It’s the sort of article that played into smug California preconceptions, while touching on the zeitgeisty trend of Bay Area expats settling in Austin. It has one truly fatal flaw in its arguments. The dude didn’t actually live in Austin. He lived in Bee Cave. If you don’t live in Austin, you may not realize just how not-Austin Bee Cave is. Bee Cave is an ugly suburb wrapped around a tacky strip mall. Bee Cave is Plano, but for white people who are too racist to live in Plano.

So the whole premise of the article is dumb. But one of his points simply enraged me. One of his complaints was just so intrinsically out of touch, that it revealed his complete lack of understanding about Central Texas, and shattered the validity of any points he may try to make:

“Austin will literally have water restrictions in place when it’s flooding. ‘Can’t you just take some of the water from here and . . . never mind.’”

That statement shows that he has no idea of why Austin exists in its present form. Why it’s even possible for our suburbs to swell like leaches on Wil Wheaton’s balls. It means that he’s never looked at a map and wondered why it looked like that. It means he knows nothing about the Highland Lakes.

Partially because I couldn’t stop thinking about this dude’s profound stupidity, I shopped around for a copy of a book I’d first read several years ago in the Austin History Center, “Flood to Faucet” by Walter E. Long.

Most people in Austin do know about the Highland Lakes, or at least they know that Lake Travis exists and that one can either have mediocre Tex Mex while overlooking it, or go to a nude beach, depending on personal preference. However, most Austinites have never heard of Lake Walter E. Long, even though it’s a giant blue splotch on the east side of the map. If you count the lake area, it’s easily the biggest park inside Austin city limits. Part of the problem is that everyone calls it Decker Lake, even though the official name has been Lake Walter E. Long since the 70s.

Whatever the name, you can find fantastic fishing out there. I’ve visited the lake many times, and at some point I thought it would be good to see who this Walter E. Long guy might be.

Most bio writeups credit Walter Ewing Long with founding the Lower Colorado River Association (LCRA), the quasi-governmental entity which owns the Highland Lakes and all the water which flows through it. They list a number of accomplishments which ought to put him in the pantheon of Austin’s founding fathers, like heading up the chamber of commerce for most of the 20^th century and acquiring land for the expanding UT campus. They also say that he wrote forty books, of which only about six can be found in archives and libraries in the area.

Sitting in the history center’s reading room one Saturday, I read through Walter E. Long’s “Old Sayings”, a curious book which just listed a number of common English-language idioms with no explanation. He also wrote a book about the dogs he had owned. He had a collie who was allowed to wander the town, from Congress avenue all the way up to West Campus. He had another dog who was somehow related to the English sheepdog from Disney’s “The Shaggy D.A.” and attended the movie’s premier at the Paramount as a VIP guest of the theater.

“Flood to Faucet” chronicles the politics, planning, and committee meetings which went into the construction of the series of dams which ensure Austin’s water supply, provide nominal electrical power, and have virtually eliminated life-threatening flooding along the Colorado River. It’s noteworthy that the actual funding of the dams was intended to make the river navigable, in effect to make Austin a port city.

For anyone who has been on the Colorado River near Austin, this ought to raise some eyebrows. Between the city and the airport, there are several gravel bars where you can’t float a canoe under normal circumstances.

Long begins his book talking about the prehistory of the Colorado River. A cycle of floods washed away trees and logs from the Hill Country, and deposited them at the beginning of the coastal plain. Over centuries these deposits piled up and rotted, shifted the river channel and piled up again. The logs formed a structure miles long and solid enough to cross on foot called the Colorado River Raft.

Dr. Comer Clay, referenced in Flood to Faucet, says that at its height, aggravated by the land-clearing of Anglo settlers, the raft stretched forty-five miles from the mouth of the river. Needless to say, all those jammed up logs made the river impassable for commercial traffic.

We still have a similar structure near Austin on the Leon River called The Logjam. In fishing circles it’s legendary for bottling up migrating fish and for being difficult to access.

In the nineteenth century they solved the Colorado Raft problem by building a steamboat from scratch upstream of the logjam, called the Kate Ward. The steamer would take cargo from Austin and Bastrop down to the head of the raft, then oxen would transport the cargo overland around the obstruction. By the time the flows were under control and the raft circumvented by a canal, the railroads had completely subverted the need for river transport. And by that time the real value of river lay in other uses, like power, irrigation, and drinking water.

For a short time, a modest dam powered a mill near where Pleasant Valley is now. But the first real exploitation of the river came with the building of the dam which made the first Lake Austin. This dam provided power for the city, and significant entertainment for the citizenry during the 1890s.

But then in 1900, a flood washed away the dam, and with it, Austin’s only source of electricity. The much vaunted moonlight towers with their blindingly bright arc-lamps, went dark. Families took their kerosene lamps out of storage. The street cars went back to being pulled by mules. Eventually the city appropriated a steam generator, but they began the twentieth century in the dark. It would take over three decades to rebuild the Austin dam (twice) and sort out the legal and financial fallout.

The next big crisis came in 1918, when the city ran out of water. Austin’s founding fathers knew they had to control the pace of the river. The city couldn’t be at the mercy of a river which was either virtually non-existent, or a deadly torrent.

I should mention at this point that although Flood to Faucet contains many summaries of meetings and committees gathering to establish the fate of the river, of all the names mentioned in the book, none of them are female. Founding fathers indeed.

It took a grant of millions from the federal government to get the Buchanan Dam built, and shortly after it the smaller but deeper Lake Travis. The chain of highland lakes ends with the Tom Miller dam, which you might recognize as the dam next to Mozart’s Coffee. This dam sits smack dab on the Balcones fault line, the very boundary between the prairies of Central Texas and the Hill Country. There’s a reason why they built two dams on this very spot. This is the end of the gorge, where the Colorado River drops.

Above this spot, the Texas Hill Country forms a massive funnel, stretching out past Fredericksberg, San Angelo, and Junction. The infrequent but inevitable Texas rain events spawn flash floods which thunder down the dry river valleys and concentrate in the massive reservoirs within two hours drive of Austin, and a couple hundred feet in elevation. Travis and Buchanan make up the bulk of the storage, and together they can hold about two-million acre-feet of water. Keeping in mind that an acre-foot is considered to be equivalent to the yearly water needs for a suburban family, that doesn’t give us too much leeway considering the exploding size of the Austin metropolitan area.

What I’m trying to say is, even if you see floods outside your window, unless it’s a million or so acre-feet heading downstream to Lake Buchanan, those floods will make no difference to how many times you can water your lawn in a week.

It took us a hundred years of committee meetings and pretending ships could one day navigate the Colorado River, just to get the dams we have. Don’t go thinking you can just put water wherever you want.

The post Walter E. Long and the Highland Lakes appeared first on Matthew Bey.

This is a post which is open pandering for a fish identification. Over the weekend I was fishing off the Caldwell Pier in Port Aransas. It was about one in the morning and just a little after high tide. I caught the fish at about the third guts, about seventy feet south of the pier. It bit on a couple of previously frozen piggy perches rigged two feet from the bottom. When I was reeling it up, I thought it was just a whiting, because it was about the size of a large one. It wasn’t until I had it on the deck of the pier before I realized how odd it looked.

The gold color is an artifact of the camera and the light conditions, in real life it seemed more silvery, like a mackerel. I don’t recall the eyes being walleye like that, but they could have been.

After I took its picture, I decided to use the stainless steel forceps to get the circle hook out. And it’s a good thing I did, because it started biting the metal with an audible crunching sound. Its mouth wasn’t very big, but it was crowned with some Nosferatu bunny fangs and some finger-amputating strong jaws.

Any rate, I threw the thing back, and neither the guy at the bait shop and the guy at the tackle shop recognized it. So now I’m asking the internet in general.

Edit 11/11/13:
I posted this fish to the forum 2coolfishing.com and it was the general opinion of the gentlemen there that this was a smooth puffer.

The post Mysterious Fish From Texas Gulf Coast appeared first on Matthew Bey.

Ingredients:

• size 14 to 18 dry fly hook
• beige thread
• small plastic barbell eyes (optional)
• brown goose biots
• yellow/chartreuse crazy legs
• brown and yellow foam
• yellow dubbing
• Aqua flash” instructions

Instructions
For this fly-tying recipe, start the thread on the hook size of your choice. Tie on the barbell eyes. If you use these, they should be a light material, not the sinking barbells. At each end of the hook, tie on the goose biots to form antennas. Starting at the curve of the hook, twist on layers of the yellow dubbing until you build up a buggy nymph-like body. At the body’s midpoint, tie on three to four rubber crazy legs. Fold the flash into a bow and tie above the legs. Then fold the flash back and tie it so it angles back from the midpoint like the wings of a fly. The final layer is the foam, which is tied at the very top. Don’t go overboard with this, you only need enough foam to keep the hook floating. I would recommend a brownish layer to give a naturalistic presentation to fish observing it from below, and a yellow layer on top to make it easier to spot against the surface of the water for anglers observing from above.

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The post A Couple of Big Bass appeared first on Matthew Bey.

When the weather’s right, the fishing team will head down to the old Colorado River for a little swimsuit fishing. Now that I’ve had some more experience with the Colorado, I would have to compare it to Lady Bird Lake, in that it’s convenient, but it’s also likely to give you a good fishing day just about as often as it completely shuts you out.

But if you get into the right spot, you can get into some decent largemouth bass action. The largie in the first photo here was caught on a spinner cast out into the center of the stream. There was no particular finesse to it, it was simply a matter of keeping the lure in the water for as long as possible.

One of the more interesting sites in the Colorado is the bridge which crosses down by Austin’s airport. A pile of detritus and bleached sticks lies across the upstream side. There is at least as many manufactured objects in the pile as there are natural. I tried walking across it in my aquasocks and it felt spongy, because the whole mass was floating. I didn’t stay long. I had visions of falling through and drowning, my body held underwater by rusty nails and half-crushed bottles of polyethylene terephthalate.

Third Degree and I went on a semi-epic wading trip during the heat of the summer. You can wade for a kilometer at a stretch along the Colorado, but then there’s that ten-meter section where it’s up to our neck. For those deep sections I brought along my inflatable chair, a surprisingly versatile piece of aquatic hardware.

We stood on a steel pipe which crosses the river and cast into a hole on the downstream side which was known to hold some big bass. When Third Degree caught his precious mini-Rappala on an overhanging tree on the far side of the hole, the only solution was to put him on the inflatable chair and drift him after the lure on the end of the tether.

I hope you can appreciate the level of coordination I had to exert in order to take a picture of Third Degree with one hand, hold a rope so he wouldn’t float away to Bastrop with the other hand, all while balancing on a slippery pipe while thigh deep in a swift current.

I’m not saying it was tough for me, I just want you to appreciate how other people would find that tough.

The post Day Trips Fishing the Colorado River appeared first on Matthew Bey.

The water in the pool was reasonably clear, so we could see small bass and sunfish patrolling back and forth and rising to swallow our prince nymphs. It wasn’t until after I had caught a dozen little sunfish of various species that I noticed Third Degree was perched on a thin shelf of rock that protruded a couple of meters over the water. But it didn’t break under his weight, so I call that a victory.

We also moved upstream and prospected several pools surrounded by thickets of poison ivy. The green sunfish in particular were voracious there, taking my glow in the dark San Juan gummy worm on every cast. There was even a baby largemouth who took a black woolly bugger that was barely smaller than itself. You have to respect that sort of ambition.

The post Fishing Bull Creek appeared first on Matthew Bey.

So of course we all got together and put our fly rods together, and piled into the Big C’s Kia for the long expedition.

You might notice that this post does not have any pictures of fish in it.

We wet our lines for an hour and a half, even going so far as to explore a nearby creek that had some promising populations of green sunfish in sporadic pools. But then it started to rain and we had to make a mad dash for the Kia’s parking spot, back by the big box store’s loading bays and dumpsters.

The post Behind a Big Box Store appeared first on Matthew Bey.

It was a genius idea except that the stretch of the river in question is about ten miles without public access points or a reliable current, as this resource page will prove. Luckily, when Mr. Gabriel and myself set out to do this, the dam at Pleasant Valley was letting out a mere trickle of water, something in the 80cfs range. So instead of being washed away on a twelve-hour marathon of floating with only beer to feed us, we barely made it a quarter of a mile before giving up and heading back.

So the next time I attempted this trip, it was with my inflatable kayak, a flimsy contraption of vinyl bladders and slow leaks. This made the travel time a lot faster, but I had still under-estimated the amount of time it would take to paddle that stretch (and this from a guy who paddled the Mississippi River in its entirety). I started out at around 2pm, and I didn’t get out of the water until after 9pm. I stopped to do quite a lot of fishing, I wasn’t paddling the whole time, but it still meant that I had to paddle by the light of the full moon for miles, before calling the Yellow Cab company with my dying cellphone and having them fail to pick me up for an hour, despite being right next to the airport where there were at least a hundred cabs. But that’s a gripe for another day.

But it’s an amazing stretch of water that river. You’re essentially right at the edge of the Austin city limits, still well within the Austin metropolitan area, but you can’t see signs of human life or hear traffic for long stretches. Other stretches are right under the flight path, but a lot of it is wild, filled with osprey and water fowl.

When the sun set over the Colorado River and the wind calmed, it took the aura of a fairyland, a place where people were rare observers of a wild tableau. I could see fish splashing across the glassy surface of the water, disturbing the orange mirror of the sky. Most of the splashes were no doubt gar, but I did see bass as well, some of them splashing in the shallows, half their backs out of the water as they chased their prey.

The next time I visited that stretch, it was with the explicit intention of staying overnight, so as not to hurry too hard to get from the put-in to the take-out. I took a Car2go straight from work to the river, stopping only briefly at the supermarket to pick up sandwich meat, american cheese, tortillas, and water. This was essentially the same diet that I had perfected while motorcycling around the country. It’s food that cannot spoil, get squashed, or require preparation. You just roll it all up and you have yourself a meal. For water I had two one-gallon jugs of fifty-nine cent spring water. I’ve learned that there’s nothing worse than being in the middle of nowhere and running out of water.

Even though this trip was all about giving myself plenty of time to fish, I didn’t make it as far as I would have hoped before dark, because I had to prospect every piece of structure and every little eddy I passed with my ultralight and spinner.

Around sunset I caught a very nice bass, one of the largest I’ve ever had. It caught the spinner and dove like a submarine in ten feet of crystal clear water. Later on, as I was cleaning the fish, I found in its stomach a half-digested sunfish and several twigs. If she had been striking at twigs, then my presentation might have looked pretty good in comparison.

Like one would expect, night fell and there was no good place to stop for the night. But there was a full moon, and its light was virtually blinding. It was bright enough that I could undo tangles in my fluorocarbon line and I spot every ripple of submerged logs and boulders. There was only the sound of my paddles, and the deafening screaming of millions of frogs.

I made camp on an island far short of where I had intended. Instead of making it half-way, I had only gone about a third of the route. And even though I had found a place to stop for the night, I couldn’t stop fishing. I continued to wade and cast by the light of the moon. That’s when I caught my first gar.

The trick with gar is they have a bony beak and they are finicky about swallowing a bait. It’s rare for a hook to set. It’s common to have them strike at a lure and then drop it at the first tug of the line. It feels a little like the lure getting caught in weeds and breaking free in an instant.

By sheer luck, my inline spinner hooked a gar. It wasn’t a very big one, but I had to play it as I pulled it into shore. I couldn’t tell what it was until I had actually landed it. There’s few things quite as disconcerting as standing knee-deep in water and cranking something snake-like and as long as your arm closer to you.

I took a long look at it before I worked it free of the hook with my Leatherman needlenose pliers. It had big glassy eyes that reflected the light of my headlamp like a cat’s. The head and snout had a definite reptilian aspect, and its thick scales gave it a particularly unappetizing trash-fish look.

The following morning I slept late and took my time making camp. When I waded through some stagnant water I got attacked by leeches for the first time in Texas. Each leech was about three millimeters long and colored a dirty brown. A swarm of them covered my feet and did a stadium-style “The Wave.” I doubt if any of them were large enough to chew through my skin, which is why they didn’t trigger my squicky leech terror.

A kayak livery had recently set up on that stretch of the river, so the Saturday morning didn’t give me as much privacy as I would have liked. A few fisherman in river-sized bass boats also passed by me.

As I made myself a breakfast of tortillas and processed sandwich meat, I watched as bass launched themselves three feet into the air in an attempt to eat the swarms of hovering magenta dragonflies. I couldn’t tell if the bass were particularly successful. It looked a little like the reverse of an osprey’s dive.

By the time I got the tent packed up, the dam had opened upstream and the river’s flow had raised a foot and doubled in speed. This meant that I didn’t have to paddle as much for the remainder of the trip, but it also meant that the river was choked with algae and weeds that were swept up in the increased current. It was impossible to use a spinner for more than a few feet before it became hopelessly fouled in gunk. I had some luck with a giant crazy-leg foam ant, catching another decent-sized bass off the surface, but that would have been a good time to use the rubber worms which I’ve never been proficient with.

A short walk from the 973 river access took me to the bus stop, where I became that weird guy with a giant dry sack with some fishing rods poking out the top. I took the 350 bus back to Hyde Park, and then took a tiny car the rest of the way home, finally validating my original plan for a public transportation river adventure.

The post Fishing Overnight on the Colorado appeared first on Matthew Bey.

That success led me to promise a friend that the next time we met, I would catch fish for our dinner. Now the great thing about this friend (the Peter Gabriel of previous posts) is that he’s willing to pick fish straight off the bone, head and all, and he doesn’t complain about the size. So yesterday I took my selection of hand-tied flies and went about the grim business of catching fish not for the sport but for the meat.

The bluegills weren’t as enthusiastic about the top water flies on Monday. Maybe it’s because I was using patterns that were too experimental, or maybe there was too much of a wind so they couldn’t cue in on the ripples as well, or maybe the cold front put them off. Whatever the reason, I eventually switched to sinking flies and did much better. In particular, the glow in the dark gummy San Juan worms got a solid hit on every cast. The fish actually chewed the worms apart. If I had more time to dial in the pattern and had more flies on hand, I could have caught a bigger meal, but I was able to bring in four fish with enough flesh on their bones to make the time spent scaling and gutting them worthwhile.

I’m not going to include a sense of scale to the frying pan photo because I don’t want you to think worse of me for being a baby killer.

We fried up the Texas perch with salt and cornmeal, taking them out of the pan when they were on the edge of falling apart into meat flakes and ribs. Bulked up as they were with the cornmeal, they provided as much food as you might reasonably expect for the entrees for two people. The taste was even more fishy than I remember it, but tasty all the same. My friend agreed that they were delicious.

Then when I came in that evening, I found this pamphlet in my mailbox:

What are the odds that on the very day that I ate a couple of bluegills that the city watershed department would send me a picture of a bluegill on a plate with arrows pointing to it with deliberately unappetizing captions? I mean, it’s not even a prestige fish. Hardly anyone bothers to eat them. And Lady Bird Lake has about six different varieties of sunfish, several of which are typically larger than bluegills (and several of the other species are prettier too).

I bet some contract graphic designer chose a bluegill image for the pamphlet just because it was the fish that fit the plate graphic the best.

The post Eating Perch from Lady Bird Lake appeared first on Matthew Bey.

I tried covering new ground from last week, although I was limited by fishing holes that were more or less on my bike ride home.

Lying very much directly on my ride home is Blunn Creek, the drainage that runs through Big and Little Stacy Parks in the Travis Heights neighborhood. I’d never attempted to fish there before, and I can tell you that the best fishing always has an element of exploring.

I had to go almost all the way down to lake level before I found a pool filled with fish. But once I did, they displayed a challenging wariness that was extremely satisfying to overcome. I had to back up to the point were I was out of their line of sight, and then pitch the fly down a narrow lane of tangling bushes.

Have I mentioned yet that I’ve been tying my own flies? More on that later I suppose.

The best fishing of the week came at the same pool where last year I had caught a snake (or to be more precise, a snake attempted to catch the fish that I had already caught). The pool lies not far from the flagship Whole Foods, sandwiched between luxury condos. On my back cast the fly sometimes smacked against the windows of people no doubt far more important than me.

Even though there are warmouths as well as cichlids in these pools, they didn’t take the foam spiders I teased across the surface. I had to once again stand over the fish horizon and toss in the sinking nymphs. But that unlocked the best cichlid fishing I’ve ever encountered.

The Rio Grande cichlids are probably the most beautiful fish you can catch in Texas. When you see them in the water, the smaller juveniles look like they have white heads and three vertical stripes between the dorsal fins and the tails. But when you get them up close you can hardly see those verticle bands. That macro-coloring melts away into beautiful peacock spotting.

Some other notable catches at that pool included the first Mexican tetra of the season, and a medium-sized warmouth that fought with such strength that I had to play out some line. Playing a fish is not something you expect to do when you’re in a creek narrow enough that you can touch the far bank with the tip of your rod.

This was a very shallow pool, but it was deep enough to catch a hand-sized pumpkinseed in its full breeding coloration. Or at least what I’d been calling a pumpkinseed. The a visit to the freshwater fish identification page at Texas State completely failed to mention pumpkinseeds or clear up my confusion. But these sunfish are frequently hybrids, so I’m not being a stickler about taxonomy. The important thing is that the fish fought like a fist-sized hellion, and he’s probably still there for any brave souls who want to catch it on their line.

On Thursday, Third Degree and I met to re-enact one of our first and greatest urban assault fishing outings.

The Waller Creek riverwalk, Austin’s lame alternative to the San Antonio Riverwalk, is a great avenue for fishing. The best places to drop a fly were the heads of pools where schools of warmouth cluster around the inlets waiting for bits of Doritos to wash down to them. I was able to stand just a little over their horizon and toss a nymph down to them and enjoy the sight of dozens of fish rushing to take the bait. At least until they got spooked.

Let’s take just a moment here to enjoy the picture of a man with three hundred dollars worth of fly rod holding a three-inch sunfish:

Friday was the shortest fishing trip of the week, but it had it’s moments. While I was stringing up my line before jumping down into Shoal creek, a couple of college kids on bikes came up to me, and I was just about to break out the standard nondescript answers to civilian questions, “a few fish” and “no, I don’t eat them,” when I realized that they were there fishing too. I gave them some advice, but stopped short of telling them about my favorite fishing spot that I was headed to later, the spot that Third Degree and I have taken to calling “The Cichlid Hole.”

Sunset at The Cichlid Hole was a quiet and pleasant moment. The surface of the pool was littered with red blossoms. At first I thought they were lost fishing bobbers and I was a little angry at the thought that somebody else had the nerve to fish there, but they were simply nature’s way of decorating the end of an already beautiful week.

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