Not a great stretch for rafters looking to float

Colorado Stream Access

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Take any Colorado stream-access battle that has taken place this century, and a small, relatively unknown but politically connected nonprofit has likely played a role. The secretive Creekside Coalition has fought for much of the past thirty years to keep stream-access laws in Colorado from becoming anything like those in Montana, where the public is allowed to recreate in its rivers and streams up to the high-water mark

The DrakeCast #74: A Reluctant Cast & Blast

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In this episode of The DrakeCast we head to the backwaters of the Mississippi River to attempt a northwoods cast and blast, chasing a dinner of pike and squirrel from my newly refinished Gheenoe. As a committed catch and release angler, this was a new and somewhat uncomfortable experience for me. Later on, we’re joined by outdoors writer Patrick Durkin to contextualize our mission and talk about the fluctuations in hunting and angling participation over the years.

Something that looks sort of like a mayfly. PC: A.J. Swentosky

Summer Doldrums

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A sharp sun is pinned overhead, drilling into the back of my neck like a hot desk lamp. I’m alone in a rowboat on a lake, a shallow depression with the sort of soft marl bottom that squelches unpleasantly between the toes. Its shape is the result of glacial waves that once buried northern Michigan in six thousand feet of hard, gray ice. In late June, with a ring of leafy oaks surrounding the lake and the air hanging wet and heavy, the fact that there was even snow here three months ago seems unlikely, and a mile of ice, impossible. When it’s hot here it seems like it’s always been hot, and always will be.

Idaho's world-class smallmouth water. PC: Visit Idaho

Dworshak Dreams

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A float tube is the wrong vessel for Dworshak Reservoir. The lake is more than fifty miles long, nearly twenty thousand acres, in some of the wildest country in Idaho. A friend who hunts elk in the surrounding forest, usually from a boat-in only campsite, refers to the lake as “Big D.”
I knew all of this before I showed up there in early May to search for smallmouth. Yet there I was, shouldering a float tube to a beach a few hundred yards from the launch, trying to avoid hearing the jet-boat crowd laughing when I strapped fins on.

Carpapolooza

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This summer, the Bighorn River Alliance is celebrating the thirty sixth year of its Carp Tourney, the oldest of its kind in the country. But the title for longest running non-competitive carp flyfishing event may belong to Nebraska’s Cornhuskers Fly Fishers and their annual CarpFest. Since the club’s founding in the 1970s, anglers have gotten together on what always turned out to be the summer’s hottest day to throw flies at carp and dip battered bottom feeders into a vat of boiling oil. In Omaha, carp are regarded as a delicacy and are regularly available at Friday night fish fries. But as former club president Larry Dostal remembers it, “The carp fishing was usually an afterthought.” So much so that when Dostal got involved in the 2010s, no one could remember anyone having actually caught a carp at CarpFest.

Deschutes Angler Fly Shop

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Amy and John Hazel, owners of Deschutes Angler Fly Shop in Maupin, Oregon, are committed to consistency. “I’ve never had anybody fish a single-handed rod, and we’ve never had anyone nymph fish for steelhead,” says Amy. “It’s always been swinging, it’s always been a floating line, and it’s always been small surface-flies that are no deeper than a couple inches.” For more than twenty-five years the couple has guided the Deschutes the way they wanted to, mainly because they feel it’s the most effective way to target the river’s summer-run steelhead. 

Worth Protecting. Photo By: Steve Bly

Monumental Decision

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FANS OF THE early-2000s political drama “The West Wing” may recall an episode in the show’s first season where Josh (Bradley Whitford, as Deputy Chief of Staff) tells President Bartlet (Martin Sheen) how he can use the Antiquities Act of 1906 to prevent a mine from being built in Montana: “You’re gonna establish Big Sky National Park!”

We never found the "water" we were searching for, but it didn't quite much matter when we stumbled upon this view and this stream, full of little wild trout. When we first walked down we saw red flashes - thinking we had stumbled upon native cutties, we began casting, only to catch the char gems we cherish back in the Southeast, somehow slightly dissapointed that we did not find the native fish to this region we were hoping for. Angler: Adam White. Photo: Sammy Chang

Colorado’s Access Issue

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ON JUNE FIFTH, the seven members of Colorado’s court of last resort unanimously ruled that 81-year-old flyfisherman Roger Hill “lacks standing” to continue his decade-long legal battle for public access along the Arkansas River (Hill v. Warsewa).

An always-appreciated view. Photo by Jeremie Hollman

Salmonfly Questions

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Living in Eastern Idaho allows me to fish some of the finest trout water in the country, from the South Fork of the Snake to the Madison in Montana. But lately, nostalgia has drawn me south, to northern Utah’s Logan and Blacksmith Fork rivers, both of which flow through the fifty-mile-long Cache Valley where I grew up. Each of these rivers had healthy salmonfly hatches when my grandpa was a kid, but now only the Blacksmith Fork does, and few people seem to know why.

Photo by Brian Grossenbacher.

Full Boat

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I knew Patrick had a wedding the night before, but I didn’t know he’d be coming straight from it. His wine-stained dress-shirt hung untucked over his pants. He had no bag; he walked up my driveway from our mom’s car just after 5 a.m. with a five weight in one hand, a pair of cowboy boots in the other, and a hip pack and a pair of jeans slung like saddlebags over each shoulder.

The author holds his hard-earned musky. “Great works are performed not by strength, but by perseverance.” –Samuel Johnson. Photo by Brett Meany

Musky Flies

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Hours into the float already, we’d chucked green and yellow, chartreuse and pink, and black and purple—some with big reflective eyes and others with barred feathers that enticingly slip and slide behind the body of the fly. Nothing was working. Brett, my musky copilot, and I weren’t moving fish like I thought we would, considering the cold mornings that fall had been delivering.

Some GOAT flies for sure. Photo by Alex Cerveniak

Hex-Mania

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If Hexagenia limbata isn’t the GOAT of all bugs, it’s at least squarely in the conversation, beginning with its sheer size and density. “Nothing in flyfishing even comes close to the spinner fall,” says the legendary Kelly Galloup in Chris Santella’s book, The Hatch is On! “I don’t care how big a salmonfly or Mother’s Day caddis or Hendrickson hatch you’ve seen, it doesn’t compare in pure biomass.”

Appreciating Clyde

Clyde Appreciation. Photo by Chad Hoffman

Clyde Pride

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Clyde had been sitting in a barn outside of Gadsden, in West Etowah County, Alabama, for nearly six months, with a flat front tire and a massive gash in his gas tank. He wanted to rumble his Detroit muscles, but hadn’t done so for some time under my watch. I never developed any mechanical skills, but my friend Adam has worked on cars since his youth, tinkering with his grandfather in their garage in Decatur. He put on a new gas tank in a little more than an hour, performing what seemed to me a mannish miracle. Clyde was purring again, and my passion for flyfishing culture would be realized at the Fly Fishing Film Festival at Cahaba Brewing in Birmingham the following weekend.

Stream Access

Photo by Corey Kruitbosch

Public Mistrust Doctrine

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“The topic of stream access illustrates one of the most perplexing types of legal conflicts that can arise… Indeed, it is difficult to find a legal issue that is more tangled and uncertain.” —A Wildlife Primer (2009), by Eric Freyfogle and Dale Goble

Colorado’s river laws might be in trouble. Roger Hill, the octogenarian trying to fulfill his dream of legally wade-fishing the Arkansas River, was at the Colorado Court of Appeals on January 27 and got good news about his case—Hill v Warsewa. 

Biggie Smalls Featured Pic

Photo by Kendrick Chittock

Biggie Smalls

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There was no doubt it was a steelhead. Until it wasn’t. The grab had been so jolting, the head shakes so violent, that no consideration was given to the fish being anything but a steelhead. Yet there at my feet, in six inches of water, lay a brown smallmouth of grotesque proportions. Pulsing and flexing, flaunting its outsized strength.

Laurel Hell Featured Pic

Finding solitude in Appalachia

Fishing a Laurel Hell

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In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself within a dark woods where the straight way was lost. —Dante Alighieri, The Inferno

In Appalachia, there’s no straight way to travel. Laurel hell grows thick, and the only way to navigate it is to put your feet in a streambed and follow every meander and oxbow of the creek.

Photo by Kurt Budliger

Kings

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Let this be a warning to you and to me and to all the other salmon killers out there; to the moochers and trollers and dam builders; the seiners and gillnetters; sushi chefs and leach mines; treaty breakers, billy clubs, old-growth bulldozers, and an ocean of plastic; to fillet knives, fish farms, and this ever-warming world, let this be a warning: These fish will outlast you.

Jacklin's Fly Shop in West Yellowstone

Jacklin's Fly Shop in March 2021. Photo by Beau Davis

Jacklin’s Fly Shop-Since 1974

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“Look at that baby!” Bob Jacklin exclaims as the foamy waters of Montana’s Madison River churn steadily around him. Elegantly draped out of the net he’s holding is the tail of a now-famous 30-inch brown trout—a fish that Jacklin had caught before. “You talk about a fish—that is a big boy!”

Drake Magazine 2020 Winter

JUST OUT CATCHING LAS VEGAS LUNKERS.

Flyfishing Sin City

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I thought I was still buzzed from the night before when I first saw what appeared to be a person lounging in a yellow pool-floatie on the water. “Only in Vegas,” I thought. Some drunk idiot ends up using Lake Bellagio as his personal swimming pool. But looking closer, I could see that the person was a man moving his arm back and forth a few times before bringing it to rest. “Is he casting?”

Image by Hogan Brown

The Life of Ryan. California fly angler wins conventional bass tourney.

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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.

Photo by Kurt Budliger. The deeper colors of a seasoned grayling.

Ingrid. One woman leaves an oversized impression in Alaska.

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I think that Ingrid would want you to know—as she stands in her waders, stands by her weir, looking down at a dark mass of grayling that were trapped in the night—that there was a time when no one would’ve thought fish would ever need to be counted. But she’d also want you to know that these don’t have to be the last wild days. She would want you to know that not everything has been lost, and that there is still the hope of unknown waters.

Archie Creek Fire along the Umpqua Hwy (OR 138) Photo taken Sept. 12, 2020. INCIWEB/NWCG (National Wildfire Coordinating Group)

Archie Creek Fire along the Umpqua Hwy (OR 138) Photo taken Sept. 12, 2020. INCIWEB/NWCG (National Wildfire Coordinating Group)

Get Well Soon. Sympathy card for the North Umpqua.

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Before first light hit any of the famed pools along Oregon’s North Umpqua on the morning of September 8th, the Archie Creek fire had already begun.

Photos: Hansi Johnson

Photos: Hansi Johnson

Mississippi Learnin’. Smallies and pike on the mighty Mississippi.

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Minnesota’s Mississippi shoreline bounds the “Southeast Blufflands” region, or what anglers know as the Minnesota Driftless. All five of us fish it: A magical world of pastoral valleys, each drained by a spring creek, mostly brimming with wild fish. 

Redfish friendly habitat in Northeast Florida. Photo: Alex Coleman

Redfish friendly habitat in Northeast Florida. Photo: Alex Coleman

North Florida Floodtides. Charleston isn’t the only tailing zone.

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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.

Bear Attack in Montana

Photo: Bryan Gregson

Ambushed. Another Bear Attack in Montana

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When Matthew Churchman woke up on a recent Sunday morning, at first the only thing growling was his stomach. Coffee and a cold breakfast took care of that. Camp, nestled in a 300-yard-long, cottonwood-and-willow stretch of river bottom, was in the process of being broken down. Skies…