Salad Days | Vol. 4
One of several shorts coming from Bloodknots over the next few months, the latest from its Salad Days series blazes into midsummer with a heady dose of trout on top.
The Reef Fly Shop
Sagebrush and brown rolling mounds. Ripping wind and an Arctic shoulder-season. One righteous truck stop bar, where dollar bills wallpaper smoky internals. And iffy gas station burritos at 6 a.m. There you have Alcova, Wyoming… at first glance.
Pizza Butts and Backcountry Cutts
Hard to argue killer cutthroat footage, but you’re going to hate this soundtrack… and us for sticking it in your head all day. Now kick back and work that pizza butt.
Last Weigh-In on WA Wild Steelhead Zones
WASHINGTON—The final public meeting for the Puget Sound Wild Steelhead Management Zone selection process will be held tonight in Sequim. Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) plans to designate at least three Puget Sound rivers to promote wild steelhead recovery in the region where steelhead were listed as threatened in 2007. The department will…
DetailsSalmon Stew—Recipe for a Columbia River Calamity
More reason to torpedo four deadbeat dams on the lower Snake River has arrived in the morbid form of a quarter million downstream sockeye now either dead or dying in the mainstem Columbia River due to soupy, inhospitable water conditions.
Bristol Bay, Minor Bust & Big Boom
Pebble Mine scored a small victory last week when the Alaska state Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling denying the Lake and Peninsula Borough (which borders Bristol Bay) from enforcing a voter-approved mining ban. Borough residents passed an initiative in October 2011 that sought to ban both large-scale topsoil removal and mining activity impacting…
DetailsYear’s BEST MOVIE Goes to: the Carp
RA Beattie’s film Carpand trashed stereotypes associated with our favorite garbage-munching carp and in the process captured “Movie of the Year” honors at the 9th Anniversary Drake Flyfishing Video Awards in Orlando last week.
TENKARPA!
Tenkarpa revealed. Don’t forget your PFD. “Here’s what happens when six guys get together at the greatest carp flyfishing destination in the US, and decide to make a fly fishing movie with no script, props or budget.” Brought to you by a Beaver Island carp trip with Indigo Guide Service.
Flyfishing Video Awards, Reader’s Choice Poll
Flyfishing’s best new movie—VOTED BY YOU—will be announced on Wednesday, July 15, at 7 p.m., in Ballroom G of Orlando’s Rosen Centre Hotel.
Free the Snake
Snake River salmon have been trucked, put on barges, and diverted up fish ladders in order to skirt four dams and reach historic habitat in numbers that would assure their future. News flash: It’s not working.
Mining Sidelined in the State of Jefferson
The Bureau of Land Management has temporarily banned new mining claims in several sensitive salmon and steelhead bearing watersheds in southern Oregon and northern California. The affected areas include waters within the Wild and Scenic Rogue and Smith River watersheds and coastal drainages Hunter Creek and the Pistol River in Oregon. Nickel strip mines have…
DetailsStripn Lebowski
The Big Lebowski crew hits San Diego for some shark magic and maybe a quick bowling sesh. “This is not ‘Nam. This is fishing. There are rules.”
Season Two | Part VIII
The joy of hex Hex time marks the biggest shitshow in the North Country, bringing every sizeable trout and big douchebag out of hiding. The spot you’ve scouted all season will inevitably hold some guy from Tennessee. And so far this year’s hatch has seen the best anglers fishing in the worst conditions, while the…
DetailsJabba the Jungle Poon
The King lives large in Nicaragua, and filmmaker Peter Christensen captures the thunderbolt with this hectic morning’s fishing edit from Tapam the Lodge.
Bahamas Backtracking? Insert DIY, Here
Last Friday the Bahamian government held a public forum in Nassau in response to controversial draft regulations aimed at the flyfishing industry. The legislation would potentially limit DIY angling opportunities and called for restrictions on foreign (aka US-based) lodge owners.
The Sound of Cicadas
Summer on Utah’s Green River In the pines above a slumbering Dutch John they clicked and we listened. Clicking, like a foreign tongue only a small group of unwashed anglers might decipher. Below the concrete wall holding Flaming Gorge Reservoir, that same clicking joined the riffing of the Green River. They clicked. The trout tuned…
DetailsPescadora
This is why god invented short-shorts redfishing. Stay cool out there kids, and watch a short session with Rebecca Courtney in Mosquito Lagoon called Pescadora. “We are setting records today.”
AK on Fire
After a warm winter with almost no snowpack, Alaska is experiencing hot, dry conditions and, consequently, a rash of more than 50 wildfires. The Sockeye Fire, just north of Anchorage, and the Card Street Fire, on the Kenai Peninsula, are listed as highest priority in the country and Alaska Governor Bill Walker has declared a…
DetailsWhy the Bahamas Needs a Plan B
[The Government of the Bahamas, Dept. of Marine Resources, on June 17 released a draft for consultation on regulation of the island nation’s flyfishing industry. That suspect piece of potential legislation would nix non-guided trips, making DIY defunct; charge foreign anglers add-on daily fees; and eliminate foreign-owned flats fishing lodges—like those up and down Andros and to…
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Season Two | Part VII
Ticks, carnival tricks, and plotting summer fishing in Michigan’s UP Drift boats are great. But I still prefer hiking into the backcountry and exploring blue lines. Northern Michigan and the Upper Peninsula can still be classified as wild. And once you get north of M-55, you’ll find small stream nirvana.
DetailsTop Ten Bikini Hatches
How to enjoy them; how to avoid them THE YAKIMA Central Washington Enjoy it: Central Washington University is why Four Loko was banned. Coeds in Ellensburg like to party next-level, and when they want to get blacked out on an inner tube, the Yakima River is their venue of choice. Hoppers and summer stones pop…
DetailsI Love Laxa
IT’S EASY TO CAST A FLY IN ICELAND. No trees get in the way. The country never had much timber to begin with, and what trees there were got cut down long ago because burning wood keeps you warmer than not burning wood. Only 20 percent of the Kentucky-sized country can support vegetation anyway, so…
DetailsChasing Natives: RAGING BULL
NO FRESHWATER FISH swimming the American West is more badass than the bull trout (Salvelinus confluentus). Like Mongolian taimen, bulls are the undisputed apex predators of their watersheds, and they know it. A mature bull swims with the élan of a gangsta in his lifted Cadillac; when he rolls by, the little fish dart for…
DetailsFor the Love of Hats
WITH ALL THE TALK I HEAR THESE DAYS about flat-brims, ironic trucker hats, and hipsters, I’ve been thinking about baseball caps and how they function as extensions of identity. A crisp New Era cap with a glittering sticker on the bill is separated from my sweat-stained fishing-logo lid by a cultural gulf as big as…
DetailsThe Trash Men
ATLANTA, YOU NEED TO UNDERSTAND, is not a particularly good fishing town. We have a striped bass run, as well as some nearby mountain fisheries for brook trout, but on the whole, it’s tough being a flyfisher in the Dirty South. When I moved to the city a decade ago, I took a stab at…
DetailsSummer School in Bristol Bay, AK
This past week Kulik Lodge and the Bristol Bay River Academy (formerly Bristol Bay Fly Fishing and Guide Academy) tutored a dozen Bristol Bay-area kids in the ins and outs of the guiding industry. Most young Alaskans already have a head start on lower 48 guides, growing up around float planes, boats, and harsh weather.…
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Season Two | Part VI
Waiting for drakes in painted-on waders There’s one thing that has always terrified me about guiding women, and that is wader rentals. I can’t stock 80 sizes of waders and boots, so I work with an area fly shop. I get the client’s measurements, pick waders up the day before, and hope like hell they…
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