Articles

Gear we love right now: August 2024

What's working on and off the water, right now

by Hatch Magazine - Thursday, Aug 8th, 2024

Casting the Scott Session on the Krka River while fly fishing in Slovenia (photo: Earl Harper).

Anglers are drowning in gear choices—rods, reels, boots, waders, lines, packs, bags, boxes, vests, apparel and more. It seems harder and harder to know what's worth coveting and what's worth ignoring. Gear reviews are a great way to explore in-depth what might be right for you, but not every piece of gear is suited to a full-length review and, even if it were, there's simply too much of it to get to. With that in mind, we periodically showcase what's working for us right now, to hopefully offer more helpful feedback on gear that's worthy of your attention.

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.

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