The Drake

FOR THE PAST 14 YEARS, Heather Hodson has been a critical care RN, working in ICU, Cardiac ICU, and Cardiac Cath Lab—the past 11 of those years at Sacred Heart Medical Center in Spokane, WA. In 2014, Hodson started a group called Spokane Women on the

IT WAS MARCH 19, 2020 (decades ago), and one of my closest friends, a man named Scott Fabrizio, was supposed to arrive in Portland to join me on the Oregon Coast for the last couple weeks of winter-steelhead season. But that didn’t happen, because Sc

WHEN MATTHEW CHURCHMAN woke up on a recent Sunday morning, at first the only thing growling was his stomach. Coffee and a cold breakfast took care of that. Camp, nestled in a 300-yard-long, cottonwood-and-willow stretch of river bottom, was in the pr

THE FIRST FEW BROOK TROUT of my Oregon upbringing were taken with a fly, a bobber, and a spinning rod from two backcountry lakes found in the Beaver State’s Mount Jefferson Wilderness Area, about a 2-hour drive southeast of Portland. The stunning pie

A LARGE REDBAND TROUT darts out from cover, followed closely by three minnows a fraction of its size. The minnows’ movements are chaotic and confused but unafraid as they chase the much-larger fish. It’s not a sight you see every day. Specifically, i

“AS GREAT AS THIS FISHERY IS, you you can still be humbled—especially if you’re on your own,” says Casper, Wyoming-based guide and fly shop manager Addie Dees, referring to the North Platte, a healthy and productive trout river that flows some 200 mi

WHEN I THINK of Auburn football, I chuckle about how, every year, it’s “All Aboard the Gus Bus,” with Tiger fans across Alabama affirming their faith in Coach Malzahn. Delusional hunch-punch is shared annually among the Auburn faithful as they prepar

LORDS OF THE FLY, the latest book by New York-based angler and former Forbes writer Monte Burke, is more about people than fish. Sure, readers will learn a lot about tarpon along the way—perhaps more than they realized could be learned about tarpon.

ON A DIRT road following northern Michigan’s Boardman River, a symphony of gravel plays in the wheel wells of my old Ford. The trail of dust kicked up behind me settles back onto the road, as if to cover my tracks. This place is meant to stay hidden.

BEN CANTRELL and Josh Leisen had been patiently surf-casting with 13-foot rods for three days in Struisbaai, an old harbor town on South Africa’s Western Cape. It would be dusk by the time they both landed 300-pound ragged-tooth sharks within a few m

YOU MAY ASK: Is it reckless to even consider traveling abroad this summer? It’s a fair question. But we feel it’s also fair for a tiny country like Belize, which has done a good job controlling COVID-19, to carefully welcome Americans, as many Belize

Editor’s note: The June 29 issue of The New Yorker included a profile of a woman named Corina Newsome, a 27-year-old black birder and grad student working in southern Georgia. In the piece, Newsome was quoted: “Birding in the marsh is as remote as I’

SATURDAY THE 11TH, April 2020. Got the news today. The troubadour of my soul’s playlist, the gravel-voiced poet of so many of our flyfishing adventures, John Prine, was hooked up to a ventilator. He didn’t survive. I keep waiting for one of the dearl

I LIVE IN MONTANA, so what was I doing on the Erie Canal? Visiting family in Macedon, New York, and healing a broken leg from the tail-end of ski season. It costs nothing to carry-on a fly rod, and my mom retired on a quarry cum condo pond. It’s alwa

MEGALOPS ATLANTICUS. The name belongs more to a creature in an’80s horror film than a fish out roaming the flats. They are so big and powerful it is hard to imagine them existing in real life. I saw Flip Pallot and Jose Wejebe cross paths with these

IT WAS ALMOST the first time in a really long time that only salmonflies, not anglers, would clumsily fall into the Deschutes. Yet, during the height of the hatch in mid-May, as the planet dealt with its own rapidly-spreading phenomenon, Oregon agree

A TWO-SEAM FASTBALL with the bases loaded must be as precise as a bow-and-arrow cast on a tiny creek, surrounded by trees and bushes. A curveball that time-travels (from twelve to six) possesses the same delicacy as my trico, floating daintily over a

AS I PARKED my car in the dirt parking lot, I wondered if it would get keyed. I’d planned my COVID-19 trip the only way I could—online, from the state-mandated safety of my home office, which I’d hardly left in weeks. On forums for hikers and fisherm

PRAISE BE to bluegills. Those grey-green coins between cattails, beneath lily pads, hovering in the arms of drowned trees. They can live in a puddle, or in the farm pond your grandma had the neighbors dig for her ducks, or in the river flowing next t

DISCUSSING A TROUT STREAM with someone who shares an intimate knowledge of it creates a quick kinship. “Took a brookie from beneath that puckerbush off the big log.” “Above or below the island?” “Below, near the birches.” “In the back eddy?” “The sla

THERE’S A SCHOOL across the street from my house with an adjacent playground and a field that in normal times would be teeming with life. It has been empty for two months now, save for the occasional wanderer and, for a little while, me. There has be

“WHEN I’M IN HERE, deep into making a piece, I feel the best I’ve ever felt in my life,” Abe Pieciak tells me. We sip bourbon at the bench in his studio while the radio plays classic rock. Pieciak (pronounced “pea-check”) is stoking the small wood st

On Memorial Day, 2020, I spent the afternoon staked out on an ocean-side flat looking for tarpon with my guide, Albert Ponzoa. It’s the same drill we have shared for twenty-eight previous Memorial Days. In some years the palolo worms have already gon

The cry was repetitive, full of alarm and desperation, the kind of sharp, guttural shriek typically reserved for life-threatening situations. At first the sound was just a curiosity, a babble toying with my slumbering consciousness. It was like a luc

On March 13, 60-year-old retired schoolteacher Ray Montoya arrived on the Arabian Archipelago of Socotra, intent on landing what is thought to be the first permit on a fly from the war-torn country of Yemen. Three weeks later, the talented fly-tyer,

On South Andros Island, in the Bahamas, barracuda are a great sport fish on a fly, sometimes requiring a two-handed stripping technique for speed. Barracude are most often released, but some guides will keep the occasional cuda for dinner. This one f

NO ONE IS GOING to cancel their annual trip to the Bighorn or the Madison to spend a week on Hakihokake Creek or Beatty’s Brook or any of the other few dozen wild trout streams you’ve never heard of that run through my home state of New Jersey. Yet h

THE WEEK THAT clings to the first days of June produces a unique blend of hatches and conditions in Pennsylvania. With flows dropping and bugs beginning to emerge, the first push of summer sends anglers to the river, hoping to catch the tail of our s

LIFE WAS GOOD for a Pennsylvania kid obsessed with flyfishing. Streams and trout were aplenty, and having a high-school shop teacher for a father meant summers spent hiking up Appalachian mountain streams in search of our favorite target, the brook t

LAST FALL, permit whisperer Wil Flack offered me his spot on a seven-day spring trip to the atolls of Poivre and St. Joseph, in the Seychelles. Opportunities to fish these remote islands are rare, so I accepted, and on March 12, flew from Dubai to Ma