Articles

For my friend Tom Davis

For now they endure, at a place called Eagle Falls
Photo: Shawn P. / cc2.0 modified

The letter came out of the clear blue sky.

It was a long time ago, and I’m not going to claim it was one of those the-day-JFK-was-shot events that you retain in perfect memory. But for more than 40 years I’ve been trying to make sense of what lay behind that letter—the needs, the hopes, the desires—and I can’t swear I’m any closer to understanding it now than I ever was.

Review: Simms Bounty Hunter 100 Roller

Luggage that makes it easy to travel with all your fly fishing gear
Photo: Shane Townsend

Americans travel for work. Many of us do anyway. Last year alone, we took some 460 million business trips. Most involved air travel. And, nearly half allowed for what the U.S. Travel Association calls “a leisure component.” That last bit is fodder for hope for my fellow anglers with the fly. It means sometimes we get to fish new water.

Even when my odds of getting out are only one in a million, I now elect the Lloyd Christmas model of optimism:

“So, you’re telling me there’s a chance?”

Way too much of a good thing: Sargassum and the sea

Beach, shore and bay-choking sargassum may be the new normal throughout much of the Caribbean
Sargassum blankets the sand and near-shore area of a Belizean beach (photo: hat3m).

I was in a bad mood, and for a gringo who’d rented a small house just across the street from the beach in a tiny Mexican fishing village just north of the border with Belize, that’s hard to fathom.

The day before, we’d dealt with a rental car company in Cancun that refused to honor the online bargain I’d found, and we got stuck with a bill that was, to put it kindly, exorbitant. With my rum budget in peril, I figured I’d return the car a week later after leaving as much of the undercarriage as I could on the speed bumps and in the potholes that pocked the road south.

Legends of the swamp

Changes were coming to Atchafalaya
Photo: Chris Hunt

There were legends in the swamp, and Billy Guidry knew it. Some of them crawled and swam, like Gus, the infamous 14-foot gator that hung out near the put-in and dined on ham sandwiches and lunch scraps the tourists fed him. Gus was beloved. A gentle giant, they all said.

The locals just shook their heads and whistled low under their breath.

Fly fishing trade group sharply denounces Trump administration's tariff increases

Costs of China trade war will be paid by anglers, AFFTA says
Photo: Isac Nóbrega/PR / cc2.0.

Joining the chorus of voices condemning the Trump administration's ongoing trade war with China, the American Fly Fishing Trade Association (AFFTA) recently released a statement denouncing the administration's decisions as "unfair" and "harmful" to the $1 billion fly fishing industry, an industry whose backbone, AFTTA says, is small and medium-sized businesses.

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