-
The Steelhead With A Thousand Faces
Maybe if I take five more steps, throw one more mend, skate one more fly, a hero will appear, armored in chrome, and dance to the music of my singing reel.
-
The Birth of A Fishing Town
Calf deep now in the cold river, Trent’s completed his prelude of silky false casts and is ready to start the show in earnest.
-
In The End, Style Might Be All We Have
Over the course of 6 trips, in and out, and nearly 40 miles, I question whether or not it’s worth it.
-
Banded
Folding neatly the greenhead splashed soundly onto the water. The old lady made quick work of the retrieve.
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
It’s six o’clock Friday afternoon. Your kid’s been sick all week, your sleep deprived, work-stressed wife has a headache, and supper-time is about to expire with you down 0-3. Time to settle for a box of mac and cheese, and kiss tomorrow morning’s fishing excursion goodbye, right? Not so fast! Go deep with a, 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
My lungs were about to explode, which masked the burning in my quads. The terrain was unforgiving. So were the birds. We had been in birds all day, but it was the last day of the season and they were onto us. Only minutes prior I had managed to scratch down my first chukar, Read More
One thousand two hundred and twenty-eight generations ago, my ancestor lay curled in a shallow depression scratched from the soil of a low African cave, listening to the night. Fear and Hunger waged a Great Battle in him. Fear was mighty and terrible in its strength, neither reasoned nor conceptual. It was real; a knowing in my ancestor,, 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.