Fly fishing out of New Orleans is a peculiar blend of city and country. Staying in town you find yourself walking Bourbon Street with a cold hurricane in your hand as you head towards the Acme Oyster House, where WT behind the bar serves you up a couple of dozen freshly shucked. Or in another spot, digging into a basket of boiled crawfish (mudbugs) cajun-style. Twisting the head off, sucking the juice and then pinching the tail to get the meat out. Messy but worth it. New Orleans is a popular culinary destination with good reason. A small fraction of visitors, like us, also know it as a gateway to some incredible in-shore flyfishing for redfish and jack crevalle.
Driving in the early morning out of town down narrow streets where shop owners are washing off debris from the night before and sweeping up empty to-go cups. We swing by Café Du Monde for chicory coffee and beignets to fortify our drive to Port Sulphur or maybe all the way down to Venice to meet our guide who will steer us through the maze of canals to the grassy marsh where redfish forage for shrimp and crabs.
I first fished here at the tail end of a business trip with a guide who had been recommended to me. He picked me up at my hotel and we drove down to collect the trailer with his Dolphin Renegade flats boat. The yard was gated and locked, he backed up to the shed and before getting out to open the doors reached across to the glove box to pull out his nickel-plated handgun. You can never be too careful.
Over the course of several years, I return to spend a few different days with Captain Rich Waldner, retired USMC who found himself stationed in Louisiana and has been credited with being an early pioneer of the shallow water fly fishing in these parts and renowned for his namesake epoxy spoon flies. Turned out Rich was a bit of an institution down here.
“Who’d you fish with?”
Certain that it can only have come from one individual, I hand a Peck’s Purple People Eater to Alec behind the counter at New Orleans’ Urban Anglers. “This guy right here”.
“Ah. The Colonel. Quite the character.”
“These things were deadly. I don’t know if he has a name for the chartreuse ones.”
“No. Don’t think I’ve ever heard him call them anything but the chartreuse ones.”
We say it in unison, “if it ain’t chartreuse, it ain’t no use.”
It’s May and Rich and I are on the phone confirming three days of fishing for the second week of June. “I tell you; we’re going to catch some fish, you know what I mean.”
Someone asks me when the last time I had three days of fishing in a row, and I prowl for the answer. Obviously, it’s been too long. Connecting through Denver I look after the business of securing a non-resident fishing license and check in with Rich. He’s been following the weather with some interest as well.
“Andrew. Now listen. I’ll be honest with you. The weather has not been great. But, hey, shoot, we’re going to give it a try. You know what I mean.”
“I’m down for five days. I got nothing else on deck. Let’s take it where we can get it.”
“There you go. Sure.”
Weathered platforms with rusty machinery or pipeline values appear on the grass. A few crab traps would be sunk near the banks. But otherwise, the massive estuary is unspoiled, and we see no other boats. The health of the fish, the abundance of mullet and appearances by alligators all pointed to a thriving fishery.
“Alright Andy, we’re entering a red zone up here. This is one of my favorite spots. Give me one up by the point about a foot from the bank. Hold onto your rod and stay ready.”
“Good shot. Perfecto.” Or, more often, “nothing wrong with that cast”, consolation feedback for not-quite-the-cast-I-was-looking-for, but a step above the dreaded, “that might do it. Sometimes they’ll come out to see what’s going on. Remember these fish are like the schoolyard bullies. They’re predators. Something comes into range and they’re going to give it a look over. They’re curious.”
My rod tip is low and pointed directly ahead. In addition to casting guidance and pacing for stripping, Rich works to imprint on my mind the appropriate next response – the strip set. “When you feel anything, strip and pull your tip down and toward you. Don’t go crazy. This ain’t bass fishing after all.” It was a hard habit to break and I need regular reminders.
Rich keeps up a steady stream of encouraging banter like water over gills. “Up there, ten o’clock. Watch that nervous water. It could be baitfish but there’s something weird about it.” Tracing fire of plowing V-wakes move off randomly ahead of the boat. We’ve blown off a couple of redfish in our hurry to pole ahead to what we think are tailing targets ahead of us.
The bite just doesn’t seem to be on. We see few fish and aside from a half dozen tails in the pond this morning, none of them seem to be exhibiting the trademark shallow water behavior that has caused some to brand them Texas bonefish. Leaving the pond through a narrow cut we nearly run over one fish, so close we look down on his back. “You put a couple of shots over him”, says Rich, “can’t believe he didn’t grab it.” It, being the Kirby’s Creature tied on to the business end of a nine-foot eight weight Scott rod. On other occasions we’ve been using Clousers like the Mardi Gras Mama or Marilyn Monroe, a marshmallow popper, even a sparkle infused resin spoon that Rich has made and describes as the Root Beer one.
“It’s weird”, he says again. The spell breaks at ten-thirty when we change tactics and location. Where a side canal joins the main channel there’s an underwater pipe encrusted with barnacles. The fish like picking them off. There’s no doubt that this is a redfish as he shows early in the shallow water where he grabbed the stripping retrieve of my second cast
I hold the rod tip high steering the fish away from the propeller of the raised motor and try to nudge him out from under the boat. In hand, I get my first up-close look at a redfish. Scaled like a carp. “Look at the fins. The power in that tale. I love the blue tint on the tail.” The water here is muddy, and the colour of this fish reflects this with a green-grey haze on him. Later I catch a fish in the crystal black water that is bronze in colour.
“Watch those crushers”, Rich points out as he steers my finger under the gill to hold the fish for a photo. “Don’t touch them. It’s reflex. They’ll bite down on you. A buddy of mine got the crush. It drew blood from under his fingernail.”
“That’s a good fish for your first red. There’s bigger fish for sure, but he ain’t bad. Over five pounds we call ‘em bad boys, the little guys are rats. The redfish in the marsh are typically juveniles and grow at impressive rates until they eventually move offshore.
We move on. Cruising the banks. “Good shot. No great shot. I like everything about that. I love the way you’re stripping that line. Now. Faster.”
Three days earlier driving past Jesuit Bend Louisiana the message on a billboard Prepare to Meet God comes out of the early morning to greet me. And at another church the sign says – If God Had a Wallet, Your Picture Would be in it. Two very different gods. One of judgment the next of love. What kind of mood will the redfish gods be in today? The dawn sky is promising without any trace of the low-pressure rains that have stalled over southern Louisiana for the past week and are predicted to linger for the next.
“I’ll never figure this place out. Been fishing it for twenty years and just when I think I understand a thing or two it fucks me up good. We got so much here to contend with. Wind. Water. Tides. Weather. Lotta combinations.” He leaves out the whims of the redfish spirits.
“This is combat casting. Nothing fancy. Pick it up. Boom. Boom. Down. Get it down in front of that bad boy and strip it. Guys call me and say they’re fly fisherman cause they’ve fished for trout. That don’t matter. Whole different game down here. I tell them to get out their eight-weight rod, not the tiny four weight, and put some pie plates out in their backyard. Then get your wife to call them out. Nine o’clock – thirty feet. Two o’clock – ten feet. Ten feet they say? Hell yes. Sometimes it’s short casting.” Combat, after all, is sometimes hand to hand.
“I’ll tell you where the best fishing is”, says my waiter at Napolean House between gumbo and the andouille sausage with red beans and rice. “Right around the offshore rigs. I used to work out there. After their shifts some of the guys would fish and take home a cooler full of fillets.”
Back on the water, eating fish has been largely disconnected from the act of catching them until we land a fine speckled trout that picked up the crimson spoon intended for a redfish cruising the edges of the grass. “He really hit that. These guys have to race to get it ‘cause the redfish are so aggressive. I’m gonna keep that fish and eat it”, he says, putting it into a used plastic bag that until recently held deli sandwiches from Danny & Clydes service center. Rich settles the fish into the icy cooler. If he has killed him, I have not witnessed the coup de grace. On an otherwise silent stretch of poling, where even drips from the push pole seem to ring across the pond, the occasional spasm in the cooler echoes on the bottom of the boat. It reminds me of a bottle of wine settling into the bucket over a long and un-hurried meal.
A plunge in the cooler would feel great just about now. Top side it’s 95 degrees and saturated with humidity. Later as Rich has me up close listening to the namesake drumming emitted from a decent sized black drum the fish feels warm. I stick my hands in the water to revive and release him. No wonder. The water is bathtub temperature.
We have been poling the flats most of the morning with a couple of fish to show for it (mostly Black Drum) but a much greater tally of blown fish, clouds of mud and tangled line as I rush forward before back casts fully load. A simmering frustration is growing, threatening to overflow. Combat? It’s stress I’m here to get a break from. Blind casting in the unsettled weather of Friday was at least satisfying in its Zen-like rhythm – the kind of diversionary concentration therapy I know I needed. Rich finds it all a kick. “This is the ultimate man. But hey, sure, we can go back to chuckin and duckin.”
Along the way, I pick up a neat trick using the point of the hook to take knots from the leader and tippet. Rich seems rather unconcerned with knotted line. “Is it in the twenty?”
“The twenty?” I ask.
“Yeah. The twenty-pound stretch. Don’t worry about it. That stuff is pretty strong.”
Rich tells me a story about the high school baseball team he coached. “We lost a game big time. We deserved to. But, after the game the guys all went over to congratulate the other team. And they were hugging like long-lost pals. So, I gather them up and tell them, look, it’s okay to be sportsmanlike, but I don’t ever want to see you behave like that again. We’re out to win. These guys aren’t your sisters. These are the enemy. It was the turning point for the whole season.” The lesson is painfully obvious. No room for frustration. It’s take-no-prisoners fishing and we’re out to kick some redfish butt. “We’re going to figure this out. No doubt about it.”
The water is a bit deeper and fish invisible from a distance seem to materialize next to the boat. They’re not spooked – at least not instantly. But neither are they biting. “Did you see that guy? He just lit up like a Budweiser sign.”
We’ve seen a few good-sized fish cruising across our path. Now we see the back of a fish heading away at twelve o’clock. It comes together with a decent cast along the ride side of the fish’s path. He turns sharply to chase down the fly that I am stripping back toward the boat. We can see him inhale the fly and feel his resistance a moment later. A deliberate but not frantic strip set, and he’s hooked. The fish tears off through a gap heading for open water. He’s taken up any slack line and more peels off, but now he’s on the reel. We work him back. Now he’s at the boat, then under it and finally into a pod of heavy grass. The line is still heavy but not alive with the feel of a fish. Cautiously pulling weedy grass aside Rich is trying to keep the ball in play.
“Sometimes they get into this stuff, and it kinda paralyzes ‘em”, he says hopefully. As if on cue the line is pulsing again as light penetrates through to the fish as the last mass of vegetation is carefully removed. Re-kindled this redfish runs again but quickly tires. His best hope foiled we feel confident. Netted and on board we grin, shake hands and generally whoop. “That’s the ultimate man. Sight fishing for redfish. That’s a lifetime fish for you.” He’s right. It’s the biggest redfish I’ve yet caught on a fly. And the first legitimately by sight. I think I could come to appreciate this kind of fishing.
Of course, the trick to redfish success is flexibility and adapting to various conditions with new tactics. In his years exploring this fishery Rich has caught redfish all kinds of ways.
“A guy wanted to see me catch a redfish on a popper. So, I started popping along that shoreline right over there. Every five feet. All the way along it.” His hand traces a third of a mile of shore. “Cast. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pick it up and cast it another five feet. Finally, I nail the son of a bitch. Get him in the boat and all the guy says is ‘humph’ unimpressed ‘let’s get back to fishing.’ He’s all rested. I can barely lift the pole.”
The flats in this part of Louisiana between Myrtle Grove and Venice are a living, breathing sponge. The air is rich and thick. Like a greenhouse only with the sky for a roof. There’s nothing taller than a man, should one find a place solid enough to stand on.
“I was bragging about you to Al last night”, he says to me. “You didn’t keep Andrew out in that shit, did you? So, I tell him these Canadians are tough”.
“Once you’re wet, you’re wet”, I reply, recalling how a stream of water off the rain gear ran straight down my spine into my shorts and right through into my socks and shoes. It was insane staying out with the gusty winds sweeping dark grey clouds across the water. To Rich, atop the poling platform and most vulnerable to the increasingly frequent flashes of lighting, as long as it was far enough off, he felt safe to continue.
Just as we would get ready to pack it in, the wind would pause, the rain would turn from fire hose intensity to mist, and we’d catch fish. A couple of times the power of the rain on the rain jacket hood was torturous white noise and the droplets stung exposed cheeks like blasting sand. But it remained above ninety degrees and the rain was warm so that the whole experience was a little like standing inside a warm shower fully clothed trying to cast.
Mullet are plentiful in the waters here. Leaping so high and long that we often turn at the sound of the fish leaving the water, catch its full length in flight and watch the splashy re-entry. “Good question. Nobody knows why. It might be to get air.” Pulling up to motor round to another spot we hear a thud on the port side like we’d just run over a crab trap marker. A mullet has launched and stunned itself against the side of the boat.
“Look at that. Something huge just moved off there. I’m not sayin it’s a fish, but it could be.” I wonder what else it could be other than a fish until we spot an alligator floating ahead. It changes instantly from its submerged log float to a powerful scrambling dive. It’s gone with a sweep of its tail. “I started out by guiding bass fishermen, including one guy who always felt he had to cast to alligators. Until one day he hooked a young one right in the eyeball. I said no more of that shit on my boat. What we’ve got here is too precious. The guys down here, the locals, they don’t always see it that way. It’s still legal to bow fish. Guys come out at night with big lights and shoot the redfish. Fish them all out of here. They just figure it will go on forever. We had a good thing going here. Shrimp, crabs, oysters. It’s never the fella on the boat that makes at the money. You hear these shrimpers talk about their thousand-dollar catches. But I tell you, just go see where that fella lives. Go see his house.”
Sometimes my catch of the day has nothing to do with fishing or eating, as it does on Monday when my wanderings take me into Peligro Gallery on Decateur Street in the French Quarter. Here, in the Healin’ Series of artist Mark Bercier is a symbol of the sun and the word fish. His statement explains the significance of the symbol – the sun - the sea - the fish - family at the beach – renewing oneself. Renewal is certainly synonymous with my own adventure.
I talk with my five-year old son in Calgary that evening. He’s particularly fascinated with the alligator sighting. “You know, they look like pickles”, he pronounces, “except without the legs and the tail and the mouth.” He’s convinced their spiney backs are like the humps on camels, which he further points out are “their lunch boxes for long trips.” Who am I to argue.
Not all the wildlife is so…alive. Making the drive Saturday morning just before seven I’m passing new roadkill. On the third try it clicks, armadillos. This is a strange place.
We’re making progress. “You notice I ain’t said nothing about your stripping?”, notes Rich, “cause you’ve got the tempo down. You’ve got it just right. Takes a while to un-learn that tip up strike. When you feel something – strip set. Keep that tip pointed at the fish. There’s nothing else out there and those weed guards mean you’re not going to get hung up on much. But make sure he’s really got it. Especially if he’s taking as he comes towards the boat, otherwise you’ll yank it right away.”
Given their diet of crabs, barnacles, shrimps my guess is that a fly isn’t going to instantly feel foreign and maybe they’re a bit more likely to move it back in their mouth for a second chew. More often than not the fish are hooked inside the mouth and not on the lips as one often expects with trout.
We fish a pond that, although outwardly looks like so many others, just isn’t giving us the right vibe. “It’s like a nuclear wasteland. There’s just nothing here.” And now that he’s mentioned it there is a notable absence of baitfish or moving water of any kind. Even the insect and bird sounds seem to have dried up. Time to move on.
Redfish is on the menu at, appropriately enough, The Redfish Grill. A table of diners from Sweden ask about the redfish. What kind of fish is it. How do you say it in Swedish. I’m stumped. How would you describe redfish? To me it’s a little like sea bass. The waiter recommends the hickory smoked redfish, but I opt for the more traditional blackened redfish with fried BBQ oysters and cabbage in Abita beer. The fish is cooked perfectly, but the thin crust of blackening spices is only on one side of the fish. My suspicion is that it has been broil finished in the oven rather than butter fried in a heavy cast iron skillet.
A night later at K-Paul’s, the kitchens of Paul Prudhomme, arguably the chef who put blackened fish on the culinary map, blackened drum is on the menu. Although redfish is sometimes referred to as red drum, this is black drum. Here the filet is crusted on both sides, crispy but without quite the same flavour. The surprise of the night is the luscious, mashed potatoes. Something so simple, made so well.
It was hard even then, to guess an age for Rich. He had done some living. His daughter was in her twenties and worked in the city at one of the bars. His father Buck, who always seemed to have a cigar in the corner of his mouth, lived with him. It’s been more than a decade since we last fished in May 2012. On that trip we split our time between Rich and another guide, young gun, Miles Larose of Shallow South. I don’t recall how we connected with Miles but it turned out to be good fit.
I went online to find Rich’s website the other day and I got redirected. Scanning the news feeds there was the odd mention or old newspaper article, but nothing current. Maybe he’s stopped guiding now. I did see him after Katrina, and he was talking about hanging it up as he showed us where the water had surged over the levee and through his garage. His house was high enough up on stilts to survive, but his boat and other gear was washed out. He had a push pole tucked up in the rafters and it was left behind.