Drake Magazine Back Issue Content
THE SUMMER OF 1998 was good to Lee Spencer. By fall he’d raised 77 steelhead to his fly on Oregon’s famed North Umpqua River, landing about half of them. (Spencer keeps meticulous notes.) Yet there was a problem. Of the fish he’d landed, three had died—two of them wild. He’d also once brought in a…
I passed the Rock Bottom Brewery on the final mile of my evening bike loop, where more than once I’d stopped for a thick porter to celebrate not being killed riding the second busiest road in Houston. Restaurants come and go quickly around here, but this place had a twist: A lily pad-filled concrete moat…
“It took A.K. to teach me how to make real camp coffee.” —John Gierach, “Camp Coffee,” Trout Bum, 1986 “U.S. military satellite captures footage of A.K. Best and Ed Engle slyly and simultaneously dumping out their cups of John Gierach’s famous camp coffee when John’s not looking. “ —The Drake, Scuddlebutt, Fall 2011 “What are…
You go to florida to fish the salt. But if you also happen to love largemouth, as I do, and you live in a place that’s a mile high, with a nine-week window to fish for them, then you take advantage of every opportunity to chase them elsewhere. Attending this summer’s annual flyfishing trade show…
DURING THE WANING DAYS OF SUMMER 2000, guide Dave Deardorff rowed his drift boat one stroke too far. Idaho’s lower South Fork of the Snake had fished well that afternoon. Cutthroat sipped BWOs under tormented skies, while Deardorff storm-jumped his way downstream. Finally, something angry surrounded him and his two clients. He sunk oar blades…
WHEN MY PARENTS SHIPPED my sister and me off to college, they didn’t expected to receive a craft brewer and a flyfishing writer in return. But we’d both seen enough of corporate America to realize that a lifetime spent living in it might not be worth the paycheck. A collaborative effort between the two worlds…
EVERY TIME A GIRLFRIEND COMPLAINS about her husband or boyfriend going fishing again (insert big sigh), I bite off a small chunk of my tongue. I’d love for my husband to go fishing. A week in Montana? Hmmm- That doesn’t seem far away enough-or long enough. I hear there are big fish in Kamchatka. And…
I WAS A LITTLE SURPRISED when Enrico Puglisi told me that his favorite permit fly was not his EP Crab. Nor was it his lifelike Descendent Crab, or his Palometa Crab, or even the fly he named after the fish itself, the Permit Crab. It’s a shrimp pattern. More precisely, his Spawning Shrimp, #4, in…
THERE WAS A TIME when skateboarder-turnedgraphics- creator Dave Hartman excelled at the art of being aimless. Bucking the law and generally lacking purpose, Hartman bounced from home to home in suburban Arizona and California, rural Alabama, and southern New Hampshire. Until fishing intervened. He found a fly rod and carried it to Montana. And there…
The Belizean coastline stretches along 239 miles of pleasant places to visit. Tourists who come here, even for the first time, often want to help save it. And there’s a lot to save in Belize—jaguars and Scarlet Macaws and lots and lots of fish. There’s also plenty to save the country from, like Jimmy Buffett…
The state fish and game departments for Washington and Oregon both face a major dilemma: how to adequately protect what remains of their wild steelhead, while also continuing to produce hatchery steelhead for the many anglers who like to bring one home for dinner.
I’d planned to fish something new, and was ready for a bold adventure. But then I remembered promising my buddy that I’d do some light mechanical work on his stupid Accord that evening. That guy doesn’t even fish. Anyway, no one likes exploring with a time constraint, so I resigned myself to fishing the same…
Back in January, NOAA meteorologists reported a brilliant haze-like anomaly ascending into the atmosphere high above Colorado’s famed 14ers. Dubbed the “Puffy Grail” it’s since been attributed to a mass exhale sparked by lawmakers legalizing in-state recreational marijuana sales. It’s now kosher to purchase and smoke pot in Colorado—where Johnny Law allows—and as anglers prepare…
127 Hours. An un-edited collection of GoPro footage from my summer spent guiding on the Madison. Nine Pounds of Melted Mono. Art project using 60 spools of Trilene, a campfire, and two bottles of Evan Williams. Book Project: Tuesdays with Cheney: 50 Places You’ll Never Flyfish Before You Die Because Obamacare Pilfered Your Savings and…
Photos by John Sherman On the hundred-and-first cast the first strip felt dull, the second heavy, and the third came tight with a thuggish throb. Silver and pink flashed underwater a split second before the river broke in a shower of water ten feet across. “Taimen! Taimen! Taimen!” yelled Victor Voydilov, who was popping up…
Fishing is a fine way to gain insight into the true nature of water. Russian literature is an equally effective medium for getting a handle on the nature of corruption. In the 1842 novel Dead Souls, by Nikolai Gogol, the protagonist Chichikov connives to get rich off a bureaucratic loophole. Estates are taxed based on…
Years before I saw either a steelhead or the Quinault River, they were twin obsessions dominating my imagination. I would eventually come to meet both, but at different times in my life, and under very different circumstances.
BEFORE THE EARLY 1990s it was impossible to catch steelhead on a fly rod, and certainly not using a floating line and a single-handed rod. We just couldn’t get our small flies deep enough, we couldn’t cast them far enough, and we all just stood there wishing we had a center pin and roe sacks,…
IT STARTS IN HIGH SUMMER, in Labrador, that land of windswept crags, quaking bogs, and enthusiastic blackflies. “The land God gave to Cain,” as the explorer, Cartier, described it. Well, it is my sincere hope that the sumbitch took along a fly rod. I sure did. I’m on assignment, chasing down a mineral prospector who…
I pulled into the Aspen Recreation Site just before 10 a.m. on Wednesday, October 3rd, after a 13-hour, nearly nonstop rental-car bender from Vancouver. The site is the lowest of three B.C. Ministry campgrounds along the Morice River, sitting about eleven miles southwest of Houston—home of the world’s largest fly rod, the world’s largest sawmill,…
The fly-tying company that lost—and blogged—it all On the morning of May 19, 2013, Idylwilde Flies founder Zach Mertens stared into his computer screen, digesting the bizarre circumstances that had sent his business spiraling. He then began punching paragraphs into the keyboard with the kind of blunt transparency unexpected of a company president and owner…
Almost Every Northwest Angler living within 100 miles of the Columbia River or its tributaries has a weekly, if not daily, if not hourly, ritual this time of year: checking the salmon and steelhead counts passing over eight dams on the Columbia and lower Snake rivers—Bonneville, The Dalles, John Day, McNary, Ice Harbor, Lower Monumental,…
I woke up Sunday morning with no way to hold my head that didn’t hurt. I contemplated spending the rest of the day staring out the window, imagining fishing trips that never happened. But the cobwebs started to clear, so I figured I might as well go fishing. I loaded a new two-hander in the…
The browns had started to rise just as Sam Bush was taking center stage. Twenty yards of dimpled St. Vrain trout water was all that separated me from Planet Bluegrass amphitheater and a full night of music in Lyons, Colorado. The urge to tube my rod prematurely and forgo my well-designed plan was tempting, but…
IN MICHIGAN’S AU SABLE RIVER VALLEY — cultural hub of the Water Wonderland — summer’s Hexagenia hatch is the source of much anticipation among river families. This is not just a father-and-son ordeal; entire lineages come out of the woodwork to share one of the richest traditions in the Mitten. Generations of anglers are lured…
A couple years ago, new to Washington, I made my first trip to the Yakima River—a Columbia tributary in the southcentral part of the state. I arrived after dark, with moonlight revealing glimpses of the river as I neared the campground. By the time I got there it was pushing midnight, yet most of the…
Dear Humpy, Just wanted to drop you a line, see how things were going. I realize that I’ve taken your very existence for granted for a long time, and I am truly sorry. Hope to see you again soon… Where did it all go wrong? From such a joyous beginning, my personal relationship with the…