The Drake

ON A RECENT TRIP to British Columbia, I hooked a steelhead. The steelhead then became unhooked (this happens). But the encounter nonetheless left me very excited. So excited, in fact, that after semi-sprinting down to the next run, I entered the rive

SEPTEMBER 13TH WAS a great day for a long-suffering stretch of Colorado’s South Platte River. After a two-year battle with Colorado’s Water Quality Control Commission, a group of stakeholders including Colorado and Denver TU groups convinced the comm

THE TARPON’S FINS scissored back and forth as it searched for baitfish, and as I watched from the deck of a panga, sixty feet away. It was working the outside edge of a miles-long smear of brown-gold “macro-algae”—a form of seaweed called “sargassum.

THE BIG NEWS this fall in college football is that schools UCLA and USC will move from the West’s Pac-12 Conference to the Midwest’s Big Ten Conference in 2023. This followed the announcement last fall that Texas and Oklahoma would move from the Big

THE LAST WEEK in July can be one of the worst weeks to live in the Keys, as the two-day “mini lobster-season” draws anyone with a boat looking to pillage the tropical spiny lobster, endemic to the tropical watershed. This free-for-all harvest is noto

OUT OF AN AUGUST fog came a convoy of five rafts, one kayak, and one stand-up-paddleboard, all of them floating the Chattahoochee River along the Alabama-Georgia line. Rowing the raft I sat in was Rowell Guevarra, a former Army Ranger instructor at F

“CASTERS! ARE YOU READY?” A man called from a rocky outcropping. I stood twenty feet away, balanced on the edge of a floating dock with the grip of my rod nestled in my hand. “Not yet!” I yelled back. My coach made final preparations, laying my thin

IN FALL OF 1993, then-President Bill Clinton signed Executive Order 12866, requiring all Federal regulatory agencies to publish a list of anticipated rulemaking actions for the upcoming twelve-month period. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS) is

Q: Dear Trask, I’m wanting to learn how to be a better fishing dog, because my captor gets mad whenever I jump into what is obviously a great swimming hole. Do you have any advice on how I can just sit there and watch him fish the hole first, and the

Oct. 18th marks the 50th anniversary of the Clean Water Act (CWA), perhaps the most far-sighted environmental legislation in American history. The CWA established the first permits for regulating discharge of pollutants into “waters of the U.S.” (Tho

UNLIKE MARCH MADNESS, which elicits endless flat-screen hoops watching, autumn madness is fueled by a metaphoric sense of life’s end. By late September, no matter where I live, I always get a quickening pulse. Living now in Oregon, I am a bit separat

I KNEW PATRICK had a wedding the night before, but I didn’t know he’d be coming straight from it. His wine-stained dress-shirt hung untucked over his pants. He had no bag; he walked up my driveway from our mom’s car just after 5 a.m. with a five weig

LIFE IS A JOURNEY through contradictory quotes. Minimalists say memories are more important than stuff. I agree: Get rid of the stuff. But Donald Miller wrote that if you can’t remember it, then it’s like you never did it. And stuff can remind you of

WHEN SPRING FISHING SEASON would arrive sixty years ago, the banks of Owego Creek were lined with anglers of all ages. This was especially true where the creek passes through our farm. Access to the stream was limited by pasture fences, so my father

“PROB HOOKED 50.” The words felt strange as I texted a quick report to my friend Dave. But it was true; I’d spent the better part of the afternoon Euro-nymphing, and the fishing was indeed ridiculous. Within the first hour, I had already hooked more

THREE DECADES of earnestly hunting smallmouth and I still marvel at the places I find them. The obvious spots—in deep runs; throughout pools; in riffles and depressions behind boulders; and in eddies that trout would relish—all make perfect sense to

FOR MY 60TH BIRTHDAY, my wife Lynn gave me a copper bracelet made by Alaska Native artist, Rob Martin. I’d been having an ongoing issue with soreness in my left wrist, and wearing copper around it seemed to help. The bracelet has two salmon on it, a

LIVING NEAR the Blue Ridge Mountains has its benefits, with solid trout fishing in the mountain streams and decent smallmouth in the rivers. But I needed some saltwater, so I headed to the coast for redfish. Technically, that’s not true. I drove to t

Hours into the float already, we’d chucked green and yellow, chartreuse and pink, and black and purple—some with big reflective eyes and others with barred feathers that enticingly slip and slide behind the body of the fly. Nothing was working. Brett

On Oct. 1, 2015, Dave Hall’s best friend was murdered. But nobody in the tight-knit community of Glide, Oregon, could stop by his place to console him, because Dave’s house had burned to the ground twelve days earlier. “It was a log home with a shake

One of the best things about the Swift River’s flyfishing-only section is the help you get from strangers out strolling on the streamside paths. Contrary to their reputation, New Englanders can be a friendly and outgoing people, and I find that most

In countless photos of a flyfisher holding a steelhead—in books and magazines, on Instagram and Facebook—most grasp their fish in the standard glory pose: lifted just above the water, one hand behind the pectoral fins and the other around the tail. S

I CAST MY CLOUSER out on a sinking-head, counted to ten, then started a fast retrieve. Halfway back to the boat, the line stopped, a strip-strike followed, and my backing was soon flowing out through the guides… Question: Where was I? Striper fishing

LIVING IN EASTERN IDAHO allows me to fish some of the finest trout water in the country, from the South Fork of the Snake to the Madison in Montana. But lately, nostalgia has drawn me south, to northern Utah’s Logan and Blacksmith Fork rivers, both o

CLOUDS AND RAIN threatened as I stepped from the single-prop onto the tarmac at the Alaskan village of Galena, home to a few hundred residents along the north bank of the Yukon River, 270 air miles west of my home in Fairbanks. Waiting for me in the

BONEFISH AND TARPON TRUST (BTT) is celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2022, and while many anglers are likely familiar with the work this Miami-based nonprofit has done to benefit the two fish in its name, the data BTT has gathered and the c