Destination travel
Despite the whole universe seeming to conspire against me, I made it to Russia for steelhead season this fall. Even better, I made it back home, although my mother and sister had their doubts. It wasn’t easy, to say the least. But I wanted to be there, and I felt it was important that I be there. Obviously, I do not in any way support the invasion of Ukraine. But I also don’t blame my friends in Russia for their government’s decisions.
The first email arrived on July 14. “Reaching out to pass along some fresh ‘industry happenings’ from the heart of Bolivia’s golden dorado region,” it began. “I figured the Drake might be interested in looking into it, as it seems on par with the prior articles investigating Deneki.”
I was caught between two worlds: human and piscine. I had been welcomed into the school. I moved with them, as they moved. I observed their feeding habits, their societal structures. I was like a salt-crusted, Ichthyological Jane Goodall, except that my silverbacks weren’t gorillas. They were bonefish. Scores of them. Possibly hundreds. All around me, glimmering tails flapped like the banners of their clan—a clan of which I was now an adopted son.
Misha Skopets’ Biggest FishFly Fishing Russia: The Far East, a review BY Ryan Peterson Photos: Guido Rahr (above), John Sherman (below) One day in the summer of 1979, Dr. Mikhail “Misha” Skopets, a young Russian ichthyologist based in Magadan in the Soviet Far East, found a mysterious fish skeleton in the stomach of a Boganid…
Until January 4, I’d never even heard the term “float-n-fly.” It sounded like a kid’s ride at the fairground, or the street name for some illicit new drug. But I Googled it that day—the same day Oroville, California-based flyfishing guide Ryan Williams, and his partner, Logan McDaniel, won the Shasta Lake Wild West Bass Trail tournament.
My first tarpon on a fly was a stout, laid-up fish that ate my worm and broke me off an hour later. I was a teenager at the time, and fortunate to have a father who took me on an annual spring trip to the Keys. But as I grew older and started achieving some success on the bow, my focus shifted to permit. Like many permit anglers, my trips often ended with a long flight home, followed by a long-winded explanation to my wife about how I could spend three days fishing, catch nothing, yet still feel the trip was “a step in the right direction.” At the height of my addiction, I was focusing more on the seconds ticking away on my watch than I was on scanning the water. I’d lost the mental game before even stepping on the skiff.
The whole trip was Forrest’s dumb idea. But for Forrest, enthusiasm overcomes all obstacles. In his world, “Rad” is always capitalized. As in, “Dude! It’ll be so Rad to go fishing right now!” But Smithers over Thanksgiving? Not Canadian Thanksgiving, mind you—on October 12, a perfectly reasonable time to be fishing in northern British Columbia—but American Thanksgiving, a month and a half later.
If you’re unfamiliar with flood-tide fishing, imagine your grassy front yard that your kid was supposed to cut three weeks ago but hasn’t. In the West this might attract crickets or hoppers, but in the coastal Southeast, when the right moons and weather combine, the grass floods, attracting snails. The snails attract fiddler crabs, the crabs attract redfish, and the redfish attract us.
On March 13, 60-year-old retired schoolteacher Ray Montoya arrived on the Arabian Archipelago of Socotra, intent on landing what is thought to be the first permit on a fly from the war-torn country of Yemen. Three weeks later, the talented fly-tyer, photographer, artist, and angler was still there, grounded like the rest of us. But Montoya is not like the rest of us. A Navy veteran, he grew up in a third-generation military family, bouncing around the U.S. as a kid. He became a teacher after college, and in the late ’90s began teaching internationally with his wife, Kerry.
Megalops atlanticus. The name belongs more to a creature in an ’80s horror film than a fish out roaming the flats. They are so big and powerful it is hard to imagine them existing in real life. I saw Flip Pallot and Jose Wejebe cross paths with these monsters…
“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,…
If you linger around a fly shop long enough on a slow day, you’ll eventually hear some crazy and creative fishing plans. My shop—Arbor Anglers in Golden, Colorado—is no exception, and on a recent afternoon in late October, the fishing plans got a little nuts. What started with: “We should find a big-ass shark-mount somewhere…
My annual migrations from Montana to Baja started in the winter of 2009, when the mainstream media first began covering news about the dangers associated with Mexico travel. Friends and family thought I was nuts, but as long as you weren’t searching for blow in Tijuana at 2 a.m., Baja was still safer than many…
For those of you who tuned in to Episode #45, you’ll know that we travelled down to East End Lodge in Grand Bahama to chase after the ghost of the flats with Captain Cecil Leathan and Bjorn Stromsness. This episode continues that journey but stops along the way to take a look at the darker…
In today’s audio story, we scan the flats of Grand Bahama in search of a single species: Bonefish. Sit back and enjoy the sounds of veteran East End Lodge guide Cecil Leathan poling Bjorn Stromsness (of the Bonefish on the Brain blog) and listen as they tell the tales of their first bonefishes and find many more.
I’m not sure I want the Miskitos back in camp. Rules are different here. Maybe there are no rules. They want gas this time. They also want weed: “Fuma?” We give it to them. They smoke it in front of our camp. We’ve given them sliced pineapple, five-gallon jugs of water, rice and beans. They…
Past the Far East Restaurant, and Big Daddy’s Buff n’ Wax, we turn left at the Mexico Congregational Church and find the boat launch empty. This is normal in the mill town of fewer than 3,000 residents, but surprises me on a spring morning: the Androscoggin is at its most fishable (around 4,500 cfs); it’s…
The crew at Howler Bros. recently took its Spring 2018 collection (which drops today) down to Abaco, Bahamas. “We found beautiful water, beautiful people and many days filled with lobster diving, blue hole finding, bonefish chasing and wave discovering. Come along for the journey.”
I’d never been to Guanaja, Honduras, but I did my research and learned that we’d have our own little island surrounded by permit flats. I was even told of permit before breakfast—almost as great as waking up in that special way.
Booze consumed me as I sat listless in the upper bar of the Dogwood; a restored Mississippi riverboat docked a few hundred yards east of the Hopedale, Louisiana, boat launch. For the next two days and nights, the Dogwood would serve as home and headquarters to anglers competing in the 2017 Sheepy tournament—a tongue-in-cheek backcountry…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…