Articles

Blown chance for albie protection

Is there a hope we'll get smart about false albacore management?
Photo: © Capt. David Blinken.

The “albie” (aka little tunny or false albacore) is the most abundant and, I’d argue best, light-tackle gamefish in the western part of its global temperate and tropical range—from Massachusetts to Brazil, the Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean and Bermuda.

The gar hole

Repentance on the banks of Point Remove Creek
Photo: Johnny Carrol Sain / Edits: Chad Shmukler

Point Remove Creek's slow, warm currents dawdle in the lazy hot days of mid-summer. The creek bottom's damp air dawdles, too. It's stagnant, amplifying smells of life and death, and the soured odor of death is strong today. Metallic green and blue bottle flies swarm and cover the corpse of a shortnose gar lying on the silty creek bank. The mucous coating of a fish is irresistible to flies.

The road to Samarra

That night was like a late afternoon tempest on a hot summer day
Photo: Joe Cummings

I fished up above Tom Creek last night. Over the course of an hour I fished back down to the run where I had come in. A tree, felled in a spring flood, lay blocking half the flow. As I cast into the near seam my peripheral vision caught movement by the bank. When I got both eyes on target I saw a good-sized trout struggling in the flow. It slipped and rolled into the fast current disappearing into the riffle below. ‘That one is screwed’, I thought.

Korkers: New WRAPTR boots will last longer, fail less often

New boot construction method aims to change the way boots are built and bought
The new Korkers WRAPTR boot (photo: Chad Shmukler).

Most anglers probably think of boots as fairly blunt, unsophisticated tools. Talking boots with Korkers' CEO Brian Chaney might change that impression. Chaney talks boots much the same way reel and rod designers talk disc drag coefficients and graphite-resin mixtures: with excitement. And product designers and company executives typically get excited when new technologies and designs solve problems and offer new possibilities.

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