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.
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.
Coming to terms with a new reality This past December, I received an unwelcome holiday surprise. Our corporate overlords rounded up the staff at the magazine where I’ve worked since its inception, twenty-three and a half years prior, to announce our new direction. The upshot: We could still pursue exciting careers in magazine journalism, a…
Sowbellies and baseball in the Cornhusker State Dawn comes early to southern Nebraska on the 16th of June. Nautical twilight, second of the earth’s three twilight phases, begins before 5 a.m. in Kearney, a town of some 30,000 sitting just off I-80 about three hours west of Omaha. I stopped in Kearney last summer on…
PIPELINES GET A BAD RAP, which they often deserve. Last November, the Keystone Pipeline—of Standing Rock protest fame—leaked more than 200,000 gallons of oil from a below-ground crack, adjacent to Sioux lands near the Lake Traverse reservation. The irony was lost on no one, least of all the protesters who were forcibly evicted from their…
You go to florida to fish the salt. But if you also happen to love largemouth, as I do, and you live in a place that’s a mile high, with a nine-week window to fish for them, then you take advantage of every opportunity to chase them elsewhere. Attending this summer’s annual flyfishing trade show…
Cohutta Fishing Company began life in fall 2009 high on aspirations… a little short on ceiling space. For three years operations were dwarfed inside an 8-foot high, 1,400 square-foot box—which made selling 9-foot fly rods tough. The shop has since relocated, ballooning its square footage, expanding inventory with stocked shelves of top gear, and planting…
The pilgrimage to my perceived Mecca took 22 years, 11 months, 16 days, and 20 hours. I arrived fresh out of college, riding a 2.7-liter American-made Japanese chariot, complete with three-inch lift kit and the white silhouette of a blitzing Montauk striper across the back window. I was hell on wheels and ready to set…
Sneaking onto a golf course to catch a few unguarded bass is one of the most time-honored traditions in flyfishing, especially if you’re a golfer. Who among us hasn’t walked down some random Sun Belt fairway (or rough, more likely) only to peer upon a hungry four-pounder lurking in a water hazard along the way?…
The Sacramento There’s a special kind of summertime heat reserved for the valleys of California. Even up north, triple digits are common in the Sacramento Valley, which is where I found Clyde parked in Ryan Peterson’s driveway, its black exterior soaking up every ray in Redding. With no AC and an afternoon departure, my first…