Articles

On killing trout

Fish are food, not friends

by Tom Hazelton - Wednesday, Oct 25th, 2017

Photo: Tom Hazleton

Killing trout is easy. The actual act, at least. I use a four-inch Mora knife for all my trout work, and even its light birch handle has plenty of heft for the job. For a hand-span length trout, one or two sharp raps above the eyes triggers that electric death-shudder, the final sparks of current, and the trout is perfectly limp in hand for the rest of the cleaning process. No twitches, no gill movement, nothing. If I’m lucky there’s some wild mint along the streambank to wrap the fish in before sliding it into my creel.

Partisan, Inc.

America for sale

by Todd Tanner - Tuesday, Oct 24th, 2017

Photo: Arian Stevens

Let’s say you’re looking for an easy score. Maybe you want to put a huge, dangerous mine in the middle of Alaska's Bristol Bay region, which is the salmon capitol of North America. Or maybe you want to keep dumping fracking waste water into the Gulf of Mexico. Or you want to tear the tops off West Virginia’s remaining mountains to get at those last hidden seams of coal. Or you want to keep showering massive quantities of pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers on genetically-modified crops from Florida to Ohio to California. Or maybe you can’t wait to privatize our vast public lands.

Blown chance for albie protection

Is there a hope we'll get smart about false albacore management?

by Ted Williams - Monday, Oct 23rd, 2017

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

by Johnny Carrol Sain - Friday, Oct 20th, 2017

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

by Steve Zakur - Tuesday, Oct 17th, 2017

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.