Articles

I never put a bomb in a trout stream

Few people have affected a sport’s or pastime’s literature the way Nick Lyons has with fly fishing

by Tim Schulz - Saturday, Aug 3rd, 2024

O'Dell Spring Creek (photo: Tim Schulz).

Few people have affected a sport’s or pastime’s literature the way Nick Lyons has with fly fishing. Through a celebrated career as an author, editor, and publisher, Nick advanced the field of fly-fishing writing in such significant ways that Tom Rosenbauer calls him the godfather of modern fly-fishing books.

Let it ride

Smallmouth surface strategies on the Menominee

by Tom Davis - Thursday, Aug 1st, 2024

Photo: Tom Davis.

There was a slot on river left between a coffee table-sized submerged rock and a half-submerged log lying parallel to shore—one of those spots that cries out to be cast to. I was in the stern of Tim Landwehr’s drift boat—my friend Peter Corbin, the eminent sporting artist, was in the bow—so I took a backhand shot and got lucky. The electric blue BoogleBug landed softly in the seam a few feet above the slot.

Flies on the fly

When it pays to take your fly tying supplies on the road

by Chris Hunt - Wednesday, Jul 31st, 2024

Photo: Earl Harper.

As we motored across Aylmer Lake in the far north of the Northwest Territories, guide Kevin McNeil touched me on my shoulder.

“Do you have bigger flies?”

Aylmer’s storied tundra lake trout were giving us a bit of a struggle, given our limited supply of streamers. As is usual, I meant to devote a couple of evenings prior to my departure to Yellowknife to tying up big lake-trout streamers – massive hunks of imitation protein that big predators just can’t ignore.

It's time for America to outgrow shark tournaments

The good news about shark-killing tournaments is that the numbers have diminished. The bad news is there’s a push for more.

by Ted Williams - Saturday, Jul 27th, 2024

A mako shark chopped up and ready for the landfill, a product of the (now defunct) Star Island Marina (Montauk, NY) Shark Tournament 2017 (photo: Bill Mckeever / Safeguard the Seas).

The first big blue shark appears in Capt. Joe’s chum slick, sucking in chunks of menhaden. Soon it’s joined by a second, smaller blue that gets hooked. The first blue reappears and mounts the hooked fish, placing Capt. Joe, First Mate Leo, and me in the tiny group of humans who have witnessed shark copulation.

Clever fish? Think again.

Where are you in the pecking order?

by Richard Wilson - Thursday, Jul 25th, 2024

Photo: Jason Jagger.

It’s no secret that our piscatorial triumphs sound so much better in the telling if the heroic angler outsmarts a wily foe. So we embellish our trout with fishy superpowers like intelligence and emotional guile. Even when we lose them, we’re never beaten by a run-of-the-mill fish: It was big and arrogant and knew exactly what it was doing!’