Humor
“Mountains are giant, restful, absorbent. You can heave your spirit into a mountain and the mountain will keep it, folded, and not throw it back as some creeks will. The creeks are the world with all its stimulus and beauty.” – Annie Dillard I grew up in the Catholic Church where, by a certain age,…
Immediately institute “Finder’s Keeper’s” rule for all bales of pot that wash up in the Marquesas. Ditch Hemingway look-a-like contest and expand Fantasy Fest to the first Saturday of each month. Boobs and feather boas ring cash registers. Old fat white guys with beards, not so much. Student loan relief from Key West Community College,…
The water’s surface is oily and shiny and silver and orange. The outgoing tide is tepid, with the current passing between your legs being the only indication that you’re wading, because the water is the same temperature as your shaking, nervous body. “Remember to breathe.” Vision drifting in and out, eyes straining for focus. Legs…
It isn’t those first, crisp, mahogany-spinner mornings that get me, the ones ending with a warm afternoon and a few straggler hoppers still clicking. It’s the days that come a couple weeks later, after the onset of frost, when the first nasty cold front under low-lying clouds makes you hustle through the wadering process because…
After eighteen hours of travel I arrive on the shaky, sweaty downside of an extended coffee and doughnut binge. I love travel, the lure of the exotic, broadening your perspective. But sometimes, instead of a welcome transportation to an easy, distant place, where you step off the plane and a bronzed beauty places a lei…
For every good shot at a tarpon, permit, or bonefish, there’s a cast-per-hour-of-effort ratio that on most days looks like a line graph of the U.S. economy. Then there are those days that you instantly know you’re losing, like a cold February morning when even the boxfish are lurking deep and you’re just hoping for…
It takes a certain swagger to pull off a good mustache. Some guys just have it: Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, Jose Wejebe. And ’staches on Norris, Bronson, Chuck Furimsky, and the Marlboro Man say “badass” like no others. Hall-of-fame pitcher and fisher “Goose” Gossage carries an enviable upper-lip umbrella, as does Dr. Phil—meaty enough to…
There is no photographic evidence of Robert Zimmerman stepping out of a river bearing a brace of trout, boots of Spanish leather glistening; nor are there secondhand tales of a small mumbling man with a bewildering patter and a decent roll cast, tales shared by grizzled guides after too much bourbon, and only with trusted…
We’d just smashed into a Kangaroo with our camper and decided it was time for a drink. We were tired of driving anyway, and those damn kangaroos were just too hard to see in the dark. We saw a sign near the road, tacked to the side of a rickety shed: “Kalbarri Pub.”
To understand John Gierach the writer, you need only look in his fly boxes, where you’ll find row upon row of meticulously tied flies sorted by purpose, size, and species. At first glance they’re the standard patterns we all carry, but start poking around and you’ll note an unexpected rib on the BWOs, an arced…
Steelheading in Smithers was a little different fourteen years ago than it is today. For starters, there were very few spey rods. Also, a hotel in town was about $80—a week. But then, as now, as always, which river you fished was sometimes decided by the weather. We’d hauled a skiff all the way from…
Saloons tucked away in the small Rocky Mountain communities that survive on the ebb and flow of anglers are where fishing stories either start or end. The more dilapidated, the better. If flakes of hide splinter off a 60-year old mule deer mount, or pornographic cartoons denote the men’s and women’s restrooms, then grab a…
1. The OCD The OCD boat gets washed at the end of every day, and is always trailered with a cover on. The OCD gets an even more thorough power-washing on days off. The OCD owner will frequently make clients stand around at the takeout ramp while he gives the boat “just a quick sponge…
John Jackson began snowboarding as a preteen on the powder-strewn spines of the Eastern Sierras, near his hometown in Crowley Lake, California. Soon after, he cast his first flies in that same backyard—in places with legendary names like Inyo, Sierra, Yosemite, and King’s. Fifteen years later and the basic ingredients haven’t changed, just the stakes.…
Stiff keys moved toward the carriage like an old man lifting his arthritic knees up a flight of stairs. They rose once, twice and, with effort, three times. A weathered and worn ribbon, now more leather than cloth, slowly began to cough up faint traces of ink with each succeeding stroke. And with each erratic…
I’m sitting now, on one of the first mornings of the New Year, in a messy, stinky pile of marabou feathers and raccoon skins that nearly canvas the frigid wood floor of my tying room. It’s only ten a.m., and I’ve sneezed at least a couple dozen times by now, and my fleecy home office…
The Been-There-Done-That Guy He is a walking, yammering Wikipedia of guides, lodges, rivers, oceans, lakes and fish. He’s the best caster he’s ever met. He sets up his vise on the bar during happy hour and forces you to notice his extraordinary tying skills. He owns three obscure IGFA records and is working on six…
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…
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…
Saturday Wake at 11:00. Practice straight-faced recitals of: “It’s really more of a mid-day fishery.” Anyone up before 9:00 will be sequestered for remainder of week. Anyone up at 6:00 saying “Let’s go for bagels!” will be sent home immediately. Afternoon seminar: co-opting expertise—sponging off of your buddy’s success stories. Extra workshop: Motivational Flyfishing with…
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.
DALLAS—September 23, 2009. In some surprising post-tradeshow industry news, Temple Fork Outfitters president Rick Pope announced today that novelist Ernest Hemingway recently rose from the dead and asked to join the advisory staff of Temple Fork Outfitters.
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…
Flip Pallot —he of Walker Cay Chronicles fame—along with IGFA Hall of Famer Stu Apte, will be featured on the ESPN Outdoors Saltwater Series this Sunday Sunday, May 3, at 8:30 a.m. (Eastern) on ESPN2.