Dawn At the River
We pulled off into the gravel roadside parking area just in time to witness the bright moon setting behind the bare trees and the sun thinking about rising in the pink eastern sky. We were the first ones on the river that day in early March . . . just the way we had...
Sparkplug Marlin
About that time it dawned on me that we had probably made a bad decision! Many years I owned and operated several huntingpreserves.in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Now that I'm retired, my wife Rita and I spend our Winters in Rincon de Guayabito, a small resort village...
Mr. Theodore Castwell
An enchantingly beautiful chalk stream, perfect cast after perfect cast, big trout rising to the fly each time it alights on the water... For Theodore Castwell, it seemed that St. Peter had indeed given him very special consideration. Mr. Theodore Castwell, having...
Hard Rain, White Noise
Hitch Barlow was a tall, bone-thin young man who worked with nails in his teeth and carpenter tools in his hands, when he was not sighting along the barrel of a big-bore rifle at a buck deer or floating line, leader, tippet and a fly across pebbles at the head of a...
Fishing for Muskie in Lake Chautauqua
They say it's the fish of ten-thousand casts. Maybe so. I truly believed that for many years and still won't argue with those odds. Twice before I had traveled all the way from Georgia to Canada to do battle with the great muskellunge only to fish for days with nary a...
Fishing For Dinosaurs
Hook into a 250-pound fish whose ancestors date back 100 million years, and you begin to wonder if you’re reeling a dinosaur through a wormhole—as if you’re about to reveal a beast that doesn’t belong in our epoch. Such are first impressions when sturgeon fishing on...
The Day the Lake Went Mad
The gale-force winds and driving rain were bad enough, but then the island itself began to move.
The Dead Man on Wendigo Brook
What trout fisherman, plunged into despair by hyper-selective fish that refuse all his imitations, hasn’t wished for a “magic” fly? In this cautionary tale from the anthology Seasons of the Angler (1988), the author reminds us to be careful what we wish for . . .
The Ghost of Arthur Woody
Duncan Dobie tells of Arthur Woody, a visionary character for forest and wildlife restoration extraordinaire in the early 20th century mountain ranges of Northern GA. The sudden spring thunderstorm stopped almost as quickly as it had started. It blew...
The Erie Jinx
Even on the best damned walleye lake in America, sometimes you have to lower your standards a bit and catch what you can. The guy I’ll call X-Factor kept calling and leaving messages on my phone. Somebody told him that I planned to fish Lake Erie in September, and he...