Summer – The Skeena Significance, Lightning Rod Rivers, The Promised Land, Hyrids: A Dozen New Fish Species, Clyde Goes Camping, Searching for Snook, Riverside Music
Winter – Pride of the Quinault, The Lagoon Factor, Good Times in Terrace, One brown, one red, one brook, Feeling salty, Drake editors remap Michigan… and fail, Groundhog Day for Salmon, Magnuson-Stevens Act in action, your new 2014 fishing license, Clyde’s sleepover with Puget Sound silvers, and a New York apparel company takes fishing to the streets. Road-tripping to Arkansas’ White River
Fall – Triple Threat, The Homestead, (Still) Steelhead Paradise, Page Six Chix, Put-in, Rises, Scuddlebutt, Idylwilde’s Wild Ride, Carping Montana´s Holter Reservoir, Tippets, (Still) Steelhead Paradise, Redspread, Passport, Chasing love in Eleuthera, chasing trout in the U.P., chasing stripers in NYC, and chasing bass in Florida. Also: loving jetties and sandwiches, but hating muskies (sorta). The Catch, Bugs, City Limits, Rod Holders, The Fish Counters, Backcountry, Permit Page
Spring – New Water, Return of the Clark Fork, Ride with Clyde V, Fishing with Kids, Zero Dark Thirty, Extraction Blues, Third Time”‘”s the Charm, Aesthetics of Death, North Fork Blues, Bones on Top, Dick McGuire, Boulder Boat Works, True Colors, Adam DeBruin, Get Ready to Rumble, Injustice, Buying the Farm, The Way of the Spey
The IGFA calls Steve Huff “the most well-respected guide in the history of flats fishing.” In Andy Mill’s book, A Passion for Tarpon, he calls Huff “bar none, the best tarpon guide alive, the best there was and the best there ever will be.” Though he spent the first half of his career guiding 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,…
IT STARTS IN HIGH SUMMER, in Labrador, that land of windswept crags, quaking bogs, and enthusiastic blackflies. “The land God gave to Cain,” as the explorer, Cartier, described it. Well, it is my sincere hope that the sumbitch took along a fly rod. I sure did. I’m on assignment, chasing down a mineral prospector who…
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,…
The fly-tying company that lost—and blogged—it all On the morning of May 19, 2013, Idylwilde Flies founder Zach Mertens stared into his computer screen, digesting the bizarre circumstances that had sent his business spiraling. He then began punching paragraphs into the keyboard with the kind of blunt transparency unexpected of a company president and owner…
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,…
I woke up Sunday morning with no way to hold my head that didn’t hurt. I contemplated spending the rest of the day staring out the window, imagining fishing trips that never happened. But the cobwebs started to clear, so I figured I might as well go fishing. I loaded a new two-hander in the…
The browns had started to rise just as Sam Bush was taking center stage. Twenty yards of dimpled St. Vrain trout water was all that separated me from Planet Bluegrass amphitheater and a full night of music in Lyons, Colorado. The urge to tube my rod prematurely and forgo my well-designed plan was tempting, but…
IN MICHIGAN’S AU SABLE RIVER VALLEY — cultural hub of the Water Wonderland — summer’s Hexagenia hatch is the source of much anticipation among river families. This is not just a father-and-son ordeal; entire lineages come out of the woodwork to share one of the richest traditions in the Mitten. Generations of anglers are lured…
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…
Dear Humpy, Just wanted to drop you a line, see how things were going. I realize that I’ve taken your very existence for granted for a long time, and I am truly sorry. Hope to see you again soon… Where did it all go wrong? From such a joyous beginning, my personal relationship with the…
ABOARD THE MV MATANUSKA, on a 1,000-mile journey up the rainforest coast from Washington, a cross section of modern-day Alaska’s citizenry relaxed to a gentle January swell—old salts in halibut jackets bound for port towns; rotund men goat-t’d up, ball caps blazing with logos of off-road-vehicle brands; young hippies, all dreadlocks and skirts-over-pants, moving North…
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…
THE FIRST BONEFISH TO EAT MY DRY was tailing in ankle-deep water. I threw it two feet ahead of him and left it to dead drift. When he got near, I stripped it and he saw the wake, followed with his head up, hesitated, then turned away. I twitched the fly and he circled it…
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,…