Here’s a little tidbit of morning trivia for you: Who was the first and only photog to sail from Antarctica on a Viking ship for 99 days across a pitching Southern Ocean, landed in Jersey City, and then hitch-hiked across the country to find Tom Bie’s couch and intern at world famous Drake Enterprises before blowing up the flyfishing cosmos with his consistently hot otherwordly images? Well, a lot of that shit might be made up, but Copi Vojta did once sleep on Tom’s couch… once. I think. Find out why vinyl is better than digital in Part 1 of this recent interview at Lo Fi Fly.
“Taking a good picture is a hard thing. Taking a bunch of good pictures is even harder. Consistently taking not only great but unique pictures is the hardest of all. Flipping through the Drake & Fly Fish Journal you get to take in so much great work but I always found myself staring at some pictures more than others…they were unique, gritty, dirty and imperfect but always said so much more than the others…..to me they had soul. It just so happened that all the pics were from the same dude with a name I couldn’t pronounce, I began to look for them in each issue that arrived.”
Tom Bie is the founder, editor, and publisher of The Drake. He started the magazine in 1998 as an annual newsprint publication based in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. He then moved it to Steamboat, Colorado (1999), Boulder, Colorado (2001), and San Clemente, California (2004), as he took jobs as managing editor at Paddler, Senior Editor at Skiing, and Editor-in-Chief at Powder, respectively. Tom and The Drake are now both based in Denver, Colorado, where The Drake is finally all grows up(Swingers, 1996) to a quarterly magazine.