Innholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2018 i Anglers Journal

We all have a fish that kicked things off: bullhead, cunner, bluegill, mackerel, snapper blue, hickory shad. Often these are the fish that still hold some weight, a portal back to blue-jean shorts, bicycles and badly organized tackle boxes. For me it was scup, and the goal was the same as every kid’s: to catch as many as possible. There was no thought of food or sport or money. Those are adult concerns. The value of my experience was purely quantitative: “Got another one. Here we go. A good one!” My father was a sailor, a boater, a lover of small wooden craft. His enjoyment of fishing was much more about the boat than the catching. He didn’t teach my brother or me how to fish, and I think that…

The Cessna’s powerful engine yanked the tail rope from my hands as the aircraft leaped forward. The plane skimmed across the surface of the water and lifted majestically into the late spring breeze. As the drone of the engine faded into the distance, we were left alone at a remote headwater lake in the southwest Alaska bush. Only animal tracks lay on the gravel bar beneath our feet. We were about to row down a river with one recorded descent, and that was more than 20 years ago. There is no person I would rather have by my side during an expedition like this than Pete Jaacks. My business partner and adventure companion, he and I forged a friendship on a shared passion for exploration while working together as wilderness…

My first boat was a kayak, my second boat was a 15-foot Gheenoe, and my third boat was an 18-foot Privateer bay boat. All three had two things in common: They were great for the shallow waters of Chesapeake Bay, and they were limited and potentially dangerous in the rough conditions that happen frequently on my home waters. All too quickly, I learned how small my Privateer was when crossing Tangier Sound from Smith Island to Crisfield, Maryland. The sound is notoriously rough, especially with a strong northeast wind and a flood tide. I was routinely making the 10-mile trip for fishing and photography, and while my bay boat was perfect for shallow water — the brand was the go-to center console in the 1980s for watermen working the creeks…

Sometimes you should just take the day off. May 12, 2017, was one of those days. If I had not, if I had let that May 12 slip away, if it had become just another workday where I woke up, fought traffic, sat in meetings, and answered emails and phone calls before fighting some more traffic, getting home, eating dinner, watching TV and going to bed, well, let’s just say it would have been a mistake. I took the day off after I saw an approaching high-pressure system settling in with temperatures rising into the low 70s. As Morgan Freeman’s character Red said in The Shawshank Redemption, “May is one damn fine month to be working outdoors.” The same can be said of fishing — particularly in the Northeast, where…

“Geometry is the archetype of the beauty of the world.”— Johannes Kepler Most spouses get sent to the couch after an unresolved argument, or for neglecting household chores. In my house, if I’m riding the sofa it likely means I’ve forgotten to take out the trash for the fifth or sixth week in a row, or fixed the smoker instead of the broken light in the bathroom. In April, I’m on the couch for an entirely different reason. The hickory shad run is on in Maryland, and having no sense of humor about being woken up before 5 a.m., my loving spouse banishes me from the bedroom. I barely sleep the night before a hickory trip, so the couch and late-night television suit me just fine. By 3:30 a.m. I’m…

I cooked the first fish I ever caught. I was in my 20s, on vacation in the Florida Keys. The weather was crazy cold: in the 30s. Lying around in the sun in Margari-taville wasn’t in the cards. With nothing better to do, I took a drive from Big Pine Key to Marathon. A sign caught my eye: “Party Boat, Grouper, $9.” Why the hell not? I thought. Fishing would beat shopping for Hawaiian shirts and conch-shell jewelry, which appeared to be the most robust local industries. I plunked down nine bucks and, a few hours later, found myself hooked up to a 35-pound grouper. He wasn’t a big guy by grouper standards, but he was big enough for me to take the $54 pool. Not a bad haul for…

It is a hot, airless September afternoon in the Catskills, the transitional stretch of that month when corn maze signs appear and swaths of summer birds begin to vanish. I’ve traveled to fish a favorite pool on the Delaware’s West Branch, and while you never need a reason to go fishing, this trip is special. Accompanying me is a new and unconventional piece of tackle: a split-cane fly rod that represents an extended collaboration with one of the world’s great builders and a personal, 40-year light-tackle odyssey. It is a piece of equipment I believe could alter the sport. Despite being a tailwater, the river is unusually low. Following weeks of drought, its mile-long flats resemble millponds, and the unseasonable heat has trees releasing leaves early. They patter down softly,…

Over coffee one day during the spring of 1969, Woody Sexton introduced me to his friend Tom McGuane. At the time, Tom; his wife, Becky; and their young son, Thomas, were living on Summerland Key. Tom, a tall, handsome writer in his late 20s, was fishing the Loggerhead Basin from inside a 16-foot Roberts skiff powered by a 33-hp Evinrude engine and steered by a tiller. That winter he wrote his first piece for Sports Illustrated magazine, “The Longest Silence,” maybe the best article ever written on flats fishing. After reading it that summer, I sent him a congratulatory letter, and he responded by inviting me to join him that fall on his ranch outside Livingston, Montana, for a week of trout fishing. To this day I am surprised I…

Folks who reside in colder climes tend to look scornfully upon those of us who call Florida home when the subject of seasonal change comes up. “You don’t even know what that means,” one friend scoffed as he regaled me with quaint tales of crisp apples, frost on the pumpkins, changing of the leaves and other such New England lore. I nodded in silent acceptance because I knew that much of what he said was true. Fall in the northern United States offers spectacular beauty in many places, along with true weather change, which for many people symbolizes the cycles of life. But I also know that a whole bunch of those same people hightail it to my part of the world come February. Apparently when the cool and crisp…

Smells trigger memories, each one unexpected and explosive. Spring has always had an aroma, but somehow its nostalgic effect is not as far-reaching as a sniff of stagnant pond mud and green algae, which might as well be a ride in a time machine to the day when I was in third grade and ruined my new sneakers casting curly-tail worms to bass. My mother was not pleased. But that smell of salt marsh stunted by the cool night air, that unmistakable aroma of estuarine water — it brings me back to the ritual of my fishing life, each season a new beginning. The arrival of spring is one of the things I love most about chasing striped bass. The season always brings hope. And it all begins with my…

I’ve danced this dance hundreds of times, yet it never fails to make my pulse race. “Throw it steady off the port side,” the captain’s voice crackles over the loudspeaker. The deckhand pitches one or two live sardines at a time over the side as the boat turns to intersect an unseen quarry. “Here they come, boys — let ’em have it!” A few nets full of live anchovies and sardines are launched off the stern, followed by a synchronized volley of casts lobbing hooked live baits into the fray. The water erupts with boils as frenzied tuna crash through the chum with open maws. Anglers whoop and holler, first at the sight and sound of the boils, then as tuna slam their baits and bend their rods into heavy…