The Drake

THERE ARE THIRTY-EIGHT nonstop routes to Cancun, Mexico, from the United States. In June, nearly eight hundred flights landed there from Houston and Dallas alone. In 2022, the combined number of passengers arriving at the Cancun and Los Cabos airport

It is time for a slow-fishing movement, and Stephen Sautner’s story (“Numbers Game,” Fall '22) was a refreshing break from the how-many-and-how-big flyfishing mentality. We all should step back and appreciate the beauty of our sport. Sautner hit it o

THE FIRST EMAIL arrived on July 14. “Reaching out to pass along some fresh ‘industry happenings’ from the heart of Bolivia’s golden dorado region,” it began. “I figured the Drake might be interested in looking into it.” The “happenings” had occurred

MIKE PEPPER CAME LATE to the painting game. The angler-turned-artist, who’s bug-inspired watercolors present a different take on flyfishing art, only started painting after he retired. His wife, Connie, had been painting for twenty years, and after s

DESPITE THE ODDS, with the country being in the throes of conflict, I made it to Russia for steelhead season this fall. Even better, I made it back, although my mother and sister had their doubts. It wasn’t easy, to say the least. But I wanted to be

FLYFISHING FOR CARP holds about as much appeal for me as getting a face tattoo. But what if my ancestors—or yours—were doing just that at the dawn of civilization? University of Connecticut anthropology professor Natalie Munro hypothesizes that this

“WE HAVE TAILS AT ONE O’CLOCK,” Andrew tells me. I’m standing on the bow of a seventeen-foot skiff as our guide, Andrew Murphy, points at a large school feeding in front of us. The scene is textbook bonefish: the boat, the clear shallows, and the tan

WHILE HAVING A BEER on the deck of the Riff Raff Brewing Company in Pagosa Springs, Colo., I spied a fly shop I’d never heard of before. Since I simply must check out every new fly shop, I stopped in—and learned that it’s not a fly shop. The first th

FOR DECADES, the United States Forest Service (USFS) and Trout Unlimited (TU) have worked together to protect coldwater fisheries. The Feds contributed technical expertise and millions in funding. TU used the money and legions of local staff and volu

My humans are super into their skiing, almost as much as their flyfishing, and while I dig the whole playing-in-the-snow part at the base area, we often end up at some fancy resort where I get stuck in the truck while they “train” or “shred the gnar”

THERE COMES A TIME in the dregs of winter when I just have to get out. In my undergrad days, after I invented alcohol, a group of us would get up before dawn and go down to the still-frozen lake to drink beer from a keg. Most of us thought we were pr

THERE IS AN OPAQUE Irish notion that humans can exchange atoms with inanimate objects. This usually enhances one at the expense of the other, and it happens almost imperceptibly slowly. My fellow Irishman, the novelist Flann O’Brien, wrote about the

WHILE DEALING WITH a tumultuous time in my early parenting life, I vented, bitched, and moaned to a family psychologist. How I felt trapped; how each day seemed an endless roundabout of work, chores, and trying not to be an asshole father; how I need

WHEN FLYFISHER types touch down in Cancun, they typically head south to do one of three things: take a shot at their first bonefish in Ascension Bay; attend a hipster wedding or tequila tasting in Tulum; or head down for a few sporty DIY days of cast

I'M NOT A SOUTHERNER And my steelhead addiction likely means that I’ll never become one. But if I was to ever leave the West for the culture and food and fishing of Dixie, South Carolina would be high on my list. And the two days I spent fishing on a

WHEN I FIRST MOVED to Western Massachusetts I was learning local waters on foot, searching for wild trout among the slippery boulder fields that the great glaciers had left behind. Using the Mohawk Trail to slip through the mountains between two wate

THE HEAT PUSHING OFF THE ENGINE was obvious, radiating through the vents and steaming up the windshield. “Are all those lights usually on like that?” asked one of the clients, who was deeply concerned with the health of our vehicle, but also with my

Who wouldn’t like to wet a line in Salisbury Cathedral? After all, standing beneath its vaulted ceiling, watched over by stained-glass angels and saints, while working a fly through its secret waters, could be the peak experience of angling in Englan

THE CABIN OF THE TRUCK is booming with tribal chants and is illuminated only by various maintenance-malfunction lights. It is 5 a.m. in October, somewhere on the 640,000-acre Warm Springs Reservation in the frigid high desert of Central Oregon, when

Years ago, upon my first publication in Gray’s Sporting Journal, editor Jim Babb suggested I look up a friend of his in Anchor Point, Alaska. I was just starting out, and Jim thought my writing to be “windy.” He thought I could learn a thing or two f

Drive around Anchorage and you will see weed shops and pawnshops, drive-thru espresso huts and homeless shelters, breweries and Baptist churches. You’ll also see specialty stores: Alaska Fashion Wigs, The Ammo Can, Granny’s Guns—all of them scattered

My wife, Jess, grew up behind the West End levee in Warren, Pennsylvania. The Allegheny River runs along the base of this levee, and the river here is scalloped with gravel bars and boulders and fishes well for smallmouth in the summer. I fished ther

LIKE MOST days in Great Falls, Montana, it was windy on Wednesday, February 19, 2014. Fifty-mile-an-hour gusts made the mid-thirties temps bite even harder than usual. Under mostly cloudy skies, authorities leaned over the rails above the Missouri Ri

ALMOST DUE NORTH of Caracas, Venezuela, with the Dominican Republic to the west and the British Virgin Islands to the east, lies relatively unexplored Puerto Rico. The flyfishing rumor mill began churning out reports this past spring about what South