The Thrill of the New

New Environments, New Creatures, New Flavors Drive My Adventures

I’ve been everywhere, man.

In that great Johnny Cash song, he mentions 91 places, ranging from big cities to small towns to countries in South America. I’ve been to 78 of them.

Five book tours will do that for you. So will a drive to hunt, fish and gather all that is good in our stretch of the world. I’ve been to every state except Hawaii, six Canadian provinces and I’m expanding my travels in Mexico more and more these days.

It’s not just checking things off a list, although in some areas that’s attractive to me, too — and is the subject of another conversation. It’s being in places you’ve only read about, or seen on an internet video or the TV. The good and the bad, the painful and the frustrating and the exhilarating.

More than anything else, it has been fishing that’s sent me so far and wide. I have fished for, caught and/or cooked more than 300 species of fish and seafood in my time on this earth. Much of this life quest is simply because I love catching fish and gathering seafood. The rest is the eating.

Starting with the Jersey Shore as a kid, I’ve since caught striped bass in 13 states, at sea, from shore, in rivers and in reservoirs. I’ve caught and eaten almost every species of salmonid except for the grayling and a few obscure whitefish species — an omission I hope to rectify soon. Every panfish, almost every bass, and I lost track of the Pacific rockfish species I’ve caught, but it’s somewhere around 42.

Each one of those fish is a story, large or small. A story about a place and time, with characters from all over, food from this small town or that big city — another experience to file away into the recesses of my gray matter. Experience is the key word here.

I crave experiences, of all kinds.

My most recent were in and around Brownsville, Texas, where the U.S. meets Mexico on the Gulf. I’ve been visiting that sweaty corner of the world, off and on, since 2011, because, well, it has a lot to offer a hunter, anger, gatherer and cook.

Culinarily, it is essentially Tamaulipas, Mexico, only with slightly more English spoken. The border may be very real now, but not so long ago it was a barely noticed line. Great flour tortillas, empalmes, machacado, piratas — many of the things I ate in Monterrey recently, but also great seafood, notably chicharron de catan.

This is crispy fried gar, usually alligator gar. After first eating it at a place called Mariscos Lauro Villar in Olmito, I was entranced: Chewy, almost like chicken breast, crispy and tailor made for dipping into the salsa of your choice, I’d never eaten gar before. I knew that someday I had to catch one.

My friend Mike Ortiz, born and raised in Brownsville, used to catch them for pocket money when he was in high school. He said that I should come back in warm weather to try and get one. It’s a date, I said.

A few years went by, and in that interim I learned that you could routinely catch another bucket list fish in that area: Centropomus undecimalis, the snook. Robalo in Spanish. This fish is so revered in Mexican gastronomy I put it on my Spanish language logo:

They are a more or less tropical fish that hates even cool water, so fishing for them in the U.S. is mostly restricted to south Texas and south Florida. In both places there’s an ethos of catch-and-release, and while I am OK with that, I really wanted to experience a snook at the table. So I waited until the season opened for keepers, which must be in a narrow slot between 24 and 28 inches. Only one fish per person per day, too.

So I took Mike up on his offer and flew into Harlingen. “This is gonna be hard,” Mike told me. “You’re asking for two fish that are hard to catch.” Yep, I know. And I’ve fished long enough where if we fail, no biggie. I’ll just come back.

Mike had found a good flats guide for us to try for snook, a young guy named Corey Mock, son of a well respected captain who, sadly, died young. Snook like to patrol shallow water, and like structure, such as pylons and docks and mangroves, sunken objects and channel edges… all of this very much like striped bass up north.

You cast out to where you think a snook might be lurking, and retrieve your jig erratically, hoping for the fish to strike. Now do this about 1,000 times.

You’ll catch speckled trout, redfish, sometimes saltwater catfish or a flounder. And sometimes you’ll lay into a snook. Even small snook fight hard. They are head shakers and jumpers, and have an instinct — innate or learned, I don’t know — to swim around something when hooked, so as to break you off on it.

It was windy. Really windy, which limited our fishing spots. But with the gale at our backs, we casted hard for hours, and did manage to catch a few snook. Alas, every one was smaller than 24 inches. No robalo para mi… But it was all good. I’d caught one! Finally.

The next day broke as windy as the last, but this time Mike and I would be trying to catch a gar, a catan. I have no idea why a gar is called a catan there. Tamaulipas seems to be the only place in Latin America where it has that name; gar are pejelagarto everywhere else. Mike and I are guessing that it’s a native word that predates Columbus.

Alligator gar are among the largest freshwater fish in North America, and routinely reach 6 feet, and have been known to reach 10 feet. Only the sturgeon is larger. (I wrote about catching a sturgeon here.) They don’t like cold water, like the snook, but are more tolerant of it, and can live as far north as southern Illinois.

Gar are unlike other fish. They have interlocking, ganoid scales coated with the equivalent of tooth enamel. They are invulnerable to most attack. Their heads are almost all bone. Generally a chill fish, gar only get frisky when ambushing something to eat, or when you get a hook into one of them. And that’s not easy.

At least getting to the fishing grounds would be easy. We were fishing a resaca, an oxbow lake of the Rio Grande, that was literally in Mike’s dad’s backyard in a subdivision. No dense jungles here, just manicured grass and palm trees.

Mike has a system for catching gar. Huck out big baits, like a tilapia head, with several rods. Each rod is set at a different depth, from the bottom to just a few feet under. Close the bail on the reel, but lower the drag completely. Sit down, open a beer. Wait.

At some point, a gar or catfish will pick up the bait. A cat will run with it like any other fish. A gar, being the Big Lebowski of predators, merely picks it up and swims around with it. It’s not hooked, and if you get antsy and set the hook now, it won’t catch in his bony mouth and you’ll lose him. So you watch him peel off line and hope he decides to eat your bait before you get spooled.

If he does, Mr. Gar stops. The line goes limp. Have we lost him? Maybe. Carefully reel in just a bit, then use your fingers to stretch the line gently. Can you still feel weight at the end? Good. He’s chomping. When Mr. gar finishes his meal, the line will start peeling off the reel again, often faster.

Now you need to tighten the drag quickly and set the hook like you’re Bill Dance. (Extra points if you get that reference.) Game on! It’s highly likely you just set the hook somewhere between the gar’s throat and gut, so he’s super not happy. It’s not terribly hard to fight a gar if you are used to big fish: Just keep the line tight and at an angle, let him run when he wants to, and reel, reel, reel.

(By now you’ve likely realized that this was actually happening!)

So yeah, there I was with a big-ass gar on the line along a resaca in a Texas subdivision on a sweltering, sunny morning. At least I’d had some coffee by then.

How big a fish we didn’t know, but it was definitely larger than three feet. I got him close to the bank quickly — too quickly as it happened — so he was still “green,” meaning full of fight. Alarmed, the gar headed under a johnboat that was moored nearby. Like the snook the day before, the fish was trying to get himself all tangled in something in the hopes of snapping the line.

Sorry, man, not going to let that happen. I leaned into the rod and broke his momentum, and the gar decided to swim away from us. Mike grabbed a gaff while his dad watched. As I brought the fish closer, Mike informed me that gaffing a gar is no easy feat. Remember that bony head and those ganoid, interlocking scales? Um, yeah. No way in hell you can jab a gaff in that. The only place is under the lower jaw, and for that the gar needs to be close, and not thrashing wildly.

By this time, Mike’s leaning over the bank, his dad is grabbing him by the back of his shorts so he doesn’t fall in with the gar, and I am wrangling what now appears to be a very large fish right up to the bank so he can get a shot. Swing and a miss! Mike’s second swing nearly tagged me in the calf, so I had to hop out of the way. The gar took that opportunity to do some death rolls, like a real gator. Oh great.

Just as we thought we’d lose him, Mike’s gaff struck home and he practically ran backwards, dragging the great fish up several yards from the bank.

Holy crap was this a giant fish! And more than its length, this was a fat, well upholstered alligator gar.

We measured it at about 5 feet, 6 inches, and guessed it was close to 100 pounds. Definitely the biggest freshwater fish I’d ever caught. We were all over the moon. “Do you know how hard that is?” Mike shouted. “And we did it in 20 minutes!” Yep, sometimes you just get lucky.

So the hardest part about catching a gar is actually killing it. That armor and bony head mean you need either a sledgehammer or a pistol. Mike had a pistol.

You break into a gar with a machete and a hammer, skimming the top of the fish’s scales off from tail to head. After that, it’s super easy. We removed the skin and scales from within using just a sharp pocketknife. A gar’s internal structure is simple, so you’re left with two thick, long “loins” that look like a fish version of a bison’s backstrap. Enough meat to share with Mike and his family, and to bring home to test recipes for Hunter Angler Gardener Cook.

There was something else, though. It was only noon. I’d allotted all day for gar, and into the next; my flight home wasn’t until evening of the following day. I picked up my phone and called Corey. “You fishing tomorrow?” Nope, but if you want to go, I’m open. Sweeeeet.

So we found ourselves back on the snook grounds at dawn.

Still windy, but after a slow first hour we started slamming snook, one after the other. It was glorious. Everything from micro snook to two keepers to a really nice 31-incher I caught towards the end of the day.

I sat in the Harlingen airport, next to my backpack cooler full of gar and snook, soaking in what good luck we’d had. Most of my trips are not this smooth. In three days, I got to check two special fish off my life list, got a chance to tangle with a fish that hasn’t changed much since the Cretaceous, 100 million years ago, caught and released more than two dozen snook, and kept two, met a new friend in Corey Mock, strengthened a bond with my old friend Mike Ortiz, cooked gar for his family, soaked up some sun, and ate a lot of tacos.

Because, well, tacos.

Until next time!

~ Hank