Fly Fishing Cuba's Gardens of the Queen Marine Reserve

Cuba Fly Fishing in the Lap of Luxury

I get a lot of sporting invitations, many from former fishing clients, to visit exotic areas and fly fish for...trout. It even happened on a 30-day tour of South Africa years back. Everyone wanted to take me trout fishing in the Drakensberg Mountains. Sounds cool.

But I've lived in Montana's Golden Triangle for several decades and I won't travel far to fish for trout. That, however, doesn't mean I won't travel to fish.

So in early January 2019 when I was invited to join a group fishing from a mother ship off Cuba in an area similar to the Florida Keys, I dug for my passport, credit card and saltwater gear.

Fast forward to late January and I'm on a modern, comfortable made-in-China bus with 20 anglers from the Chesapeake Bay area. We're rumbling (the dirt-road kind) through the night, bound for a tiny port town. It's been a long trail and my eyes feel like dry ball bearings. We arrive in due time and I board the mother ship in a daze, fall asleep to the sound of her engines and wake up the next morning in paradise, 50 miles offshore.

Ten Dolphin flats skiffs garland the stern, awaiting us -- two per boat. Still a bit dazed, I step aboard my skiff, empty-handed but for my lunch. My three rods are aboard and ready for action. Holy shit! And off we go, rocketing through Mangrovia, my name for the kingdom of coastal forests that produce the bonefish, tarpon, permit and other shallow-water game fish prized by long-rodders. (Yes, I AM developing a Mangrovia flag.)

Twenty minutes later, the boat stopped, the guide gets birdy, climbs the poling platform and whispers, "Bonefish, leben o'clock fitty meters...um, fitty feet." My partner, a flats veteran who has honors, is already on deck and on the school. The vaunted "ghost of the flats" have met their match as he expertly drops the fly ahead of the school. My partner strip-strikes twice while never raising his rod tip until the bonefish feels the steel and turns into an RPG.

Fish to hand, my partner lights a cigar. I'm up.

A eye blink later it's 4 p.m. when our 90-foot mother ship comes into view. We tie up and are greeted by the beaming cruise director. She hands each of us a fresh mojito and an ice-cold facecloth. Behind us, our rods are being rinsed and racked for the next day's fishing.

Several hours later -- after an extended happy hour -- 20 of us tuck into a buffet-style dinner that leaves nothing to be desired. Baked Alaska is tonight's dessert. Afterwards, several anglers move to the sun(down) deck and others remain into the night over a bottle or two of 7-year-old Havana Club rum. The Cuban musical group Buena Vista Social Club sets the mood over the ship's stereo system.

Dawn brings a chef's breakfast -- no mere cooks on this trip -- and high winds that made for challenging but fun fishing for the next several of our six days.

As they say, however, a picture's worth a thousand words:

RIP Bert

Bert Lance predicted more than a quarter of a century ago that he would serve what he called “the living penalty” for the rest of his life. His passing Aug. 15, 2013 at 82 proved him right.

What Mr. Lance, former head of the Office of Management and Budget and a close advisor to President Jimmy Carter, called “the living penalty” is the purgatory inhabited by those the federal government fails to convict.

In Mr. Lance’s case, the government’s conviction failure was epic. Several federal agencies and ranks of government lawyers threw enormous amounts of mud at the wall, hoping that some would stick. But after five simultaneous lawsuits were tried in the court of public opinion – the front pages of the nation’s newspapers – the mud didn’t stick, not officially anyway.

As the lawsuits and headlines faded, Bert knew he’d won a pyrrhic victory. He told me so in 1987 as I was researching and writing the first draft of his book on the subject “The Truth of the Matter,” between newspaper jobs.

Shortly thereafter, life took me elsewhere and I never spoke to Bert again. Over the past decade though, I’ve come away from each Internet check-up on him increasingly convinced that he served the living penalty: Virtually everything about Bert in the public record since his tenure at OMB includes or is limited to the reef of allegations upon which the USS Mud At The Wall foundered.

Bert Lance was singled out as the target of a government “Shock and Awe” campaign, a very public spectacle in which there were no winners. After his post-Washington years he deserved, like the rest of us, to be left alone.

To Mr. Lance’s detractors who gnashed their teeth in print and private at his expense for the past 26 years, shame on you all.

Rest in peace, Bert.

Goddam the Puppyman

If the title of this blog throw's you a curve, it's an adaptation of the lyrics from the 1968 tune and album The Pusher by the rock band Steppenwolf.

My 3-month-old English pointer is not the culmination of bad choices that leads to a heroin habit. It's just that she's disruptive on about that scale.

Pogo has been with us for three weeks. Our 6-year-old Lab would have her whacked if he had access to a phone and a credit card. Our 5-year-old German wirehair nosedived to the bottom of his bipolarity index.

A day after Pogo's arrival we road-tripped to Wisconsin for a two-week lakeside vacation. On the way out we spent a week one night in a North Dakota hotel room that wasn't big enough to swing a dead cat. On the return trip, a larger hotel room surrounded by 30 open acres afforded the unique opportunity to do puppy wind sprints at the height of a blistering High Plains heat wave.

We arrived home hollow-eyed but hopeful. And in the five days since, Pogo has flourished. She pees approximately every 18.5 seconds and enjoys spreading two generations of dog toys around the house to make sure she still doesn't like any of them.

Were it not for my patient and long-suffering wife, Pogo would spend most of her puppyhood in a crate.

Nevertheless, Pogo's a cute pup with a great personality and a 12 o'clock tail on point. If we all survive her puppyhood, I'm convinced she's going to be a great bird dog.

Last Best Dog in the Last Best Place

Pogo will soon be joining our family and pack. She's 9 weeks old and doinking around with her sister near Dallas, Texas. In a day or so, I'll pick her up at the airport in Bozeman, Montana.

The new pup is an Elhew-bred English pointer, a strain and breed touted as the ne plus ultra bird dog for foot hunters like me.

Pogo at 8 weeks "tail training."

We also have a Labrador retriever and a German wire-haired pointer. They're both males, both neutered, and both good hunters. So why add an English pointer to the mix?

Statistically, I have about a decade and change left to hunt the Last Best Place and I want to do it with what might turn out to be my Last Best Dog.

A half-dozen years ago, I switched from flushing dogs to pointing dogs. Beatle, our 5-year-old German wire-haired pointer, was the first step.

Wirehairs are true pointing dogs. But they're bred to hunt all game -- fur and feather. And Beatle does, often when we're bird hunting. I don't. English pointers like Pogo, by comparison, are bred to hunt birds. Period.

The author's English game gun.

Yes, Beatle is still welcome afield. So is Darwin, our 6-year-old Lab, who has his own style. Were either of them writing this blog the content would undoubtedly be very different. But they're not, so that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Epic Hatch

Casting from the bow of my drift boat, I could hardly believe the power and finesse of my buddy’s new Hardy 5-weight as I drilled a big orange Sofa Pillow under bank-side willows swarming with salmon flies.

Sofa Pillow (above). Real Deal (below).

The imitation bounced on the current only a couple of feet before a trout sipped it as if it were a mayfly. Any similarity ended at the hook set on stout 2X tippet. I bent the 9-foot fly rod nearly in half. It felt like I’d set the hook on a cement block – until the trout raced to midriver from a hole shot that rivaled a saltwater flats skiff. 

Montana’s Yellowstone River is known largely for being America’s longest wild river and for the legendary unpredictability of its trout fishing in the 90-mile blue-ribbon stretch downstream from Yellowstone National Park. Every now and then, though, the ‘Stone gives it up.

This was one of those times.

Not only was the Yellowstone giving it up in a crescendo of trout madness that anglers were already calling the “epic” Salmonfly Hatch of 2013, the river had been fishing superbly since mid May. 

The healthy, wild cutthroat trout that took my Sofa Pillow and 20 yards of fly line came to the net after a spirited fight. A quick picture and I released the trout. Then my fishing buddy Dan Mitchell reminded me that we were playing Montana baseball – three strikes or a fish landed and we switched. It was his turn to fish, my turn at the oars.

Chuck Schwartz

Days before the salmonfly hatch, Dan had broken a rod on a Yellowstone fish east of Livingston and he was anxious to learn the timing of his new Hardy rod. I found it to be about the space between a back-pocket lightning bolt and thunderclap. Scarcely had I gotten a Corona Light teed up and the boat positioned when Dan raised the rod sharply and fly line sporting a rooster tail shot under the boat. I pulled for open water so he could fight the fish, put the net within Dan’s reach and chugged the beer so I’d be ready to take over the rod, as per Montana baseball’s immutable rules.

Dan Mitchell

Dan and I had already experienced several days of quality salmonfly fishing that, for the Yellowstone, can only be described as the sum of all superlatives. So it was not news to us a few days hence when the angling grapevine pronounced the hatch under way at Loch Leven Fishing Access. Within 48 hours the river swarmed with anglers and salmonflies as both moved upriver.

What made the 2013 hatch unique? Simply put, it was the first time in 20-plus years that the Yellowstone River was not swollen with spring’s muddy runoff bucking along at 15 to 20 miles an hour. Of course the big bugs make their appearance every year and the trout gorge on them, runoff notwithstanding. But relatively low, clear water in May and June 2013– half the normal volume – gave anglers access to the hatch, which has assumed mythical proportions on the Yellowstone for its elusiveness.

Bob Hayes (above). The Author (below)

But it’s not the only elusive hatch on the Yellowstone. This year, as usual, anglers stayed tuned to the river in March and early April in anticipation of the Mother’s Day Caddis Hatch, a blizzard hatch that all too often coincides with spring runoff – as it did this year. By mid-May, though, the river was dropping and clearing, prompting optimism that the 20-year salmonfly shutout could end.

Indeed, by mid-May the river had dropped to levels safe for floating and wading.  The water was turning green and the dangerous debris was already downstream.  The hatches were sparse, but the trout – big trout -- were chasing streamers. The stage was set for the salmonfly hatch.

But, of course, this is the Yellowstone, an undammed river. So when the temperature jumped into the 80s for a couple of days in late June, the river flow increased by several thousand cubic feet per second, turning the water toward unfishable milk chocolate. The fragile optimism for the imminent salmonfly hatch was taking a standing 8-count.

The heat wave continued but the river began to drop and clear again on June 23.  Runoff was over -- early for once and the hatch was on.

The last week of June is a blur. High moments with friends and fish on the river are captured by cell phone cameras and less reliable memories. It includes my first float through Yankee Jim Canyon with longtime friend Bob Hayes, who recently bought a raft to go where his drift boat could not. The fishing above and below the canyon was stellar. Fishing in the canyon, where anglers seldom venture, defies description. And switching places with Bob, as river baseball required, was done at a speed and with an insistence and lack of decorum I suspect is unique to rafting the canyon during the salmonfly hatch.

John Palmer with a beauty.

Another moment that surfaces is the two young flyfishers framed by the setting sun who were attempting to revive a trout that looked like it was at least 8 pounds. As we passed in the drift boat, they asked for a Coke, which they said would help revive the fish. Really?

Still other gilded moments are the confident rise of a large trout to a perfectly drifted fly, the unrestrained joy of a friend with a deep bend in his fly rod, and the look-away hookups that happened because we were imparting slight action to the fly.

It was 10 glorious, frenzied days of fishing, the likes of which my friends and I may not see again. But that’s okay, because 50 years of roaming the planet with fly rod in hand teaches that matchless days astream are just that.

Kimball Leighton is a former Yellowstone River guide/outfitter and author of the book “Seasons of the Yellowstone: An Angler’s Year”