Former New Mexico youth pastor turned Louisiana redfish guide David Best was all smiles when this jumbo sheepshead came to net in Louisiana. Drizzly delta weather had turned off late season bull redfish. Anything other than a slimy black drum was reason to celebrate. The trick now? How to get the fly back. Photo: Robert […]
In the 10-year anniversary edition of The Flyfish Journal, published in fall 2018, we published an essay by the late John Gierach called “Close to Home.” The piece is a meandering, entertaining and, finally, insightful reflection on Gierach’s home waters, beginning with his decision to buy “a wretched, but habitable little home … across the […]
DEE FINKELDee Finkel has called various places in the Northeastern U.S. home, from Philadelphia to Boston and a few places in between. She currently resides in Western Massachusetts where she dreams about flyfishing and fly tying all day at the car dealership where she works, much to her manager’s chagrin. Her work has appeared in […]
Samuel Beckett wrote: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” It’s unclear if Beckett was a flyfisher, but he certainly possessed the sort of neural wiring common to dry fly purists, permit junkies, carp stalkers and steelheaders, the best of which often fail spectacularly. Success or failure are ultimately determined […]
Less than two hours northeast of Redding, CA, the arid landscape morphs drastically into an enormous plateau surrounded by corrugated mountains interspersed with wetland clearings. Vast swaths of uncut timber stretch up the flanks of volcanoes that make up the southern reaches of the Cascades. This region between Mount Shasta (to the north) and Mount […]
Fishing breakups are rough. I’ve had three. The first was Pat. We were just kids with tackle boxes on our handlebars, biking to our local bass spots in Northern New Jersey: office complex fountains, golf course ponds, bends of rivers obscured by thick brush you’d have to army crawl through. The best spots were the […]
It’s a little like religion and a lot like sex, You should never know when you’re gonna get it next. —Jimmy Buffett Wile E. Coyote had the roadrunner, Tom had Jerry, Seinfeld had Newman, Charlie Brown the football, Ahab a whale, Indiana Jones an ark, King Arthur the Grail, and Gatsby the green light at […]
The envelope contained three items: a Christmas card, an old cloth bag and a matchbox. The cloth bag was something I’d forgotten on a recent fishing trip. The Christmas card made sense—it was Christmas. But the matchbox—that was the odd thing. On the outside of the card, a cowboy carefully trimmed a fake Christmas tree. […]
Oliver Round’s wading boots grip granite flat-topped like slate. My black Lab, Sadie, keeps quiet, a great blue heron roosting on the deadfall by the frozen pond. I only dream of my friend’s fishing. The heron crouches while dog and I trudge snow toward the medical building in zero-degree dark. Oliver hunkers, casts. With a […]
Last spring, while making observations in my field book for Science on the Fly—a nonprofit that partners with anglers to sample their watersheds—I noticed a barn swallow, hanging lifeless from a tangled fly, 25 feet off the ground from the underside of a bridge. Its body is still there as I write this over a year later, and it’s a […]
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