Spring 2019

Anglers Journal

A Fishing Life

Anglers Journal1 min read
Better Than a Bertram.
Legendary. We don’t need to explain what it means. Think of a legendary athlete, a legendary destination, or the most legendary catch you’ve ever seen. The picture forms in your mind as clearly and quickly as your eyes move across this page. Legends
Anglers Journal3 min read
Contributors
Bill Barich’s 10 books include Laughing in the Hills, A Pint of Plain and Crazy for Rivers. He has written about fly-fishing for The New Yorker, Sports Illustrated and other publications. Bill takes us to Ireland to fish Dublin’s River Dodder, on the
Anglers Journal5 min read
Mail
I was at Miami International Airport on a long delay to Buffalo, New York, so I stopped by a newsstand and picked up the Winter issue of Anglers Journal. I read “Fish Pimping,” and although it’s beautifully written, I have a completely different view
Anglers Journal3 min read
Woke Up Still Not Dead
I had been in the hospital for about four weeks when I got a message from peripatetic fly fisherman and friend Pat Ford, a photographer and writer who contributes regularly to Anglers Journal. He sent fish photos and salutations from a trip he’d just
Anglers Journal6 min read
The Knife That’s Fed Millions (and Me)
Seven keeper fluke, plus a half-dozen tailor blues we’d found marauding a school of rainfish on the way in: not a bad morning for a young trout and largemouth guy learning the ways of inshore fishing from an old salt. Russ Wilson, the outdoor writer
Anglers Journal7 min read
The Ways of the River Dodder
Long ago, I learned a vital angling lesson: Never leave home without a fly rod. In my travels, I’ve often stumbled on fishable water by chance — in Nigeria, say, where as a Peace Corps teacher I hooked a carp-like creature fit for the television show
Anglers Journal8 min read
Taking Stock
An early morning mist rises from the waters, revealing what lies below. As if on cue, a worker at the Quinebaug Valley State Trout Hatchery breaks the surface and the stillness with a long-handled dip net, pulling up maybe a dozen rainbow trout from
Anglers Journal2 min read
Angler-in-Chief
Andy Mill met George H.W. Bush in 1987, the year before Bush was elected president. For the next 20 years, the two fished together often. Bush would call Mill with unmistakable inflection in his voice: “An-DY? What are you doing two weeks from tomorr
Anglers Journal3 min read
Worth Crowing About
I’ve never been a fan of the term bucket list, which exploded into instant overuse after the tear-jerker movie of the same name debuted. Suddenly, everyone felt compelled to tell you exactly which things just had to be experienced before he or she ca
Anglers Journal3 min read
Fast, Strong, Tenacious
My long-departed friend and mentor Russ Wilson used to tell me: “You know, if you tied a 15-pound bluefish tail to tail with a 30-pound striper, the bluefish would drag the striper around until it drowned.” Russ was old school, a lifelong bass man of
Anglers Journal3 min read
Decadent Delight
In the bayous of southeast Louisiana, there’s an old school redfish camp called Bourgeois where the gastronomic influence of New Orleans hangs like Spanish moss. Lean in, and you’ll hear the Cajun guides bantering about tides and flies in one breath,
Anglers Journal3 min read
Beautiful Chaos
Small V-wakes form on a glass surface, almost unnoticeable to the untrained eye. After hours of squinting through salt-stained sunglasses, I’m unsure that what I’m seeing is real. Maybe rays, maybe porpoise — I don’t want another false alarm. But as
Anglers Journal3 min read
A Prince Of The Flats
I doubt there is a fish more accommodating than the mutton snapper. They grow to almost 20 pounds, provide outstanding table fare and can be caught everywhere, from 200 feet of water to the flats. They are common throughout the Florida Keys and Baham
Anglers Journal2 min read
The Wild Ones
It was my second day in the Alaskan bush. Light rain accompanied us downriver as the salmon made their way upstream. We pulled our raft into a swirling eddy at a confluence with a big tributary. I hopped out of the boat and waded up to my knees. I be
Anglers Journal10 min read
Perfect Patterns
A stiff easterly mashes sets of frothy green waves into the sand of Island Beach State Park in New Jersey. To our right, beach grasses dance in the breeze atop 30-foot dunes that the wind has scrubbed for a millennium. Aside from our southbound tire
Anglers Journal7 min read
Alaska, the First Time
I went to Alaska in late August, for the very first time, hoping to catch silver salmon. A longtime fly fisherman, at 68, I was almost the last of my fishing pals to make the pilgrimage. In the early morning chill, I boarded a floatplane in Anchorage
Anglers Journal8 min read
The Gaffe’s On Me
It happened on the last day of the Boothbay Harbor Tuna Tournament in early August 1978. We were aboard my old Shark II, a 34-foot lobster boat I had rejigged for the charter trade, and we were drifting on a flat, pewter-colored sea about 6 miles sou
Anglers Journal13 min read
Fish Story
In the early 1960s my parents ran a service station about 60 miles west of Fort Worth. The gas station was in the middle of the country, along a reddish, gravelly, rutted road on the way to nowhere. You could see someone coming from a long way off. P
Anglers Journal2 min read
Faces of Silver Creek
Silver Creek is often referred to as the graduate school of fly-fishing for trout. Located in a sagebrush prairie in south-central Idaho, the spring creek is flanked by willows, farms and ranchland. Think barley, alfalfa, cows, sheep and a tiny, down
Anglers Journal6 min read
Front and Center
This may come as a shock to some, but it’s OK to be comfortable when you’re headed offshore to fish. You don’t need to be standing for hours on end. Nor do you have to sit on a cooler or a fishbox when you’re taking a break to grab a sandwich. “Just
Anglers Journal3 min read
My Boat My Life
In early 2007, my dad purchased an 18-foot Eagle flats boat to fish Sebastian Inlet and the Indian River near his house in Palm Bay, Florida. I found the boat on eBay and instantly fell in love with her. The hull could not be missed, with its dark gr

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