Articles

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

by Chris Hunt - Friday, May 24th, 2019

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

by Chris Hunt - Tuesday, May 21st, 2019

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

by Chad Shmukler - Thursday, May 16th, 2019

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.

I shot Muldowney

And you would have too

by Jon Tobey - Tuesday, May 14th, 2019

Photo: Pat Chattack / cc2.0 modified.

I shot Muldowney, and you would've shot that double-crossing low-holer too. Except once I tell you what he did, you would've filleted him out and fed his bones to your dogs, meaning between you and me, I'm the one who showed restraint. Course everybody always figured it, but nobody could prove it, so I was left alone on the water for 40 years to tend my traps. But now they stuck a camera up my ass and I'm going to die of cancer, so I don't mind who knows it.

The fish that made a river famous

Is catch and release killing cutthroat restoration efforts on the South Fork?

by Chris Hunt - Friday, May 10th, 2019

A pair of Yellowstone cutthroat trout (photo: Pay Clayon / Fish Eye Guy Photography).

If the determining factor in the effort to save the native Yellowstone cutthroat trout of Idaho’s South Fork of the Snake River is how hard cutthroats fight at the end of a leader … well, then, the fight is already lost.