Legend has it that in some bodies of water, in a certain mountain range, in one western state – all of which will remain nameless – the brook trout are so good at reproduction, and so bad at decision making that a fisherman once pulled dinner from the water, for his entire expedition, using, Read More
Native fish are cool, that’s just my opinion. There is simply something to be said for a fish that is living in the place it evolved. Maybe there are better reasons but that’s what it always comes down to for me. Don’t get me wrong here, I spend more time fishing for rainbows and, Read More
Reading a river isn’t exactly easy, but at least there’s some printing on the proverbial page. Rocks, banks, bends, eddies, riffles, pools – the features of moving water are myriad and often readily evident. 25 miles offshore though, it’s a whole different story, or more to the point, no story at all. 360 degrees, Read More
The rise was visible down the bank, just into the shade under a russian olive. My two year old was hanging onto my leg and my wife was on the sticks. Our daughter was crouched on the cooler next to me. It was the first time our entire family had been in a drift, Read More
PMD’s and Yellow Sally’s were coming off. We were fishing to pods of risers. It was the first true dry fly hatch I had fished this year and it took some adjusting to. Having fished streamers with 2x all winter, punctuated by working on my strip set for a trip to the salt, my, Read More
It’s a park now, mown green-space and graveled paths owned by the city of Williamsburg Virginia. But when I was a boy, not so much older than my son is now, “Government Property” was a tangle of tidewater forest and marshland where earthen battlements – remnants of the civil war – lay hidden in, Read More
The rainbow, who’s situation simply deprived him being able to go to the ocean, gave me his best in honor of his sea run brothers.
We were boys, 16 maybe 17, and newly possessed of ancient desires. Our ill-defined hungers for something slippery, pulsing, and mysterious were poorly met by the confines of our asphalt and strip-mall world, confines erected by sensible elders to keep us in the navigable middle channel and away from the rapids. But being boys,, Read More
I learn something every time I go fishing. Yet with every lesson I realize that the boundaries of my ignorance are farther away than ever. Usually this “progress” comes in bight sized chunks that, like parenting, are great for maintaining humility. It’s a puzzle here (jab), a challenge there (jab, cross) and maybe even, Read More
All day I had been swinging my fly through some of the best steelhead water on the planet, but I hadn’t connected with a fish. The Dean had been kind to me over the past few days and I was utterly spoiled on what was my first steelhead trip. Still, I was addicted to, Read More