Great Guide Not
I owe much of what I know about how, where, and when to fish to great guides. Guides who spend day after day on the same water accompanying myriad clients of varied ability and temperament amass an abundance of knowledge that’s ours for the learning. Most of the time...
A Cole Creek Diary
It tumbles off the east face of Big Back Mountain, leaping and flowing down its stony, laurel-lined course as it has for eons. Dad and I had fished its lower reaches when we’d first moved to Tennessee back in the early sixties, and many times we had talked about...
Keeping Counsel with a Creek
We were transients moving from one epoch in life to another, but the little stream and the woods and fields it drained live larger than one can imagine.
Two Brothers. Two ‘Real’ Fish. One Great Memory
My parents made a serious error raising me. I was their firstborn, so I suppose I can cut them a little slack. They were still trying to figure out the whole parenting thing. One of their most critical mistakes, notwithstanding the one they made nine months before I...
The Cutthroat’s Tomb
Fishing for a trout that many once believed was extinct.
Tiger Hunting In Africa
It was our second morning of fishing on Tanzania’s Ruhudji River and we had just skirted a pod of agitated hippos on our hour-long boat ride to where we’d be fishing. Our guide, South African Mark Murray, told my partner Phil Satre to swing his fly across the head of...
A Good Thing
“The Falls Hole is the defining run in this stream that had defined our lives for so many years, and Dad had learned its every nuance in decades now long passed.” Snow and rain tracked nearly horizontal, and tiny shards of ice bit into our faces when we turned into...
A Christmas Present
The colorful flats around Christmas Island are the world’s best place to fly fish for giant trevally.
Fish Conservation at Vermejo Park Ranch
Rio Grande cutthroat trout in New Mexico rebounding thanks to private lands conservation.
Troutalope
Genus: Oncorkynchus pronghornii Habitat: Wide-open spaces inland American West Life History: Contrary to common opinion, the troutalope is not rare. In fact, thousands of people have a stuffed one in the garage, bagged with other incredible junk headed to the...