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 […]

Bag du Jour Force-feeding yourself freeze-dried beef stroganoff at 12,000 feet in the Eastern Sierra is no place you want to be.  Alex’s silence, his head held in his hands, said it all. Dude was in a bad place. The altitude and a fishless day and too little water and too many miles had messed […]

Hell rarely breaks loose so quickly and so close, only to smash cut, as in a film, so abruptly to the peace and quiet that is the special province of a Caribbean island beach mid-morning before the sun and heat have properly gathered steam. Copi Vojta and I were standing on Puerto Rico’s west coast—a […]

The 45th parallel south lies about a 20-minute drive from my home on New Zealand’s South Island. That puts me right in the heart of the roaring 40s, a real perk for the early mariners from which the blustery namesake originated but not so much for the modern-day fly angler. It was mid-September, the start […]

As Karim Boutellaka and I pilot our rental car across a high plateau in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains, it’s hard to believe that any fish—much less a remnant population of Ice Age brown trout—could survive in this arid landscape. The rocky slopes completely lack vegetation in some spots. In others, the rough ground is sparsely covered […]

Tasmania’s Western Lakes can’t be found on maps. This isn’t a deliberate approach to keeping things on the shush—there is little point, as there is enough water “out west” to fish every day of the week for a century. The reason this place isn’t on a map is far more logical—it isn’t an official name. […]

When I moved from Montana to Alaska in 2008 to study fisheries science at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, one of the things I fell in love with was how remote the “last frontier” really was. There were rivers only accessible via float planes. There were postage-stamp towns and villages where the residents subsisted on […]

In April 1992, Sierra Leone was in the beginning stages of what would become a decade-long civil war. With the aid of then-president of Liberia Charles Taylor (who is currently serving a 50-year sentence in the United Kingdom for various war crimes committed during that war), rebels in eastern Sierra Leone rose up against President […]

On a snowy night in late February 2018, my lawyer son met me for the annual montage of flyfishing documentaries, those amphetamine-like films of women and men flitting around the world in search of sanity. I sat beside him in the theater, twitching and squirming like some Narcotics Anonymous flunky watching junkies snort coke on […]

From the beginning, Chris Sinclair questioned my insistence that we forego more lethal bear deterrents. He’d been a hard nut to crack when it came to convincing him to come along on our expedition into the Labrador wilderness, maybe because he was the youngest and least experienced in prolonged backcountry camping, or maybe because he […]