“Everybody’s got a plan until I hit ’em in the mouth.” — Mike Tyson “THIS IS GONNA HAPPEN FAST, OKAY?” I say to my angler, whose lips have curled into a half-smile. “The line is gonna burn your hand if you do it right.” He continues to search my face as I explain the violent…
More than rods, reels, and toenail clippers… the most essential piece of fishing equipment might be your hat. Bad hats don’t fish. Austin, TX-based apparel brand Howler Brothers makes good ones. In addition, their Spring 2015 collection features five new shirts, four new styles of shorts and boardshorts, and a pile of fresh t-shirts designs.
Standing in the Wally Dog parking lot in Greenville, South Carolina, I swear I can hear the ocean. The coast is at least three hours away, yet the sound of surf fills my ears. I glance over my shoulder: nothing but cars and trucks along Poinsett Highway.
The Alaska Railroad winter train runs 360 miles between Anchorage and Fairbanks on the weekends, and it will drop you off anywhere along the track, much of it otherwise inaccessible wilderness. My fishing partner, Dan, and I used to work for the railroad in Anchorage, me as a PR flack and he as the chief…
Clyde should be dead by now. He was pronounced dead. More than once, in fact. In February 2012, a Salt Lake wrencher put a $1,200 tranny in him and said, “He might make it through March.” In November of that same year, driver Steven Hawley emailed: “Clyde’s 460 is shot. Best quote for a rebuild…
Rogelio Velasco has owned Yucatan-based Pesca Maya fishing resort for 19 years, so he knows the challenge of producing off-the-grid electricity, especially for power-hungry air conditioners. Pesca Maya, like all Ascension Bay resorts, sits inside the Sian Ka’an biosphere reserve, where power lines don’t exist and aren’t forthcoming. So instead, most lodges rely on diesel…
MENTION THAT YOU’RE PLANNING A TRIP to Colorado’s Gunnison River, and a likely response will be something like, “Oh, cool—are you fishing Black Canyon or floating the Gorge?” Which makes perfect sense. After all, between the famed salmonfly hatch and national park status of Black Canyon, and the horse-pack/ rafting reputation of Gunny Gorge, it’s…
“As with rush-hour driving or the public use of cell phones, everyone believes we need a code of etiquette, but no one can agree on what it would be, and some couldn’t bring themselves to observe it regardless.” —Ted Leeson, Inventing Montana Friday I’ve seen this before. It starts as a spark, then a faint…
In March and April, depending on where you live on the East Coast, the first broods of monarch butterflies hatch from their chrysalis (a cocoon to you and I) and enjoy a short two- to six-week life span. They do what butterflies are best at: they flit around, eat flowers, look pretty, avoid elementary schoolers…
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…
“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…
If apps are your thing and selecting the right line for your rig isn’t, RIO might have the solution. Last week, the Idaho Falls-based company introduced its free Line Selector App, designed to make “…the connection to fish come easier for anglers whether it’s through its lines, leaders and tippet or through education on the…
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…
CLYDE HAS A FLAT. I can see it from the boat ramp of Montana’s Bitterroot River. The front of the old Merc is sloping toward the passenger side, and while I’m happy to discover that there’s a spare in the trunk, I’m unhappy to discover that the jack is missing its handle. I’m unhappy again…
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…
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,…
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,…
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…