No News is Bad News

Just to confirm that fishing embers are still warm, I'll do a quick report on last weekend's fishing and paddling. The fishing actually resulting in catching, as it occasionally does, and the paddling was a healthy exercise in support of one of the upcoming summer's big fishing adventures in Alaska.

Coming up to last weekend there was a nice long warming trend of the kind that can bring the delta back to life in February. Add a steady barometer and stripers are happy little fellas. And those little ones are the only ones I was able to contact on Saturday (up to 'keeper' length at the most) but I did contact enough of them to be a happy little fella myself on my 18-mile, counter-clockwise circuit of a large island out there. The tide was with me most of the way, but I ended nice and tired with about ten striper notches and two largemouth ones. Largemouth bass in February; this is where a boy from Maine feels very thankful to be living in California.

After resting a day I headed out on President's Day to some fairly ideal tides for Angel Island exploration: five foot flood and 6 foot ebb slacking out around midafternoon. I want to get used to riding tidal currents, as it is reportedly the only way to get around the complicated maze of passages in Prince Wiliam Sound where I'll be paddling and fishing in August. For this day trip I only took the fishing rod in case of extreme temptation, like busting stripers under a cloud of diving birds -- no such luck. Should have left the fishing stuff at home, because that salt water is murder on reels. Look what it did to the nice Shimano that I got for Nicaragua:



In further bad news, the warm trend is over and weather conditions right now are such that I will delay a Pit River trip -- no historical March 1 opener for Pit Boss. I shall have to give up the name to whoever has the moxie to go up there and fish in the snow and hail. Though I don't think it will be too long yet to wait . . .

From the Googleplex

Looks like this is it -- I'm going back to work any minute now. I'm at the famous Googleplex, where free food and dry cleaning stop fishing sabbaticals in their tracks. It's a looong long way from Rio San Juan right now, is part of what I'm thinking. I'm also thinking that if this sees me through some cold months to shad season, then all's well that ends well :)

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.