IT’S EASY TO CAST A FLY IN ICELAND. No trees get in the way. The country never had much timber to begin with, and what trees there were got cut down long ago because burning wood keeps you warmer than not burning wood. Only 20 percent of the Kentucky-sized country can support vegetation anyway, so…
With so many manufacturers barking the benefits of increasingly faster actions, veteran rod designer Tim Rajeff of Echo Fly Rods asks “why follow the flock”?
Seattle is a fishy place. With the Puget Sound in its backyard, the Olympic Peninsula three hours west, and sneaky creeks within striking distance due east, you’d think that in addition to espresso factories on every corner it’d be easy to source a fly shop. But that hasn’t always been the case. Until now.
Five on six, from sockeye to smallmouth. HANNA PERKINS, BROWN TROUT, BIG HOLE RIVER,MT. PHOTO: AUSTIN TRAYSER KATHRYN HICKMAN, SUMMER STEELHEAD, DEAN RIVER,B.C. PHOTO: JEFF HICKMAN
IN THE SHOWTIME SERIES HOMELAND, Carrie Mathison, played by actress Claire Danes, leads drone strikes against terrorists from the comfort of her CIA station. But the same technology that makes drones—also known as unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs—convenient military weapons, has also helped advance the careers of real-world civilians, including a growing list of flyfishing…
Convincing a permit to eat your fly is similar to doing business in a foreign country in that success in both is hard-won. Guide and Tres Pescados Fly Shop owner, Wil Flack, can relate.
Clyde should be dead by now. He was pronounced dead. More than once, in fact. In February 2012, a Salt Lake wrencher put a $1,200 tranny in him and said, “He might make it through March.” In November of that same year, driver Steven Hawley emailed: “Clyde’s 460 is shot. Best quote for a rebuild…
“As with rush-hour driving or the public use of cell phones, everyone believes we need a code of etiquette, but no one can agree on what it would be, and some couldn’t bring themselves to observe it regardless.” —Ted Leeson, Inventing Montana Friday I’ve seen this before. It starts as a spark, then a faint…
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…
THERE WAS A TIME when skateboarder-turnedgraphics- creator Dave Hartman excelled at the art of being aimless. Bucking the law and generally lacking purpose, Hartman bounced from home to home in suburban Arizona and California, rural Alabama, and southern New Hampshire. Until fishing intervened. He found a fly rod and carried it to Montana. And there…
SAN FRANCISCO—According to a study by state biologists, several drought-stricken rivers in northern California’s coastal forests are being polluted and sucked dry by water-guzzling medical marijuana farms. Worse, many affected waterways also contain non-smoking endangered salmon, steelhead, and other species. Biologists estimate that 30,000 pot plants were being grown in each river system. It’s also estimated…
The state fish and game departments for Washington and Oregon both face a major dilemma: how to adequately protect what remains of their wild steelhead, while also continuing to produce hatchery steelhead for the many anglers who like to bring one home for dinner.
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…
Photos and words by Lucas Young There’s a fine line in winter steelheading between bliss and torment. If there was no hope for the first, there’d be little incentive to endure the latter. Riding in Clyde is a bit like that. In summer, he’s warm and smooth and stylish—blissful, even. But in February, with the…
Fishing is a fine way to gain insight into the true nature of water. Russian literature is an equally effective medium for getting a handle on the nature of corruption. In the 1842 novel Dead Souls, by Nikolai Gogol, the protagonist Chichikov connives to get rich off a bureaucratic loophole. Estates are taxed based on…
Years before I saw either a steelhead or the Quinault River, they were twin obsessions dominating my imagination. I would eventually come to meet both, but at different times in my life, and under very different circumstances.
BEFORE THE EARLY 1990s it was impossible to catch steelhead on a fly rod, and certainly not using a floating line and a single-handed rod. We just couldn’t get our small flies deep enough, we couldn’t cast them far enough, and we all just stood there wishing we had a center pin and roe sacks,…
I pulled into the Aspen Recreation Site just before 10 a.m. on Wednesday, October 3rd, after a 13-hour, nearly nonstop rental-car bender from Vancouver. The site is the lowest of three B.C. Ministry campgrounds along the Morice River, sitting about eleven miles southwest of Houston—home of the world’s largest fly rod, the world’s largest sawmill,…
Almost Every Northwest Angler living within 100 miles of the Columbia River or its tributaries has a weekly, if not daily, if not hourly, ritual this time of year: checking the salmon and steelhead counts passing over eight dams on the Columbia and lower Snake rivers—Bonneville, The Dalles, John Day, McNary, Ice Harbor, Lower Monumental,…
A couple years ago, new to Washington, I made my first trip to the Yakima River—a Columbia tributary in the southcentral part of the state. I arrived after dark, with moonlight revealing glimpses of the river as I neared the campground. By the time I got there it was pushing midnight, yet most of the…
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,…
IN 1972 WALT “CLYDE” FRAZIER was holding down the New York Knicks’ backcourt with Earl “the Pearl” Monroe, and my dad came home one day to our suburban Connecticut home at the wheel of a shiny white Mercury Montego MX Brougham. Though it was classified a mid-size, the Montego, with its hood extending into next…
HUDDLED IN THE CRAMPED HOTEL ROOM, I peer down at the creamer label and see that it and the sugar are both produced by the same Texas chemical company. Looking around, it’s hard to believe that they’ve actually fit two queen beds in here. Every inch of open space is filled with duffel bags, rod…
DICK MCGUIRE DIED as we fishers should hope to die—fishing his home water. At 82 years of age in 2007, McGuire launched his boat on Ennis Lake and never came home. They found him the next day floating face down. The coroner didn’t perform an autopsy, so we don’t know exactly what caused his death,…
Back in the fall, during the second presidential debate, President Obama and Mitt Romney got into a somewhat spirited exchange on the topic of energy. It began by Romney saying that “oil production is down 14 percent this year on federal land, and gas production is down nine percent. Why? Because the President cut in…
Across the continent, 2012 was a bad year to be a climate- change skeptic, but a much worse year to be a fish. Before you bid a tepid au revoir to this torrid 12 months, consider: According to 350.org founder and climate raconteur Bill McKibben, June broke 2,132 high-temperature records across the country. May was…