Category Archives: Drake Magazine Back Issue Content 2019
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.
“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
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,…
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,…
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?…
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…
Every year, a small number of striped bass winter over in the bays, marshes, and salt ponds of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. We call them “holdovers.” They’re not big, they can be tough to find, and by the middle of the winter, they look a little haggard. Their flanks, once polished a gleaming silver by a…
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…
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…
Clyde gets his groove back, in Arkansas Clyde is docked in the parking lot of Little Rock’s Ozark Angler, his big ass hanging beyond the lined allotment and his bigger-still nose hanging yards past the curb. He’s been baking in the 90-plus degrees for several hours. I yank once and then again on his heavy…
From North Carolina to the Vineyard When the indulgences of summer have finally and fully come to an end, it’s time to start thinking about albies. I leave my home before the great commute begins. It’s the only sane way to travel east on the island and, at that time of day, it can actually…
Thomas & Thomas finds a friend in the whiskey business Like many Westerners, I grew up without ever giving much thought to bamboo fly rods or rye whiskey. These things were viewed—like icy ski slopes or Steelers fans—as products of the Northeast, and thus of little concern to us Left Coasters. In college I started…
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…
Why flyfishing works for traumatically wounded combat veterans The two pairs of boots sit next to each other on my closet floor: old, waterproof, knee-high LaCrosse Alphas, and the tan combat boots that I wore as a paratrooper fighting in Afghanistan. I’m attached to them both, but for very different reasons. I enlisted in 2008,…
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…
Not the leave-behind you wanted My father stood in the middle of the Beaverhead River, looking upstream calmly but urgently, almost how he looks when he’s sorting cows. This was a little different. His reel and his rod’s butt section were sitting on the bank. And he had a question. “Do fly rods float?” We’d…
Just another walk on the beach My primary tactic for snook in South Florida revolves around what my friend, Bear, calls “people avoidance.” It’s become a mantra that leads us toward, through, and past things—not only what river-section to float or campsite to choose, but when to pick up or set down certain hobbies, learn…
Coming to terms with a new reality This past December, I received an unwelcome holiday surprise. Our corporate overlords rounded up the staff at the magazine where I’ve worked since its inception, twenty-three and a half years prior, to announce our new direction. The upshot: We could still pursue exciting careers in magazine journalism, a…
A winter of discontent in Ennis If your summer plans include a tailwater weekend along Montana’s Madison River, you won’t be alone. In early April 2018, after years of surveys, public meetings, and citizen advisory committees, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks (FWP) released its draft Recreational Management Plan for the Madison, which included some alarming…
Horseshoes & Hand Grenades’ Russell Pedersen releases fishy solo album Deliverance references notwithstanding, a drive to the river is always made better with banjo music. Good banjo tunes, like good trout streams or musky rivers, find just the right pace, yet still flow and wind toward unexpected places. Few people understand that better than Russell…
The West may experience a lengthy runoff in 2019 While it’s always tricky making May or June runoff predictions in March, Snotel data from around the West indicates that snowpack levels, especially in Southern Colorado, Southern Utah, and parts of California’s Central Sierras, are poised in 2019 to create high flows or a long runoff…
Lager for good times and good causes On a recent redfishing trip to Louisiana, I was introduced to SweetWater Brewing Company’s newest offering, Guide Beer, which officially launches to the public in May. On our way out of Atlanta, I’d managed to score a six-pack of a promotional run from my friend Andy Bowen, who…
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…
Sowbellies and baseball in the Cornhusker State Dawn comes early to southern Nebraska on the 16th of June. Nautical twilight, second of the earth’s three twilight phases, begins before 5 a.m. in Kearney, a town of some 30,000 sitting just off I-80 about three hours west of Omaha. I stopped in Kearney last summer on…
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…
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.”…
