Clouds and rain threatened as I stepped from the single-prop onto the tarmac at the Alaskan village of Galena, home to a few hundred residents along the north bank of the Yukon River, 270 air miles west of my home in Fairbanks.
Minnesota’s Mississippi shoreline bounds the “Southeast Blufflands” region, or what anglers know as the Minnesota Driftless. All five of us fish it: A magical world of pastoral valleys, each drained by a spring creek, mostly brimming with wild fish.
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…
Dan caught the only inconnu. Let’s get that out of the way. “Dan” is Dan Armstrong, a well-traveled, Bozeman-based photographer who occasionally gets invited on spectacular fishing trips with the tacit understanding that his job is to record the heroics of the writer and keep his hands off the rod. But it was our last…
CHASING HATCHES IS STUPID and obnoxious. I know. I’ve tried. Pursuing particular insects insures that the potential for disappointment will dwarf the likelihood of success. If us fishing media folk are to be believed (also a bad idea), fishing is an appreciation of the moment, being present, or some other Baba Ram Das shit. Planning…
I woke to the sound of slaughter. Several times a night this happened. The noise was caused by a pair of prehistoric animals hunting beneath my bed at Brazil’s Uakari Lodge, a floating eco-resort nestled along a protected stretch of the Amazon River, about 400 miles west of Manaus. Guests are advised to sleep with…
THERE ARE MANY SLIMY and unappealing things in Washington, D.C.—politicians, attorneys, lobbyists—but flyfisher Austin Murphy is interested in just one: the northern snakehead, also known as the Potomac Pike or the fearsome-sounding Frankenfish, named for its seemingly unnatural ability to move on land, live for days out of water breathing air, secrete mucus from its…
EVERY TIME A GIRLFRIEND COMPLAINS about her husband or boyfriend going fishing again (insert big sigh), I bite off a small chunk of my tongue. I’d love for my husband to go fishing. A week in Montana? Hmmm- That doesn’t seem far away enough-or long enough. I hear there are big fish in Kamchatka. And…
Today’s fly shop is evolving. No longer is it merely a place to stumble in, drop 10 bucks on bugs, exit toward river, and repeat six months later. There’s more to the equation. Successful shops are community builders. Gathering places for the like-minded. Hubs of activity offering wisdoms extending beyond the sale rack.
Matt Schliske isn’t 90 years old. He does not have a scraggly beard or a cabin in the woods. His driveway shows no signs of potholes and decrepit pickup trucks. And from what I can tell, the 37-year-old does not fit many of the clichés associated with “bamboo rod maker,” other than one: the pursuit…
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.