Anglers Journal celebrates the best writing, photography, illustration, design and sporting art on the topic of fishing. Come join some of the most prolific fishing editors and writers in the industry for the best angling experience on the water.
I’ve always felt most in harmony with the natural world when traveling light, unencumbered with excess gear and free of distracting technology. I can’t speak for everyone, but keeping it simple keeps me most comfortable in my own skin while I’m on the water and catching. I like a simple boat, my gear winnowed to the basics and my attention focused only on finding fish and reading the water: the choppy seas off a headland, a tide rip making up, a dark shore. The same goes when I am on foot and studying the surf, walking a Northern stream or chasing bass and panfish around a farm pond. You know the feeling when you’re dialed in, tapping your intuition, observing, mulling and weighing everything around you. You catch something from…
SUBSCRIBE TO ANGLERS JOURNAL Call (800) 877-5207 or visit anglersjournal.com. Subscriptions are $29 for one year (four issues: Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall). Please send letters and comments to Anglers Journal, 35 Industrial Park Road, Unit 10, Centerbrook, CT 06409, or email wsisson@aimmedia.com. MORE THAN A MENTOR Kudos to Gary Reich for his fine article about Bob Clouser [“One Fly To Rule Them All,” Fall]. I appreciated Mr. Reich’s piece for the personal touch he gave to this wonderful person and his new life in Florida. Bob was my mentor in teaching me how to fly cast. I’d try to hire Bob for as many dates as I could get; one had to book Bob far in advance for many years, as he was such a popular and sought-after guide. Bob…
Carpathian browns and grayling finning far from missile strikes and tank blasts, just a goat trail to a pine shack, old Boris and his pet bear. I fed the bear apples while Boris snipped greasy fur for streamer wings his gypsy wife cinched with silk. River voices, chickens, your leaky leather accordion, sometimes gunshots — Don’t worry, you’d laugh. Only Dmitry shooting wild pig. Gutted before us and roasted in the yard — svynyna with yellow pickles and moonshine. No Internet, riding horses to the bosky banks, fish rising all morning. Let’s pray it’s over soon, you text. Your room will be ready. You and Nina okay? Okay now, but many refugees at dairy farm — crying mothers, little girls petting a calf. There was that plunging blue pool behind…
On a beautiful late-spring evening, I was swinging a fly on a small stream in southern New England. I’d heard it hosted a run of American shad. The notion of anadromous fish that grow to more than 7 pounds, swim up small streams and take a fly held a strong allure. But I’d never chased shad, and I found it frustrating. The stream was cloaked in maples and oaks, and I lost flies in the branches overhead and on the woody detritus stuck in the fine sediment on the bed of the slow stream. I saw a couple of promising swirls, but that was it. Not a single bump. Maybe I’d placed too much faith in the stream. I’d moved east from Montana six months earlier and left behind a…
Standing on the docks of Shrimp Landing, I look out over the Salt River, which connects to the Crystal River and then flows into the Gulf of Mexico. I breathe in the salt air as the sun inches up out of its slumber. The marsh grass on the opposite side of the river hardly moves in the stillness of morning as the sky turns from black to pink to orange. A bird is silhouetted on the top of a palm tree whose fronds were lopped off in a big blow, like a dandelion that lost its fuzz to the air-filled cheeks of a child. The aroma of barbecue wafts out of a smoker by a small storefront that stocks a mix of tackle, dry goods, bait, fish dip and T-shirts.…
From the forward seat of a drift boat, Bert Berkley floats a dry fly to a quiet eddy of aquamarine water near the willow-brushed banks of the Beaverhead River. His presentation is close to flawless, and as guide Jeff Lyon invokes the standard incantation to the fish gods in these parts — “Eat it!” — Berkley is handsomely rewarded. A hefty rainbow trout smashes the fly, leaps in a splash of technicolor and zips downstream in a sizzling run that gives Berkley’s 4-weight Sage fly rod a workout. “Tip up,” Lyon says reflexively — advice that elicits a good-natured response from Berkley. “I believe I’m doing that,” Berkley says as his rod bends in a perfect arc against a pristine Montana morning sky. After five decades of fly-fishing all over…
