Fly Zone 2007

Nicaragua was fishy as I could wish, but very geary. The only strike I had on a fly was a scrappy little machaca on San Fernando who threw the hook. So I would have to admit that, for me, Nicaragua was a no-fly zone.

Not so on some of my delta home water today. After a warm afternoon of trolling around for one thin schoolie, I decided to trespass on an unoccupied dock for a bit of fly casting. To the degree that you can call 350 grains of tungsten a fly line. Anyway, it worked:



Love them stripers. Love the delta, even. I think I have my answer to "Y ahora que?" There's not much I can do here in California to outdo a San Juan tarpon, but I can certainly dredge up a whole lot of pleasant fishing and paddling out of my usual old haunts. It was just a great afternoon out there: calm, and relatively warm, and very pretty with the sunset and fullish moon rising at dusk.

Y Ahora Que?

The only problem with an experience like catching a tarpon is making the next move. If you land a ten-inch trout, you immediately cast again with hopes of a twelve or a twenty-inch trout. But after fighting a 93 pound tarpon from your kayak? The question is so baffling that yesterday I did the unthinkable and paddled on the bay without one shred of fishing tackle on board. Made a nice circuit of the Brothers and Red Rock and enjoyed some current maneuvers, but that's just stalling tactics in a life defined by fishing.

"Y ahora que?" is exactly the question I asked before Chepe and the boys showed up to bail me out, though. Maybe there will be some more divine intervention for me now. What seems more likely is some diabolic intervention, in the form of -- a job. Many weeks ago I had the evil thought of abandoning my six weeks in Patagonia (the next sabbatical plan) for a contract job short enough to not interfere with six weeks in Alaska (the main event). Talking with Google last night strongly suggests that this awful thing may happen. As good as that might be for my resume, it would put a damper on a fishin sabbatical and its related blog.

But I'm ahead of myself here. It ain't over till it's over. Don't count your tarpon sausage until it's in the boat. And so on. No matter what, I'll still be out there for Caddis Madness in March, and will go shadaholic in May. On opening day on the Pit I'll go to those rocky riverbanks thinking like Whitman that I am mad for it to be in contact with me. Vamos a ver.

Tarpon + Kayak = Comedy

Those who know me well can pretty easily imagine how impatiently I made the trip from Solentiname to Sabalos, starting at 5:00 a. m. and then ending at 3:00 p. m. when, soaked in jungle sweat from the effort of assembling my boat in a rush, I finally got back onto tarpon water. This being my fourth official tarpon trolling day, I knew the drill: get to the deep run and troll against the current at about 2.5 mph; when it shallows out, turn around and troll quickly back downstream; repeat until completely exhausted and/or dark falls. Like so many outdoor activities, this type of fishing becomes calming through repetition, even hypnotic.

That is, until the STRIKE! Over 20 feet of water, there´s no mistaking the violent, rod-whipping strike of a tarpon. Nor the deep indignation of not getting a solid hookup. I took a quick range on a shed and some trees and paddled down to repeat the same line. Guess what: WHAM! another identical strike. By now my knees are feeling a little shaky with excitement. After 20+ hours of looking for them, I am finally fishing over some grabby goddamn tarpon at 4:00 p. m. on my second to last day on the San Juan.

On the third pass the rod went down into a ¨C¨ shape and stayed that way, bringing the boat to a shuddering halt and making the drag sing that sweetest high-pitched song. By the time I´d picked up the rod and ruddered around to look downstream, the fish was already completely out of the water and looking, against the afternoon light, like the most beautiful thing I have seen in this fairly beautiful country. It came down in a fearful big splash, and I pulled up the rod in acute terror -- was it still on tight? It was.

A fool´s hope suddenly fulfilled is only one of the powerful emotions that started flowing at 50 million CFS. There was also shock and awe at the size and power of such a huge fish, as well as a wild joy, even unsurpressable glee, that burst up out its buried places every time the tarpon made another violent and magnificent jump. I made some pretty damn silly hooting and shouting and laughing noises during this stage of the struggle, eventually hustling out my camera with shaking hands to try and film this exquisite moment. Luck was really with me that day, because the very moment I hit the digital film button the tarpon made its fifth jump. Try viewing that clip here.

As long as the fish was running hard and jumping, the scene seemed somewhat like a guy fighting a fish from a boat. But when the tarpon settled down and started sulking on the bottom, it quickly became apparent that a 93 pound fish holding in 3 mph current tugging, on 40 pound braided monofilament, a 40 pound boat containing a rather baffled 160 pound gringo, is the very definition of a stalemate. Periodically the tarpon made a move for the surface to roll and thrash in ways that seemed pretty clearly to be a threat to the boat. Even in my addled brain a sense of mild danger started to grow. It was about 4:45, and this stalemate could have lasted until midnight or longer.

The cavalry does come over the hill, though, in the form of local fisherman Vicente Escobar, his young cousin Chepe, and two grinning kids all packed into a dugout canoe. ¨What are you going to do with the fish?¨ Vicente asks from a polite distance. ¨Other than lose him or be drowned by him?¨ I´m thinking . . . at this point I am as ready as ever in my life to accept some help landing a fish, normally not all my M. O. So I reply, ¨If we can land this fish together, it´s yours.¨ And quicker than you can say Sabalo Chorizo, we instantly formed into a tightly organized five-man fishing team. We lashed my kayak on one side, and after clambering into their completely unstable craft, I fought the fish off the opposite side.





And man did those guys know how to paddle. They kept the boat moving opposite the fish at all times, and I kept sweating and cursing as I knelt in a slurry of half-dead mojarras and bait, keeping pressure on the fish as best I could. Once or twice I paused in the battle to take a picture; the guys all looked at me as if to say, ¨dude -- do you want a picture, or a fish in the boat?¨ Of course, I wanted both. At the sketchiest moment in this last stage of the fight, I brought the fish to the boatside for the first time and it toootally freaked out, running under the boat with the tip of my rod broken off and amazing us all by jumping on the opposite side of the kayak. In the frantic rowing to correct this situation I was sure we were all going to swim.

But we didn´t. The team kept its wits, and as dark started to deepen, we made a successful if not pretty end to the battle. I got to where I could pull the tarpon´s head up every five minutes or so, and at these moments Chepe left off paddling and turned his crudely hewn, sodden wood paddle into a club, whacking at the big silvery fish head for all he was worth, bless him. The stunned fish still took two men to lift him up into the boat. Juego ganado! High fives and smiles all around! I got a couple of shots in the wobbling canoe, and they got some serious fish meat at 10 cordobas a pound, plus the deeply embedded Rapala plug. We´d floated pretty far downstream, and I had to scurry off to the hotel to be sure of a safe landing.

Chepe happened to live in the maze of shacks down from the hotel, and I´ll be gormed if he didn´t show up the next morning in his dugout with a big bowl of chorizo de Sabalo -- tarpon sausage. I´ll be even more gormed if that shit wasn´t absolutely delicious. You could easily pass it off as pork chorizo, though somebody might comment that it had a remotely fishy flavor. I made a little bit of a mistake by taking the bowl back filled with my extraneous fishing tackle to give to Chepe, telling him I thought the chorizo was delicous. I think this forced him, with a quietly elegant and very touching Nicaraguan courtesy, to come back to the hotel an hour later with another, bigger bowl of chorizo plus tamales and sour cream made by the Senora de la casa. I made him sit down at the hotel to have a tamale and beer with me (which was stretching social codes, since he was very much a shirtless indigenous fisherman among the bermuda-pants patrons of the town´s shwankiest 15 dollar hotel) and had to think: if we could get Hugo Chavez and Dick Cheney to go land a tarpon together, then we would almost surely have harmonious friendship between nations.

So now, on my last full Nicaraguan day chillin´in San Carlos, I´m thinking that it has been a pretty damn good first month of my sabbatical. Lots of great fishing, lots of human value, and plenty of adventure. If the plane goes down in flames tomorrow, gentle readers, let be known that I died quite happy.

Pluggin away in Laguneroville

If I were doing truly detailed blogging, I would have written more about Scott and Serena. They are a friendly couple I met in Boca de Sabalos two weeks ago. They are ex-Peace Corps folks who have lived through some wierd shit in strange places of the world, so now the difficulties of living in Nicaragua half the year do not faze them at all. They have put together a brilliant half-here/half-home type of lifestyle in which they keep doing enlightened philanthropy, but very selfishly (which is the only way I would believe it, with the powerful aid of the Invisible Hand). I learned a lot about them travelling with them, and then also when they let me use their guest room for a night when it turned out that all the rooms on the island (all four or five) were taken. Their deal is such a surprisingly economically excellent balance that I think I´d like to write a piece on them in order to inspire rest of us who might be trapped in treadmills of work, single countries and residences, etc.

Anyway, the BEST thing about them is that Scott fishes. With his detailed advice (he has the fisherman´s memory for certain patches of grass or rocks that nobody else would even notice), I got into big rainbow bass on practically my first effort in Solentiname. What a hoot! Even after a week of fishing for them I still couldn´t help laughing to see a giant kissing gourami on my line. They strike hard, pull like stripers, and taste great with garlic butter or on a skewer with peppers and onions.



Overall, the Solentiname Islands are a kind of kayak fisher´s paradise. Imagine dozens of islands with shallow rocky saddles between them teeming with fish. It rains a bit, but not for long; you´ll hit some wind and big chop in any exposed area, but that just means you can have a blast surfing back -- and all the while you know that the water is warm as bathwater. The little hotels all have perfectly serviceable rock beaches, and since everybody goes everywhere by boat on these roadless islands, you fit right in with the locals. If you´re as lucky as I was, you can fish up your own lunch and dinner every day and present it to the cook. Fried mojarras (like perch), lagunero con salso or al ajillo, or en brocheta . . . not bad at all.

The only rub is that the water is quite murky and as a result fly fishing is practically useless. I gave the long rod a little time, but couldn´t stick with it without some reinforcement. The way to get them is with plugs, fished in a certain secret way that I don´t feel comfortable posting in the internets. I spent many happy hours trolling and casting plugs. However, the thing I really don´t want to publish on the internets is this: I fished bait! Having broken down my boat on the last day, needing some rest, I went ahead and followed the local example of hunting up some freshwater crabs in the shallows and then plunking them off the dock. I was really just aiming for some lunchtime mojarras, but I´ll be damned if a four-pound lagunero didn´t take my bobber rig for a little ride . . . wheee!


Now that I´ve had enough fun and enough rest, my plan is to go back down to Boca de Sabalos and take one more whack at a tarpon-powered Nantucket sleigh ride. Should be able to put in a few hours tonight and then a whole morning tomorrow before starting back North. As John McPhee pointed out, it´s not patience that drives most of us fishers; it´s hope.

San Juan Trippin

Back in my homebound days as a disaffected teenager I was accustomed to do a certain amount of travelling without ever leaving Bar Harbor. At 19 I went to Peru for the first time (of three trips) and began a lasting trend of tripping in the more conventional versions of space and time. And let me tell you that going down the San Juan in a foldable kayak is, in a word, a trip. With the tarpon rolling all around, and a four-foot gar on the line, and a crocodile sunning on the shore where you´d like to land to try and unhook the gar, you really get taken back to a time not just premodern or precolonial but prehistoric. It is wierd and exhilirating.

I wrote that fishing is a positive mode of freedom, and that it has been. However, just lately it has not been a particularly great mode of other things such as, for instance, catching fish. My whole tally on the San Juan includes two gar, one snapped off on branches (the four footer) and another ugly ass one that I got on film. No bite on the tarpon. And believe me I tried: eight hours trolling near Boca Sabalos, five hours trolling from a motorboat near Castillo, and then eight more kayak hours on a great looking run further down. Other guys were out at Castillo and Sabalos, and no one hooked up. In fact, the overpriced guide whose website I raided for information (http://www.nicaraguafishing.com/) brought down ten sports on the hotel at Sabalos, allowing me to escape just in time. Word is that they haven´t caught a damn thing either. There have been rains; the river is colored and full of floating hyacinths; but those are all excuses. I got skunked. I am mas salado que un cuajo.

With hopes of change in the wind! I met a couple of cool gringo expats who are living on San Fernando in the Solentiname archipelago (my next stop) and they not only informed me of spots and techniques, but will actually take me out in a boat with the locals. By now I am far from too proud to accept a little help and company. Though I defintely still hope to hunt and land a few from my sweet kayak, which has survived barbed wire on the dock post of Sabalos, the rapids at Castillo, and severe slashing from the teeth and treble hooks associated with 50 pounds of angry gar.


Harrassing a small crocodile on the Rio Bartola.

You Can Git There from Here

By spending the entire afternoon loitering at the dock yesterday, I was able to get a farking ticket to San Carlos at last. There was quite a bit of pushing and sharp elbows at the ticket window, and I would like to apologize to the locals for that. I acted as agent for a group of about a half-dozen confused Germans, whose passports I carried to the window with me to make sure they got proper tickets. In turn they helped me carry around my clunky kayak bags.

Travel guides say the ferry journey is uncomfortable and tedious, but I actually found the scene very amusing and circus-like. The winds and waves on this night crossing were awful, and they shot random sprays of lake water across random parts of the deck, completely soaking groups of passengers and causing several ladies in unstable shoes to sit down on the deck very very quickly. For my part, I strung my hammock up on the boat frame in a quite dry spot. This is by far the best way to travel in such circumstances. Sometimes the hammock started swinging back and forth with the speed and violence of some amusement park ride, cracking me up completely. Once the waves calmed a bit I slept like a baby, and was still strung up on the rafters when people started disembarking here in San Carlos.



I already have my ticket downriver to Boca Sabalos, where decent hotels exist and kayaks can be unfolded. And tarpon caught? Oh boy I do hope so. That would be pretty cruel false advertising if there weren´t any tarpon around (¨sabalo¨ is Spanish for tarpon). Actually catching one may be an altogether different matter from finding one, but at the moment I am feeling strangely invincible: if a guy can get to San Carlos, then he should be able to handle just about anything.

ETFO Attained

A breezy kayak beach con cabana goes a long way toward convincing a gringo that he may be in the right place after all. So does seeing at least one small part of the larger scheme (Friday ETFO) work out as planned. I got into a few schools of Machaca, which are members of the herring family that includes shad and tarpon. Apparently they get as big as really large shad. Most of mine were more like small shad, but I seemed to be very easy to please. Catching anything at all in that wierd setting of volcanoes and gale winds was a treat.

Guapote were reputed to be in the area, but none actually appeared anywhere including the hotel menu. The few rocky spots of proper habitat were really, really hammered by waves and wind, all day long. Picture four-foot spilling rollers smashing and reflecting back off a cliff, with accompanying wind that could knock you out with a slipped paddle. Not even a 5:30 start kept me out of conditions at the very limit of my kayaking ability -- the wind howled all night. I know this isn´t exactly wise when boating solo, but I´ll be damned if I was going to stay on the beach. The first day I did a session of surfing (sans expensive rods and equipment aboard) and it seemed to help build confidence. In any event, I wasn´t going to die of hypothermia in that bathwater. Worst case is just to float back to Granada pushed by trade winds, real hungry and sunburnt after three days of drinking lake water.

I´m pretty pleased at myself for getting down to that spot. Being .5 km off the bus route, it was 100% turista-free (excepting yours truly) and quite cheap. I got a lot of Spanish practice and paddled and ate myself into pleasant cerveza stupors. Next move is attempt #2 to get onto a ten-hour ferry ride that promises to be uncomfortable in the extreme. Let´s hope I make it! Otherwise I may even try a route through Costa Rica, we shall see. I´m getting used to the heat and having some fun finally, but I´m still pretty eager to see some tarpon and bass.

Puro Reloj NOT

In my last post I mentioned the phrase ¨puro reloj,¨ which seems to refer to the tendency among gringos to do everything by the clock, on tight schedules or strict guidelines. Would the best translation be ¨all clock¨ or ¨all by the numbers?¨

Anyway, it´s one thing to say it, and quite another thing to live it. Yesterday I lived it, a lot. An ex-technical writer might fall back on a procedural format (being verbally puro reloj) to describe the debacle of my attempt to get to San Carlos as planned:

1) Get to ticket window exactly as instructed at 10:00 a. m. and find a big long line and no tickets being sold.
2) After 45 minutes the line starts to move at a snail´s pace; 45 minutes later I am far from the ticket window and a half hour past my checkout. I bail on the line, thinking I´ll come back closer to 2:00 (when the window is supposed to close).
3) For a little while I live in ignorant bliss, watching Arsenal beat Charlton. When the match is over I head back down to the ticket window.
4) To my dismay, the line is yet longer than before. And, though I join it and suffer the heat for a half hour, the same folks who opened it 45 minutes late do go ahead and close it right on the hour. 2:00 p. m., no more tickets being sold.
5) OK. Fine. It´s hard to get to San Carlos, but I am a guy who tries hard. I grab a taxi who will take me to San Jorge for thirty dollars (six or seven times the cost of the ferry ticket) so that I can get a ´quick´ ferry to Ometepe island, where the San Carlos ferry makes a 6:30 stop. I will try to outrun it by land.
6) To make a long story short, I will fail in this hopeful endeavor. I get to the island with a little time to spare, but then the bus to the port (no chance of the two ferries leaving the same dock -- that would be silly puro reloj) stops everywhere to load on everyone and everything, and as it gets dark I am deep in Latin American travel hell: crammed so hard in a stifling school bus that only one foot makes it to the floor.

Step 7 seems to be to wait here on Ometepe until the same ferry makes its next pass Monday. I´m considering camping next to the ticket window this time. Meanwhile I´m headed to a place on the island´s back side called Charco Verde, which looks like it has some nice paddling and possibly even some fishing. It ain´t no Solentiname, but maybe it will tide me over. The only option is to run back to the mainland and try to catch a bus to San Carlos, which is said to be cruelly long and bumpy (even the locals speak of it with dread) and will probably be full, very late, or out of service, if my luck holds. Better to go with it a bit. Right? Gentle Readers, do not be too surprised if, in a giant spasm of impatience, I fly right back to California, checking my clock all the way . . . .

Antigua Connection

People say that Granada, Nicaragua resembles Antigua, Guatemala. More than ten years have passed since I spent several lazy weeks in Antigua learning Spanish, but based on that experience I would say that the people are right. Like Antigua, Granada has various crumbling colonial buildings that give the place a romantic tone; like Antigua, Granada gets some local color from native American arts and styles; and like Antigua, Granada is crawling with gringos like your author.

Antigua-style gringoism has its benefits and costs. I can get good coffee in the morning and watch English soccer in the bars. However, I can do both of those things at home and not be required to endure the endless blasting of 80's pop songs on the intercom (outside the tourist economy, this would be salsa or vallenato or some latin pop, which I like far better than, for instance, Air Supply. That awful 80's duo has a particularly awful lyric that may end up being the motto of my blog: "I'm never gonna tell you all things I gotta tell you but I know I'm gonna give it a try" [retch]). The darker side of growing Gringoism is that the locals get cynical and refuse to smile or say Buenas Tardes, and I'm sad to say that is about half the time around here.

I can only plead guilty, though. My visit here is fairly pointless: per my grand plan, I'm supposed to be 'acclimatizing' and getting used to way things work in the country before setting off to remoter parts. 28 hours into Granada, I think I've already achieved the objective. I've changed money, bought a nice cheap hammock, and have made the people at the hotel bar promise to tune into Arsenal vs. Charlton Athletic tomorrow at noon. The match should be decided before I get on the fourteen hour ferry to San Carlos and enter territory that is probably going to lack cable television and internet. Arsenal damn well better win.

In fairness to Granada, I point out that a person with more time and more motivation to get around and do things would probably be having a terrific time. You could go climb the Masaya Volcano that makes the view here so beautifully Antiguan. You could take a tour to the "Isletas" or to Zapatera island, both of which are things I'd be doing if I were willing to unbag my kayak for just one day of paddling. After a couple of weeks of San Carlos I'll probably be jonesing for some coffee and televised football (especially the start of the Argentine Torneo de Verano) but at the moment all I can do is bloggingly grumble . . .

Lost or Stolen

It will sound obvious to everyone, but especially to my fellow Noo Inglundurs, when I observe that it is wicked hot down here. Really debilitatingly hot and by no means a dry heat. I have already had my first travel screwup, and I´m blaming it on the heat. The heat muddles my head and makes me rush things so I can get back out of the heat, which makes me hotter yet and contributes to a vicious inferno circle.

Weeks ago in cooler climes I carefully selected a pair of sunglasses especially for this trip. Lightweight polarized lenses are always good for fishing, but when they have little removable gaskets that shut out all air, vapor and insect life, they are especially good for fishing among Nicaraguan chayules. Chayules are little gnats that hatch in such profusion that they are known to blot out streetlights around here. Bottles of beer are served with protective napkins and a straw to keep them out.

Normally they´re light in Granada, but I was lucky enough this afternoon to run into a hatch of them down by Lake Nicaragua. They turned a stiff cooling wind into a pricking, itching little storm of exoskeletons. I pulled out my shades, popped in those gaskets, and immediately started feeling like the cleverest bastard on the planet. Such hubris is never meant to last . . . .

My whole aim in making that hot trek down to the lake was to pick up a ticket on the ferry to San Carlos. These are sold from a dank little barred window manned by a slurring red-eyed soldier type. He took my passport and made a long, careful inspection of it before handing it back and telling me I can´t actually get a ticket until the day of the departure, Thursday. Gringos are all `puro reloj´ and I am a grumpy example as I go off in a huff. It takes me about a half second of chuyul wind to realize I no longer have the shades attached to me. They´re not on the ground, nor on the sill next to the window where I probably would have put them down. I ask the ticket pirate about it, and his hyperinnocent attitude convinces me that he has them in his pocket.

Now, to give some sense of audience participation to this bloggishly pointless blog, I might ask: does this count as a stolen or as a lost pair of glasses?

Either way I know I count as a pretty big idiot, one who has entered the Nicarguan market for sunglasses.

Freedom From and Freedom To

Seven years is a long time to hold a job, especially in technology. My titles and employers changed a few times during that stretch, but the job stayed the same: documenting software. Sometimes this got very interesting. Most of the time it was not so.

So, when the corporate bosses announced my termination at the close of 2006, I genuinely rejoiced. In the course of my technology career I have seen, enviously, a few good friends and colleagues get cut loose with lovely severance packages and transition deals. Now I have a layoff of my own! For a couple of weeks now I have been completely free from the need to go to the office, to check mail, to try and understand bug reports or attend dreadful meetings (and at least for the moment, I'm still getting paid).

However, I know from Nietzsche that freedom from anything is "negative freedom". It's the freedom of a slave who, suddenly freed, probably has nothing he really wants to do except not do what he had been doing before. The truer, better freedom is the freedom to do something. And fortunately I do have something to throw my energy into and fill with meaning and importance in this dark existential void we all live in: go fishing.

And write about fishing, and plan fishing, and paddle different kinds of kayaks to go fishing, and take pictures of fish, and take breaks from fishing in order to return to fishing. "Gone Fishing" is the hackneyed sign to post on the door of your old office, but in my case fishing is a highly positive mode of freedom, and I hope in this blog to make a decent case for why fishing might be a worthwhile main pursuit for an unemployed , unattached American male closing in on 40.

First stop, Nicaragua. I'll get on a plane tonight and potentially post some bloggish responses to being in Granada tomorrow, though the actual ETFO (Estimated Time of Fish On) will be sometime next Friday night. Imagining a wacky-looking guapote swimming up to the side of my kayak makes me think 2007 is going to be a Happy New Year.