In Montana there are two kinds of winter days-those that are warm enough for fishing and those that aren’t. Here, cold is a relative term. A week of high-sky, 40-degree weather in early November can send the Baetis hatch into submission and seem downright arctic after a month of Indian Summer. Yet a windless February…
Here’s how you float the Yellowstone: With a good friend, it’s impossible to make a mistake. It’s also impossible not to. Every oar splash and drift through a seam is cause for good-natured accusation and graceful riposte (“You’re the shithead.” / “Hey, fuck you.”) Waiting your turn at the put-in, sizing up the other fishermen.…
I pour a little rum in my cider and get typing. At present, I am coupled with winter, 400 square feet of cabin, a half-empty bottle of rum, and memories of my rookie year of guiding in Yellowstone Park. The only sound breaking the tap-tap of the ‘writer is the occasional gust of wind dusting…
See them coming, swimming toward you like ducks across the sky at dawn. It’s hard for a Northern Rockies trout chaser to fathom: no hatch to match, no current seam to aim for, just you and a couple dozen bonefish headed your direction. Throw it too late and you’ll spook ’em. Too early and your…
Ephemerella grandis is, like the rest of us, a sex fiend. From the moment he sheds his heavy, heinous body of youth, his thoughts are dominated by mayfly fornication-drake nookie, if you will. He can’t sleep. He can’t eat. He can do nothing but flutter about on the breezes of desire, looking above the river…
Flyfishing is a sexy sport. This I know because I’m in awe of good fishermen, which has left me attracted to grubby guys I normally wouldn’t have noticed except maybe to offer them change. I’m not too experienced a flyfisher and I’m a terrible flirt, yet when it comes to mixing the two together I…
It only took a few minutes kneeling and staring into the ripples before I spotted a fish. A cutthroat, maybe 10 inches long, darted from behind a rock into the undercut bank. Walking this spread earlier in the afternoon, ranch broker Greg Fay told me that since he began restoring this creek along Montana’s Ruby…
See them coming, swimming toward you like ducks across the sky at dawn. It’s hard for a Northern Rockies trout chaser to fathom: no hatch to match, no current seam to aim for, just you and a couple dozen bonefish headed your direction. Throw it too late and you’ll spook ’em. Too early and your…
Sitting up in the pilot house, we could see with our own eyes that a serious storm was coming. The Weatherfax hadn’t shown a good picture of it the day before, but you could see it on the radar, streaming through above Cuba, across Grand Bahama, and now it was on top of us. Chris…
The game, it seems, is to see who can use the smallest boat to catch the biggest fish. And Adam Kimmerly is getting good at it. Kimmerly discovered sit-on-top kayak fishing a little more than a year ago, not long after moving to San Diego. Now it’s his passion.
You’re a cab driver in New York City in 1971, trying to make a right hand turn at a busy Manhattan intersection but there’s some cocky bike messenger in your way and he won’t move. So you nudge him. Not hard, just enough to let him know that you’re in a cab and he’s on…
The sound builds slowly in early afternoon, decibel levels rising and fading in a never-ending sequence you recognize as cicadas. They emerge every 13 or 17 years, depending on species. It’s very predictable and natural, like the moon and tides, but hatches some years are more epic than others and when the cycles overlap, the…
The fish were in, Savone said, had been since March. So we found them that April morning, a 45-minute upstream hike from the high tide mark. Steelhead. A threesome here, half dozen there, big, slab-sided, and salmon-sized, all holding in those tannic Alaskan riffles. We cast bright streamers at them well into the afternoon, flexing…