Innholdsfortegnelse for Fall 2023 i Anglers Journal

I’VE BEEN AROUND BOATS BASICALLY MY ENTIRE LIFE. My dad always had some sort of boat for us to play around in, from the time we were kids until I started buying my own boats. I’m 51 now, and I’ve lived in Miami since I was 2 years old. I owned a bunch of junk boats over the years, and then a buddy got a 25-foot Sea Vee that we would fish on, and I was like, “Man, this is what I want.” I ended up working for Sea Vee for several years in production and quality control, and I saw firsthand the company’s dedication to building high-quality boats. I’m now the director of sales for U.S. boat shows at Informa. I bought my first Sea Vee in 2002, an…

In his prime, Cape Cod surf fisherman Ron Arra would uncork mighty casts that seemed bound for the moon. A former professional athlete, he won five national championships for distance casting between 1983 and 1988. He tossed a 5¼-ounce lead weight on 12-pound monofilament a Paul Bunyan-esque 758 feet, 4 inches (more than 250 yards) in 1987 in Falmouth, Massachusetts. In 1989, he became the first person to heave a tear-drop sinker across Cape Cod Canal at Pole 100. That monster cast traveled 786 feet. He would repeat the feat three more times that week. Unofficially, he’s tossed a casting weight 850 feet, nearly three football fields. We stand beside the canal before 6 a.m. on a muggy summer morning as Arra steadily casts large surface plugs that disappear into…

I’m not sure exactly how old I was the first time I rowed a boat. I was young, I know that. The craft was a banged-up aluminum jonboat. The venue was Brockway Lake — actually a lily pad-choked pond — just down the road from my childhood home in western Michigan. Early evening, the smell of irrigated corn, a bass chorus of bullfrogs. My dad casting a Jitterbug from the stern while I gave it a go. The oars were pine, silver with age, warped and splintery. They, along with generations of mice, lived under the boat, which we stored overturned behind the garage. The boat fit in the back of my dad’s pickup. There were no seats or life jackets, just two aluminum benches that got blistering hot in…

Michael Carr is an English teacher and writer from New Jersey who chases stripers with a fly rod whenever and wherever he can. He is working on a collection of fishing essays in the off-hours between hikes, pond trips and driveway hockey with his sons. Michael takes us off the south shore of Massachusetts to target striped bass in “A Change of Plans.” Kelly Dalling Fallon is a secondgeneration Australian charter operator. She currently works alongside her husband, Capt. Luke Fallon, running Kekoa Sports Fishing on the Great Barrier Reef. She is a veteran of 18 black marlin seasons, and her photos have appeared in numerous fishing publications worldwide. She also is the author of the Black Marlin Blog, documenting the Cairns marlin fishery. Kelly’s work appears in “A Dingo’s…

“I’M GIVING YOU ONE MORE SHOT, DUDE, AND THAT’S IT. This is getting stupid.” I heard my good friend Capt. Eric Kerber loud and clear but pretended I didn’t. He wasn’t wrong. This was both stupid and selfish. I was the only guy on the charter who cared a lick about fly-fishing. We ended up more than an hour from port off Sandy Hook, New Jersey, before finally spotting the hard tails of false albacore slicing the October chop. The schools were tight and fleeting — up for five seconds, then down for 30 before popping up 50 to 100 yards away. The other fellas, all standing around with epoxy jigs dangling from their spinning rods, could have easily hit several of the blitzes from 70 feet, but Kerber told…

It starts with worms plucked from compost,a bag of stinky clams leaking over my mother’s fridge.Driving a hook through an eel’s gasping lipsdidn’t go well with my first girlfriend. But I knew what worked. One night in Key West, I blew half my paycheck on a mermaidI didn’t, don’t know. In the fuzzy morning, shelling out eighty bucksfor a dozen goggle-eyes, I tossed one over my shoulder — Be free! The bait lady laughed into her bubbling tanks of blue runners,mullet, crab and spiny lobster (yes, lobster)she claimed giant grouper can’t resist. Desire and cost buzzed under those buggy dock lights,as they did, years later, after two skunked days of fly-fishingwith my fiancé, when she started asking the wrong questionsabout fishing. Pretending to check her streamer, I tipped itwith a…

After about five minutes of talking to Jarad “Dingo” Boshammer, you realize he is one of those extra-fishy guys who likes to fish more than you do. And he’s better at it, and probably always will be. Born in Hervey Bay, in Queensland, Australia, in 1982 to Sid Boshammer, a liveaboard charter captain, and his wife, Kerri, Dingo had fishing in his DNA. “Fishing was always in my veins,” he says. “I didn’t have a choice. I grew up on a sailboat. I was catching fish before I could walk.” His father noticed right away that his son was a bit more focused than most kids his age. “One of my first impressions was that even as a 3-year-old, Jarad had an amazing amount of patience,” Sid says. When Dingo…

Given enough time and distance, you begin to see more clearly those events that shaped your fishing life. They appear to me now as 60-year-old memories that evoke the same feelings as on the days the actual episodes occurred. My recollections are wrapped as tightly as tarred marline around the wooden frame of a handline and include a dock, a lighthouse, an old skiff and various mentors — a professor, a lobsterman and a tall, lanky outdoorsman from Campbell County, Tennessee. The emotional essence of such touchstones gives our early memories enduring and propulsive power. They enable us to look back and connect the many dots that steered us toward a lifetime devotion to chasing fish. My earliest ones stretch so far back that it often feels as if I…

FLY-FISHING IS TRANSITORY. We live it gracefully — some of us less than gracefully. The cast, the retrieve, the hopeful connection, all appear and disappear in blissful evanescence. When you get a chance to partake in it, the moment should live on longer than the minutes and hours actually spent fishing. Occasionally, you’ll find yourself in a little pocket of the world that you didn’t think existed, and yet it does — and originated long before you got there. I spent a morning getting to know captains Parker Mauck and Chris Killenberg of Westport Fly Fishing. They’re genuinely nice guys, and they showed me a secluded area around Westport, Massachusetts, a fishing village on Buzzards Bay where no one seemed to be fishing on a Saturday during the height of…

As the plane approached Freeport International Airport, I glanced out the window at the clear skies stretching across the horizon and the azure waters shimmering in the distance. The picturesque June weather was a far cry from the catastrophic conditions wrought by Hurricane Dorian four years earlier, in 2019, when the storm’s eyewall pounded Grand Bahama Island for 40 hellish hours. Soon, the rebuilt terminals came into view as the plane touched down on the airport’s only runway. Dorian had submerged this tarmac under six feet of water and turned it into a debris field. Looking at it now, you’d never know. Robert Neher, the owner of East End Lodge, picked up me and my wife, Laura. After an oceanside lunch at Banana Bay, the three of us headed east…

I spend roughly a month in Alaska each summer, usually chasing rainbow trout and salmon in the creeks and rivers. All told, I’ve spent nearly three years of my life fishing in Alaska. On a few occasions, I’ve gone offshore to fish, and it’s quite a bit different from my home waters in Florida. My first offshore trip on the Bering Sea was out of Hoodoo Lodge’s outcamp in 2013. I was with my friend Tony Weaver, and we didn’t know what to expect. We fished in shallow water (less than 60 feet) on a small aluminum boat they had stored next to a shack and caught a strange collection of bottom-dwellers I’d never seen before. We also caught halibut, rockfish and lingcod, but nothing of any size. We fly-fished…