Innholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2023 i Anglers Journal

As temperatures rise and the days lengthen, striped bass flood coastal waters from the Mid-Atlantic to New England. The traditional early spots see the first fish, but word spreads quickly as informal, overlapping networks come alive with news that schoolies have arrived. The once-bare woods — mostly silent all winter — reverberate at twilight with the sound of thousands of chirping spring peepers. I lie on my back and stare at the early-spring sky, feeling the season’s anthem as much as hearing it from the vernal pools and marshes. I love spring fishing for stripers, from the heavyweights we find when drifting live bunker beneath circling osprey to the ones in the salt ponds tattering our Clousers, deceivers and worm flies on warm evenings that stretch well into the night.…

The sun rises over the Royal River in Yarmouth, Maine. Photographer James Manning is next to me in the boat, sipping coffee and deciding whether to put his camera into its underwater housing. It is our second day fishing in Maine, and the air is mild with a slight chill. We hope to find a quiet patch of water and some eager fish to return us to a sense of equilibrium once again. Maine during summer is one of the treasured places in my heart. When I was 15, I caught my first striped bass not far from here. I was an inept angler, but I was there with my dad, and we were celebrating what was our first “normal” year of my adolescence without the prospect of me having…

As a Cape May native, chasing billfish runs deep in the upbringing of HMY Yacht Sales Professional, and Viking expert Jeff Thiel. We had the opportunity to sit down and discuss who Jeff really is and how his passion for fishing led to careers in the marine industry. Thiel brings over 25 years of tournament sportfishing knowledge to the table with extensive experience in the maritime world. Running numerous fishing programs and traveling the globe has molded Thiel into a world-class fisherman and yacht broker. Thiel started his career in the maritime industry at 16 as a mate on board the “South Jersey Champion” owned by Dick Webber. The lure and history of international destinations soon became a reality for Thiel. “South Jersey Champion” set course to sought after fishing…

ANCIENT GREEK PHILOSOPHERS STRIVED TO ESTABLISH what they called summum bonum, “the greatest good to which all human effort in life should be directed.” I learned this from a 78-year-old angler who described himself as an Epicurean. My wife, Leigh, and I had arrived in the Florida Keys in February, having made the tedious drive from Colorado for a two-month stay in Marathon. While fly-fishing from foot along a narrow causeway on Middle Torch Key, I saw a guy poling another angler in what appeared to be a small skiff. The seated angler was tangling with a large fish. I had waded out onto a flat on the incoming tide, trying not to stumble on small coral heads or step on sea urchins. The water was clear and knee-deep. I…

ABOUT 16 YEARS AGO, Paul Guard, the founder of Action Craft boats, called and said he was selling the company and had a 17-foot skiff that he could sell me cheap. I had been running Action Crafts for years, and he gave me a great deal, so I bought the boat. I paid $16,000 for it, and I’ve been running it ever since. I fish Mosquito Lagoon, the Indian River and along the Space Coast in central Florida, and my 17-foot, 2-inch Action Craft is ideal, especially its stability. A lot of the clients I take out are older, and they can fish comfortably in my boat without stumbling. It’s really stable and has wide gunwales, so you can easily walk from bow to stern. Newer, lighter poling skiffs aren’t…

Chunkers are viewed as the bottom-feeders of the fishing world, the polar opposite of the refined and finesse-obsessed fly fisherman. Chunkers are seen as beer-drinking, cigarette-smoking, white-bucket-wielding Neanderthals whose only goal is to harvest meat. Some will tell you chunking is cheating. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The way I chunk is every bit as refined, sophisticated and intense as any pencil-popping, eel-slinging, deceiver-drifting surf guy you could imagine. Step one is catching bunker. Despite having had no trouble finding bait the past several nights, my first two stops this evening came up short. I had a single adult menhaden in my cooler, but my average outing requires 20 to 30 bunker. I had already invested more than an hour looking for bait, and with the change in…

As we run south, away from the launch ramp at C.S. Lee Park in Geneva, Florida, the narrow ribbon of dark water begins to burst open into a massive floodplain. My eyes adjust to the vast, wide-angle landscape as I slowly turn my head, letting my mind create a panoramic image of the mosaic. Tall grass swaying in the breeze as far as I can see. Hammocks of sabal palms and cypress trees drooping with Spanish moss provide the only dots of shade in an exposed vista. When you live on a pancake, as I do in central Florida, you must go to the beach or look inland to find an expanse of wild country such as the one unfolding in front of me on the St. Johns, the state’s…

I stood on a windy hill on an early April evening, smelling the rain blowing off the sound as it moved up the river valley, shrouding it in sheets of mist. At that moment, I made up my mind that, unlike the previous season, I would spend as many days in the field as possible. Not for love, money or work would I miss another stretch of productive spring tides. I knew that if I was to be of any use to anyone, including myself, I had to get back to the edges where land meets the sea. To those nooks and crannies where I have long found fish and a measure of peace. When I wrote that years ago, it was the truth. It still is. Spring is the…

THANK YOU, JOE BROOKS My father gave me my first fly rod 70 years ago, and I came to know of Joe Brooks not long after that [“Last Chance,” Winter]. Though I never met the man, I admired and respected Brooks. I will always be grateful for his ability to inspire so many of us to better-appreciate the gentlemanly pursuit of fly-fishing. Frank Sharpe Burtonsville, Maryland INTELLIGENT LIFE I picked up the Fall issue of Anglers Journal on a flight from Houston to Virginia. It was my companion for the flight. Two stories really made an impression on me. The first is Charlie Levine’s “Weighing In” [“The Great Escape”]. This is a description of my soul. I often tell my wife there are three F’s in life: food, fishing and…

PLACE TIES US TO ONE ANOTHER, STITCHES OUR MEMORIES TOGETHER with a fine hand. It stands, like a witness tree on a long-ago family farm, marker to love and death and loyalty. For the last decade, we’ve made a pilgrimage together, father and son, to a stream in Montana, a mountain tributary miles and miles away from the valley and the river it eventually feeds. Willows and dogwood drape the banks. The undergrowth too thick to consider bushwhacking because the drainage is plentiful with grizzly bears. There are pools where the water is forced downhill at breakneck speed, where light refracts, painting the surface turquoise. Here, snowmelt runs clear as a grandmother’s window in spring, blue-veined hand having wiped away winter with vinegar and water. After months of snow and…

Capt. Peter B. Wright was quite possibly the best heavy-tackle captain of the modern era. The IGFA Hall of Famer was born in 1944 and grew up in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. At age 11, he started working on boats and wired his first marlin in the Bahamas. Wright received a degree in biology from Georgia Tech in 1965 and a master’s in marine biology from the University of Miami in 1967. In 1968, after collecting cephalopods for a research program in Antarctica, Wright found his way to Australia. He hitchhiked to Cairns and fished for black marlin on the Great Barrier Reef with Capt. George Bransford, who is credited with catching the first 1,000-pound marlin, or “grander,” in Australia. Wright fell in love with the marlin fishery and fished the…

BUNKER SPOONS ARE THIN pieces of curved metal shaped like a tear drop with lead keels and an 8/0 to 10/0 hook fastened to the rear. Trolled behind a boat, the metal lures come alive and have fooled many large stripers over the decades. Big striped bass mistake the spoons for adult menhaden (hence the name), a favorite food that can reach 15 inches and weigh more than a pound. Introduced roughly 60 years ago, bunker spoons epitomize the “large bait, large bass” ethos embraced by many striper anglers. They are trolled on wire line with long mono leaders to get down into the depths where the bigger bass hunt. Bunker spoons may appear deceptively simple, but getting a piece of steel to flutter and wobble like an erratic bunker…

It was a hot, sticky August morning in south Texas as we motored at idle speed through the darkness. The only sound we heard were surface slaps rippling out from a massive bait ball and periodic explosions as pelicans dive-bombed into the fray no farther than 20 yards off the bow of the 24-foot Skeeter. Conditions were on target for intersecting massive, migratory tarpon. With his headlamp providing our only on-board light, Capt. Brian Barrera threw his cast net as we approached the South Padre Island jetties to load up on silver mullet. Bait was plentiful, and Barrera filled the live well with little effort, which typically is not the case. Finding the right bait can be a grind that runs late into the morning as the day heats up.…