The Drake

AFTER ONE PARTICULARLY hot and fishless day on Québec’s Bonaventure River, my friend Jonas was driving out the dirt road and came across a group of parked cars. He stopped to take a look and, by his telling, before he knew it he was seated at a table

THERE ARE MORE OF US NOW. In fact, there are far more. More than ever before. We aren’t guessing; we know the number of fishing licenses sold in 2020 vs. 2019, and frankly, it isn’t even close. Two examples: Colorado’s fishing license sales increased

Your content is really what draws me to The Drake. I work as a Conservation Officer up in northwestern Ontario, about an hour from Lake Nipigon, a massive freshwater lake that produces some of the biggest wild brook trout in North America. I really l

UNTIL JANUARY 4, I’d never even heard the term “float-n-fly.” It sounded like a kid’s ride at the fairground, or the street name for some illicit new drug. But I Googled it that day—the same day Oroville, California-based flyfishing guide Ryan Willia

Salmon need a river, and right now, they don’t have one. We’ve spent 17 billion dollars trying to restore salmon runs, and the fact is, it’s not happening. And if we don’t do something soon, we can write off Idaho salmon to history. I think we’ll hav

MAINE IS A WILD AND RUGGED PLACE by East Coast standards, with much of the state being undeveloped, off the grid, densely forested, wet, buggy, and blanketed by snow more than half the year. It is also home to more than 700 self-sustaining native bro

SAY YOU’RE IN SEATTLE. But you need to travel 1,300 miles to Denver, and you must crawl on your hands and knees to get there. The future of humanity depends on it. More than two grueling years later, having survived a battle with a mountain lion and

PUGET SOUND LIGHTS up orange with the sunrise—slowly at first, just the peaks of the Olympic Mountains—and eventually the evergreen stretches of peninsula and the open water itself, where I strip a chartreuse baitfish fly as saltwater laps at my wade

I LIKE PIKE. I like their lurky, predatory nature, and how you’re never quite sure if “bringing them to hand” is the right thing to do. I like how they often require a sinking line or sink-tip to chase them, but how, occasionally in the shallows, the

I met Bobby Settles in 2003, halfway through his 23 years of co-owning and managing Casa Blanca and Playa Blanca lodges, across Ascension Bay from Punta Allen, Mex. His energy left an impression. Six years later, I was back at Playa during the Swine

I PUSHED OFF FROM the bank onto a patch of glass. My paddle sliced open the chilly water, dripped, then cut in again under a rising sun. A ring-necked duck dipped its beak before disappearing beneath the surface, then rose a moment later, drifted, an

I WAS STANDING in front of the floor-to-ceiling window of my hotel room in The Paris Las Vegas at dawn. The gigantic replica of the Eiffel Tower was before me, and a deep orange glow reflected off The Bellagio’s thousands of windows. A few pedestrian

MY FIRST TARPON on a fly was a stout, laid-up fish that ate my worm and broke me off an hour later. I was a teenager at the time, and fortunate to have a father who took me on an annual spring trip to the Keys. But as I grew older and started achievi

I THINK THAT INGRID would want you to know—as she stands in her waders, stands by her weir, looking down at a dark mass of grayling that were trapped in the night—that there was a time when no one would’ve thought fish would ever need to be counted.

IN SPRING 2020, the rivers near Seattle ran high from snowmelt, but tensions in the city ran higher. Covid-19 was rampant, masks were everywhere, and those with seasonal allergies were given a wide berth. People sometimes forget that our city was fir

JIMMY AND I SET OFF on a Saturday morning for the Pisgah National Forest—specifically, Wilson’s Creek Gorge—our minds set on big browns and bright rainbows. The trip from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Wilson’s Creek normally takes about an hour and h

THIS STORY ISN’T UNIQUE, except that it’s mine. Picture the Olympic Peninsula in all its storied history. Rain. Cold. A father and son with no prior steelhead experience, and a guide who is careful to set reasonably low expectations. A raft, rugged f

THE DRONING HUM of an idling two-stroke is a wonderful way to start a morning. But I’m nervous. On the ride out, schools of redfish and mullet churn the water as we pass. My heart rate picks up when I come off plane and slow to the first spot. Sweaty

IT ALL STARTED OUT SO WELL. I carry two strapped-down cinderblocks in the bed of my truck in wintertime Southeast Alaska, because 37 and raining during the day means freezing overnight. The additional weight helps with traction. Snow doesn’t hide its

None of us guessed what was coming. Within hours of our leaving the river, the county would close all boat ramps and Oregon’s governor would implement stay-at-home guidelines. We were fishing on the last days of winter steelhead season 2020 and we di

Homosassa was a small, quiet fishing port on the west coast of Florida until around the mid-1970s, when it was discovered that fantastic concentrations of giant tarpon gathered annually from late April through May at the mouth of the Homosassa River.

Taylor Streit still has a hard time with the Red River. He grumbles as he walks along its banks in the last stretch before it joins the Rio Grande, deep in a black-walled gorge in northern New Mexico. It’s four miles to the confluence, but between ho

I BEGAN TEACHING Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It in the fall of 2015, to my English 1A Composition and Rhetoric class at a community college so far removed from the rivers of Montana that many students didn’t understand the book’s cover phot

“WELCOME TO THE NORDURA,” says a smiling Einar Sigfússon, manager of this fabled Icelandic salmon river. I sat down with my burly Scottish fishing companion, Euan, as we ate a hearty halibut broth and listened to Einar tell us about the Nordura. The

DURING A LONG SET OF YEARS, chasing trout all over this continent and a few others, I was always in frustrating pursuit of the single best pattern to match any given hatch. It became quite a quest: If I could find precisely the right fly to match the

THEORETICALLY, HE COULD’VE followed through on medical school, remained a Texas carpenter, or kept his only desk-jockey job selling insurance in Grand Rapids. Instead, when the pandemic hit Michigan last March, ace Muskegon River guide Jay Allen coul

I WALK UP the gravel shoreline trying to avoid mounds of fresh bear crap underfoot, while still focusing my gaze on the water, looking behind the gaudy, red-and-green forms of spawning sockeye for a more subtle movement: a mere shadow on the streambe

WHEN ANGLERS SEE POPULATIONS of many fish in a particular area, they will sometimes say things like, “the fish here are fine, I see tons of them!” Problem is, by the time we actually notice declines in a fishery, the damage has often already been don