Father’s Boats
He fished for panfish, bass, and maybe, just maybe, a muskie.
The Day Momma Killed Corky
It was an act of violence rougher than anything Hemingway ever wrote about – the blood-curdling screams made me sick to my stomach. But about that time I hooked a monster bluegill… A Southern Tall Tale Excuse me, gents. Jimmy Shakes here, nice to meet ya. I couldn’t...
Hemingway’s Pilar – Chasing Billfish and German U-boats
Papa called her Pilar and she was a fishing machine, a 1934 Wheeler Playmate, custom built to his specifications in a Brooklyn boatyard. She was 38 feet at the waterline, with a low-cut transom rigged with a roller for sliding fish aboard. She held a ton of ice, had...
Fishing with Ordinary American Heroes
The old war wound nagged at him as he waded the stream.
Putah Creek
The secluded waterway became the perfect setting for a lifetime of treasured memories.
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
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
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
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
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.