The drug known commonly as “the tug” died on January 28, 2014, when the impotent one-liner received no reaction from flannel-clad bobber-doggers staring awkwardly up at the rafters of a left coast lodge.
The former goodtiming, fist-bump instigator was the progeny of popular fishing idioms. Its great granddaddy, “tight lines,” suffered a similar fate in 1992 after it was reduced to an email signature and later deleted and replaced by “bent rodz.” While “best fishes” has been marginalized to seasonal work at holiday get-togethers.
Fueling the slide, scientists at a Kansas-based drug research center concluded that the tug—as in, “a fish pulling line from a reel set on medium drag and held by an excitable angler”—was not to be misconstrued as an actual narcotic. Using mice and chopstick fly rods, repeated tugging on mouse mouths only produced agitation and fear in the majority of test subjects.
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.