lesson, as I took it, was to make sure the rubber hose connecting to your sponsons is long enough.  With my beautiful Wisper, the tubes were so short that I had to lean over hard to reach the inflating nozzle with my mouth (especially awkward with a PFD with full pockets) and it seems like I had been unconsciously pulling them out and up every time I added air while on the water.  Pull hard enough often enough and guess what?  They come apart from the sponson!  

Following these events I became a sponson nazi.  I ordered an extra Wisper sponson from Feathercraft, specifying that I wanted a nice long tube attached to it please, and made sure to get a spare Kahuna sponson for my backup boat.  ALL of my sponsons have now been modified with nice, long tubes that allow fairly relaxed inflation while seated in the cockpit.  I recommend these measures to anyone who paddles a foldable with sponsons.  

Windbound South and North

During the windy winter months on the Sea of Cortez you’ll get wondrous calm days that normally come two at time, sometimes three in a row, and very seldom much longer than that.  What comes after a nice spell could be anything from a stiff breeze for a couple days to a three or four-day “Norte” blowing very hard out of the North.  

It was on the second day of a calm spell that I launched from Caleta San Lucas in a Feathercraft Kahuna packed for camping.  From that launch point around the spit and then up to the north end of San Marcos island it’s a half dozen miles or so, and I enjoyed every dip of the paddle.  Trolling for grouper was very good, and I had a fantastic fresh dinner under the stars in a near-perfect arroyo camp on the island, sipping a few ounces of my small ration of scotch for dessert.

By nightfall, however, a wind started to pick up noticeably, and by the wee hours of the morning it was a howling gale that made sleeping in a tent somewhat challenging.  I was sheltered in the arroyo, but the noise was impressive, with surf booming on the rocks a hundred feet away.

There was no question of going out on the water that next day.  Gusts must have been reaching 30 knots or more, and channel between the island and mainland was filled with whitecaps and devoid of any kind of boat.  Concerns in my mind were mild but real; I had planned on three days out and brought five days worth of food and probably nearly a week’s worth of water – if carefully used – in three MSR dromedary bags.  However, I hadn’t included two critical elements in my backup rations: alcohol (the scotch was just about gone) and (gasp) coffee!  

The wind kept blowing all the second full day, and sitting on land got very old. To hike south to the gypsum mine at the south end of the island, a dry and difficult five mile walk I calculated, was something I was saving for an emergency.  And despite the desperate feeling of running water through coffee grinds a third time, I wasn’t quite at that emergency level yet.  The wind would lay down eventually, and I’d head straight back to the caleta.

Just after midnight on my third night out, I’d swear that I heard a change in the general tone of the howling . . . was the wind starting to die out?  I convinced myself that it was, even though 3-4 foot waves were still crashing in on my little beach.  I wanted out of there bad enough to operate at the limits of my ability and confidence.

And yes, the wind had dialed down to about half its general fury in those dark wee hours. The sky was radiant with stars and very beautiful, and the conditions felt marginally safe – until I got about three quarters of a mile out.  At that point, the sheer size of the spilling waves just got to be too much.  I couldn’t see them coming (it was that dark) but I could hear the big ones foaming toward me from the north, increasing steadily in volume, and then when the spilling noise was just about in my ears I got lifted UP UP UP very quickly, as if on some carnival ride, and doused with water while bracing hard on the back of the waves.  Ten minutes or so of that treatment convinced me to pick a moment to carefully turn the boat and head on back to the island.  My escape attempt was a failure.

I laid down on the beach and resumed “sleeping” with the boat’s sponson as a pillow, exhausted, frustrated, and fully daunted.  Eventually I dozed off under that beautiful sky, and when the warmth of the morning sun woke me, guess what: the north wind was replaced by a slight breeze out of the south, and the channel was very nearly flat.  I couldn’t believe it!  Just a handful of hours after my abortive rock ‘n rolling carnival ride, conditions were perfect for paddling.  I launched without hesitation, and in the time it took me to cover the miles back to the caleta, the water had actually grown just about completely flat, demonstrating the power of a even a slight opposing breeze on wind waves. 

Ultimately, this trip felt like a very valuable and even rewarding experience that I decided I would make every possible attempt to not repeat.  Yet, for some reason,  a few years later I found myself windbound again on a tiny island on Naknek Lake in Alaska, a thousand or so miles from Baja and right at the end of a 10-day trip.  This time the winds were even worse – 60 knots, according to pilot who eventually was able to come pick me up – making windfall trees my main immediate concern, in addition to anchoring the tent firmly enough that it wouldn’t blow away.  

Once again, the two-day blow finally subsided while I was sleeping. I wore earplugs in the tent, which was the only way I could doze amid the howling gusts, and I cautiously took one out to confirm: YES!  It was quiet!  No howling, no gale. A man never broke down a camp quicker than I did in that dim near-midnight midsummer subarctic light.  Good thing I hurried, too, since the wind was finding its voice again by the time I was loaded and ready to launch.  I hustled upwind in the lee of an adjacent island, and then turned downwind toward the beach on the mainland which was actually my appointed pickup spot for the next morning.  Pushed by the wind, I reached the beach landing after a brief, brisk paddle, and let out a long, heartfelt howl of relief that had been building for 48 hours.  

How happy was I to see the floatplane landing at that beach in mellow 10 knot winds the next morning?  Very.  Reflecting on a half dozen or so long trips in that area, I realized that I've been lucky to have been seriously windbound only once. It's a manageable risk that I’ll be happy to take again some summer coming up soon.  

If at once you can't find trout . . .

Where did the summer go? Thanks to a July struggle with gout and a September session of covid, mine seemed short.  But I’m grateful for an August spell in Alaska and a June trip that covered bassy parts of Canada and turned-out-to-be-trouty parts of the Adirondacks.  That's right – in the same area where we struck out in August 21, we caught brook trout!  A whole three of them!!

Yes, we’re talking about the beautiful water on private land in the Adirondacks where no amount of effort last August would produce a trout strike (see previous post).  It would be hard to dream up a troutier pond: cool burbling inlets, deep holes, down trees, overhanging brush, and a nice wide, slow-moving outlet.  Yet my friend and I put serious time last year into proving that you could flail the pond with dries, nymphs, streamers, and gear and still come up with nothing except excuses.  The water was too warm.  The days were too bright, or too windy. Lots of loons. Poachers!  

So, you might say, try again in spring when the water is still cool.  To the degree that early June is still spring, we did that this year – with results!  Just a few casts off the small wooden dock with a black wooly bugger, and we had our proof that at least ONE trout was still alive in that pristine pond. 

For a New York minute it looked like maybe the cooler water was going to unlock our fishing attempts and help collect useful survey results on the trout population.  Or, maybe not. We spent another hour or so casting that same evening, and came back with a canoe the next (very windy) day, and returned again to fish a good chunk of the shoreline in spitting rain on a cold grey day, all without another single positive result.   

To be fair, the day out there with the canoe was so gusty that meaningful fishing was nearly impossible. On open water we got blown along as a jogging pace and were only able to paddle against the wind roughly at a slug’s pace. The only way to put any concentrated effort into an area was to get back on land, so we found a nice big rock to stand on. Here come the excuses again, but it’s true that fishing near trees limits a fly-fisher’s casting room, and after a few minutes on the rocks my esteemed professor friend found spin fishing’s most solid limitation: the bottom of the pond. Isn’t it a mystery how a great scientific mind accustomed to analysis and careful procedures can suddenly find itself facing challenges in understanding that a significantly heavy lure (it was a Rapala jig) must needs be retrieved fairly quickly to stay up off the bottom? I decided to be a dick and insist that, instead of cutting the line, we needed to make every effort to get the lure free (I only had two and did really want to try them on walleye in Canada later on) so the professor was urged to launch the canoe with the idea being that he’d go get the lure free and then come back to get me while I stood on the rocks holding the spin rod. What happened instead was such a comedy that I deeply rue not trying to film it: as soon as he sat his healthy physical person in the stern, the bow went sharply up and immediately caught a really powerful sudden gust of wind. This fierce wind twisted the canoe around in a flash and was pushing the professor wicked fast toward the outlet, a rock-strewn place where current would have been added to a canoe hull’s complications. Science triumphed with a couple strong sweep strokes to beach the bow on shore (nice paddling professor!), where the gusts were waited out and where my laughter did eventually die down to where I cracked up only once every three or four minutes thinking about the scene.

After all that good fun and a nice diet of convivial beers and whisky, I was genuinely sad to say goodbye to the professor the next day when he returned to his classrooms. On the other hand, I’d be lying if I said I weren’t happy to have the quiet cabin in that amazing place all to myself for a little while. I took advantage of the time to zip around in a kayak and prove that the main pond was still overrun with largemouth bass. But the trout mystery continued to itch in my mind. Why just one fish? What were we doing wrong? Did I really not know how to catch brook trout, after growing up in Maine and spending dozens of years catching them from Baxter State Park to Tierra del Fuego? Not to divulge anything that might run me afoul of any authorities, but it is a fact that there at the cabin I had in my possession a small amount of mushroom powder. I decided it was time to deploy this magic dust in the service of science, to open and recharge a mind running in futile grooves and help it devise a new method of catching trout. And when the answer later appeared vividly in my mind amid images of electric greens and sexy trees (don't ask), I literally slapped myself on the head for the obviousness of it: moving water!! True, brookies do like stillwater and can even breed in it, and true, the moving water near these ponds was small and limited. But we hadn’t even tried the creek!

Thanks to this simple bit of inspiration, two more samples were collected.  It took some joyful work bushwhacking through the brush to find a bit of casting/dapping room, and the ratio of creek chubs to brookies was nearly ten to one.  But to your correspondent’s great satisfaction, two tiny but beautiful specimens of salvelinus fontinalis somehow got their mouths around a size 18 ant pattern and allowed themselves to be photographed and recorded.

These healthy juvenile brook trout were swimming just a long stone’s throw from where the creek mouth empties into a pond full of hungry largemouth bass (I had caught several bass right near that outlet on the previous night). Also, they were swimming a babbling half mile or so downstream from the small pond where we had caught the first (significantly larger) brookie.  What this says for science and for any practical plans to try and encourage the thriving and expansion of the brook trout is a bit beyond the comprehension of my unmushroomed mind, and is probably best left to the professor and his cohort. But I can say that catching those little jewels and holding them for a moment in a wet palm of the hand felt like finding the last piece of a fascinating but frustrating puzzle.  In other words, though the catch was measured in low-digit inches, it was fishing at its very best.

Fishing for Science

Why do fishers fish? Better not ask. A clear hazard of the “contemplative man’s sport” is over-contemplation, over-explanation. The contemplative souls who pursue fly-fishing seem to spend a lot of breath giving various reasons for “standing in a river waving a stick,” as John Geirach has called it. If you know some fly fishers, or if you’ve read Geirach or Izaak Walton, you know what I mean. 

The reason I usually give has some Zen cachet and is backed by a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “If you go expressly to look at the moon, it becomes tinsel.” That’s to say, if you go intentionally outdoors to find Beauty and Peace in Nature, you’re likely to end up with a contrived “tinsel'' experience unless you have something to occupy the nagging, goal-oriented, rational part of your mind. To free the part of you that can actually sense Beauty and Peace, you need something else to focus on instead of Beauty and Peace, so that you’ll actually be able to see and experience the ineffable surprise of Beauty and Peace in the odd moments when your focus lapses. And where better to focus your mind than all the fussy details of fly fishing, as it leads you wading and kayaking and hiking into inarguably beautiful river, pond, and lake environments? 

I’ve recently discovered an excellent way to even further complicate that tortuous logic: Science. Take that, tinsel! What if my fishing activity actually advanced scientific knowledge? What, further, if those efforts to scientifically gather and interpret data were motivated and guided by enlightened conservation goals?

Thanks to an old friend of mine who is a scientist and an educator at an Eastern university, I got a taste of what it’s like to fish for science. You could fairly safely say that my old pal runs in a circle that's a bit more scienc-ey and enlightened than my own usual silicon valley crowd out here. Through his contacts he has undertaken the unique job of helping to manage a sizable private tract of land in the Northeast. They're not managing it as pure wilderness—a well-appointed cabin on the property is enough to prove that—but on all evidence, they are managing it very carefully and actively in good faith.

The non-tinsel treasures found on this fairly large piece of conserved land include forests, meadows, swamps, trails, primitive roads, creeks, and a couple of really beautiful ponds.  The handful of people that have access to the property use a sophisticated suite of data collection and visualization software to keep track of the various treasures.  For the roads and trails and trees, good data already exists.  But for the ponds, which have a distant history of storied trout fishing in the days of the Vanderbilts, data has been scarce.  That’s where I came in: a guy with barbless hooks in his flies and, hopefully, the skills to get some trout to grab them. What *is* swimming in these ponds that have barely been fished for a period of 25 years?  

Needless to say, I was abundantly eager to sign up to try and help answer that question. All the highest expectations lay on that wondrous fish, a longtime friend of mine, the trout.  And not just any trout: it’s possible that these isolated ponds would contain undiluted genetic strains of salvelinus fontinalis. I suppose it could refer to a colorful brown, but in my imagination this line from Richard Hugo’s “Trout” always described a brookie: “say red is on his side like apples in a fog.”

Late August is not the best time to go looking for brookies in the top of the water column.  However, some clouds and cool showers gave us a degree of hope as we arrived on the scene right around dusk.  I had pictured fishing from a canoe on these ponds, but with limited light left in the day we loaded into a small wooden motorboat tied to an old dock and embarked on the first attempt at data collection.  My traps were oiled: a 4wt with a nice double-tapered floating line whose long fine leader was tipped with an elk hair caddis; and a 6wt strung with a clear-tip intermediate line and a beadhead wooly bugger.  Nothing fancy or hatch-specific—there were no bugs visible on the surface anyway—but these are flies that should have appealed to any brookie that hadn’t seen the point of a hook for a dozen years or more.  The elk hair caddis always fools the non-native but thriving brookies I see in alpine lakes in the Sierras, and the biggest brookie I ever caught, a memorable fattie from a pond in Patagonia, took a wooly bugger.  Not sure if that is pure science, but it’s what I started with.

In a half-hour’s initial effort we stealthily approached downed trees and beaver dams and other likely cover and delicately offered up the caddis: no takers. Same result for a smaller parachute Adams. The mood sank; it started to not look like the pond was full of hungry, unsophisticated trout.  My friend and his son seemed to be a little less impressed by my fancy fishing rods and unfurling loops each time they failed to produce a strike. Switching to the wooly bugger, we got hits!  But I am sorry to report that when the first of these hits were solidly hooked and dragged to the boat with great anticipation, the catch turned out to be that least trouty of catches, a largemouth bass.  

There’s science for you: it may be a negative result, but it’s information.  In fact, the landowners had feared exactly this result.  In recent decades some of the lakes in the area have actually been intentionally stocked with largemouth bass for their sport value, where sport refers less to fly casting and more to fast boats plastered with colorful stickers -- even “tournaments,” I imagine.  No such activity was allowed on the private ponds, of course, but it truly is a fact of Nature that everything is connected.  Property lines can’t stop bass fry from swimming up and down creeks, property lines can’t prevent a heron with some fertilized bass eggs stuck to its legs from flying from lake to lake.  And once bass are on the scene, they are quite capable of subjugating other species to oblivion with their large hungry mouths and aggressive ambush feeding.  

That’s a sad outcome for science and for conservation.  But I cannot look anyone in the eye and say truthfully that an unfished pond full of bass is a sad outcome for a fly fisher in possession of an 8wt with a weight-forward floating line attached. When my friend left the next morning on the long drive back to the university, I put together my folding kayak and went out with the 8wt and a hypothesis: I wished to discover whether every likely piece of cover, every weed clump, down tree, and rock along the entire shore of this lovely pond, held an aggressive largemouth bass.  The terminal experimental equipment was a balsa bass popper, and I think you can guess the result: positive.

With the aid of an all-terrain vehicle and some intense off-road driving that I wouldn’t have expected from a professor, we had also sampled another of the property’s ponds by canoe. This smaller pond is a lot more promising for a population of brookies, as it is significantly deeper and colder than the main pond.  We worked the dries and wooly bugger there as well, and, while we couldn’t find a brook trout, we notably didn’t find any largemouth bass.  I think if bass were there, they would have attacked the bugger unhesitatingly. We also tried a string leech, just to be sure.  But the only catch was small sunfish that barely got their mouths around a size 18 Adams.  We left believing that if we came back in springtime before the summer heat inverts the thermocline, we might have a fair chance at finding brook trout. 

Hopefully that sounds scientific, and hopefully some well-meaning fly fisher (who hopefully will be me) will get a chance to try out that hypothesis.  I can tell you that I really, really like fishing for science.  Philosophical and personal reasons for fishing are real and will always count; but add in an actual, practical scientific goal in the service of conserving natural resources (and thereby ensuring the survival of meaningful fishing), and you can feel very, very good about your fishing. I’ll add that paddling and fishing all day in a lake that is basically all yours, and then falling asleep in a hammock while rain hammers on the cabin roof, can really make you feel good about being alive on earth.  Much gratitude for my friend and the landowner who made that happen.

The Mother of All Unloads

It is a fact of life that plans change, and sometimes they change at the very last minute. This is abundantly true of fishing plans. The wind forecast suddenly worsens, and a paddle on the Delta doesn't look so good anymore. Some bullshit starts to happen at work, and you realize that you're not going to make it out the door on a Friday afternoon for a long weekend up north.

When these things happen, there's nothing to do but unload the truck. And as joyous and rich in anticipation as it can be to load the truck for a weekend -- in goes the cooler with a delicious Belgian beer in it, in goes the backpack with wading boots and waders -- it is correspondingly  unpleasant to unload it. As the back of the truck empties, so empties your happy little bubble.

Today, several months into our lovely pandemic that has turned life upside down in so many ways, I have just finished the Mother of all Truck Unloads. Here’s what had to come back out:

• A large bear can packed with food and two sizeable double-ziploc-bagged flasks of single malt scotch.  Really good scotch.
• A dry suit with newly (expensively) replaced neck and wrist gaskets.  Also, new rain pants, a tarp, and a tent treated with DWR.
• Flies that aren’t much use in California: dahlberg divers, long black string leeches, mouse patterns.
• A nice fast foldable kayak.

That’s right, I was locked and loaded to go kayak fishing in Alaska.  For a few years running I have been hooked on paddling for bass and walleye up in Canada, so I have neglected my favorite Alaskan stillwater fishing hole (a lake 234 square miles in size).  Well OK, I’m locked out of Canada along with all the other masked and unmasked American patriots; but maybe I can get to Alaska!

Maybe.  For a while there was a 14-day quarantine, and you weren’t allowed to leave the road system.  Then, when that lifted, the 72-hour covid test result requirement was just too strict -- nobody could guarantee a test any tighter than 2 to 4 days out.  Finally, the testing window expanded to five days, and my planning gears started turning hard and fast.

I’ll spare you the gory details except to say: I was screwed both by tardy results that took a full five days, AND by the airline.  The airline changed the flight almost daily in the week running up to departure, making it more inconvenient each time. My first-class one-stop turned into a mixed cabin 2-stop with an overnight in Anchorage real quick, and when the last change popped up even as I was looking at checking in even though I didn’t have my test results -- that’s when I realized it was time to give up and cut losses.  

And that explains all the unloading.  Definitely, I’m happy that I’m not sick, and that I live in the woods, and that I can still drive to some wild country and find some good to great fishing.  But man, I was dreaming hard about that big lake full of fat lakers, char, and rainbows, and the little spring creek filled with grayling, and the back bays teeming with big pike, and even of a finale of swinging mice on the last day before pickup.  On balance, it seemed worth a 5-6 hour trip in the germ tube, all masked up and claustrophobic . . .  

If life is anything like normal next year and nonstops to Anchorage can be had, I might do *both* Alaska and Canada in the early summer.  Eventually the Big Unload will just be a distant memory to laugh at; but right now it is definitely still too soon.

Austral Winter, Part One

If things keep going as planned, my fishing trips this winter are going to have a decidedly Austral flavor.  I'm still going to do my very Boreal Baja trip for the solstice and new year (see previous entry for an example).  However, with a long week of Australian fishing under my belt already, and a couple weeks of Patagonia planned for February, there should be a lot of fishing going on down on the bottom half of the planet!

The November Down Under trip almost didn't happen, thanks to my distaste for being cooped up with other people in an airplane.  If it were just me and the stewardesses hanging out in the white noise of the cabin, it would probably be my favorite hobby ever. Instead, in reality, it is hours of bad air and baby screams and uncomfortable sleep.  But sometimes you just gotta suck it up and go, especially when your Uncle Larry is paying for a business class ticket, and so I did.

Ah, but not without sticking in a nice spell of my own flying (economy class) from Melbourne to exotic Mackay!  Why Mackay?  One reason: the Whitsunday islands.  Excellent advice from an Australian kayak fishing forum got me pointed that direction in search of sweet beach camping and unusual grabs among the reefs.  My expectations were fairly high, and all were met.  Look at my first camp at Crayfish beach:

That's a pretty sweet beach camp, and it was all mine for two nights.  And there were indeed grabs!  Initially I wasn't very optimistic, after hearing the ferry operator talk about things.  "Oh yeah, my cousin does the caretaking at the old Hook Island Resort (my takeout/return point) and he hasn't been catching anything.  He likes to watch boats come out, fish a spot, get nothing, and then motor away so that another boat can come and do the same in the same spot.  Not much fishing right now.  But for me, I'd rather watch grass grow."

That doesn't sound great; but therein lies a bit of a tale that I'll end this blog with.  Meanwhile, I'll say that there was plenty of fishing at Crayfish beach.  Without even getting in the boat, I could wade out onto the reef at low tide and cast a Crazy Charlie out over pools between 1-3 feet deep, and hook something almost every time: little yellow striped fish, little grouper-ish fish with spots, and sometimes some hard-pulling medium sized blue/purple characters that I'd never seen before but look vaguely like a triggerfish.  Pargo-ish characters put some pretty savage grabs on trolled lures that made me think they were at least twice as fat as they ended up being:

Better yet, there was a mangrove-lined back bay that was full of eager snapper that took both clousers and topwater -- and who were very tasty served up with a spicy rub and some noodles.

I missed the big one though. On day two there, something big grabbed my popper fly as soon as it landed and took off FAST for the reef. I couldn't stop it, and got snapped off; a trevally? It had a silver back and might have been two feet long. I was howling about that snapoff for sure.  In what my old buddy Strouster might consider "luck," I wasn't quite done snapping off big fish, either.  Days later, after I'd gone back to the mainland and asked some questions about barramundi at a tackle shop, I ended up at Proserpine Lake. After much trolling and "flipping" (weighted plastic fish trap-like lures), a light turned on and I got two solid hookups within a 20 minute window. One was huge, like a meter-long tarpon, and immediately flung the lure back in my direction after one awesome jump. With hands shaking I kept at it and hooked a second, catchable-sized one and finally yanked him close to the boat after some spectacular aerials -- or, I should say nearly catchable, as the line snapped under light pressure just as I was getting out the camera. The fish might have been pushing two feet long, and I think it might have gill-raked my 40# flouro tippet (on 40# braid). I went out the next day using longer pieces of 60, and didn't get a single bump in 4.5 hours of trying, much of the time with my gopro camera running just to get a shot of the jumps. Damn! I really wanted a pic of one of those beasts.

But wait!  I still haven't finished my Whitsunday island observations.  First: it was not kid-glove kayaking.  The massive tidal movements in that part of the world, paired with opposing winds, made it a much-needed exercise in advanced kayaking for me.  Almost immediately upon trolling out of Crayfish Bay going south, I got into a state of full clapotis, with the current rushing south at pace, the considerable southerly wind pushing it into steep waves, and plenty of reflecting waves off the rocky headland to make it crazy and unpredictable.  I knew I shouldn't have been trolling, but didn't dare take both hands off the paddle to deal with it!  Eventually, I was forced to reel up in order to cross a big "potato patch" of standing waves on a rip between the north tip of Whitsunday and one of the points on Hook island, where I had to do a couple of no-fooling low braces to keep from getting capsized.  As I looked back with my lungs pumping and hands shaking, I saw that this little feat had earned a round of applause and whistles from a passing sailboat.

And this is all good; who knows when conditions like that are going to happen in Baja?  I've been dorking around on calm days on the San Luis Forebay and the delta too long, and doing my fastidiously pre-checked Monterey Bay trips, thoroughly vetted for swell and tide and wind.  I'm getting old, but I don't need to get lazy!  Thank you Whitsundays for a wake-up call.

The second observation is that, despite the gloomy prognostications I heard on the ferry, the fishing was nice!  At my Cairn beach camp I had regular grabs from reef fish while trolling about, and also was able to hook nice coral trout on flies cast right from the beach.  And those puppies are TASTY.  Probably the nicest coral of the trip came to hand just in front of the Hook Island Resort, where I was killing time waiting for the ferry, and (unbeknownst) being watched on binoculars from the resort's windows.  Finally the caretaker, a really friendly guy (I didn't run across a single unfriendly Australian) came strolling down the beach to talk.  This was the cousin who wasn't catching anything, and so he seemed pretty surprised that a California geek in a kayak was doing pretty darned OK right on his front porch.



I shit you not, that nice fellow actually helped carry my gear over the beach to the ferry, and asked me for a selfie shot before we left.  I was feeling pretty good about the world.  Though, later that night I kind of wished I'd kept the coral trout pictured above to fry and enjoy and prolong the Whitsunday joy just that much longer.  I'm cultivating my Sydney office contacts and seriously thinking about hauling the kayak back there to general area of the Great Barrier Reef, which is as far as my venerable old Feathercraft Kahuna has every gone from home.

But as always, as far as "home" goes, it's where your hat hangs just right.  I got into the groove camping on the beach and loved every second of my warm, humid, unscheduled life.  Which is, of course, how vacationing should be. I was pleasantly drunk on fresh warm air and maybe just a little Bruichladdich CC01 or Laphroig PX Cask from duty free when I mistook a turtle fin for a shark fin and went out to cast the popper for a shark take.  But it's all good, right?

Baja Best Yet

A trip like the one I had last month in Mexico deserves a blog.  Unambiguously, it was my best Baja trip yet, the pinnacle instance of my little midwinter ritual of making a ridiculously long drive to camp out and fish from my kayaks on the shores of the Baja peninsula.  I was pretty happy with last year, which was the first year that I felt like I really got the camping solitude fully wired.  But this year, two factors combined to overcome my own physical deterioration (from age) and limited paddling ranges, and make it the best ever: friendly winds, and willing fish.

On night one, I must say, the weather omens were not looking good.  I sat and watched a distant lightning show as I sipped the evening scotch in my wonderful elephant-tree camp, but didn't feel a drop.  I've had this experience a few times before in the desert, where you get to see and hear a distant storm, but never actually feel a single raindrop falling on your head.

That didn't happen this time.  What did happen, was that a few hours after lying down, I woke up to an incredibly intense rain storm: lightning cracking apparently right over my tent, deafening thunder blasts, and POUNDING, pounding rain.  Just to be safe wind and dew-wise (an issue on the Pacific coast) I take a 3-4 season tent that has withstood severe conditions in Alaska, so I felt pretty confident that I could just sit and listen, and maybe stick my head out if the sheets of rain stopped falling. 

WRONG.  Randomly, I put my hand down on the floor of the tent, and guess what?  It was soft!  Kind of like it had a giant inch-deep puddle under it!  And that indeed was the case.  That's not good; that's bad.  Even in my post-scotch sleepiness, I quickly realized I had to get out of my warm dry sanctuary and do something -- like get out my folding shovel and dig a trench in splashing mud while marble-sized raindrops pelted me mercilessly.  It worked, and I got the water flowing around the tent instead of under it.  But it was not a pleasant part of a restful night.

The next day was also unperfect: on arrival in Santa Rosalia, a Norte was blowing up whitecaps on the Sea of Cortez.  Old and pragmatic, and knowing of a really sweet underpriced hotel with nice rooms and killer views, I decided against more bad-weather camping.  However, wind forecasts for the next day were OK, so I did put together my boat and start preparing psychologically to launch in three-foot wakes knocking around the cobblestones of my favorite beach.  The wind stops, yes; but the waves take a good 6-8 hours to quit afterward.

Again, initial omens were not good.  What is this, at the prime yellowtail spot?  Not a yellowtail. Barely any tail at all!

No, yellowtail were decidedly not there at the spot.  This shark, who swallowed a speed jig so far down his throat I didn't dare try to extract it until he was dead, saved the day.  Firm, white meat, and just delicious.

OK, the "best Baja yet" part is about to start.  I got over to the Pacific and settled into a camp at one of my favorite places in the world.  There's always an intense, long, 90-minute sunset there.

And yes, fish were on the bite!  The wind stayed down the entire time, and I fished flies almost exclusively and topwater predominantly.  You couldn't stop the snapper; I think I hooked more than 20 each day out, almost all on topwater.  

And, best of all, the snook were in.  I started small, but each fish seemed to get twice as big as the last one until I landed one that was easily the biggest I've taken on a fly, ever.

So what's better than that, right?  Well, how about prime, calm wind conditions back on the Cortez side, and fairly regular bait bust-ups just off the beach?  Word on the beach was that they were seeing more sardines in the area than they'd seen for years, and that dorado were still hanging around in the cooling water to take advantage of that.  

I trolled topwater-ish dorado treats five miles out to Isla Carmen and never got anything but needlefish (which were swarming).  It was a tough paddle against current and some minor rollers, so I camped out and figured I'd just do a mild 4-5 mile fishing day near camp the second day, and take it easy.  Look who spoiled my plan:

After I'd paddled out about 1.5 miles from camp, my very first speed-jig drop got hit hard, by that fish.  I was sporting 60 pound braid tipped with 100 pound flourocarbon leader on my burliest level-wind setup -- I've been "rocked" by big yellowtail more times than I'd like to admit, so now I prepare -- and I knew what was called for: hauling that fucker up off the bottom with as much pressure as I dared to put on him.  In a kayak, it's more a question of capsizing than breaking that kind of tackle, but I was willing to edge things.  The worst risk is in fact getting cut off on a rock, because the sudden release of pressure causes a fearful recoil, in which you swing fast and hard back from the direction the fish had been pulling.

Not a problem this time. For a good four or five seconds after the bite the fish didn't really react, and I pulled up four or five solid few pump-and-reel motions before he knew he was hooked, apparently.  THEN he ran like a muthah, causing the drag to scream and slamming the rod butt into the cockpit coaming to tow me at an alarming pace . . . but somehow he didn't get into a rock.  Whenever he paused in his shoulder-battering runs, I resumed pumping and reeling, and this went on for ten or fifteen minutes until the fish was up around 150 feet over a 250 foot bottom (I use a line-counting Shimano reel), and hell -- I rested.  I could feel the burn in my shoulders and forearms, and sweat was dripping down my face even in the cool of early morning.  While I rested, the fish, still a mystery but definitely under suspicion of yellowness, pulled the yak around in a large circle.

"Oh -- it's a BOSS yellow" is what I said out loud when I finally got a good look at him. I love eating yellowtail collar and yellowtail belly and hamachi sushi, and there was just no way I was going to let him go.  Yet, as soon as the gaff went into him, things got serious: there goes your restful 4-5 mile day. It is now a 15 mile day of breaking camp and packing the kayak and churning against rising afternoon winds to get back to the mainland shore where there is a cooler full of ice where all that fish meat can be made safe.  

I made the trip and I butchered the beast (while rioting seagulls shat all over the camp), and I ate the delicious collar.  

The whole next day was devoted to eating and preparing to eat the fish: sushi with ramen for breakfast; ceviche for lunch; extended fish-smoking through the afternoon (with testing/snacking) followed by a super-delicious, fatty belly.

But even after all that "resting," I was physically spent.  Fighting that damn bicho had caused some stringy, sore spots in my 50 year-old shoulder and forearm and lower back; and doing 24 miles in two days didn't help.  I should have either a) ended the trip right there, or b) taken a four-five day rest, which was impossible given my work/vacation window.  So I went with c), a desperate one-day run back over to the Pacific to see if I could get an even dreamier snook to go with my dream yellowtail.

The fishing wasn't bad -- lots more snapper, a grouper dinner -- but the most notable event was a big snapoff, where a strong fish (the dream snook?) ran me hard into the mangrove roots and even broke the tip of my 8wt to rub it in.  Maybe I could have stopped him when I was still fresh in the first days of the trip, but I wasn't fresh.  I was done. Stick a fork in his ass done.

However, you would have heard no complaints, because what was really done, to perfection, was my best yet Baja winter solstice trip. I looked back at earlier trips, and realized that in tough years, like 2014, I only got a handful of days to paddle and fish amid endless bad wind.  It was the opposite in 2017, for sure: so much of a blessing that it kind of became a curse as I paddled and fished (and caught!) my way to total exhaustion.  Will I try again next year, knowing it could go either way?  Bet on it.