Articles

How to drink your way through the fishing day: Alabama Gulf Coast

Your guide to the best food and drink on the Alabama coast
OSO at Bear Point Harbor in Orange Beach, Alabama (photo: Chris Hunt).

You’re not supposed to fall in love with the first place you visit on a fishing trip. And you’re especially not supposed to fall in love with a kitschy chain joint, but when the stack of fried green tomatoes appears on the table, you roll with it and you go with your heart.

When the tide birds sing on South Andros

Even in the hardest wind you can always find a lee
Photo: Chad Shmukler

Andros Island is the biggest of the Bahamas with the fewest people. You catch the spirit of the place when you make your approach into Andros Town airport (where there is no sign of a town) and see the old plane wrecks left along the runway. Much of this 150-mile-long island is an unexplored jungle of coppice, pine, mangroves, sand and mud, all woven with cays, cuts, creeks and channels. You can fish there all your life and still get lost in virgin water.

Pressured redfish

With the right approach, even wary, winter redfish will eat a fly
Photo: Chris Hunt

As the sun crested the pines over Bayou St. John, Capt. Sam Glass had his doubts about the day ahead. First, when he stepped into his skiff after dropping it into the salt from his trailer, the bottom of the boat cracked audibly.

Ice.

During the night, the temperatures in Orange Beach hit 30 degrees. As Glass remarked, “Yeah … we don’t do that kind of cold down here.”

But an arctic blast sent the mercury into a free fall after the fog rolled in the night before. And freeze, it did.

Modernized FlyFishingJobs.com relaunches under Angling Trade banner

In a challenging employment landscape, fly fishing employers and workers now have a powerful new tool
Photo: Tim Romano

The North American labor market has been transforming rapidly over the last two decades. The global COVID-19 pandemic, which began almost two years ago today, fueled further transitions which analysts are still trying in earnest to understand. Many individuals amongst the United States’ rapidly aging population that would have retired sometime during this decade, data suggests, decided to retire early as a result of the pandemic.

The best dry fly river in America?

There may be no other river in America where the fish spend more time looking up
The South Fork of the Snake River (photo: Bob Wick / cc2.0).

It was August 1998 — I was in Idaho for the first time, on a job interview, where I hoped to become the editor of a twice-monthly outdoors magazine, while also editing the local newspaper’s weekly farm and ranch guide. I didn’t know the first thing about farming or ranching, but as a journalist, I was fairly confident I could learn on the go. I did know a fair bit about fishing and enough about hunting to get by. That was the appeal, of course—writing about the outdoors and time outside in what was then one of the best-kept secrets in America.

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