Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2025 i Anglers Journal

AJ Stripey “I love to fish offshore for billfish, and have fished all over for them, from the Bahamas, St. Thomas, Venezuela, Panama, Costa Rica, Mexico to the Texas gulf.”George Strait Country Music Artist AJ Last Cast “Poling gave me a perspective into the world of guides and their clients … the importance of pointing out the fish and setting up the skiff for them to make the cast.”Guy de la Valdène On the Water AJ Chrome Dome “… the good of having wisely invested so much time in wild country …”Harry Middleton Rivers of Memory…

CAPT. BOBBY RICE IS IN HIS 25TH SEASON guiding out of his native Truro, Massachusetts, a fishy outpost at the northern end of Cape Cod, just below Provincetown. Rice has pioneered some of the most demanding light-tackle fishing on the planet chasing giant bluefin tuna. Alongside Capt. Dom Petrarca, Rice began focusing on bluefin tuna on light tackle roughly 15 years ago, around the time Shimano introduced the 20000 SW Stella spinning reel, a formidable foe for giant tuna, which he matches with Japanese-made Centaur rods. The two friends perfected this class of fishing and claimed unoffcial record bluefin catches on spinning gear two days apart in 2014, Rice landing a 423-pounder and Petrarca landing a 597-pounder. Landing tuna of this size on spinning tackle was once unthinkable. Another part…

MARK ANDERSON ROLLS ANOTHER TOBACCO-HERB “ROLLIE” on the wooden seat of his 15-foot skiff. He lights up, a few sparks fluttering down toward the red gas tank, and tells us to cast under a low-hanging willow. We’re on the Thames, west of London, fishing for pike along the banks of Eton College, where many of Britain’s elite are educated. “Strip faster, pause longer,” Anderson instructs. After more unanswered retrieves and casts that fall short, Anderson barks, “no, no, no,” as I hang a big red streamer over a log. Anderson shakes his head, exhales a plume of tangy smoke and says, “perfect.” Charles Rangeley-Wilson, my old friend from England who introduced me to Anderson, delivers a precise cast under the leafy branch, strips once and hooks a pike. “That-a-boy, Charlie,”…

It’s 4:30 a.m. The world around me is a dark smudge until the blinding glare of an overhead recessed light slams into my eyes, cutting through my foggy brain like a 2,000-lumen spreader light blasting off freshly waxed gelcoat. I lie on a pull-out sofa, the closest thing to a bed I’ve had in a week. I’m at the mercy of our crew’s early risers — chief among them Capt. Art Sapp, who wakes well before the sun each day to search for something that swims. Two hours to go until we throw lines. The clock is ticking, and we’ve got to transfer 200 baitfish from their floating pens to Native Son’s live wells. Disrupt their scales or slime coat? That ain’t happening. These fish are more than bait —…

Overnight, the small, seaside village where I often fish has been transformed into a buzzing landscape of frazzled parents with tired kids, young lovers searching for the dunes, rent-a-cops, sailors in goofy hats, powerboaters wearing too much jewelry, bicycles, baby strollers, skateboards, boogie boards and ice cream cones that cost more than a gallon of gas. The hordes seem to materialize from the ether, like clouds of shad flies in early April: slow, clumsy, harmless, but annoying nonetheless. You just want to give them all a good swat. More than a 100 people swarm the sidewalks, and no one looks like I do. It’s as if they were poured from the same dozen molds. They’re dressed in polo shirts and T-shirts, khaki shorts, nice jeans, skirts, boat shoes, sandals. You…

If you live long enough, you get old. I’m slowing down a little bit. I’m not jumping out of boats in the middle of the ocean to swim with sharks anymore. When I was a kid I bought my first fly rod. … It was bamboo with a wooden handle, and it cost $4.50. I decided I wanted to photograph football games, so I bought a little camera and a telephoto lens between my freshman and sophomore year at Notre Dame. I didn’t have any training; I just had a natural talent for it, I guess. The camera was my key to everything. Tom McGuane was the first guy to show me how to rig a tarpon leader. My cobia world record will never be beaten. It took me 2½…

JOHN SALAFIA AND BRIANA SMITH GOT INTO BOATING a decade ago while living in Essex, Connecticut. The couple’s first boat was a 1989 Boston Whaler 13 with a 25-hp outboard. They sold the Whaler after a year-and-a-half and moved up to a 2003 Trophy 1802 walkaround with its original 125-hp Mercury. That boat got them out on Long Island Sound, where Salafia fed his appetite for saltwater fishing. They unloaded the Trophy and started a boat project on a fixer upper that didn’t end well and left them boatless. In 2018, Salafia took a new job, and the couple moved to Newport, Rhode Island. One year later, they purchased a house in Wakefield, Rhode Island, and got married. With room for a boat, they began thinking about their next vessel.…

Three of us bump along a dusty road as we make our way to a river in the Canterbury region of New Zealand’s South Island. After many long nights spent poring over maps in Idaho to create a flexible itinerary for this month-long trip, it’s finally happening. Zac and Abbey Mayhew and I position ourselves to fish lowland streams amid an oceanic climate, with dry tussock and gorse-filled mountain catchments, fairy-tale green, bush-flanked rivers, and high alpine glaciers. And on the back end of this trip, Zac and I are headed for a week of guided helicopter fishing at Cedar Lodge, located along the Makarora River near Mount Aspiring National Park. The South Island is roughly 32 percent larger than the North Island, yet only one quarter of New Zealand’s…

It’s mid-July, the muggy dog days of summer, and the breeze in our faces as we cruise at 25 knots feels wonderful. My buddy and I are headed for an island several miles off southern New England, which shall remain nameless. Seas are calm, resident stripers are settled in, and we’ve got all the time in the world. We arrive shortly before dark and kill some time gauging the current and drift, making sure there are no prying eyes on us. The fish are spooky enough in the shallows on calm nights without having pilgrims blundering through with too much noise and too many lights. My partners and I have put in enough time out here over the years to have figured out the summer bite. We are chasing bass…

TARPON ARE CRUEL, WICKED FISH. Before I started fishing for them, everything I’d read or seen gave me the impression that they are majestic, cunning and beautiful. Yes, they are all those things, but those are not their dominant traits. Deep in the night, from shore, in the hard-running currents that cut between the islands of the Florida Keys, tarpon are evil incarnate. The grace and glamour they display on the flats is stripped away, and they become demonic. It is not their fussy nature or the copious, superfluous violence of their fight that I struggle with the most. It is the space they occupy that makes them so sinister: Bridges are their lair. Each bridge has a unique personality. A cursory glance suggests many are the same, but that…

“How many of those do you smoke a day?” ask incredulous clients of Capt. Frank Crescitelli regarding his prodigious intake of La Flor Dominicana Double Ligero 700 maduros. “That’s a proprietary number,” is his canned response. But if there’s anything that precedes Crescitelli more than the oversized cigars that seem eternally perched in the corner of his mouth, it is his superlative mastery of any and all manner of saltwater fishing. Granted his accolades, the man deflects praise with utmost grace. “I gravitate toward the things I suck at,” the auto mechanic-turned-fishing guide tells photographer Tom Lynch and me as we slide out into a section of channel Crescitelli calls “The Hole.” His right-hand fishing partner, a 10-year-old spaniel named Mia, giddily pitter-patters back and forth across his 24-foot Bluewave…

When Carter Andrews walks into a tackle shop, people take notice. Everything about Andrews is big, from his goatee to his personality to his booming voice. He even refers to himself as Big Boy. But behind the persona is an authentic angler living a fishing life that most of us can’t help but envy. He has his own Outdoor Channel television show, The Obsession of Carter Andrews, a small fleet of boats, a tackle room that rivals most retail outlets and a passport full of stamps. But if you peel back the layers, Andrews at his core is a driven fisherman who simply loves to catch everything that swims. When he hooks a fish, he gets just as excited today, at 58, as he did when he was a boy.…