Innholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2025 i Anglers Journal

AJ Eye Level “There are few thrills in fishing that come close to the feel and sight of a leaping tarpon weighing more than 100 pounds. I know because it took me 83 years to boat my first really big one.”George H.W. Bush “A Passion for Tarpon,” by Andy Mill AJ Big Tease “Hope is such a bait, it covers any hook.”Oliver Goldsmith AJ Down-Sea “Surf fishing satisfies my primitive needs. … I feel like I’m married to the lip of the sea.”Roberto Germani “Reading the Water,” by Robert Post AJ On the Hunt “The wildness and adventure that are in fishing still recommend it to me.”Henry David Thoreau…

IT SHOULD BE SAID THAT CATCH-AND-RELEASE FISHING is a fine conservation principle, but it is not a bedrock moral commandment that ennobles the catcher. I have kept no more than a dozen trout in the last 40 years; most of those were caught in an isolated lake in the Andes, where hardly anyone else fishes. It abounded with pound-and-a-half brook trout that would take on nearly every cast. Catching them was as easy as picking ripe apples off a tree. Their flesh was the vibrant coral color of salmon, and when cooked in a skillet over a wood fire, they were as delicious as food ever can be. Still, the plain fact of the matter is, if you love catching wild fish, there is no way to sustain a fishery…

Lying face down on a massage table, staring out the window at a fleet of bay-boats and watching the captains banter with one another, I try not to focus on the pain climbing up my right calf. It feels like a hot scalpel is carving me up like a leg of lamb. The rat-a-tat-tat of the tattoo gun reminds me of the sound of the old air compressor at my stepdad’s auto-body shop when I was a kid. I redirect my thoughts of pain to redfish, the Louisiana bayou and this crazy fishing guide/musician/tattoo artist whose work will live on my body till my last breath. I met Theophile (pronounced toe-FEEL) Bourgeois IV when he was strumming a guitar in the Grundéns booth at ICAST, the giant tackle trade show…

 Strapped inside the noisy, four-seater cabin of a twin-engine Piper, I felt a sudden change in pressure in my ears, confirming our descent. Glancing out the window, I took in my first view of a barren, nondescript lump of brown rock amidst an expanse of indigo blue that stretched to the horizon. After many months of planning, we were about to fish the unsullied waters surrounding Robinson Crusoe Island. Many anglers believe there are no “new” fisheries left to discover. I’ve fallen into that lot myself, yet at 64, I’m fortunate to have fished and traveled extensively. Then I heard of a destination neither I nor any of my traveling fishing friends were aware of — a South Pacific location reputed for its wide range of game fish, most of…

We want to hear from you. Please send your comments to editor-in-chief Charlie Levine at charlie.levine@firecrown.com. Follow us @anglers_journal. It was nearly noon as we slid Capt. Brandon McGraw’s Hell’s Bay skiff off the trailer and into Florida’s Indian River. The surprising punch of a cool breeze provoked me to yank the zipper on my jacket all the way to my chin. It was a Friday, and the ramp was quiet, only a few other trailers in the parking lot. I don’t normally embark on a trip at this hour, but we wanted to let the January day warm up, which it had but was still in the 50s. The low-hanging clouds seemed to push all of the atmospheric moisture onto my shoulders. A shiver vibrated down my backbone. I…

THE WORK OF PHOTOGRAPHER JEFF DWORSKY illustrated a story published in Anglers Journal nearly six years ago about the small fishing town of Stonington on Maine’s Deer Isle. Dworsky moved there from Massachusetts in 1973 when he was 17. Now Dworsky’s work is the subject of a handsome, large-format book called Sealskin, from Charcoal Press. The book is 10 by 13 inches and 110 pages, with a hard cover embossed with a tipped-on photo. It highlights that which prompted our own feature of Dworsky’s photography: his visual documentation of a now bygone era in a tight-knit fishing community that preceded smartphones, Wi-Fi and artificial intelligence. “The analog world,” Dworsky said. Dworsky made friends quickly and gained the trust of many of Stonington’s roughly 900 townspeople, many of whom were fishermen.…

“LUCKY SKUNK? F-THAT!” I heard my boat’s name taken in vain. “Who’d want a skunk around?” My son and I looked up from scrubbing the bloody deck and saw a sneering, sunburned man. “Well,” I responded, “you gotta co-op negative mojo. Make the skunk your own positive power.” The man’s face twisted into confusion. My son lifted a 10-pound coho salmon from the cooler. For more than 15 years, this 16-foot skiff has been more than lucky; she’s been an easy-to-trailer, reliable means to the ocean, bays, rivers and lakes we love. My wife and I bought this 2001 Smoker Craft with a 4-stroke, 25-hp Mercury from a friend in 2008, for $6,200. I installed extra rod holders, downrigger mounts, a swim ladder (the kids insisted) and a 9.9-hp auxiliary…

Most fly-fishing anglers around the Northeast set their sights on Antillean grass flats for a quick-strike, midwinter respite with prospective fixes of bonefish, tarpon and permit whether we can afford it or not. Escaping the dark, cold metropolises to which so many of us are tethered is necessary to the survival of our species. On such trips over the years, I’ve struggled to find expansive, easily accessible flats with as many bonefish as I cared to count. A trip to Ascension Bay, where I lived in a small thatch hut for a month, for instance, was stifled by dead-end strolls on promising flats only to hit impossible dropoffs that called for a panga I was in no position to afford. So when I pored over satellite images of the 50-mile…

Spring is hurtling our way and with it the sense that anything is possible. In the movable kingdom of fish, all is again fresh and new and within our grasp. If you live in an area with real winter, this season of awakening is particularly welcome. I’ll turn 71 in May, and striped bass will again be gallivanting in the tidal river I have fished since I was a boy. I intend to drift many tides over the rocks, drop offs and oyster beds I consider old friends. I look forward to the sharp calls from the first flights of terns, to the feel of a bulky fish streaking for deeper water and to the annoyed whistles from a pair of ospreys on a nesting platform that rises from a…

THE SUN BEGAN TO PEAK OVER THE HORIZON as a light offshore breeze kept the hot, muggy air of Cabo San Lucas’ tropical desert at bay. It was a beautiful, calm morning — the roar of the boat’s engines didn’t even wake the sea lions lying on top of each other on the docks. As we left the harbor, I gazed out at the Cabo Arch, the massive rock formation that provided a sense of hope for the fishing that lay ahead for my brother, dad, grandfather and me. The first mate climbed down from the tower; reels buzzed and ticked as lines were let out into the Pacific. “It won’t be long now,” my grandfather said hopefully. While my dad and brother feasted on the breakfast the chef prepared,…

WHILE THE WORDS “CONSERVATIONIST” AND “PRESERVATIONIST” are sometimes used interchangeably, they are different. Conservationists advocate for responsible and sustainable use of natural resources, while preservationists advocate no use. I fall into the former category. I have a profound respect for the resource, as I believe most anglers do. But I kill fish. As a full-time captain, I spend the majority of my life underway, and I kill more than most. I’m not apologizing; it’s just the way it is. I don’t think I’m alone. All anglers kill fish. Even the folks who release everything inadvertently kill fish, but anglers don’t recklessly kill fish. If anything, it’s the opposite, but killing fish for sport puts me and other conservation-focused guides and anglers in a weird spot. FALSE VIRTUE Whenever I use…

John Gonya steers his 18-foot aluminum jonboat through the slow-moving eddies of the Penobscot River’s main stem with a trolling motor. The water, though tannin-stained and dark as tea, runs clear, and the Maine river lays out wide and languid, rock gardens fronting deep pools, the current accelerating to light rapids as it runs over shallow gravel bars. It’s a cool, cloudy Saturday before Labor Day, and Gonya, guiding on and off for 30 years, has navigated us to an attractive spot — a sand bank with a steep drop-off, submerged rocks just inside a line of slow-moving current. I plop a shiny, bronze-colored Rapala jointed minnow close to the bank, and two jerks later, wham! A feisty smallmouth bass clobbers the bait with all the ferocity for which these…

David Danforth had one helluva summer. He and his merry band of fly anglers spent more than two months in Mexico, Belize and Costa Rica, where Danforth painted murals on three lodges and the group collaborated on a film called King of Color. They also fished a ton. Danforth’s paintings are loud and bold, full of color and motion, a mashup of street art and abstract with a nod toward Basquiat and a touch of Indiana Jones. You certainly wouldn’t mistake his work for Winslow Homer’s. “I’m trying to make fishing cool to people who weren’t raised in it,” says the 39-year-old angler from Tampa, Florida. “I’m trying to put power, color and motion into these fish — to show that fishing is more than just sitting on a dock…