Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2021 i Anglers Journal

As long as I’ve fly-fished, I’ve logged my experiences in a black-and-red hardcover journal. The entries date to the early 1970s. My thinking at the time was strictly utilitarian. The recording of data would be a handy reminder if I ventured back to fish an area again. I didn’t realize that one day the journals would provide more than simple river notes about fly patterns and tippet strength. The handwritten entries would open an unlikely portal back to a time of unencumbered idealism. Out on the paved road at the turnoff, midway between Saratoga and Walcott Junction, Wyoming, a sign indicated the historic Overland Trail, where deep wagon ruts could still be seen in many places. My fishing buddy Coz swung the barbed wire gate open as I drove onto…

I was 13 years old. We were fishing 30 miles south of Long Island, New York, and I was on the reel. Fresh off my freshman wrestling season, I was strong and cocky in a way only high school boys can be. I cranked for all I was worth, but it was obvious to the rest of the team in the cockpit that I was competing outside my weight class. We assumed I was hooked up to a modest blue shark, as that’s what we had been tangling with all morning. Then it happened. Far off our port quarter, the shark blasted a hole in the sea and launched itself 6 feet in the air before completing a quarter twist and plunging back into the Atlantic. “Whoa, mako, whoa!” my…

Last September, east of Block Island, Rhode Island, the big bluefish showed up. Some giants. The fish hung around for two weeks feeding on sand eels and halfbeaks, then vanished as quickly as they arrived. I made four trips into the fury, catching fish to 19 pounds. It was the kind of fishing that you hope maybe one day happens again. There is something about the fight of a blue. The fish are familiar to so many of us, almost commonplace, that it’s easy to forget how strong they are. Often the fight starts with deep pulls, where the fish goes broadside to the line, unmovable, staying down. Then the fish runs out, the drag gives line, and soon the blue comes up and breaks clear, head shaking, mouth wide…

I did my first guide trip in 2003 at age 20 on the Blackfoot River. I was working at a dude ranch outside of Missoula, Montana, a typical Midwestern transplant, as spastic and confused as a 1-year-old golden retriever. I was not a very good fishing guide that summer. Or the summer after that. Or probably even the summer after that. As I quickly learned, the problem with guiding is that actually catching your people some fish is often secondary to the much more difficult process of interpersonal relations. As someone with introverted tendencies, the sheer amount of talking one is required to do on any given guide day can be much more exhausting than actually rowing the boat. As far as I can tell, guiding is at least 70…

Try as I might, I could never love a largemouth bass the way my father did. He held no other gamefish in such high esteem. As a boy in the Midwest, he spent countless hours catching them in farm ponds and never lost that enthusiasm, even after his job landed him in Manhattan. Every summer of my childhood, he insisted we travel from our Long Island home to a Minnesota lake, a different one each year, for a two-week summer vacation. We made the first trip when I was 9. Despite my father’s excitement, I had my doubts about it. We’d fished together once at Hempstead Lake State Park near our house in New York, and the only thing I caught was an eel that scared the bejesus out of…

Savio Mizzi might be considered a newcomer in the world of marine artists, but he has been a creative force in fine arts for more than 40 years. He is passionate about his art, but like everything else in his life, it takes a back seat to fishing. When Mizzi and his wife, Gigi, were house hunting in the Hamptons in the late 1980s, they drove past a group of anglers catching fish from the beach. “That was all it took,” Mizzi says. “We bought a house near Three Mile Harbor, and I set up my studio. I was still doing freelance graphics work for ad agencies in Manhattan, and commission work, including book covers for New York publishing houses.” This was in addition to his endless musings on sketch…

There aren’t many fish I haven’t caught, so I get asked this question a lot: Pound for pound, which fish is the strongest? I wish I had a concrete answer. The standard comparison is to tie two fish tail to tail and see which one wins, but that’s not really feasible, and there’s more to strength than just pulling. There’s a difference between inshore, where a giant trevally probably is king, and offshore. Is a 50-pound giant trevally stronger than a 50-pound bonefish (if bones got that big)? Is a 1,000-pound bluefin tuna stronger than a 1,000-pound blue marlin? Which would be harder to catch on identical tackle from, say, a stationary boat? These are good questions. In an effort to save time, I’ll limit my semirandom thoughts to offshore…

Shall I compare thee to a Kawasaki? To a just-launched RPG? To a juiced-up 100-meter sprinter popping from Olympic starting blocks? Afforded my full quiver — snarky similes, literate metaphors and intricate conceits — I would nonetheless fall short of characterizing my beloved bonefish’s unsurpassed short-range surge and velocity. Does the poet’s insufficient diction shame him? Hardly. He is consoled, rather, by the company he keeps. Even Carl Linneaus failed. (Though of course, ensconced at his desk, the great taxonomist had not made actual contact with a living bonefish before taxonomizing.) Albula vulpes. White Fox? Sure, the vulpine nose, the cunning, but a fox trots. How about White Fox-With-Its-Tail-On-Fire-And-A-Pack-Of-Hounds-In-Pursuit? Of course many speedier fish reside in the salt — the sailfish cuts the blue water at a warping 70 mph,…

Growing up in Watch Hill, Rhode Island, Anglers Journal editor-in-chief Bill Sisson recalls being mesmerized by the water and fishing from a young age. Memories include pier fishing for cunners and tinker mackerel with his father, and hanging over the seawall rocks and piers, gazing at the crabs and baitfish below. “I caught my first striper when I was 13,” Sisson says. “The sea and the creatures in it fascinated me very early on.” Though he continued chasing his fishing obsession, especially in the surf, through his teens and 20s, Sisson was in his early 30s when he bought his first fishing boat. “I took out a little loan and bought a Tashmoo 18 lobster skiff,” he says. “I found a 30-hp Yamaha 2-stroke for it, rigged it with a…

Growing up in Texas, Ronnie Green’s great-grandmother taught him to fish. She’d wear a dress and go after crappie, bluegills and gasper goos (freshwater drum) with a spinning rod. When Green, a professional bass angler and the host of World Fishing Network’s A Fishing Story with Ronnie Green, interviewed African American fishing pioneer Alfred Williams, it turned out that Williams’ great-grandmother had taught him to pull channel cats out of the Pearl River with a cane pole as a boy in Mississippi. America’s fishing history has an underrecorded chapter of Black women fishing the lakes and rivers of the South since well before the Civil War. “Native American women taught a lot of African American women to fish. It was a means to get food,” says Green, who is 53…

It was the first time I’d asked anyone this question, but it seemed appropriate for a 29-year-old international scout for a Major League Baseball team who happens to be crazy about fishing. “Would you rather catch a 700-pound blue marlin or win a World Series?” But before Astrid deGruchy can answer, I up the ante. “Let’s make it a grander, a World Series victory or a 1,000-pound blue marlin?” “That’s like a Sophie’s Choice question,” deGruchy says, referring to the 1982 movie in which actress Meryl Streep has to live with a life-altering decision she makes involving her two children. My question obviously isn’t on that level, but deGruchy hems and haws for a few moments. “I believe the chances of catching a 1,000-pound blue marlin are less than they…

If you took the 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance automobile race and tossed it in a mixing bowl with an Ironman triathlon, you’d end up with something that resembles the Skiff Challenge. To win Le Mans, you need an overengineered supercar that can run at maximum revs for 24 hours straight. To finish an Ironman, athletes must overcome a grueling course that comprises a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bicycle ride and a marathon. The Ironman tests personal mettle; Le Mans pushes metal and man to their limits. The Skiff Challenge requires a bit of both. There are no rain delays and no lay days during the Skiff Challenge, a 1,300-mile, body-pounding race around the Sunshine State to raise awareness of the state’s water issues and money for Everglades restoration.…

The Ring magazine, established in 1922, has maintained a list of the best boxers, pound for pound, since Mike Tyson laced up the gloves. A subjective valuation, the magazine’s P4P ranking is a popular metric of the best fighters relative to their weight. How would Muhammad Ali fare against Floyd Mayweather Jr. if they boxed in the same weight class? We will never know, but it sure is fun to speculate. We anglers are equally invested in our favorite fighters. It just so happens that our combatants are of the aquatic and gilled variety. So let’s get ready to rumble with our own P4P ranking. I present to you the challenger in the pelagic corner: the Atlantic salmon. The binomial name of Atlantic salmon, Salmo salar, is derived in part…

It was barely first light, and we were at the “Hundred Square” of Hudson Canyon off New Jersey, three years ago. I had just put out a pair of large ballyhoo rigged under black and purple Joe Shute skirts and was free-spooling a spreader bar down the middle when all three were demolished simultaneously. An expletive escaped my lips as the line burned my thumb, and before I could push the drag to strike, the fish was gone. The reel on the rod in the starboard holder screamed for 20 seconds before it snapped back to attention, the result of some undetermined tackle failure. My buddy Kris Trasberg grabbed the screaming port-side outfit knowing he was about to tangle with his first bigeye tuna — and it was a good…