Saturday I parked beside the old Coast Guard station on First Street at East Beach, St. Simons, and started what I expect will be a long project: walking the Golden Isles at low tide, one stretch of shoreline at a time, looking for places a man with a fly rod can wade to fish without paying for a boat. This is the first entry. That there is a first entry at all should be counted as a small victory, and I will explain why.
It started with a guided trip. Capt. Michael Garcia, who owns Marsh Bug Charters and serves as head guide at On The Fly Outfitters, took me out on these waters, and it was a wonderful day with a man who knows the tides, the fish, and the patience required for a client like me. Michael runs fly and light tackle trips for redfish and tarpon from St. Simons, Jekyll, and Brunswick, built around shallow-water sight fishing, and he would rather teach you something than just put you on a fish. If you want to see this coast done right, marshbugcharters.com is where to start. I came home happy and did what any man does after a good day with a professional, which is decide he could do it himself. I live here, after all. Surely, I thought, in total innocence, there is a way to go fishing in your own backyard that does not run five hundred dollars a day. Michael earns every dollar of that, and then some. I have owned boats, and the best boat I ever had was a friend's, so I can tell you with some authority that a charter is still a bargain next to owning one, unless you lack gainful employment or have married very well. This is simply an acknowledgment that I am not Elon Musk, and my fishing budget has to share a household with things like groceries.
Now, I have been fly fishing since the 1990s, and I mention that only so you understand how little it helped. Thirty years with a fly rod, just about none of it here. I have fished mountain trout streams and northern tailwaters, and none of them prepared me for this coast. The Golden Isles marsh is not trout water. The wind is constant and often personal, the water clarity runs from hopeful to fictional, and the bottom is made of oysters, mud, and things designed to cut you. As far as this coast is concerned, I am a beginner, and the coast has been very patient about pointing that out.
My first attempt at doing it myself was the marsh. I worked out a whole system for wading it after redfish, with three rods matched to three kinds of wind, fly lines weighed on a scale because the labels are, politely, dishonest, and a leader formula I was more proud of than a grown man should be. I even wrote an article about it. Then I went scouting at low tide near the Jekyll Island flats and crossed a fiddler crab flat, the kind of ground I had walked many times. The crabs scattered ahead of me waving their one big claw, and I took that as a friendly hello. In hindsight they were waving goodbye, sucker. I took one step forward and was chest-deep in mud before I understood a choice had been involved. There was no gradual sinking, just ground and then no ground. I spun, got two fistfuls of spartina, and hauled myself out with a good deal less confidence than I went in with. The grass held, and I have never felt so warmly toward a plant. The article stayed in the drawer, and for a while so did the idea.
My family, I should say, has walked these marshes a lot longer than I have. My grandfather moved through them a hundred years ago on business the revenue men would have liked to discuss with him, and my father followed as a boy, barefoot, never once asking whether a marsh full of oysters was a good place for bare feet. As far as I know neither of them went in to the chest. I, on the other hand, spent my youth as a surf bum at La Jolla Shores in California, where the sand is firm, the water is clear, and the worst thing the bottom does is sting your foot. My forebears grew up learning which mud would hold a man. I grew up learning which wave would. I came back to this coast with better gear and worse assumptions, and the fiddler flat was where the assumptions got their review.
What got me thinking about it again was the 20th Annual Fly Fishing Film Tour at the Historic Ritz Theatre downtown, hosted by On The Fly Outfitters and benefiting the Georgia Saltwater Anglers Association. A theater full of people who have chosen the least efficient way to catch a fish ever devised, sitting in the dark watching other people do it beautifully, will put ideas back in your head whether you want them there or not. It did not help that the man who had shown me how it is supposed to be done works out of the same shop. I walked out of the Ritz that night with the itch back, a slightly better attitude about mud, and the clear understanding that the shop on Newcastle Street was not going to let me quietly retire. If the marsh was going to try to keep me, I would go looking for ground that wanted me less.
So I went to the beach, which for an old surf bum felt a little like coming home, and which turns out to be family ground too. My great-great-grandfather was the keeper of that Coast Guard station building, its maintenance man, the fellow who kept the pipes running and the doors hanging straight. He spent his working days looking after that building, and a few generations later I parked in front of it hoping the place would look after me. The station was built by the WPA, one of 45 Roosevelt authorized and one of only three believed still standing. When it opened in 1937 the surf ran nearly to the front door, and the sand has filled in since, which is how the island's most popular beach came to be there. It started life as a life-saving station, which for a man in my position felt less like history and more like a hint.
The beach is a different animal from the marsh, and for a fly rod that cuts both ways. There is no flooded spartina pushing redfish up into the grass, no tailing fish in six inches of water, and none of the stalking that makes marsh fishing what it is. What there is, at low tide, is a set of drop-offs that can be reached by wading. Near, mind you. Within wading distance is a phrase I now say slowly, with my weight on my back foot. A fish holding on the edge of a drop-off at low water can be reached with a fly. Not easily, and not every day, but it can be reached from sand that stays where you put it, which my La Jolla feet remember fondly and which after the Jekyll flats I count as a feature.
There is one more advantage, and at my age I have learned to count it. The beach has people on it. Joggers, dog walkers, children with buckets, and the occasional surf fisherman with a sand spike and a bait bucket, whom the fly crowd will spend years trying to convert while working very hard not to look like it. If I go under at East Beach, somebody will notice, film it, post it, and once they can breathe again from laughing, call 911. In an isolated marsh the only witnesses are the fiddler crabs, and they have already said their goodbyes. The odds of a fish are lower on the beach. So are the odds of my becoming a statistic for the next fool to read about, and I would rather that fool read this log than my obituary.
If you go, stop into the station. The Coastal Georgia Historical Society runs it now as the World War II Home Front Museum, and the story it keeps is not a small one. On April 8, 1942, a German submarine sank two merchant ships off St. Simons and twenty-two sailors died, and the survivors were brought to that station. I stood in the parking lot thinking about my great-great-grandfather keeping that building in working order, and about men pulled out of that same water in the dark and brought through its doors, and it put one bad step on a fiddler flat in proportion. The Society keeps that building standing and that story told, and a small coast needs somebody to do both. My great-great-grandfather would probably just want to know who is fixing the plumbing.
So that is the plan. One rod, one box of flies, a tide chart, and a great deal of respect for where I put my feet. Each entry will be another stretch of this coast, what it looked like at low water, whether a fly rod has any business there, and how close I came to staying. If you see a man in his sixties wading very carefully toward a drop-off off East Beach, wave. He will appreciate the witness.