The Drake

IN DECEMBER 2022, two Northern European professors published a paper in the Finnish Journal of Tourism Research titled “Angling Tourism: A State of the Art Review.” Their research looked at ninety-eight articles on angling tourism in twenty-nine coun

ON JUNE FIFTH, the seven members of Colorado’s court of last resort unanimously ruled that 81-year-old flyfisherman Roger Hill “lacks standing” to continue his decade-long legal battle for public access along the Arkansas River (Hill v. Warsewa). Put

FLYFISHING’S GUIDE/CLIENT relationship has always been a special one. All the best guides understand that advice should be given sparingly—as hangry, hungover mumbles mixed with chew spit. Meanwhile, all the best clients understand that, while there

A ONE-GALLON ZIPLOC bag full of water is a wonderful tool for observing a brook trout, allowing you to study it like a jeweler might hold a diamond to the light. I was participating in a sampling event hosted by Trout Power, a Rome, New York-based no

HERE I SIT, behind the backseat of this old Mercury Marquis, staring at the white-oak acorns I’ve collected in the spare tire to get me through winter. My tiny heart is about to explode because my home just began roaring again like the Detroit luxury

SIX YEARS AGO on these very pages, Drake podfather Elliott Adler profiled fisheries biologist Ryan Dunmeyer and art teacher James Dunlap, who together had started producing fine art of beautiful flies—the kind you tie to the end of your line. In the

I first heard of Mending the Line in June of 2021. The writer, Stephen Camelio, emailed to say he’d written a screenplay “about a Marine injured in Afghanistan who comes to a V.A. hospital in Livingston, where he meets a damaged Vietnam vet who teach

SHILOH NICKERS AND ROCKS GENTLY, finding her footing on the basalt and granite. She is taking me down into the valley, down to the river, this river of cutthroats galore. Some rivers are good, some are damn good, and a very few are exceptional. This

THE LOOK IN my wife’s eyes suggested that what she was about to tell me would be a crushing blow. “I wasn’t able to get a ticket for you,” she said. “I’m so sorry.” The ticket in question was to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, which, in the world of our te

THE SUNSPOTS ON HIS FOREARMS are constellations in time. I considered how many hours he had spent baking in the sun, waiting for something to happen. Just how many mackerel had his hands claimed, how many sea trout fell to his cooler? “Need anything

IN MINNESOTA BLUFF country we don’t have twenty-six-inch cutthroat. Nor do we have grizzlies, wild horses, or broad, hundred-mile-long, gravel-bottomed rivers pouring down from the mountains. What we do have is the Whitewater Valley and Bud’s Last St

WHAT A BRUNCH SPREAD. Cut flowers, starched and ironed linens, antique water glasses, the good dishes. Open doors ushered in mid-summer morning breezes. A welcome gift from a crisp, clear night following another scorching high-desert day. Pot roast,

WE’VE OWNED THE CABIN for twenty years now, perched above a rushing tributary of the East Branch Delaware River in the Catskill Mountains. My son grew up splashing in the stream and catching frogs, then paddling the river and hiking in the woods. He

I GRABBED A BEER and sat on the riverbank with my bare feet in the water. The sun had slipped behind the monolithic hills of the canyon sometime earlier, setting the surrounding grasses awash in a warm haze that crept down the cliff walls and spread

IN EARLY APRIL, many emails were sent from concerned guides in Louisiana, asking clients and friends to fill out a survey launched by Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. The survey asked a range of questions, from the coastal region you t

THE MINNESOTA Department of Natural Resources (DNR) staff were too busy dumping two thousand young rainbows into the small stream to notice my camera clicking away beside them. Three men wandered around the hatchery truck in long unwashed waders. The

Landing a big salmon makes an angler, at least temporarily, immune to the petty slings and arrows of life. What is a traffic ticket to someone who has just landed a forty-pound salmon? Nothing. Long wait for your table? Meaningless. You’ve exited the

Baseball and fishing are not uncommon bedfellows. In our family, they developed into our two sons’ varsity baseball journey (one as a pitcher, one a center fielder), and as a joint obsession with flyfishing. It’s no coincidence that they again conver

The “bridge” is three rotten telegraph poles laid lengthways across the gorge. It’s barely wider than the eight-wheeled Argocat we’ll drive across it. I can see the stream gushing twenty feet below through the gaps in between. “Replacing the bridge i

Spend a couple weeks touring around the flyfishing byways of Ireland, and you will notice that many of the country’s beautiful backroads are extremely narrow, bordered on both sides by thick, centuriesold stone walls. Driving at high speeds mere inch

I HAVE SOMETHING IN COMMON with the green drake: I’m not an early riser. Consequently, I consider the annual summer solstice a sacred occasion, with nearly sixteen hours of continuous daylight, the earth tilting toward the sun like a tourist basking

SOMETIMES WE GO PERMIT fishing and don’t catch one. (Most of the time, actually.) Don’t let that ruin your trip. As photographer Joe Evans and friends learned on a recent trip to Xcalak, Mexico, (a great place for permit) those black-tailed devils sh