The Boardman River Revisited: Busman’s Holiday on the Boardman
Twenty-five years had passed since I had gone fishing with the Smith brothers. Thirty years had passed since I had seen the Love Shack. I had never seen Oz. Jake was sleeping in his tent by the river. Chris was sleeping back home with his wife. I was sleeping with Oz...
We Fixed the Predator Problem So Thoroughly That Now We Have a Predator Problem
Somewhere off the coast of Florida right now, a mako is doing to a sailfish what a wood chipper does to a Christmas tree, and someone in the boat is filming it in vertical video for maximum emotional impact. This has become a genre unto itself. Scroll for ten minutes...
Autumn’s a Comin’
Fall begins in July. That’s when savvy hunters and anglers unlimber their guns and stout fly rods. Though it’s tee-shirt and golf-short weather throughout the lower 48, it’s time to freshen your swing on those crossing shots; forego the bench and practice shooting...
Night Fishing
As a boy learning to fly-fish for trout on the name branded freestone flows and limestone streams of Pennsylvania, fishing hours were strictly entrenched into my sporting ethics. No matter if fish were still sipping spinners, 30 minutes after sunset our flies were...
The Specter of Tiger Creek
After passing the winter on the plantation, we moved, in the spring, down to a house on the coast, where we spent the summer, safe from malaria and other swamp-fevers . . . It was there that we did our salt-water fishing, and there that we had this adventure with a...
Frank Young: An Angler for the Ages
As a trout fisherman, Frank was simply the best I have ever been privileged to witness in action, and I’ve been astream with the likes of Gary Borger and Lee Wulff.
Why the Wye
An act of God combined with a dash of Grace creates a trout stream of royal proportion. Not far from the dirt path was a field thick with wide stalks of dark green, calf-high grass. To get a glimpse of the sun, wildflowers in nearly every hue—soft purple and blue,...
Tutorial in Microcosm
Bream fishing with a fly rod is God’s way of making up for lack of funds. The old man wheezed as he made his way up the bank from the boat. Had to sit awhile on a stump to get his breath and reorganize his lungs. He wished he really could reorganize them. There’d...
Nervous Water
A father and son are finally reunited, on a secluded lake high in the Colorado Rockies. On a clear June morning, I took my father bass fishing into the Colorado Rocky Mountains. I had not seen or spoken to him in ten years. We ate an early breakfast at a truck stop on...
Ted Williams: The Greatest Hitter (and Fisherman) There Ever Was
They called him The Kid. The Splendid Splinter. Teddy Ballgame. And by his own admission all he wanted in life was to walk down the street and have people say, “There goes Ted Williams, the greatest hitter there ever was.” Arguably the best player the game has ever...