Drake Magazine Back Issue Content: 2019

Spring – True Wilderness, Black Squall, Spring Showers. Contributors: Elliott Adler Photos by Hansi Johnson, Tom McGuane, Brian Grossenbacher, Matt Shaw, Mark Lewis, Hansi Johnson, Corey Kruitbosch, Arian Stevens, Dave McCoy, and Lee Church

Summer – Unemployed Fishing, The Last Ride, Returning from War. Contributors: Matt Labash, Ben Haguewood, Michael J. Macleod

Fall – Smallie Savage, Smoke on the Water, La Vita Largemouth, Two-Track Attack

Winter – From marlin in Mexico to largemouth in Louisiana to tailwater trout in Colorado. Plus: winter stripers in Connecticut, winter steelhead in the Pacific Northwest, sea-run cutties, BVI bonefish, the Skagit, the St. Joe, the Tallahatchie, the Tongass National Forest, Iceland and Greenland, Alaskan char, western Cuba, Espirito Santo Bay, Clyde goes bassin’, winter in Minnesota, permit in Belize, redfish in Louisiana, trout-town envy, and the wrongdoings of a father and daughter.

Drake Magazine Southeast Alaska Tongass

Photo by Jim Klug

The Roadless Rule in America’s Salmon Forest

“Judge Sharon Gleason, U.S. District Court Judge for the District of Alaska, ruled last week that the Forest Service violated federal law by approving future logging in the 16.7 million-acre Tongass National Forest.”

I pay my bills here in Southeast Alaska, at least in part, by having short and intense conversations on airplanes. I help wedge wadered clients from all over the globe into DeHavilland Beavers, then drop in on some of the planet’s most spectacular temperate rainforest

Baja Bait Ball in Magdalena Bay.

Photo: Nick Price

Mag Bay Magic

Survive, is what an angler does the first few minutes after hooking a striped marlin. My friend Nick and I shout with joy, accompanied by excited words in Spanish from our new friends. We watch a reel getting emptied and watch the fish leap, flip, and dive. Thirty minutes later and it’s the post-release chatter,…

Alaska West Lodge

Photo: Tosh Brown

American Greed, Inc.

riter and historian David T. Courtwright calls them “limbic capitalists”—people or companies that target our limbic system, the part of our brains primarily responsible for emotion, especially as it relates to pleasure, motivation, and survival. Courtwright is author of The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business. “Biological evolution shaped the limbic system,…

Steelhead conservation in Oregon

Photo: Nate Koenigsknecht

Can’t We Let Them Live?

As a lifetime Oregon resident, angler, and guide, I spend 40-60 days a year on the rivers of the Southern Oregon coast. I interact with anglers that use all types of methods, and every one of them I’ve talked to has noticed a significant decline in encounters with wild steelhead. How can this be explained?…

Drake Magazine Winter Fly Fishing

Photo: Corey Kruitbosch

The Winter Writhe

It’s late February and I stumble out the door to grab another beer kept cold by winter’s free refrigeration. If it was anything but the high-octane variety, it would’ve frozen from a lack of alcohol. I pop the cap, drain it, and unzip my pants, melting as much snow as possible when I piss—anything to…

PHOTO BY MORGAN HEIM

Smoke on the Water

Marijuana cultivation’s impacts on our rivers Chris and James stand on the lawn behind Indian Creek Resort, stomping their feet against the cold while passing a joint back and forth. Recreational pot has been legal in California since January 2019, so the two aren’t breaking any laws. Tomorrow the three of us will be rafting…

A FLY ROD, NOT A GILLNET, IS HOW TO CHASE PERMIT

PHOTO BY COREY KRUITBOSCH

Hoping for a Net Loss

The push to ban gillnets in Belize At a Guatemalan fish-processing plant in spring of 2019, a team of journalists saw something that would make any flats angler cringe: several 80-gallon drums filled with salted permit. The journalists, from the Belizean newspaper The Reporter, were there to examine Guatemala’s shark-fishing trade, and the problems it…

A FAT BATCH OF NEWLY MINTED ELWHA CHROME.

PHOTO BY SHANE ANDERSON

Undeleted – Story of Elwha River

The return of the Elwha’s steelhead Give a rainbow trout a direct line to the ocean and you have a potential steelhead. Throw a dam in its path and watch anadromy hit a wall. Salmonids in Washington State’s Elwha River, on the northeastern edge of the rain-soaked Olympic Peninsula, found their long-lost gateway to the…

CHICKEE CHECK-IN TIME.

PHOTO BY JEREMY CLARK

Swamped

Revivalists and renegades in South Florida’s Everglades It begins as a subtle unzippering across the surface. Nothing more than shape and motion—forcing the brain to calculate distance to target, direction of movement, and speed of travel. These computations form the basis of what comes next: an attempt to drop a bottlecap-sized fly in the path…

Tarpon on the hunt during Palolo worm hatch.

PHOTO BY AUSTIN COIT

Once Upon a Tide

Mystique, mayhem, and the palolo worm hatch Late May, Florida Keys. Four in the afternoon. Skiffs buzz back to docks with tired guides and sun-drunk clients. Thoughts of missed shots and cold beer. A dying easterly rustles palm fronds; thunderheads lurk like massive silver anvils. Oceanside, brown bonefish flats sport crisscrossing prop scars. Between the…

ANDREW UCLES (FRONT), AND BRIAN GROSSENBACHER, ON THE SET IN MYANMAR. COURTESY HOT SNAKES MEDIA/ HISTORY CHANNEL

A Star is Born

Facing the Beast with Brian Grossenbacher If you’ve paid even the slightest attention to flyfishing media over the past two decades, then you’ve seen plenty of shots taken by Bozeman, Montana-based photographer Brian Grossenbacher. Whether shooting commercially for clients like Simms, Orvis, and Yeti, or editorially for this magazine and many others, Grossenbacher has made…

EMMA SANSOM, POINTING TO A CARP. GADSDEN, ALABAMA, SPRING 1863. PHOTO BY DAVID FRANCK

PHOTO BY DAVID FRANCK

Carping with Emma

Statuary in the Southern Imagination “What do we do with hundreds of Confederate monuments and related statuary across the United States? Americans face a challenge that might be called the mass curation of our public spaces, in light of contemporary sensibilities, yes, but just as important, in service of what has always been the truth.”…