Over the years, Bear’s Den Fly Fishing Company in Taunton, Mass., about forty minutes south of Boston, has earned a reputation for knowing not just the best new gear, but also the value of vintage. It’s a robust shop with an unusually wide range of rod brands: Beulah, Diamondback, Douglas, Echo, G. Loomis, Hardy, Nam, Orvis, Redington, Sage, Scott, St. Croix, TFO, Thomas & Thomas, and Winston…
Every year, a small number of striped bass winter over in the bays, marshes, and salt ponds of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. We call them “holdovers.” They’re not big, they can be tough to find, and by the middle of the winter, they look a little haggard. Their flanks, once polished a gleaming silver by a…
From North Carolina to the Vineyard When the indulgences of summer have finally and fully come to an end, it’s time to start thinking about albies. I leave my home before the great commute begins. It’s the only sane way to travel east on the island and, at that time of day, it can actually…
This was once one of my favorite spots in the Catskills. Paul and I used to fish it a lot before he moved to Montana. It’s a good place for Isonychias in the fall, and fishing a big dry in October in the East is something to be relished. I was last here more than…
GLASS AND RUSTED METAL on the beach. The deafening sound of planes landing. And a steady striped-bass bite. The mussel beds and grungy shores of Boston Harbor may not be pristine, but they reliably produce fish—stripers, bluefish, carp, even the rare bluefin. When I tell people I fish here, they scoff, laugh, or plain don’t…
THE ROCKS ON THIS JETTY were all once uniform and composed. They say that, long ago, you could drive a car on them, all the way out to the tower, where the greasy cormorants preen their feathers. This is no longer possible. The Long Island Express hit it with 100 mile-an-hour winds and 15-foot swells…
BENEATH THE MAYO BRIDGE I share a small island with the homeless of Richmond. I return each year when the tiny buds of spring start to appear and warm weather kicks out the last frost. The folks on the island don’t seem to mind. They know why I’m here. There’s a small sandy shore on…
Gamefish status for redfish, speckled trout, and stripers would seem like a no-brainer for anyone outside of the commercial fishing industry. But in North Carolina, even mentioning such an unholy thought could get a gun drawn on you. This spring sights are set on House Bill 353, a state measure that would effectively ban gillnetting…
The Atlanta, Georgia, metropolis moves and shakes with more than 5 million people. It’s home to Coca-Cola and Rubbermaid, sweet red meat and BBQ, and crunk scenesters like Lil Jon and OutKast. What these entities have to do with flyfishing culture is hard to say. But beneath all the Hotlanta hype, a force has surfaced.
My local flyshop is now an empty space with a “For Lease” sign in the window, closed due to competing Internet sales, Wally World, Cabela’s, and a Dick’s. It was the only local place where I could actually talk to someone who fished, fly fished, and gave a damn about the state of fishing in…
I’m sitting now, on one of the first mornings of the New Year, in a messy, stinky pile of marabou feathers and raccoon skins that nearly canvas the frigid wood floor of my tying room. It’s only ten a.m., and I’ve sneezed at least a couple dozen times by now, and my fleecy home office…
When I moved to an Albany, NY suburb from northern Michigan five years ago, my first priority was to find the closest flyshop. At my new place of employment, I walked through a maze of cubicles, searching for the most outdoorsy looking guy in the building. “Bruce, where’s the local fly shop?” “We don’t really have…
We all know what a proper flyshop is supposed to look like. You park where a gas station burned down in the Sixties, walk by a nice place to get a drink, cross over the rickety old porch and then flap through the screen door, stepping into a converted general store built before the crops…