“Nah, these won’t do for triggers,” says Keith Rose-Innes, thumbing through my box of stainless steel bonefish flies. “They’ll bite right through that.” Rose-Innes, who was among the first to pioneer flyfishing in the Seychelles, knows from experience the power of our target species for the week: triggerfish. A box of green-and-white crab flies on […]

The last thing Fred Searcy would have been thinking about before the .44 caliber slug pierced his skull was the snow. It was coming down hard on Dec. 5, 1916, and Searcy was struggling to keep control of his horse-drawn coach as he navigated the 30 miles of dirt track from Three Creek, ID to […]

“Shark tore off half the body with one bite, swam down, then came right back and grabbed the head just as I was reaching for it. You could hear its teeth slap together.” Tony Biski shook his head, bloodshot eyes squinting from beneath a weathered baseball cap against the late-summer wind and sun. His boat […]

Combining with the Rio Conchos and the Pecos to make up the Rio Grande, the Devil’s River is the most remote and pristine river in the state of Texas. Getting there requires a treacherous, high-clearance 4×4 creep through some of the most hardscrabble places in the Southwest. And this week, as the guy selling me […]

7:05 p.m. September 9 We explode out of the mist, roaring up River X, careening around skeins of fog snagged on old-growth sentinels, banking hard, skidding through empty air to charge up River Y, rocks, trees, all reality blurring beneath my feet. A mostly gone bottle of Crown clutched between Kate’s knees and the hammering […]

First the horn. Then the finger. Oh, Interstate 10, you are a conflicted concrete soul. This truck ambles grandmotherly and the busy bees just can’t stand it. No matter, in a few hours I’ll be deep into the folds of a Louisiana marsh with no one for miles—just a canoe, a Mexican thunderbird blanket, a […]

It’s pouring rain in Old Havana. There’s no chasing the ghost of Hemingway today. We stand upon broken cobblestones in Calle Obispo, behind a crowd pouring from the doors of El Floridita, a crumbling colonial façade that looks as bombed out as all the others. Ramón scans the tourists holding cameras to snap photos of […]

Mention the Buddhist Kingdom of Bhutan and the first idea that pops into minds is not flyfishing, but the notion of Gross National Happiness. Introduced in 1972 by Bhutan’s fourth Dragon King, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, GNH is a policy built on Buddhist spiritual values—sustainable development, preservation and promotion of culture, conservation of the natural environment and the establishment of good […]

David motors over but the wave doesn’t move. A fishing line dangles from her throat; you can’t see the hook or hot dog, but they’re there. Her belly and throat, scraped from the struggle and wait on land, her eyes turning glass. She floats like a goldfish in a bowl, ignored by children who promised […]

People say rivers give them a sense of stability. When water measured in cubic feet per second flows unfailingly as the seconds tick by, there’s a feeling of constancy and endlessness.  But if it’s a wild, freestone river, fed by the sky and melting snow, making its own bed of least resistance over ancient mud […]