When I pull into a parking spot, when I finally see the stretch of river that speaks to me, I tend to lose my calm. The tailgate opens, my gear tumbles out, and I’m lost in trying to do three things at once, to get my waders on, pack my gear, and string my rod.
Read MoreBrown Trout Birthday Bash, Part 1
The first conversations before rigging up are a spell, something to conjure up a best-case scenario. We want dry fly fishing. We’d accept swinging wets. We’ll nymph if that’s what the day offers, but we won’t go home and brag about it.
Read MoreCarp Quest 2018
I’ve decided that this is the year I finally crack the whole carp thing. I’ve done the reading, I’ve looked at the maps, and I am ready to go all in. At least until runoff is over and all of the trout water opens up. But until then, it’s carp for me.
Read MoreThe Trips We Never Take
My summers are littered with the trips that I don’t take, all the adventures that never came off or made it out of the planning stages.
Read MoreFlotsam: Lost and Found
Things even out over time. When you lose something in a river (barring a fly rod, of course. You’re going in after the fly rod.) it’s simply left your hands to wind up in another’s.
Read MoreFOMO
No one ever added a thumbs up emoji to a picture of you compiling monthly reports or swilling your fourth cup of terrible office coffee. These things are simply what bridges the gaps between our opportunities to do the things that we actually want to be doing.
Read MoreFly Philosophy
I am an informal fly tyer. I have stolen heavily from a great number of people and resources and smashed all those tricks, tips, preferences, and shortcuts into what I’d call my personal style.
Read MoreGas Station Coffee
That last sip of gas station coffee goes down smooth. It’s almost entirely hazelnut flavored creamer at this point, and little more than lukewarm, but I am loving it.
Read MoreFishing in Town
There’s no real gray area about fishing in town. You tend to either love it (well, maybe be ok with it. Love is a strong term), or you hate it. It’s a difficult position to find yourself in, knowing that you may have great fishing in town but that the surroundings definitely won’t be the pristine river environment that you prefer on the weekends.
Read MoreHampstead's Knockabout
The honest truth about this fly is that I stole the pattern from Jeff, who either invented it or modified it, I can’t remember. I contributed almost nothing to the development of this pattern, except for the name, the erroneous pedigree, and the verbal abuse I offered up to Jeff whenever he was catching fish on it and I wasn’t.
Read MoreCasting Call
When I picked up a Western rod again I told myself that I’d be willing to settle for bare competence.
Read MoreMedicine Bow
By the time I return to the cabin I am dead tired. It’s all I can do to get my boots and waders off, gulp down some food, and then collapse into the bed, a mess of sweat, mosquito bites, and sunscreen. I caught fish despite myself, and a full day’s worth of jumping brookies fills my head, individual fish blurring into a long montage of strikes and releases.
Read MoreSalvation at Joe Wright
“Just wait,” another angler called without looking away from their indicator. “In another two hours there’ll be forty-five, maybe fifty people standing here.” And so it goes on Joe Wright Reservoir, where the inlet is off-limits until July 1st, and the grayling spawn draws crowds of anglers eager to stand shoulder-to-shoulder while a veritable herd of fish stampedes upstream, deep in the throes of piscine lust.
Read MoreSilver Creek
It’s the kind of place where, if you start early enough—bringing well-bagged peanut butter sandwiches and full water bottles—you won’t have to leave the water until it’s almost too dark to find the cabin again. On days like this, a small group of anglers can catch so many trout between them that good-natured competition quickly gives way to gleeful confusion.
Read MoreBWO
Streamlined and minimalist, my Blue-Winged Olives are impressionistic, a sketchy rendering of the barest outlines of an insect: hackle, body, and tail with no fisherman-pleasing upright wing to complicate the pattern.
Read MoreWolff Atlas Vise
I like to imagine that Captain Nemo would have been a fly fisherman. That he would have stood on the deck of the Nautilus swinging streamers for kraken on windless, starlit nights. After dinner, in his stateroom, he would have tied intricate deer hair flies by candlelight, carving sculpted diver-style heads with a straight razor, and whispering madly to the flies about the monstrous jaws they would eventually meet.
Read MoreFallen In
I’ve just fallen into the river. Perched one-footed on top of a slick rock and trying to cast into the deep part of the pool was too much for my boot’s aging tread. I’ve just splashed, magnificently, inelegantly, completely, into neck deep water. A quick, gasping lunge towards the bank and I toss my rod into the willows, rip open my chest pack, and throw my phone onto the grass.
Read MoreWeekend Dispatch from the Arkansas
The pile of fleece on the floor stirs as Baxter begins to unfold himself from his blanket fort. I say, “My, what big teeth you have.” But he shakes himself awake in a manner that indicates he is a dog, and doesn’t know what the fuck I’m talking about.
Read MoreWinter Fishing Desperation
It’s the ass-end of January, and I longingly remember the sequences I use to tie blood knots, davey knots, and surgeons knots, but when I look down at my hands, dry and cracked from the cold winter air, they feel useless and palsied. They feel old.
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