The Drake

I WAS REMINDED last winter of just how fun it can be to fish Louisiana in the middle of ski season. Come February, it’s easy to get stuck thinking nonstop about Belize, Mexico, or the Bahamas. This is understandable, what with the beaches and bonefis

That Clyde tale (“Back in the Saddle” Fall ’19), was as American as rosé apple cider. Creek-tripping by land yacht. Nice story. Bryan Bennett, via drakemag.com Great piece on false albacore (“Albies of Autumn” Fall ’19). I live and fish for them in N

WRITER AND HISTORIAN DAVID T. Courtwright calls them “limbic capitalists”—people or companies that target our limbic system, the part of our brains primarily responsible for emotion, especially as it relates to pleasure, motivation, and survival. Cou

HIGH IN BRITISH Columbia’s Cascade Mountains, 100 miles east of Vancouver, an infant Skagit River bubbles to life. More of a mountain brook, it trickles west following Highway 3 until its confluence with the eastbound Sumallo River turns it south, tr

DESPITE SITTING JUST south of Mexico’s popular Ascension Bay—and, like Ascension, located within the 1.3 million-acre Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve—Espiritu Santo Bay is far less known and far less fished. The main reason: Road access. The drive from

ICELAND HAS SEEMINGLY been the rage forever, and justifiably so, with the waterfalls, volcanos, and some of the world’s finest Atlantic salmon rivers. But if you’re tired of being the only one at the party who’s hasn’t hiked the glaciers of Skaftafel

THE HARDEST PART about fishing western Cuba’s Guanahacabibes Peninsula is learning how to pronounce it. Opening spring 2020 for its first full season, El Faro Lodge is brought to you by the folks at Untamed Angling; the team that put dorado on ten th

IT’S A FIFTY-MILE DRIVE from Gearhart, Oregon, south to Tillamook, following US 101. If you drove it today, it would take you just over an hour. In Trask, a historical novel set in 1848, it takes nearly 200 pages. Originally published in 1960, Trask

WHEN IT COMES to traffic, I’d rather be stuck behind cows than cars. Colorado gained 80,000 new human residents from 2017 to 2018, so when I hit hooved traffic upon entering the town of Carbondale, at the head of the Crystal River Valley, I tended to

AS A LIFETIME Oregon resident, angler, and guide, I spend 40-60 days a year on the rivers of the Southern Oregon coast. I interact with anglers that use all types of methods, and every one of them I’ve talked to has noticed a significant decline in e

DATA FROM THOUSANDS of United States Geological Survey (USGS) stream gauges makes it easy to check conditions on almost any river in the country. You’ll find flows measured in water-level, cubic feet per second (cfs), or both, and some gauges even gi

I PAY MY bills here in Southeast Alaska, at least in part, by having short and intense conversations on airplanes. I help wedge wadered clients from all over the globe into DeHavilland Beavers, then drop in on some of the planet’s most spectacular te

AT NEARLY 300 SQUARE MILES, Louisiana’s Toledo Bend Reservoir is the largest in the South and the fifth largest in the country, stretching for some 70 miles along the Texas/Louisiana border. Clyde and I arrived on a late-June evening last summer, hav

Longtime legend of Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley, guide, carpenter, dog-lover, and fly-tyer Roy Palm passed away in November 2019, from cancer. A one-time Aspen bar bouncer and former owner of Frying Pan Anglers in Basalt, Palm’s legacy includes his

KNOW HOW YOU SOMETIMES feel like you’re doing your fair share to help a worthy cause, be it the environment or those less fortunate than yourself, and then you meet someone who’s really contributing and making a difference—one of those people that do

IT’S LATE FEBRUARY and I stumble out the door to grab another beer kept cold by winter’s free refrigeration. If it was anything but the high-octane variety, it would’ve frozen from a lack of alcohol. I pop the cap, drain it, and unzip my pants, melti

MY MIND DRIFTS between two worlds as I survey the muddy water flowing slowly between creosote piers supporting this abandoned railroad bridge. One world is tangible, here and now: the Tallahatchie River coiling through North Mississippi and, within i

I’ve never gotten along well with numbers, especially in the mathematical sense. I almost didn’t graduate high school because of them. But at my senior math finals, my grade sitting at a solid D-, I somehow walked away with a passing grade. Having al

BEFORE I’D FULLY degenerated into the folly of flyfishing, I lived in South Bend, Indiana, along the St. Joseph River. Every year, I would talk my dad or girlfriend into a winter drift trip for steelhead, but this was the business of egg sacks and cr

I’M AWAKE AGAIN at midnight, ghost-pale and sweating profusely, tortured by the possibility that my hometown of Gunnison, Colorado, doesn’t measure up to other Western trout towns. I’m haunted by the prospect that I may be cheating myself out of angl

ACCORDING TO MUSIC lore, Doug Ingle, organist and lead vocalist for the legendary rock band Iron Butterfly, wrote the band’s most popular song during an evening of heavy drinking. The instrument-driven ballad would eventually run more than 17 minutes

WHEN LEWIS and Clark discovered coastal cutthroat, they were using horse-hair leaders, wearing rain-drenched leather moccasins, and traveling with a bunch of aggravated pack mules. When I discovered coastal cutthroat more than 200 years later, I did

EVERY YEAR, a small number of striped bass winter over in the bays, marshes, and salt ponds of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. We call them “holdovers.” They’re not big, they can be tough to find, and by the middle of the winter, they look a little haggard.

IN FALL OF 2016, I was browsing in my local bookstore when I saw a poster advertising upcoming author events. I was beyond excited when I read that David James Duncan, author of The River Why, My Story as Told By Water, and The Brothers K, among othe

Ron called December 14, out of the blue, to say he’d booked us a guide for two days in Colorado, starting the 20th. That kind of spontaneity wasn’t like him, or me, so I figured I’d better join him. I found a flight from San Francisco that matched up

Sigurður “Siggy” Sigurðsson swung his 4Runner off the dirt tracks and through the low-lying grass, stopping among some copseweed at the edge of the Litlaá River. He rolled out of the car and stood in front of the headlights. Whether the Icelandic sun

Survive, is what an angler does the first few minutes after hooking a striped marlin. My friend Nick and I shout with joy, accompanied by excited words in Spanish from our new friends. We watch a reel getting emptied and watch the fish leap, flip, an

Eager as I was to wet a line, the misty slopes across the lake drew my gaze to a row of treeless summits dented with deep, spherical depressions. The Dena’ina people call these hills Vahunqishdghuch’i: the “ones with holes on it.” Some locals call th

I SAW THEM the first morning as I stood choking down shitty hotel coffee and staring out our window from the 24th floor. Fish. Rising and rolling. Right below me in the canals. Holy shit. Dawn was breaking and the Adhan pouring out of the mosque seve

I SAT STARING at my computer monitor, transfixed by what I’d found in a Japanese flyfishing forum. It was the perfect fly. At least, it was exactly what I needed to catch pink salmon on Japan’s Churui River. I just knew it. And it wasn’t even the fla

CARL ALLEN WAS twelve years old when he knew he would one day call the Bahamas home. Memories of his many trips to the renowned Walkers Cay with his father and stepfather fostered a love affair with the islands well into adulthood. Allen is the type

IT’S EARLY JANUARY and my postseason fly-vest purge has begun. Outside, the second big storm of the Maine winter dumps the kind of snow that intends to stay through April. My routine is always the same: everything out of every pocket, each item exami

IN OCTOBER 2001, Hurricane Iris ransacked Belize, leveling trees, flooding fields and streets, and driving more than 15,000 people from their homes before vanishing into the ether somewhere over Central America. One year before the storm, veteran Bel