Putah Creek

Putah Creek

The secluded waterway became the perfect setting for a lifetime of treasured memories.

A Healing Place

A Healing Place

It was the day of his birth, the genesis of his sixty-third year, and it had been a good one. It could have been celebrated anywhere in the world, as so many times before it had. But not today. Not this time. Today, it had been spent on the small streams near home,...
The Erie Jinx

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...
The Ghost of Arthur Woody

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...
A Day on the Dolphin: An Unexpected Adventure

A Day on the Dolphin: An Unexpected Adventure

There was urgency in his voice. My grandfather and Ed Brower went below deck. The Dolphin’s bilge pump had stopped working. Water was coming in.     It’s a bright Saturday afternoon in Fairfield, Connecticut, just after 5:00; mid-April 1960. Daffodils bloom along the...
Quick Brown Fox

Quick Brown Fox

A brown trout has no soul. Souls are reserved for the fisherman and his kind, along with the accountability that most assuredly accompanies a soul.

The Intruder

The Intruder

And then, one day, there he was — a guy was standing by MY lake, and what the…he had a fly rod in his hand!  It wasn’t much as waters go — probably a couple acres at best.  I’d passed by it many times always on the way to somewhere else.  It lay a few hundred yards...