Drake Magazine Back Issue Content
The view from between my wading boots couldn’t be better: a good-looking drift boat anchored in the eddy, a cooler full of barley pops sitting nearby on the gravel bar, the river burbling beyond. Hell, I think I just saw a rise on the far side. But there is very little that could motivate me…
When you first climb up there, scrambling over the bait well to your perch above the Baja blue, the bow of a panga feels like love itself beneath the soles of your naked feet—warm, slippery, perilous, unstable. The sea, you sense, lies at your command; the authority seems daunting, then reckless, even appalling. For at…
Hwy 101, from Northern California to Port Angeles, Washington. No stretch of highway in the country crosses more prime steelhead water than this one. Start on California’s Klamath or Smith, then head up to Oregon’s Rogue or the great Tillamook Bay rivers like the Trask and Wilson, and then finish up on the drippy Washington…
He regularly casts 80 to 100 feet, with no accuracy whatsoever. He doesn’t seem to think it’s in any way weird to fish in the dark, all night, every night, sometimes for weeks at a time. He thinks a 1/0 hook is small. He assumes that the hot chicks at Lighthouse Beach are checking him…
An excerpt from the winter/spring issue—on shelves now. April rains are metaphysical fertilizers that pollinate your inner wuss, thus giving life to an emotional suckathon. This can threaten to close down winter steelhead season. Yet, despite few fresh upriver fish, with even fewer windows of fishable conditions, and with wet campfires that seldom aspire to…
“This,” Guy Lobjoit says, with a sweep of the hand toward a tangle of reeds and dark water, “is where I was killed by a hippo last year.” The time was hard dusk, about the same as now, and the trio had just pushed through the papyrus thicket blanketing the narrow isthmus between a delicious…
He has a serious problem, this man. Some would call it a sickness. He’s a junkie of the worst kind and he knows it, lying and cheating to get what he needs, reckless in the pursuit of his much-needed fix.
Four Mile Creek heads among the uplands near the Ohio-Indiana line in hills left behind by retreating glaciers. Springs well up into tiny rivulets formed in the folds of the land, mostly cleared for corn and beans. One runnel begets two and so on, eventually forming Four Mile, which gathers more water as it glides…
“There was no evidence to show they’d been around. There were no boats, no wreckage. There was nothing.” – Henry Bain. Andros Island, Bahamas Image:Chip Bates On the morning of August 5, 1995, Stanley Bain stood in front of his Cargill Creek Lodge and surveyed the small flyfishing empire that he’d built. The resort sat…
Excerpt from the new Fall 2007 Issue How did I get here? I’m lying on my back in a sticky, soaking, sagging, zero-degree, goose-down mummy bag, shivering like a dog shitting a peach pit. The canvas ceiling above our heads has reached total saturation while the frame creaks and sways through 40mph winds. The canvas…
What to do when a fish morphs from gills and guts into something larger – a memory that splashes across three generations of anglers, alternating between dream and reality? Born to my grandfather, this fish swam through my father Charles and landed with me. Even before I hooked her one cool April morning on Georgia’s…
The ancient Mako 17 lounged beside an Indian River fishing camp. Amid the rusted trailer and decaying leafy interior clutter was her magical and somehow readable stern message merrily announcing, “Reds R Us.” I chuckled at the irony of that sun-bleached clunker’s name as I wheeled a friend’s sleek, carbon-and-fiberglass Maverick down the ramp. Almost…
“A brook trout wouldn’t last five minutes in this water,” I say to Haroldo as he leans over the gunwale and washes the slime off his knife. “Never mind the water temperature he’d be dead before he ever felt the heat.” Haroldo looked up, smiled, and nodded like he understood. “You believe in natural selection?”…
The sun is high overhead as I step out of the trees, drop my pack and flop down on the grass, watching the wind send long ripples across the lake. Bear, my grey-muzzled companion, quenches his thirst in the cool water We’ve been hiking all day and while my legs and lungs feel the mileage,…
I grew up in Detroit, a city whose belching smokestacks and clamoring auto plants preach a relentless contempt for mass transportation. Yet when I moved to Washington, D.C., I fell in love with trains—the grand stations and comforting rhythms of the ride hooked me. I eventually ditched my car completely, relying solely on bike, cab…
Springtime on the Bighorn and the midges are thick, blanketing the water, your dory, and your legs if you let them. They look like ‘skeeters but aren’t, and despite their huge numbers on the surface, many trout will still hold tight to the river bottom, living large on midge larva trying to worm-wiggle their way…
The second time I met R. L. Winston’s Bamboo Guru, Glenn Brackett, he was in the Twin Bridges Post Office. It was my first week in town and I was hot to get a few letters off with the new postmark. I walked in past Glenn and a couple of ranchers who were leaning up…
Ka-plop! Okay, that’s it! The second cartop-to-windshield avalanche at a stop sign is a strong signal: Ditch Jackson winter for somewhere that mosquitoes, sunscreen and T-shirts outnumber gloves, parkas and plug-in car heaters. Evacuation by car is the answer. Unfortunately my ol’ gear room isn’t primed for fast winter getaways. I figure at least two…
IT STARTED WITH A CAST, an offering, that didn’t get hooked in the willows behind you or the pine tree overhead but instead sailed out above the water and landed near the intended zone, near enough anyway, that something took it. Whether or not a fish was hooked matters little. It was a proposal, and…
— Michal Murri It’s getting dark now so I’m going for it. Through crawling along the bottom of this dark and dreary river, I’m headed for shore, across this riffle, bringing my wings and wishes with me. I’ve been here for two years, ya know, “foraging,” as they say, on tiny plant matter and other…
Three, is the magic number — Blind Melon Portrait of a Passionate Trio On a fishing trip, or a road journey of any kind, really, three people offers the perfect mix. One to drive, one to handle tunes and navigate, and one to sit in back and pass important items up front when necessary.