POACHING THE HONEY HOLE by Alan Czenkusch

There aren’t a lot of fly fishing guides in Texas.  Fishing  guides are as common as mesquite trees, but most places in Texas folks tend to stare at fly fishing in the way they’d eye a horse painted pink—not sure exactly what’s going on here, but it’s not the natural order of things, and probably somehow unwholesome.

 As you may know, when you begin fishing a new water, a good way to get up to speed is to book a day with a guide.  I do it fairly often, and I try to make it clear that what I want to do is to get lined out for the rest of my vacation.  Since I hadn’t been around Rockport for years I did some calling around to find a guide.  Fortune smiled; I got a day booked with Chuck Scates.  Chuck has the rep of being the absolute best salt water fly fishing guide in Texas, and I was pretty stoked about being able to chase redfish with a guy who has invented redfish flies that work, who’s been at it for years, and who’s envied even by other guides.  The only problem was that he was booked for the next two days, so my day with him was set for three days hence.

I did a little more calling.  Maybe I could catch a half day with another guide and at least get a start in the right direction.  Now I’ll probably, at some point, fish the Rockport-Aransas part of the Texas coast again.  So I’m going to call these two gentlemen “Earl” and “Bubba” but don’t go down there thinking that all you have to do is avoid guides named Earl or Bubba and you’ll be all right.  And they may somehow get wind of this tale and know who I’m talking about, but I’ll be able to deny it.

 Anyway, Earl’s ad in the yellow pages claimed that he guided fly fishermen.  It didn’t claim “fly fishing only” or that he even specialized in fly fishing.  More like “oh, by the way, a guy with a fly rod got in my boat once.”  Not in those words, but “fly fishing” was in quite a bit smaller type at the very bottom of the ad . . .

 Well, Earl was busy.  But his fishing buddy, Bubba, would be thrilled to take me out.  Maybe not thrilled, exactly, but he was known along the coast for his tolerance of pink horses, fly rods, and other aberrations.  The price wasn’t much of a bargain, but then it was short notice, and so we were approaching a deal when Bubba happened to mention his swell airboat.  Negotiations ceased.  I had to tell Bubba that I’d lost too much hearing, from exposure to loud noise, to be interested in being within a block of an airboat, much less in one.  He was hurt.  He was proud of his airboat, he enjoyed it, and it seemed hard for him to grasp that I did not share his enthusiasm for unmuffled airplane engines.  But I was adamant, and so the phone call was soon over.

I had happened to mention to Earl where I was staying, and he happened to mention that he lived in the yellow house about a hundred yards west of my lodge.  I also let it out that I was going to get to fish with Chuck Scates before I left. 

I fished on my own that day.  I didn’t do too well.  In fact I didn’t do doodly squat, and I went back to the lodge in the middle of the afternoon.  There was a message to call Earl, and although I was reluctant to resume the airboat debate, I called him back.  No airboat argument; he and Bubba just wanted to drop by and show me their day’s bag.  Earl’s boat was still on the trailer, and he hopped aboard and lifted a cooler down to Bubba.  Well, these ol’ boys had done all right.  I didn’t have to ask what they caught this cooler full of big redfish on—it was obvious that what live shrimp they didn’t squash underfoot (and maybe even rub over their bodies, from the general odor) they’d employed as live bait.  I thanked them for sharing.

 The day finally came to fish with Scates.  I met him while it was still dark and we were pretty well to the first spot by the time it was light enough to see.  I swear this guy could hear redfish better than I could see them.  Chuck had agreed  to both get me into fish, and plan out what I should do the next few days.  He took extra pains to point out landmarks so that I could retrace our route, and we stopped at a boat rental place so I could reserve one for tomorrow.  His fishing day ran from 6 AM to 2 PM and while I set no records, it was just about nonstop action for those eight hours.  I learned an awful lot about the Coastal Bend’s fish, their waters and habits, and how to bamboozle and hoodwink them with flies.  He also gave me a handful of flies that he not only had tied himself, he’d invented the patterns.  And he gave me some pointers on casting in the wind.  Just a real great day on the Texas coast and worth every penny. 

I was back at the lodge by three, and after a little regrouping figured I should reinforce the casting tricks he’d shown me.  The lodge had its own fishing pier, sticking out into the laguna for a couple hundred yards, and it was labeled “For Lodge Guests Only.”  I strung up my 9-weight again, walked out onto it, and started working casts into the 15-knot breeze.  I didn’t pay much attention to the kid that came out behind me, figuring he was just another Texan gawking at deviant angling behavior.  He sidled over while I was clearing a wind knot and we started visiting.

“Where you from?” I asked him, figuring that his family was staying at the lodge.

“Oh, I live in that yellow house over there.”  He pointed to Earl’s house.

“Ahh, your dad’s a fishing guide, huh?”  And then the strangest thing happened.  This 12- or 13-year old pulled off an impeccable Jon Lovitz impression:  “Uh, ah, no  . . . no, he’s not a fishing guide, he, uh, no, not a guide.  He’s a, a contractor.  Yeah, a contractor.”  Looking everywhere but at me.

 “Oh.”  What kinda shit is this?  I could see Earl’s boat parked in front of the yellow house.

 Uh, you been fishing here all day?”  Still no eye contact.

“No,” I told the kid, “actually, I started early this morning down towards Aransas Pass.  I had a really great day with this fishing guide.  I was pretty well worn out by one and we were back at the dock by two.”

 The kid’s focus sharpened:  “You mean you LIMITED OUT BY TWO O’CLOCK?”

 Now, since I’d been releasing fish, the concept of limiting out wasn’t really relevant.  I began to suspect what was going on, and I just said “Yeah, we were done by two.  But this guide showed me how to get around in there, and I’m going to rent a boat and go back and do the exact same thing tomorrow.”  And with that, this sly little Texican spy lit out for the house.  Leaving me on this pier, thinking “Hmmm . . . ”

The next morning I rolled out while it was still pitch dark and drove down to the boat rental place on the Aransas Ship Channel.  Threw my gear in the boat, fired it up, and headed for one particular channel marker (not telling you what number but I will say it was a green one), and hung a left into the big “lake” where Chuck and I started yesterday.  Texans call them lakes; they’re really just big salt water bays and in that part of the coast, they’re bordered by black mangroves.  I ran south until the water got shallow enough to be worrisome, then killed the motor, tilted it up, and started poling.

As soon as I’d gotten to yesterday’s first stop—our footprints showed on the bottom even in the dim light—I dropped the anchor and started looking.  But not for long.  There was enough wind to make little waves, and they were making an obnoxious noise against the aluminum hull.  Not good if you’re trying to deceive an animal that has what amounts to ears all over its body.  Not far off I could see a kind of a slot in the mangroves.  The water there, out of the wind, was almost glassy.  Well, I’ll pole over there and stop this racket.  The boat fit in that slot as if I had macheted out a hole in the mangroves for it.

I had brought along a plastic milk carton for visibility since the rent boat didn’t have a poling platform.  I put it on the middle seat, and standing on it I could see over the tops of the bushes.  I settled down to look for fish.

 I don’t know how long I’d been hearing this sound before I really paid any attention to it.  It was coming from the next lake over to the east.  It sounded like some kind of motor, slowly and regularly rising and falling in volume:  “rrrrrrrRRRRRRRrrrrrrrRRRRRRRrrrrrrr”  Hmm—what the heck is that all about?  It went on and on, and after a while I sort of ignored it.  A nagging sort of curiosity, but then the whole point of being here was to catch more redfish.

It was just past slack low tide, and like yesterday, there weren’t many fish moving around then.  I kept looking.  Directly, clear across the lake, maybe 250 yards, there were some pushes that sure looked like redfish moving out of the deep water up onto the flats.  They were steady, sustained pushes—the businesslike pushes that distinguish redfish from mullet—and it looked like the action was about to commence.

The motor noise from the next lake changed.  The pitch increased, became louder and steady, and as I realized that it was an airboat I could also hear that it was heading north, toward the main channel.  I could also tell that when it got into the ship channel it turned west, toward my lake.  And then I could see it, turning in just about where I had an hour earlier.  When it got to the middle of the lake the driver cut the throttle down to an idle and let go of the tiller.  Both guys stood up, and as the airboat slowly circled (“rrrrrrr” when the bow was pointed at me, and “RRRRRRR” when it was pointed away), they both put up binoculars.

Wow.  It’s Earl and Bubba.  They can’t be bird watching and I somehow doubt that they are looking for anything but me.  I slowly stepped down off the milk carton and instead of looking over the mangroves, I peeped through them.  I had on my usual neutral-colored fishing garb, and I was in an olive-drab boat, and it just worked out that I couldn’t have been hidden better if I’d tried.  I’ll bet they stayed in the middle of that lake for half an hour, circling and looking and circling and looking, and I laid low.  Finally, they lit the airboat up again, moved to the next lake west, and then I heard some more of that “rrrrrrrRRRRRRRrrrrrrrRRRRRRRrrrrrrr.”  You have, by now, caught on as I did that these sportsmen felt a strong need to locate Chuck Scates’ redfish honey hole.

Don’t blab this story around.  At least until after my next trip to Rockport.  By then I will have created the most absurd, ridiculous fly ever tied, with a weed guard that absolutely prevents a hookup, and I will go out onto that pier at the lodge and practice casting until that little creep comes out to interrogate me again.  Then, after he promises never to tell a soul, I’ll give him that fly, and I will tell him that I limited out by noon with it, down at Chuck’s honey hole.

                                                                                                Captain Zen

                                                                                                Carbondale

                                                                                                December 2002