“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. […]

“Wanna see what a salmon fly tattoo on your stomach looks like after two kids?” Brita Fordice rolls down the waistband of her shorts to reveal a splashy, colorful fly with a wide hook that resembles the letter J more than an actual hook.  “It looks like a bird took a colorful shit on my […]

It’s midafternoon in Bellingham, WA,  and a bonfire is burning behind my house—split timber from last winter’s tree fall is towered high and bright, and an October breeze is gently feeding the flames. There’s a break after weeks of rain and the wind has blown even the grass dry, begging us to sit outside.  With […]

“It wasn’t my plan.” It’s April outside Umeå in north-central Sweden, and Rolf Nylinder is sitting in the little room in his house that occasionally makes appearances in his films. The window behind him is covered by a Venetian blind lit from above, while on the sill sit a few candles in brass holders, a […]

The legend of Bob Clay is already well established: He’s one of the finest bamboo rod builders and steelhead fishermen on earth. To cast one of his cane spey rods is to feel the rhythm of nature. To fish with him is to learn and understand nuances of the steelhead world you probably never even […]

It’s almost midnight as I leave a Death Cab for Cutie concert, traveling north from Seattle and sitting shotgun in a 2008 Ford pickup, a seat more often occupied by a shorthaired pointer and a Boston pug. At the wheel is the band’s drummer, Jason McGerr, relaxed and still sweat-soaked from the show. There are […]

“With a name like Erik Ogershok, you have to be a metal singer,” Alvin Dedeaux says just before he drops a streamer into the water. “I mean come on, it’s perfect.” We’re on the Colorado River, near Austin, TX, and Dedeaux is waxing poetic about the local metal scene. Ogershok, a metal guitarist turned local […]

Winter’s night presses down on the Teton Valley of eastern Idaho. Headlights twist and beam through a storm of thick flakes, slick roads and rising snowbanks. I pull off Highway 33 and down a stranger’s driveway for a Craigslist deal—I need to unload some winter gear on my way home from work in Jackson, WY. […]

“They have a sense of reality that is a total illusion,” Jorge Trucco says from the driver’s seat of his SUV. We are on a dirt road near Junín de los Andes in Argentine Patagonia. The tall, windswept poplars we pass have turned amber and Trucco is nearing the end of a long season. We […]

“It happened right there—just off that mangrove island,” Ansil Saunders says.  He points to the spot where in 1971 his client, Jerry Lavenstein, a now-deceased sportsman from Virginia Beach, VA, caught a 16-pound bonefish on eight-pound test on a live shrimp. That fish was an all-tackle world record, one that still stands. Saunders is a […]