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…
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…
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…
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…
127 Hours. An un-edited collection of GoPro footage from my summer spent guiding on the Madison. Nine Pounds of Melted Mono. Art project using 60 spools of Trilene, a campfire, and two bottles of Evan Williams. Book Project: Tuesdays with Cheney: 50 Places You’ll Never Flyfish Before You Die Because Obamacare Pilfered Your Savings and…
CLYDE WAS RIGHT where Viking had left him the night before, backed into a salmonberry thicket, booze and beer resting on his hood, a lone fly box open to the morning dew. I remembered then, vaguely, showing off some new patterns by headlamp after our arrival the night before. If the fly box was mine,…
THE FIRST BONEFISH TO EAT MY DRY was tailing in ankle-deep water. I threw it two feet ahead of him and left it to dead drift. When he got near, I stripped it and he saw the wake, followed with his head up, hesitated, then turned away. I twitched the fly and he circled it…
Bay Area fly shops have taken a hit and many hanger-ons have slid off the cliff in recent times. In 2006, after witnessing a flurry of shops fold, current California Fly Shop owners Xavier and Karen Carbonnet made the brazen move to embrace the industry and acquire one.
To understand John Gierach the writer, you need only look in his fly boxes, where you’ll find row upon row of meticulously tied flies sorted by purpose, size, and species. At first glance they’re the standard patterns we all carry, but start poking around and you’ll note an unexpected rib on the BWOs, an arced…
Digging into Charlie’s, the 6-year-old Arvada, Colorado flyshop mainstay, is akin to entering the box of a tying master. But instead of perusing a dozen rows of meticulously filled C&F foam slits, you’ve stumbled into a dream selection of 2,400 fly bins filled
The view from between my wading boots couldn’t be better: a good-looking drift boat anchored in the eddy, a cooler full of barley pops sitting nearby on the gravel bar, the river burbling beyond. Hell, I think I just saw a rise on the far side. But there is very little that could motivate me…
Ultra remote Rainbow Lake, New York, buried deep within six million-acre Adirondack State Park, may seem an unlikely place for any business, let alone a startup flyshop. But that hasn’t deterred area native Vince Wilcox, who moved his online Colorado operations east and opened Wiley’s Flies in May 2008.