The Shining Tides: Summer

The Shining Tides: Summer

Roccus sinuated, swirled and sounded, and all the line so laboriously won was lost before the boat could be brought on a following course. So the May was gone. The backward spring leaped to keep abreast of the sun’s orbit. Anglers sandpapered rods, wound guides and...
The Shining Tides: Spring

The Shining Tides: Spring

Roccus the striped bass had survived man’s hooks and nets and the ocean’s deadliest predators…and now, in her last years, she’d become the largest of her kind. Sun and a wafer edge of dissolving moon rose a few minutes apart. From a late roost...
California Steelhead: The Fish of a Thousand Casts

California Steelhead: The Fish of a Thousand Casts

A Little Background Oncorhynchus mykis – aka Steelhead – are a unique form of rainbow trout. Born in high country freshwater, they experience a physiological transformation within a year that allows them to survive in the ocean. They spend most of their...
Setting Sights on Nebraska’s Walleye

Setting Sights on Nebraska’s Walleye

The walleye may be Nebraska’s most popular, albeit often hard-to-catch, game fish. It is known for not only having great-tasting fillets, but also for growing big and providing anglers a fishing challenge. Despite its reputation for being hard to catch, at certain...
South Carolina Stripers

South Carolina Stripers

The success of striped bass in our freshwater reservoirs represents one of the great modern-day stories of nature’s ability to adapt. We got skunked that day, yet it remains one of my most vivid fishing memories. It was a warm spring morning in 1963. My dad had...
The Anniversary Gift

The Anniversary Gift

She would leave him soon, and for this reason she had insisted that he fish the opener without her, the only gift she wanted for their anniversary. The first day of trout season usually filled him with excitement. Even as a man he felt like a boy awaiting Christmas...
The Rod to Remember

The Rod to Remember

The old rod had a history far richer than any he ever imagined when he first bought it, so many lives ago. And now his own life was about to change. He hovered just inches above my face, urgently pounding me with questions that I desperately needed for him to answer...
‘Ol Settler of Deep Hole

‘Ol Settler of Deep Hole

No fish had ever exerted a greater influence on the thoughts, the imagination, the manners or the moral character of his pursuers. Uncle Eb was a born lover of fun. But he had a solemn way of fishing that was no credit to a cheerful man. It was the same when he played...
Salmon Or Striper?

Salmon Or Striper?

Fishermen on Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula can not only roll the dice on landing an Atlantic salmon, but go after a high-odds striper as well. If you’ve ever cast a sinking line into a deep crystalline stream hoping to entice a 20-pound Atlantic salmon to snap...