Drake Magazine Back Issue Content Fall 2017
This was once one of my favorite spots in the Catskills. Paul and I used to fish it a lot before he moved to Montana. It’s a good place for Isonychias in the fall, and fishing a big dry in October in the East is something to be relished. I was last here more than…
Like Dirk Nowitzki, Clyde was stuck in Dallas. But what I thought might be little more than a quick rescue mission turned into two of the more interesting fishing days of my summer.
When a net-pen enclosure holding more than 300,000 farmed Atlantic salmon, owned by Canadian company Cooke Aquaculture, broke open in August, approximately 160,000 fish escaped into Washington’s Puget Sound. Atlantics are classified by the state as an aquatic invasive species and a “pollutant.”
The first places I explored as a kid, outside of my backyard, were the small creeks and wetlands near my home. They were full of tadpoles, salamanders, and, if we were lucky, turtles. I spent countless hours trying to fit various animals into Mason jars, but mostly I just covered myself in mud.
I’ve made a lot of trips between northern Minnesota and northern Michigan. Usually I’m fishing my way across, hunting hex-eating browns and flats-cruising smallies in July, and backwoods muskies in November. By far the fishiest route is U.S. 2 through the Upper Peninsula and across the Mackinac Bridge down into the top of the mitten;…
Booze consumed me as I sat listless in the upper bar of the Dogwood; a restored Mississippi riverboat docked a few hundred yards east of the Hopedale, Louisiana, boat launch. For the next two days and nights, the Dogwood would serve as home and headquarters to anglers competing in the 2017 Sheepy tournament—a tongue-in-cheek backcountry…
Is this what mortality feels like? They’re in the deep pools, the ones that are filling now with yellow alder leaves. They come up easily to a humpy or an elk-hair caddis, bright browns and brook trout flashing the colors of autumn. At least that’s what I suppose. I don’t know for sure, actually.