When the Lilies Bloom
A quick look in the backyard confirms it.
The Easter lilies are blooming.
There’s your sign, coastal angler.
It’s trout time.
Capt. Tom Holliday has been gone for several years now. Still, every March, when the blood-red blooms of the lilies burst forth from the greenery below the big tallow tree outside the master bedroom window, I think of him.
And I think of him fondly. He was, to make a massive understatement, “a character.”
Holliday was owner, chief fishing guide, logistics guru and philosophical soothsayer of all things significant at Cocodrie Charters, a comfortably-appointed fishing lodge situated on the Louisiana coast near Vermillion and Terrebone Bays that Holliday operated for years with his family. I should warn you that the Hollidays tried to kill me on more than one occasion. Instead of firearms, however, they opted for obscene portions of shrimp etouffé.
It almost worked. Fortunately, though, I’d somehow survive the gluttonous evening and still be up in time for a hot cup of coal-black coffee and an always-animated conversation with Holliday at the breakfast table. Then, appropriately fed and sufficiently amped with caffeine, we’d hop aboard his 22-foot Blue Wave and strike out atop some of the finest trout waters God ever granted Mother Earth.
Cocodrie wasn’t a big-fish scene, a fact that I attributed more to the technique than the terrain. I maintain to this day that if anyone ever took the trouble to hop overboard, waders donned, and walk a topwater next to a grass-lined shore caressed by a moving tide, he or she would learn that the area’s trout are not so small after all. Every time I made the suggestion, Holliday would look at me with an incredulous glance and remind me that it was “plum crazy to get out of a perfectly good boat.”
Someone, someday, will give wading a shot. And unless the bottom is as impossibly soft as Holliday maintained, he or she is likely to pull an eye-bending speck out of the water. If I ever get that chance, it’ll be executed via kayak. But that’s another trip, one of those adventures often pondered but for some reason never implemented.
Not yet, anyway.
When I hopped aboard Holliday’s boat I always carried light tackle, a load of speck rigs and shadtail jigs, and on occasion, an 8-weight Temple Fork fly rod fitted with a gold Penn International reel and weight-forward floating fly line. It didn’t much matter what we threw. Once the water temperatures nudged the 70-degree mark, Cocodrie’s trout went from having the heart rate of hibernating bears to the predatory pulses of prowling panthers. Small they were, often no longer than 14 inches, but every millimeter of every fish was bad attitude. The action was remarkable.
It was great fun, and we did it at least a couple times a year. One trip, the night before we fished, I asked Holliday if he had any good redfishing in the area. It was like I had just asked Russell Crowe if he could act. Insulted my the mere suggestion of meager redfish populations, Holliday took me and fellow outdoor writer Doug Pike inside a series of deep, narrow sloughs with lime-green grass banks late that afternoon, a network of olive-watered canals where we caught redfish on MirrOlure Top Dog Jr. surface plugs … all of them quality redfish in the 25-inch range … until the sun got low enough to viciously release countless black-cloud demon hordes of Louisiana coastal marsh mosquitoes.
Cocodrie mosquitoes remind me of the bat like monkey-critters that the Wicked Witch of the West dispatched to snatch Dorothy, Toto and friends from a lonely stretch of The Yellow Brick Road just outside of The Emerald City. I suspect, given the chance, the demon-skeeters would have carried us away as well, but Holliday had the sense to fire up the engine and get the hell out of Dodge before the welt count got out of hand.
When we got back, Holliday got on the phone and summoned his minions, who dutifully reported to the lodge (as much, I suspect, for his wife’s cooking as for the elaborate fishing tale that would surely be told at the dinner table).
“Guys, it was like watching a couple of golf pros,” Holliday told his friends, his Cajun accent making it all sound ever more dramatic. “I’m talking Tiger Woods! These guys would see a ripple on the water, whip a topwater a few feet on the other side, “walk” it a bit. and then BAM! I mean BAM! Every time they were on. Every time! Man, you shoulda’ been there! These two guys ain’t your Regular Joe Fisherman; I can tell you that much. Nosiree. They’re masters, I tell you, MASTERS!”
Whether our colorful friend did this for Pike’s and my own ego gratification, to impress his compadres, or was simply sincerely that impressed with the topwater circus my friend and I enjoyed that evening, it was great fun, if not a bit embarrassing, to hear Holliday go on and on about the awe-inspiring spectacle of “world-class fishermen at work.”
Again, folks on that part of the coast, at least at that time, had not gotten into tossing topwaters. As for wading, they thought it an idiotic approach. They were way too busy catching way too many fish on soft plastics to ever give either concept a second thought. Louisiana anglers are a pragmatic lot, not prone to stray from that which already works.
In that regard, they are not unlike dedicated anglers from other Gulf Coast locales.
Holliday said he learned a lot from us that day. I assured him that I, too, learned quite a bit.
I learned that there is nothing better than sitting around with a bunch of buddies after a great evening of fishing to tell jokes, make fun of each other and proffer unbelievable fishing stories (fish stories which, in regard to Cocodrie, may have indeed been unbelievable but were nonetheless invariably backed up by fact).
I learned that the only thing certain to remain a constant in life is that life is certain to constantly change. That education was driven home in painful fashion the day I got word that Tom had died. I anticipated fishing many more days with my friend Tom Holliday, stubbornly choosing to deny that he was in pretty poor health when I fished with him the last time in 1999.
That was the way he wanted it. No fuss; no whining; just get your butt out there and fish.
The last time we fished together, the lilies outside of Holliday’s home were blooming with colorful enthusiasm. I learned from my buddy Tom that when the Easter lilies bloom you’d best wipe down the spinning rigs, put fresh hooks on the lures and get to the water post-haste to enjoy some of the best speckled trout fishing of the year. It’s a standard rule, wherever you fish on the Gulf Coast curvature.
That is exactly what I am focusing on at the time of this writing. Fishing. As much as possible, at this superb time of year, with good friends who, one day, won’t be around to enjoy it.
I hope, for your sake it is your priority, too … and that, more importantly, you have already decided to take along someone else. Someone to witness the battles, offer consolation after the misses and share the stories when you get back to dock and it’s all just one more memory.
If Tom Holliday taught me anything, it’s that fishing is not meant to be a solitary sport. Handling rods is best done in the company of friends … friends who, like you, understand and acknowledge that every moment we spend on the water is an irreplaceable pearl in the strand of time that we are each allotted by God.
Check the lilies in your back yard, and go see for yourself.
I guarantee you, if my old buddy Tom were still here, he’d be on that boat right now.
Tom Holliday was not a man who took time for granted.
If I learned just one thing from my colorful old Cajun fishing buddy, I believe to this day that his appreciation for time, his unbridled passion to live every moment of it as fully as possible, was … and still is … the most important lesson of all.
Howdy. I am 
