Articles

The infection (the follow)

Infected by the destructive obsession that is musky
Photo: Matthew Reilly

There is a disease rampant among fly fishermen that causes one to relish the difficult and the miserable, to willingly subject oneself to the harshest of conditions, lusting after the elusive. To stack skill and will against low probability, hoping for high reward. This defines the hunt for predatory fish—most purely, the quest for musky.

Review: Mystic Reaper fly rod

Chasing grayling, pike and more with Mystic's value rod
The Mystic Reaper 3 weight (photo: Chris Hunt).

I’ve known about Mystic fly rods for a while now—several years. Designer and entrepreneur Dennis Klein and his wife, Victoria, who owns the business, make some fine fishing gear from the company’s small shop in Michigan. If you haven’t heard of Mystic, you need to.

Does fly pattern matter?

How often is fly choice your limiting factor
Selecting a fly on the Madison River in Yellowstone National Park (photo: John Juracek).

Certain beliefs are so widely and deeply entrenched in our sport that they’re essentially considered givens, and rarely, if ever, called into question. One of the most closely held says that fly pattern matters. Matters in terms of success. We’re taught to believe that our choice of fly is responsible for the fish we catch, and that if we merely find the right fly, our success will know no bounds. But does it really work that way? Is our choice of fly that critical? Good question.

Balance

A land made whole by caribou and musk ox and griz
Photo: Bob Clarke

The current pushes and pulls. My feet shift, incrementally, muscles tensing and then relaxing to the rhythms of the river. My fly line slides off into the depths, unseen, unknown, tenuous — searching for a seam I can’t quite make out. But it’s there. I sense it. I intuit it. I know it. A living seam in a living river, the same slice of equilibrium that might hold a steelhead on the Dean or a rainbow on the Henry’s Fork. Yet I’m not on the Dean, or the Henry's Fork, or the Yellowstone, or anyplace else in the known angling universe.

Review: Sage X fly rod

Sage has its new classic on its hands
Santos Madero fishes the Sage X on Kamchatka's Savan River (photo: Chad Shmukler).

What makes a new rod a company’s biggest release ever? Or most important? Or even most noteworthy? It’s hard to imagine any objective measure. That said, it may be equally hard to imagine that when Sage introduced the X back in June, the Bainbridge Island rod maker hadn’t reached its biggest milestone to date.

Pages