As a teenager I had a habit of riding my bike down to the beach of my dying hometown in the dark, before the orange glow of streetlights faded with the break of dawn. This usually happened in early fall when the chinook started showing, often following a light rain that barely raised the creek flowing into the harbor.
Stan Beaulier’s pickup, towing a five-owner Clacka, idles by the Grand Motel’s parking lot, which is occupied by our ancient gang-of-four fly-gear fiddlers. A fine young guide, Stan wears sandals for shoe-demanding river bottoms and is frequently laughing while spouting common and Latin names of Wisconsin’s eleven native turtles, cardinal flowers, and five different redhorse species known only to McClane’s.
In May of 2025, I found myself in a boat with someone who on paper, I did not like. I was on the oars and my nemesis was watching a popper, twitching it every three or four seconds, along a line of lily pads. It was Wisconsin’s trout opener so instead of battling crowds on the small streams of the Driftless Area, we decided to hit a slough off of the Wisconsin River in search of anything that would bite.
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.
On the morning of June 25th, my friend and guide Luke Annear swung by in his truck with his Towee in tow. When Luke isn’t pursuing his third post-graduate degree from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, you can usually find him chasing carp on the rivers of southern Wisconsin. Luke’s guide service, Freshwater Flats, specializes in site fishing opportunities for carp. But that day, we were trying something a little bit different.
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.
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.
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.
Alex Gonsiewski is a flyfishing guide in Oregon, where he targets trout and summer steelhead on the Deschutes River, summer steelhead on the John Day, and winter steelhead on the North Oregon coast. Between rainbow runs, Alex hosts angling trips around the world. He’s taken clients to Mexico, Belize, Bolivia, Alaska, Christmas Island, and Puerto Rico.
In 2023, Alex and a group of clients flew to Sudan for nine days of fishing on the Red Sea’s Nubian Flats. Unfortunately, while Alex and company were on the water, the country fell into a vicious civil war that has since claimed the lives of 150,000 people and displaced more than thirteen million.
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!”
The real warmth arrives in late April. By dawn, backlit vapor rises from the edge of lily pads; at noon, turtles sunbathe on every exposed log; just after 2 PM, a quilt of gray clouds arrives from the south. It’s beer-time on your local largemouth pond.
The essay Cold & Clear by John Larison originally appeared in the Winter 2016 issue of The Drake Magazine and to this day, it is one of best stories about steelheading we’ve ever run. On this episode of The DrakeCast we bring you the author reading his story followed by an interview with Larison from 2019.
When it came to hobbies, my dad was an accomplished dabbler. He’d go all in on a hobby, whatever it was, yet inevitably he’d lose interest in it. The shelf life varied for any one of Dad’s many recreational pursuits, but it was usually a matter of months rather than years. Take running, for example. Dad got the running bug following the 1977 publication of Jim Fixx’s The Complete Book of Running. I can still picture its monochromatic jacket cover with a runner in stride wearing red running shorts, matching red running shoes, against a red background. Dad read the book and then went about buying all the necessary gear: Brooks running shoes, colorful running shorts with vented slits nearly to the waistband, close-fitting nylon tank tops, terry cloth wristbands, and a usually red bandana. That was his kit. And like so many of my dad’s avocations, there was usually one idiosyncratic item associated with the new hobby that especially stood out. Here it was Gator Gum (lemon-lime flavor), which Dad chewed before a run and claimed that it staved off dehydration. As for the actual running, Dad did put in some miles. “Got in a 10-miler this morning,” he’d say. “Got my second wind around mile six,” he’d add, or “Felt great today.” Then, several months would go by and he simply didn’t run anymore.
In May, what must a mayfly think? Does it wait calmly for the tender moment of copulation, or itch to get on with it? I pondered these mysteries, more pressing than they might appear, on a river in the Cotswolds, a part of England touted for antique shops more than trout.
AFTER ALL THESE YEARS, I finally get to hotspot. Anyone who has ever suffered through the four-hundred-mile godforsaken
slog from Casper, Wyoming, to Echo, Utah, on I-80 knows it to be one of the most desolate drives in America. If you’re not
being run off the freeway by stimulant-powered semi-drivers, it’s only because snowfall or 60-mph crosswinds have forced
them to commandeer all the rest areas.
“AND FINALLY, I say to you,” Jesus announced, from the back of Simon Peter’s boat, to the crowd that had gathered on shore, “love one another as I have loved you. Thank you, Capernaum! Thank you, and good night!”
AHAB WAS AN AMATEUR. If you want real obsession, you need to cast farther. You need to climb down root-ladders and weave through briar bushes to the river just as spring melt is ebbing, then low-crawl under massive logs and scamper over wet river- stones more slippery than a candidate’s promise.
DAN SOLTAU is owner of the Plano, Texas-based fly shop Dirty Water Fly Company. He also hosts fishing trips, and recently returned from hosting his sixth group at Anglers Inn, located in the Mexican state of Sinaloa. One of the many nice aspects of Anglers Inn is that it has lodges on both Lake El Salto and Lake Picachos, two of the finest largemouth lakes on earth. A typical hosted trip would see all of the guests staying together at one of the two lakes, with maybe a chance for a day trip to the other one. But this would not be a typical hosted trip.
LIKE MANY FIRST-TIME ATTENDEES, he sat in the back for several nights, drinking coffee and working up the nerve. I noticed him, but I’ve seen plenty of his type come and go. Some have hit rock bottom and are ready to deal with their problem. Others know the truth but aren’t ready to accept their dependency until it destroys everything they once held dear. When you’ve been to as many meetings as I have, you learn not to get attached to the dabblers.
THE BOISE RIVER flows just beyond my office door, passing Fortune 500 companies and a cadre of office complexes and eateries. Along its banks is a twenty-five-mile greenbelt where hundreds of people walk, bike, jog, roller blade, and relax.
ONE THING BEGINNING fly anglers should be taught is the importance of knowing when to quit. In certain sports, sheer will and dogged determination are critical to success, but this can backfire in the case of tangled leaders. Every seasoned guide has witnessed this: The caster has missed a hookset or thrown a tailing loop into themselves or committed some other cardinal sin resulting in an infamous bird nest. Their rod is draped with a wet girdle bug, some split shot, a size-18 pheasant tail, and a strike indicator, all webbed together with dripping coils of crisscrossed fluorocarbon. Without fail, the new angler will ignore the line nippers hanging from his neck and instead set about trying to untangle the jumbled snarl while avoiding having to snip or re-tie any part of the system.
THOSE WHO PREFER fall fishing typically want to partake in a peaceful practice, connecting to the water and the fish at a time with fewer jetskiers and Instagramming paddleboarders in manbuns. These anglers aim for graceful, leisurely, practical fishing. Then there are those who chase false albacore.
A YOUNG ANGLER lands a nice-ish trout and wants to share the photo, not only because of the fish, but because of the location: at the base of a waterfall, beneath a big bridge and a gondola, in downtown Spokane, Washington.
Jim Lichatowich is as happy as anyone that the Elwha dams on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula came down. But a recent attempt to witness the biological recovery
there reminds him that there are equally stubborn obstacles to steelhead and salmon recovery that unfortunately can’t be removed with dynamite or heavy equipment. “A
former colleague of mine organized a trip to Elwha after the dams were out,” Lichatowich says. “He called me and said, ‘the trip is still on but you’re not on it. The guy
from National Marine Fisheries Service that was gonna show us around mentioned your name to his supervisor and was told you couldn’t come.’ So I was uninvited. But that was the week that Republicans shut the government down, so no one got to go anyway.”
It rained nearly all day—not heavy but steady—and stopped just after dinner. Perfect! I knew from his manner, Dad was itching to hop in the old pickup later that evening and motor to our local, unassuming public golf course. With a bucket in one hand, a flashlight in the other, he took me to one of his favorite spots—about 100 yards down the second fairway. His other choice spot was just this side of a fairway bunker on the eleventh hole.
The look in my wife’s eyes suggested that what she was about to tell me would be a crushing blow. “I wasn’t able to get a ticket for you,” she said. “I’m so sorry.” The ticket in question was to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, which, in the world of our teen and pre-teen daughters, is serious currency. My wife had secured six such tickets to the sold-out concert at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa. All of which were allotted to my daughters, their friends, and their moms. I put my hands on my wife’s shoulders, looked her straight in the eyes and replied, “Don’t worry, honey. I’ll try to find something else to do.”
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.