After I spring for the plane ticket to Chile, I tell my friends there, all of them professional flyfishing guides, the most important things are to see everyone, eat good food and drink good wine together. Not that I will pass up any opportunity to go fishing, but the months of border closures have left […]
New Mexico Department of Game and Fish ran this roadside advertising campaign for years: “Take a Kid Fishing.” The billboard featured a chubby little boy, eyes swelling with tears and hands holding a scarred-up hatchery trout. I chuckled at the irony of it as we drove past one, headed up the Pecos River that windy […]
As Osmany ran the skiff across the gulf toward a little channel where dead mangroves merged with new, the boat began to slide and fall in colossal swells. When a dot of trees finally came into view, Osmany radioed Yadian, whose skiff was coming in behind ours. “Yadian, háblame!” he said, lighting a cigarette under […]
The Nez Perce call the river yáwwinma, meaning place of cold water. Non-Indigenous people refer to it as Rapid River. It’s the only stream Congress ever designated a Wild and Scenic river exclusively because of its water quality. Even in August anglers wet-wading its headwaters suffer numb feet. The steep forested canyon and its rock formations […]
It is worth stopping and looking at the work of James Sampsel, a flyfishing guide and artist based on the Wild and Scenic Rogue River on Oregon’s south coast. Dynamic or subtle, Sampsel’s paintings reward the viewer’s investment of time. Many are scenes anglers will find familiar, if not in the specific details of western […]
The African night stretched to infinity beyond the tip of my 12-weight. Our fourth night wading this untamed beach had yielded nothing but a steady stream of blood leaking from my right heel, the rich plasma broadcasting my presence to patrolling sharks like an overzealous waiter trying to sell the evening special. “Hey Teddy,” I […]
It was mid-July 1994. From my home in the San Juan Islands of Washington state, I was 10 days into a kayaking odyssey that would ultimately deliver me completely around the largest island along the west coast of the Americas, Canada’s 12,000-square-mile Vancouver Island, BC. The idea had come about during my years on the […]
“It feels like my hand is burning…” Sure enough, my hand was, in fact, burning. A 32-pound bull red was peeling across a channel deep in the Mississippi River Delta, taking with it 100 feet of line and a fair amount of my skin as Camille Egdorf McCormick and our guide, Travis Huckeba, looked on. […]
Dave Downing picked me up at the Glasgow Airport at 8 a.m. Two hours later, I stood in the middle of the River Clyde in a setting that could be mistaken for an 18th-century oil painting alongside Downing, a former world championship angler on the National Scottish Fly Fishing team and a well-known fly tier […]
Andrew Thompson has always straddled worlds, been caught between town and country, the anachronistic and the au courant. This dichotomy explains his work to a considerable degree. For someone who has known him for nearly 30 years, his recent renderings of rainbow trout and a great blue heron in acrylic and gold leaf on a […]
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