Two flyfishermen and 50 Mennonites walk into a train station…  Our fishing trip was starting out as much like the lead-in to a good joke as it was the welcome culmination of a year spent scheming and planning. It was almost midnight when Mike and I finally boarded the train in Rochester, NY. We had […]

“Sorry mate, working that weekend now.”  “My wife’s folks just called; they’re coming to stay.” “Daughter’s got a surfing tournament, no can do.”  Six years had passed since my New Zealand arrival and I’d been keen to tackle a multiday backcountry trip ever since touching down on Kiwi soil. I’d gotten close a couple times […]

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 […]