Spring – Flowing Ambition, BayWatch II, Dog Days of Spring, Return to Providence
Summer – Shadow Grab, I’ll Take a Half-Dozen Malpeques and a Cocktail. A Tribute to Jim Harrison, National Park of Flyfishing, Of Mice and Brown Trout
Fall – The Tugur Chum Eaters, The Dean, Mac-Daddy, & the Advocate, The Adirondack Experience
Winter – Into the Mystic, Skagit, v2.0, Brazilian Brawlers, Cold and Clear
BEFORE APRIL ARCHER cofounded Denver-based SaraBella Fishing—makers of women-specific fly rods—she’d already noticed an influx of female flyfishers to the sport. But as an angler herself, fishing since she was a toddler and flyfishing for the past 16 years, she also recognized that there was a distinct lack of women-specific gear.
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…
WHEN IT’S TOO HOT TO FISH, Yakima River guide Nate Rowley snorkels his favorite trout water. He’s been snorkeling a lot lately. On a scorching August afternoon at a coffee shop in downtown Cle Elum, Washington, he reports his findings from a stretch of the Teanaway River, one of the Yakima’s more significant tributaries, protected…
AFTER GETTING WORD that I’d be next in line for the continuing Ride with Clyde saga, my fishing and social life took on a strange, A-list vibe. Clyde is a rock-star rig, and I suddenly became a kind of social agent for this over-forty hunk of Detroit steel.
IT’S NOT DIFFICULT to imagine the tiny community of Forks, Washington, on the Olympic Peninsula, kindling the kind of small-town restlessness that prompts its sons and daughters to move elsewhere. But Gray Struznik, born into this land of tall trees and deep puddles, was never struck by that desire to bounce. Instead, he stayed and…
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…
IN MARCH OF 2016, C1 films released a permit movie called t. Falcatus Ch. 1: Day of Days. The film opens with Nathaniel Linville, owner of The Angling Company fly shop in Key West, giving viewers advice: “I recommend anyone who’s watching this, turn the volume down; I got nothing interesting to say.”
EVEN IN THE END, Cliff Hansen—one of the most influential advocates of local control and state rights in Wyoming history—thought it was a good idea. But thank the river gods he didn’t get his way back in the day. Otherwise, the Snake River in what is now Grand Teton National Park would be a whole…
A few years ago, I was sitting on the porch of a house I no longer live in, venting to a friend about “too much work, not enough fishing.” I told him I wanted to fish again, and said I knew just the guy to get me back on the water. The porch had great…
FOR MANY YEARS after I met Jeff Cottrell, I would have said that SoCal’s Bear Creek was the best small stream I’ve ever fished. A secretive tributary of the San Gabriel River not far from the troubled sprawl of the L.A. basin, it was the kind of place only fishing kids knew about.…
CHAD BROWN, the Navy veteran who spawned the Soul River Runs Deep brand, looks like he’s just fought the battle of his life. And it’s no surprise he’s beat. A glance at my watch shows 3 a.m. Alaska time and Brown, along with his squad of vet volunteers here to herd a posse of bedraggled…
IT STARTS AROUND THE SAME TIME every year, in late June or early July. And on a day that you should be fishing, you’re instead making furtive mouse clicks and talking in hushed tones with your buddies, always reminding yourselves that it’s still too early to say anything definitive. Then, as trout fishing ebbs into…
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…
DEEP INSIDE MOST TROUT anglers lies an understanding that the existence of clean water and healthy public habitat are what get us out of bed in the morning, especially on weekends. Many have sacrificed lucrative careers, either by stalling out in the middle when the job-responsibility-to-annual-vacation-day ratio became optimal for fishing, or by running away…
THE BEST-KEPT SECRET in all of Colorado is on the Taylor River. Every fisherman in the state knows the river itself, and those who think they’re special know to fish it at night, but a select few know the real spot. In the town of Almont, just across the bridge on Taylor River Road, sits…
NO ONE IS SURE where the brook trout found in Soda Butte Creek came from. Maybe a flood washed them over from a neighboring drainage. Maybe somebody in Cooke City had a bucket and a brookie fetish. Then again, the source doesn’t exactly matter. The fish are interlopers in one of Yellowstone National Park’s most…
“I CALL THESE OUR FEEL-GOOD PROGRAMS,” says Dennis Dunsmoor, Director of Colorado Correctional Industries (CCI), referring to several small-scale businesses he oversees, including rod-building, that are run out of the Arrowhead Correctional Center in Cañon City. “We don’t make money off of them, but the offenders learn skills that will help them on the outside.…
Upon learning of Jim Harrison’s death, reputedly hunched over his typewriter at work on a poem, I gather some of my favorite books and walk to a nearby bar. Perching on a stool by the window, I order a tequila cocktail and a half dozen Malpeque oysters. The oysters arrive, lascivious, nearly quivering in their…
I want to share this award with all the indigenous communities around the world. It is time that we recognize your history, and that we protect your indigenous lands from corporate interests and people that are out there to exploit them. It is time that we heard your voice. —Leonardo DiCaprio, Golden Globes, Jan. 10,…
[The Obama administration and California officials are set to announce an agreement to remove four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River, sidestepping Congress to restore its salmon and steelhead fisheries. The move would result in the largest river restoration in U.S. history. A news conference trumpeting the deal will take place today at the Yurok Reservation in…
Cleaning a meat slicer requires a certain kind of finesse. It takes concentration, patience, and that funny muscle in your upper forearm. I’m standing awkwardly behind the glass counter at Terri’s Deli in upstate New York, my oddly shaped teenage torso hunched over the slicer. My toothpick arms move carefully back and forth as my fingers get…
The inaugural unfurling took place four years ago in Yellowstone, on Slough Creek’s high meadow reaches. Plush 650-fill down internals provided a cozy bulwark against the still frigid nighttime lows of early spring. Her rugged inflatable underside took the edge off pointy rocks and smothered knobby roots for a comfortable night’s slumber. While her lightweight…
We were steelhead junkies, hooked on moving water. Rivers flowed through us like a stiff Texas breeze. Over a weekend we’d soak up enough to keep us sane for a while, but eventually the beetles would begin to scutter around in our heads again, and we knew it was time to load the truck with…
When Malheur Wildlife Refuge militants in January made the decidedly un-Boy Scout move of announcing their lack of long-range plans by calling for snacks, perhaps they didn’t recognize the plethora of protein swimming just out their adopted back door: a millions-strong armada of carp, so many that their protruding backs can give off the illusion…
Just before midnight on March 27, 2009, South African flyfishing outfitter Gerhard Laubscher and his FlyCastaway guide crew were several hours deep into an end-of-the-season bender on the island of Mahe, the principal destination for tourists in the Seychelles.
After just two days of Western Montana’s “Get Your Guide On” Flyfishing Guide School, seasoned two-year vets Maddox and Karter say they can totally separate the future guides from the wannabees. Here’s a partial list of giveaway blunders they have witnessed: