Articles

"The roughest bunch of preachers I ever saw"

When Morningside Played Notre Dame

by Tom Davis - Monday, Oct 4th, 2021

The 1917 Morningside football team (photo: Public domain).

In my memory it was early fall, the leaves in Sioux City just beginning to turn. I must have been twelve or thirteen. Dad and I were tossing the football in the yard and talking about my grandfather, Les Davis. He’d died in 1966, when I was nine. Thankfully I’d had the chance to fish with him the summer before his death on a trip to Lake of the Woods in Ontario—my first-ever Canadian fishing trip—and to this day I’ve never seen his equal with a bait-casting outfit.

What to look for in a musky rod

Musky anglers face a unique set of challenges which the right tool can help address

by Matthew Reilly - Sunday, Oct 3rd, 2021

Extended grips and fighting butts pull double duty in encouraging a strip set. By choking up on the grip and planting the fighting butt in your armpit, you effectively lock in a downward rod angle, making a strip set more natural (photo: Matt Reilly).

In any pursuit, it pays to have the right tool for the job. In the same way that tying flies on sharp, well-built hooks improves your hookup ratio, having a fly rod that’s designed specifically for your purpose makes your job as an angler infinitely easier, translating into more success. Specifically, in low odds games like musky fishing, where every little advantage skews the probability of success in your favor, having gear that works for you, that can withstand the paces and not fail when it counts most, is huge.

The life and death of a fly rod

Most fly rods are more than just a sum of their parts

by Spencer Durrant - Monday, Sep 27th, 2021

Photo: Spencer Durrant

Fly anglers tend to anthropomorphize the objects of our obsession to such a degree that I often wonder if it’s us or five-year-olds who possess the most active imaginations. Nevertheless, the assertion that fly rods are more than just tools shouldn’t be too hard a claim to swallow. For a group of folks that regularly affirm that trout are capable of elaborate, deductive reasoning, I reckon there’s room for the idea that fly rods are more than the sum of their parts.

A plague on all your trout

Trout are wildlife, too. But much of the environmental community doesn’t seem to care.

by Ted Williams - Wednesday, Sep 22nd, 2021

A wild, native Yellowstone cutthroat trout from the Montana high country (photo: Pat Clayton / Fish Eye Guy Photography).

Of the myriad threats currently facing native trout, few if any are more deadly than non-native fish which were flung around the national waterscape like confetti back in the days when genetics and native ecosystems were irrelevant to managers and anglers.

Researchers closing in on identifying elusive bonefish spawning sites

The discovery is critical to bonefish conservation, scientists say

by Hatch Magazine - Monday, Sep 20th, 2021

A pre-spawning aggregation (PSA) of bonefish in the Bahamas (photo: Tom Henshilwood).

It wasn't that long ago that relatively little was known about how and where bonefish spawn. It was 2013 when scientists discovered that these flats-dwelling fish, who spend the vast majority of their lives in shallow water, actually spawned in water as deep as 164 feet.