Drake Magazine Back Issue Content
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.
SO YOU’VE DECIDED to fish green drakes this summer. On a western river, preferably. Good for you. It’s an incredible hatch that too often gets overlooked for the more glorious salmonfly. Is your significant other coming along? Does he or she fish? Wait, a better question: Does your partner like to do anything other than…
FROM THE SICKLE’S CURVE of Great Abaco Island’s eastern shore, the next piece of solid ground for 3,500 miles is the African continent. Between those shores lies ample room for inspiration. This is perhaps why noted American sporting artist Vaughn Cochran called a summit. “Years ago, when I managed fishing lodges, I had this idea…
Dan caught the only inconnu. Let’s get that out of the way. “Dan” is Dan Armstrong, a well-traveled, Bozeman-based photographer who occasionally gets invited on spectacular fishing trips with the tacit understanding that his job is to record the heroics of the writer and keep his hands off the rod. But it was our last…
I’m sitting in Bob Mitchell’s Fly Shop in St. Paul, Minnesota, watching Brian Bergeson tie a fly. His thread wraps are quick and confident. He trims a tightly bound clump of bucktail and a plume of hair rises and settles to the table. His Red Bull sits safely outside the fallout radius. His fingers seem…
One night during my sophomore year of college, a drunk Swedish exchange student sunk into my couch and began telling tales of the old country. Midsommar’s Eve is a special event in June, Henrick said, when all able-bodied citizens eat and drink till they can’t. He reminisced about his first Midsommar’s kiss, first Midsommar’s beer,…
After graduating from college, I accepted a position as an actuarial analyst—a very digital, very stationary job. My parents appreciated this move, as it meant financial independence, and also that I wouldn’t be joining some friends on what eventually became an eight-month motorcycle tour of America. I was mostly certain I didn’t want to become…
Tucker Jones is certainly comfortable speaking in front of a surly audience. This much is clear from the outset. The burly, self-deprecating Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist is standing in front of a group of 50 guides and anglers on a blustery spring evening at his agency’s office overlooking the Columbia River in…
ON MARCH 20, 2017, a canary-yellow A-star helicopter kicked up a cloud of sand while planting its skids on a tiny atoll off the Caribbean coast of Honduras. Years in the making, the landing at Faraway Cay was like a blindfold removed. According to satellite imagery, the island doesn’t exist. But minutes after landing, Steve…
Tommy Robinson remembered his moment of enlightenment. It took place in the ’70s, back when nobody believed you could catch permit on a fly. Robinson grew up in Key West, and began guiding before he’d even graduated high school. But on this day he was an angler, fishing from the back of the boat while…
IT’S 3:00 A.M. IN THE EVERGLADES AND TIM BORSKI IS LOOKING FOR SNAKES. I’m riding along with him as we drive very slowly down State Road 9336—the only four-digit road in Florida. It is 34 miles from Florida City to Flamingo, a distance we are currently covering at about 15 miles per hour. “Right up…
COMPARED TO THE INITIAL REPORT, our weather wasn’t looking so bad. Wind was steady at eight or nine knots out of the northwest, pushing temps down to the mid-forties. The water had cooled significantly over the last week, and reports of trout and reds still being around were spotty and unsubstantiated. Our odds weren’t good.…
“Gaining a good network of supporters is critical to the life of any new NGO, and in this day and age people can be very leery of supporting any non-profit; not everyone out there is completely sincere in their fundraising efforts.” —Bucky Buchstaber, from the opening paragraph to his story, “Fly Fishing Collaborative in South…
CHASING HATCHES IS STUPID and obnoxious. I know. I’ve tried. Pursuing particular insects insures that the potential for disappointment will dwarf the likelihood of success. If us fishing media folk are to be believed (also a bad idea), fishing is an appreciation of the moment, being present, or some other Baba Ram Das shit. Planning…
The familiar tug, the comforting bend of the 7-weight, and another Michigan smallmouth—this one, 17 inches. Not a record, but it came to my net in a peculiar spot in an unaccustomed location; along a stretch of the Kalamazoo River west of Marshall, Michigan, where the tree-lined banks now give way to clear-cut fields and…
Mid-June after a May-long drought and, weeks before we thought they would, the rivers had begun to “take shape,” an idiom I’ve always loved for its suggestions of primal formation and rebirth. What was just days prior a brown blob squirming primordially down from Rogers’ Pass is suddenly the jade-green Blackfoot, its boulders and riffly…
“I got one once that had a spot shaped like Mickey Mouse ears— for real,” says Captain John Turcot, referring to one of the more memorable markings he’s encountered over his two decades of hunting reds in Florida’s Mosquito Lagoon.
“ARE YOU SURE that car’s gonna make it?” the gas station employee asked, without knowing our destination. Clyde was the only one who knew the answer. Instinct and lack of mechanical competence told me to trust him.
I woke to the sound of slaughter. Several times a night this happened. The noise was caused by a pair of prehistoric animals hunting beneath my bed at Brazil’s Uakari Lodge, a floating eco-resort nestled along a protected stretch of the Amazon River, about 400 miles west of Manaus. Guests are advised to sleep with…
WHEN IT’S TOO HOT TO FISH, Yakima River guide Nate Rowley snorkels his favorite trout water. He’s been snorkeling a lot lately. On a scorching August afternoon at a coffee shop in downtown Cle Elum, Washington, he reports his findings from a stretch of the Teanaway River, one of the Yakima’s more significant tributaries, protected…
AFTER GETTING WORD that I’d be next in line for the continuing Ride with Clyde saga, my fishing and social life took on a strange, A-list vibe. Clyde is a rock-star rig, and I suddenly became a kind of social agent for this over-forty hunk of Detroit steel.
IT’S NOT DIFFICULT to imagine the tiny community of Forks, Washington, on the Olympic Peninsula, kindling the kind of small-town restlessness that prompts its sons and daughters to move elsewhere. But Gray Struznik, born into this land of tall trees and deep puddles, was never struck by that desire to bounce. Instead, he stayed and…
GLASS AND RUSTED METAL on the beach. The deafening sound of planes landing. And a steady striped-bass bite. The mussel beds and grungy shores of Boston Harbor may not be pristine, but they reliably produce fish—stripers, bluefish, carp, even the rare bluefin. When I tell people I fish here, they scoff, laugh, or plain don’t…
IN MARCH OF 2016, C1 films released a permit movie called t. Falcatus Ch. 1: Day of Days. The film opens with Nathaniel Linville, owner of The Angling Company fly shop in Key West, giving viewers advice: “I recommend anyone who’s watching this, turn the volume down; I got nothing interesting to say.”
Rolling over from my plywood perch on the top bunk, I peer down to see all three of my cabinmates asleep. So I rule them out. Slipping the headlamp from beneath my pillow and turning on the light reveals not one but two Alaska-sized mice sitting on top of a cooler, munching saltines. I stare…
“My father was very sure about certain matters pertaining to the universe. To him, all good things—trout as well as eternal salvation—come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy.” —Norman MacLean ABOUT TEN YEARS AGO, JAY BREVIK AND I SPENT A DAY FISHING several of the Olympic Peninsula’s winter…
I STOOD IN THE NEAR DARK AT THE TOP OF THE TRAIL THAT LED DOWN a series of switchbacks to the river. A neighbor had told me that for several days there’d been grizzly tracks all down the trail. I thought that grizzlies probably liked these low light levels and could see well enough to…