Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2023 i The Drake

IN DECEMBER 2022, two Northern European professors published a paper in the Finnish Journal of Tourism Research titled “Angling Tourism: A State of the Art Review.” Their research looked at ninety-eight articles on angling tourism in twenty-nine countries. Their biggest takeaway: “Tourism studies have, by and large, ignored angling as a tourism activity across the globe, despite angling’s significant contributions to the tourism industry.” Reactions to this may range from “No surprise” to “Who cares?” If it’s the latter: The economic impact of flyfishing dollars on national, state, and local economies, particularly in rural communities, is directly proportional to the power of our voice when it comes to investments and policy decisions. For a somewhat sad but honest example: Pickleball-playing snowbirds traveling to Florida, Hawaii, Arizona, and elsewhere have gained…

FLYFISHING’S GUIDE/CLIENT relationship has always been a special one. All the best guides understand that advice should be given sparingly—as hangry, hungover mumbles mixed with chew spit. Meanwhile, all the best clients understand that, while there are no dumb questions, there are still plenty of dumb questions. Guide: “Always mend upstream, unless you have to mend downstream.” Client, to guide on a trip: “Did you bring any stool softeners?” Guide: “What kind of fucking coward wears a size 8 wading boot?” Flyshop customer: “You like snook? I like snook. Small world!” Guide: “Make your next cast upstream and to the right.” Client: “Downstream?” Guide: “No, upstream and to the right.” Client: “I’m not sure what you mean.” Guide: “Face upstream. Cast that direction.” Client: “I still don’t get what you’re…

THE SUNSPOTS ON HIS FOREARMS are constellations in time. I considered how many hours he had spent baking in the sun, waiting for something to happen. Just how many mackerel had his hands claimed, how many sea trout fell to his cooler? “Need anything else?” the man snapped, waiting for me to grab my beef jerky and make way for his next customer. That man’s arms are not unlike many of the arms I see, speckled with stories and, like any good fisherman or guide, filtered with lies. The line of skiffs sliding into the gas station before dawn load up with ice, REC-90, and junk food for another day in the sun. After a few waves, hey how are ya’s, and go get ‘em’s, I close the truck door…

WE’VE OWNED THE CABIN for twenty years now, perched above a rushing tributary of the East Branch Delaware River in the Catskill Mountains. My son grew up splashing in the stream and catching frogs, then paddling the river and hiking in the woods. He starts college in September. Over the years, friends and neighbors have come and gone. Some moved away; others passed. Scattered second homes have sprung up along the dirt road where forests once stood. The fishing, too, has waxed and waned. Droughts and low water seem more frequent. Anglers complain that the river is too crowded, and that certain hatches aren’t what they once were. Maybe so. Then, hidden on a hard drive, I find a journal entry: June 9th, 2019. Arrived at the cabin on Friday…

THE MINNESOTA Department of Natural Resources (DNR) staff were too busy dumping two thousand young rainbows into the small stream to notice my camera clicking away beside them. Three men wandered around the hatchery truck in long unwashed waders. Their hands grasped nets that frothed with rainbows as they walked down the bank to the water. It was a short procession that involved taking scoops of fish from the brown-stained hatchery tank and then lumbering them just a few steps away. My eyes hungrily tracked the scene. One of them stood next to me, observing, and said proudly, “This is the creek where they come to shock northern pike for the Minnesota State Fair. These small trout are at the bottom of the food chain out here.” “Really?” I asked…

The “bridge” is three rotten telegraph poles laid lengthways across the gorge. It’s barely wider than the eight-wheeled Argocat we’ll drive across it. I can see the stream gushing twenty feet below through the gaps in between. “Replacing the bridge is one of my jobs for the winter,” Ewen says, grinning, exposing the missing tooth he knocked out while vaping. It doesn’t make him look any less like George Clooney’s offspring. Handsome fucker. “But that’s what I said last winter.” He puts the Argocat in gear. I cross myself. I’ve been thinking a lot about death lately. The Queen dying Sept. 8, the day before I left for a week of fishing on Jura, isn’t helping. To me, in that last photo at Balmoral Castle, she looked like any other…

A ONE-GALLON ZIPLOC bag full of water is a wonderful tool for observing a brook trout, allowing you to study it like a jeweler might hold a diamond to the light. I was participating in a sampling event hosted by Trout Power, a Rome, New York-based nonprofit founded in 2011 that uses citizen science to advocate for native brook trout. Specifically, the group aims to identify new strains of wild, native brookies in New York’s Adirondack Park. Results thus far have been encouraging. Like technology used to provide humans with insights about their own heritage, recent advances in genomic testing allow average anglers to determine (with a little help from experts) the heritage of native fish, all for about twenty-five bucks per test. With a quick fin snip, citizen scientists…

SHILOH NICKERS AND ROCKS GENTLY, finding her footing on the basalt and granite. She is taking me down into the valley, down to the river, this river of cutthroats galore. Some rivers are good, some are damn good, and a very few are exceptional. This one knows me and I swear the trout are always glad to see me. Maybe they know I will not harm them, that my plan is to interrupt their life as briefly as possible, give them as good a thrill as they give me, and then gently release them. Some streams are just made for a bamboo four weight and dry flies, and this is one of them. It’s a long and winding trail. Shiloh’s done it a thousand times, knows the trail like an…

IN MINNESOTA BLUFF country we don’t have twenty-six-inch cutthroat. Nor do we have grizzlies, wild horses, or broad, hundred-mile-long, gravel-bottomed rivers pouring down from the mountains. What we do have is the Whitewater Valley and Bud’s Last Stop with three-dollar burgers. For a buck more you get a pint of Coke over ice, cold as a spring creek. And that ain’t bad. Another thing we don’t have are crowds. I can fish over two miles of the pretty West Branch and not see another angler all afternoon. Is it because the fishing is bad? Last Saturday, using a 3-weight and a small Hendrickson, I caught and released sixteen brown trout, one after another. I suppose it’s too late to ask you not to tell anyone. I must not look like…

I GRABBED A BEER and sat on the riverbank with my bare feet in the water. The sun had slipped behind the monolithic hills of the canyon sometime earlier, setting the surrounding grasses awash in a warm haze that crept down the cliff walls and spread across the river’s surface like a claret oil spill. The air was crisp and finally comfortable, a welcome relief from the day’s unrelenting desert heat. I cracked my beer and cursed as it sprayed foam all over my shirt. Suddenly my eyes caught movement across the river. A pair of headlamps on the opposite bank were bouncing downstream through the dense streamside brush. The two shaded figures stepped out of the tall grass onto the narrow gravel bar directly across from me and paused,…

Landing a big salmon makes an angler, at least temporarily, immune to the petty slings and arrows of life. What is a traffic ticket to someone who has just landed a forty-pound salmon? Nothing. Long wait for your table? Meaningless. You’ve exited the dull antechamber of regular life and have entered a fantastic formal ballroom. And no one can take that away from you. This universal fact places an understandable premium on the few big-fish rivers that remain. It is hard to catch a large salmon where none exist. Yet your invitations to fish Norway’s Steinfossen Pool, or spend a week in Lorne Cottage along the Cascapedia, have not likely been lost in the mail. And your wealthier, better-connected friends, casting farther and more tastefully, are too busy to save…

Spend a couple weeks touring around the flyfishing byways of Ireland, and you will notice that many of the country’s beautiful backroads are extremely narrow, bordered on both sides by thick, centuriesold stone walls. Driving at high speeds mere inches from these jagged guardrails is a lot like fishing at slow speeds for wary Atlantic salmon—both require hours of focused vigilance despite the slim chance of running into either. The challenge of landing a Salmo salar in Ireland shouldn’t deter anyone from trying. Wild Atlantic salmon—like their cultural siblings, wild Pacific steelhead—are hard to catch no matter where they’re found. Indeed, it is the species’ difficult nature that attracts many a masochistic follower in the first place. But at least in Ireland, you’ll never be far from salmon-adjacent activities like…

SOMETIMES WE GO PERMIT fishing and don’t catch one. (Most of the time, actually.) Don’t let that ruin your trip. As photographer Joe Evans and friends learned on a recent trip to Xcalak, Mexico, (a great place for permit) those black-tailed devils should be the bonus to a flats trip, not the be-all end-all for its success. The main goal is finding fun.…

ON JUNE FIFTH, the seven members of Colorado’s court of last resort unanimously ruled that 81-year-old flyfisherman Roger Hill “lacks standing” to continue his decade-long legal battle for public access along the Arkansas River (Hill v. Warsewa). Put another way, the Colorado Supreme Court unanimously ruled that its justices lack the resolve or the readiness to pursue a rational clarification of the state’s river-access laws. It’s hard to blame the judges. Their reluctance is likely due in part to State Attorney General Phil Weiser not wanting the clarification pursued—not by the judiciary, anyway. But let’s not pretend that the state Supreme Court couldn’t have granted Hill the permission he sought. If we’ve learned anything about supreme courts over the past few years (state or federal), it’s that precedent doesn’t have…

HERE I SIT, behind the backseat of this old Mercury Marquis, staring at the white-oak acorns I’ve collected in the spare tire to get me through winter. My tiny heart is about to explode because my home just began roaring again like the Detroit luxury boat it was built to be. There’s some idiot driving it. I watched him stealthily from under the seat as he kept calling folks, saying, “Well, Clyde’s running again.” Or, “Just took Clyde to Foxy’s.” I would’ve freaked out entirely—my home was being stolen with me inside! But the gas fumes acted as a mild sedative, and I fell asleep instead. Waking up, I knew I had to get the hell out. Fight or flight had become a survival imperative, because if this human found…

THE LOOK IN my wife’s eyes suggested that what she was about to tell me would be a crushing blow. “I wasn’t able to get a ticket for you,” she said. “I’m so sorry.” The ticket in question was to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, which, in the world of our teen and pre-teen daughters, is serious currency. My wife had secured six such tickets to the sold-out concert at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa. All of which were allotted to my daughters, their friends, and their moms. I put my hands on my wife’s shoulders, looked her straight in the eyes and replied, “Don’t worry, honey. I’ll try to find something else to do.” We’d planned a whole trip to Florida around surprising our daughters with the concert, and suddenly…

IN EARLY APRIL, many emails were sent from concerned guides in Louisiana, asking clients and friends to fill out a survey launched by Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. The survey asked a range of questions, from the coastal region you typically fish, to the number of reds you typically harvest. Some discouraging data was also included: “Recreational landings are at the lowest levels since the 1980s,” and “Overfishing has occurred in most of the last decade.” Current Louisiana regulations allow every angler to kill five redfish over 16 inches, one of which can be over 27 inches. The survey included this message: “Some of these regulations may need to be changed if the stock of redfish is to improve.” It then listed twenty-four options for suggested regulation changes, none…

Baseball and fishing are not uncommon bedfellows. In our family, they developed into our two sons’ varsity baseball journey (one as a pitcher, one a center fielder), and as a joint obsession with flyfishing. It’s no coincidence that they again converged during a stay in the Florida Keys, which is how I came to be standing on the casting deck of a skiff in the backcountry out of Islamorada, with legendary angler Stu Apte. The wind had calmed, leaving only the plop of the push pole and a light slap of water against the hull. I held a Stu Apte signature 12-weight coupled with his signature reel, while our veteran guide, Steve Thomas, tirelessly searched for tarpon. Behind me, sitting on a cushioned cooler while scrutinizing my every move, was…

I HAVE SOMETHING IN COMMON with the green drake: I’m not an early riser. Consequently, I consider the annual summer solstice a sacred occasion, with nearly sixteen hours of continuous daylight, the earth tilting toward the sun like a tourist basking on the beach. In the Intermountain West, the solstice summons anglers to famed rivers where big trout eat big bugs—from green and brown drakes on the Henry’s Fork to salmonflies up the road on the Madison. This perfect brew of extended daylight, neighboring rivers, and sizable bugs presents the opportunity for what I’ve termed the “Solstice Slam”—three fish on three flies from two rivers in the same day. June on the Henry’s Fork can feel like both gift and burden. The gift is its glorious water, challenging trout, and…