Bruun (L) and Pallot, smallmouth fishing in Wisconsin. August, 2025.

A Flip Fable

bass, Drake Magazine Fall 2025, Freshwater Fly Fishing, Homepage ContentLeave a comment

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.

Something that looks sort of like a mayfly. PC: A.J. Swentosky

Summer Doldrums

bass, Drake Magazine Summer 2025, Flies, Freshwater Fly Fishing, Homepage Content, U.S. placesLeave a comment

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.

Idaho's world-class smallmouth water. PC: Visit Idaho

Dworshak Dreams

bass, Drake Magazine Summer 2025, Homepage Content, U.S. placesLeave a comment

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.

City Limits: Washington DC – Trout and Traintracks

Drake Magazine Back Issue Content 2003, Lifestyle, Trout, U.S. placesLeave a comment

I grew up in Detroit, a city whose belching smokestacks and clamoring auto plants preach a relentless contempt for mass transportation. Yet when I moved to Washington, D.C., I fell in love with trains—the grand stations and comforting rhythms of the ride hooked me. I eventually ditched my car completely, relying solely on bike, cab…