Travel

LEARNING TO SEE IN THE JOULTER CAYS

Once my grandmother watched a moose give birth in the woods. People do not believe this. Impossible! What are the chances? My grandmother’s odds of seeing the extraordinary were higher than most. She spent a lifetime in the mixed deciduous-coniferous forest of central Ontario. When you put in as many hours on the trail as […]

ICELAND

“Today is your day. Fish or don’t fish.”  We were standing outside a gas station under the roof covering the pumps, trying to stay out of the pouring rain. The river I passed on the way to the meet was rising—off color and moving fast. I’d come a long way to fish the Varmá and […]

MARSHALL ISLANDS

Making my way through the Marshall Islands International Airport’s open-air structure, I can see other passengers, mostly nationals, visible outside the customs entry, lined up on the tarmac for an unexpected security measure. Health care workers garbed in personal protective equipment are screening each traveler before allowing entry. Caught off guard, this is the first […]

Scotland

My first experience with Atlantic salmon lasted a week. I covered beautiful and unfamiliar water for the better part of each day—every day except Sunday—and did not hook a fish. It was exactly the kind of fishing I like best—a puzzle with cryptic clues. And when I wasn’t standing in the river, fumbling every third […]

Oregon

A road sign in southwest Oregon. Unremarkable in shape or color—brown rectangle, white lettering, white border. It conveys no traffic regulations—maximum speed, no passing, curves ahead. However, it does express a rule. No, more than a rule—a law, an ethic. To some, this sign marks paradise. To others, it signifies elitism. But to most, this sign […]

ILWACO

At the time of the last census in 2010, the population of Ilwaco, WA, stood at 936, meaning the Port of Ilwaco has a boat slip for just about every man, woman and child in town. As with any port town, it’s the kind of place that’s always been used to either drop something off […]

Russia

The Atlantic salmon grabbed the fly low on the Voronya River, in a smooth piece of holding water just above the estuary where the river meets the Arctic Ocean. It made three huge runs, each deep into the backing, and I chased it a hundred yards downstream before it surged a fourth time and threw […]

BRAZIL

A Bus Ride It’s nearly 3,000 miles by air from Atlanta to Manaus, Brazil. At one end lie striped bass that congregate in Georgia’s rivers for their spawning run each spring; at the other, bass of the peacock variety, colorful denizens of the Amazon river watershed. From Manaus, it’s another 200 miles east by bus […]

NORWAY

Darkness washes along the latitudes, 760 feet per second. It approaches from the west, rolling over the Bering Sea and the Kamchatka peninsula before crossing the sea of Okhotsk and tumbling over eastern Siberia. Darkness falls over tigers in the Sikhote-Alin mountain range and musk deer on the Russian tundra. It unfurls over the vast […]

ACROSS THE U.S.

My teenage daughter and I had been talking about taking a cross-country fishing trip for a couple of years, but life always seemed to intervene. Last summer, I was determined to make it happen, and just as determined to use it as a tool to show Bella how amazing fishing could be, how it could […]

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