Innholdsfortegnelse for Fall/Winter 2023 i The Drake

SINCE I forget them, or don’t know how to pronouce them, I rarely use the Latin, or scientific, name for an insect. Instead, I do the American thing and make fun of those who do. Knowing the Latin name of a bug is impressive, but not impressive enough to outweigh the annoyance of you using the Latin name for a bug. (Baetis being the obvious exception, if only to avoid the rousing “bluewing” vs “bluewinged” debate.) If you are going to use the Latin name, then it must be pronounced properly. Lest we forget, the reason Latin was chosen as the language for naming plants and animals in the first place is because Latin is a “dead tongue” and thus won’t evolve over time. Nowhere is this more crucial than…

IN JUNE OF 2022, Max Holmes became President and CEO of the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. He’s been fishing his whole life and can talk stripers around Cape Cod or salter (sea-run) brookies in the Quashnet River. But he’s also a climate scientist, with a PhD in biogeochemistry and a deep knowledge of the data and statistics surrounding the mother of modern-day buzzkills. His advice on that sinking sensibility: Face your dragons. A little science can go a long way toward helping you better understand how your favorite water might be made healthier. This is the inspiration behind Science on the Fly (SOTF). The hypothesis Holmes set out to test when he launched the program in 2019 was that anglers could be a natural ally in…

BLOOD DRIPS DOWN my leg where a horsefly just chewed a chunk of flesh from my calf. But I can’t look away. An ancient snout just broke the surface, revealing a longnose gar I’m here to catch. These fish are so old that, like tarpon or arapaima, they sip oxygen from the surface when there’s not enough in the water itself. Gar are a good excuse to pull on swim trunks and throw an eight-weight in the dead of summer, especially after tying some red-and-white bunny leeches with puny little stinger hooks trailing out the back on fifty-pound braid. Their teeth are a nightmare, made to slice and hold—mostly bait, but sometimes us. This is a blood sport after all, gar being predisposed to bloodletting, maybe even more so than…

THE MATCH STRIKES and a thread of sulfurous air snakes into my nose. I roll over in my sleeping bag and see my dad turning the stove knob. A blue flame ignites the coffee percolator. “What time is it?” I groan, hearing raindrops thumping on the camper shell. “6:30,” he replies. I push out of the bag and wrestle into my hunting clothes. Apparently, neither of us set an alarm. Within minutes, I’m jostling alone upriver in my truck, tires splashing through potholes, coffee sloshing in my mug. I want to fish today, but hunting has a tendency to pry me off the streams in favor of the mountains. The previous year, I had defied 1-in-400 odds to draw a bighorn ram tag in this drainage. So, all summer, while…

“HOW MUCH SALT fishing experience do you have?” “Zero,” I replied, with a confident smile, unaware of just how hard the salt was about to fight back. I’d been obsessing over this experience for months. As a touring musician, we’d had our last show of the year the night before, at the Coast Is Clear Festival, in Key West. As soon as our tour dates were confirmed, I’d emailed my guide asking for a single day’s fishing. I didn’t warn him that I would be the greenest sport he’d pole around all year, mostly because I wasn’t yet aware that I would be. Also, he never asked. The night before, my bandmates asked why I was leaving early, before the festival was over. They’d never seen me get up at…

Iceland’s remote and lovely Hafralonsa River begins in Lake Hafralon, lost in the mountains of the country’s northeast corner, opposite from Reykjavic. The small fishing port of Thorshöfn, where the river meets the ocean, sits just shy of the Arctic Circle. Thorshöfn is an unassuming village of fewer than four hundred people, but it would come to leave a lasting impression. This is Iceland’s coldest region, with harsh winters and very short summers. It’s only when a high-pressure system settles over its high latitudes, and the sun shines for twenty hours, between mid-July and mid-August, that the afternoon water temperature in the Hafralonsa can reach into the mid-50s. In the morning, it rarely exceeds the mid-40s, and the salmon can be seen in the deep pools, in the shadow of…

My wife, Leigh, and I arrived in bustling Ketchum, Idaho, last fall after a two-day drive. My only previous visit had been a family ski trip in the ’70s. Ketchum was far less bustling in 1939, when the Sun Valley Lodge invited Ernest Hemingway to stay at the resort for free. With his mistress, the dazzling journalist Martha Gellhorn, the couple was treated like royalty. The lodge placed a guide at their disposal to fish on coveted private properties, and Hemingway fell so in love with Ketchum that he bought a house there in 1959. Leigh and I took a brief Hemingway tour, beginning at the Sun Valley Lodge, with its impressive collection of vintage photographs. We then motored to a memorial on nearby Trail Creek, where a bronze of…

FIFTY YEARS AGO this October, at a Montana Fish and Game Commission meeting in Ennis, a shocking suggestion was made: “Our recommendation today,” said then Fisheries Chief Art Whitney, “is that, for the 1974 season, we do not plant catchables in streams with thriving wild trout populations.” This highly unpopular decision was based on the findings of a young Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks (FWP) biologist named Dick Vincent, who’d helped design a new electroshocking device and who, by 1974, had been studying the effects of hatchery fish on wild trout populations for nearly eight years. “He was a revolutionary biologist,” says Wade Fellin, co-owner of Big Hole Lodge, and founder of the Save Wild Trout coalition. “He said if we stop managing for the fish, and start managing for…

“THE TUG IS the drug” was once a clever, original opinion about the merits of a steelhead’s grab—that often surprising sign of life from a seemingly barren river. Subsequently, promiscuous overuse placed this phrase under layers of bro strata, left to rot in the slagheap next to “tight lines,” uttered by reputable anglers only in jest. But I ask you now to momentarily reverse that understandable consequence and consider the phrase seriously, even philosophically, as a piece of knowledge about the world. On the one hand, the emphasis on “drug” reflects an undeniable truth: Our brain’s dopamine neurons are highly engaged when a steelhead grabs our fly. Since the likelihood of any given cast connecting with a fish is low, a steelhead brings a dopamine spike that leads to your…

WE RAN WAY out to the west of Key West that day, over the wide Northwest Channel and through the glassy Lakes Passage. We’d left Mule and Archer keys miles behind us, slalomed through the tight channel past Wolkowsky’s solitary house on Ballast, then farther west down the oceanside of Woman, skimming along at thirty knots. I’d staked the skiff out for lunch on a deep shoulder edge of Boca Grande, by that thin strip of beach. There’s a nice depth-gradient there and good current flow. During the right tide, tarpon use it like a highway. This being a Sunday, we’d eaten our pressed and toasted Cuban mixes from Kim’s on the Boulevard, where the wall is pasted with squadron patches from former Top Gun flight crews at the Naval…

AS A CASTING INSTRUCTOR with Fly Fishers International, I’ve heard about every metaphor there is to aid casters in everything from power application to tracking. These teaching aids range from the slightly helpful to the useless. The variability in the quality of these analogies becomes a natural hurdle as we try to condense the bizarre tactile motion of fly casting into imagery that translates. We’ve all heard some of them: “You’ve got a cup of coffee; your backcast should mimic throwing the contents of your cup over your shoulder.” “Your forward cast should feel like flicking paint off the end of a paintbrush.” “Stop it high, watch it fly!” My least favorite: “Imagine you’re throwing an apple off the end of a stick.” I’m not sure how many new fly…

7:30 a.m. May 9. La Parguera. THE MORNING’S FIFTEEN-MINUTE drive to the boat ramp rolls over hills studded with cacti, then past cattle ranches reminiscent of Montana, before dropping us beneath palm trees scattered along the coast. Our skiff hadn’t been in the water five minutes before we spot some rollers. While I’ve fished flats before, this is my first proper tarpon trip and I am a saltwater captain’s nightmare: a Western Trout Guy; handy with a rod but holding a deep-seated trout-set and high-stick fighting technique, both sins in the salt. A stiff breeze is blowing across the Caribbean, and despite years throwing streamers into howling Wyoming winds on the North Platte, I’m feeling woefully unprepared. I pull my nine-iron from the gunnel and nervously step to the tee.…

I LIVE IN EXILE. My home waters are the Lake Michigan watersheds in the Manistee National Forest—everything west of US-131 from Grand Rapids to Traverse City. In 2019, my work moved me to Kansas City, where I’m now at least three hours from cold, clear streams. This after learning to cast from Gary Borger himself on the banks of the flies-only Pere Marquette, walking distance from my in-law’s house. Everything I know about fishing, I know from that fast, tight water, from which I’ve hauled in log-heavy kings, twenty-inch browns, and a respectable number of lake-run rainbows. In Kansas, the water is green and murky. That’s as clean as it gets. The whole state is littered with stagnant pond water, and every stream in Johnson County is on the receiving…

TAXONOMICALLY, BULL TROUT are relative newcomers to the salmonid tribe, only declared a distinct species from its cousin, the Dolly Varden, in 1980. Though they have been listed as a threatened species under the U.S. Endangered Species Act since 1998, state regulations vary widely. In Idaho, fishing for bulls is allowed, but killing one has been illegal since 1994. In Montana, only three waters allow bull trout to be targeted: Lake Koocanusa; part of the South Fork Flathead; and Hungry Horse Reservoir, which also allows harvest (one per day, two per season). In Oregon, bull trout can only be targeted in the Metolius River, and the Metolius Arm of Lake Billy Chinook. In 2005, after killing a bull trout from Arrowrock Reservoir, Idaho angler Jordan Pugh paid nearly $1,500 in…

STATION. THE KITCHEN. LEDGES. For more than a century, anglers have walked the trails to these famed pools along Oregon’s North Umpqua River, carefully making their way to precise casting stations, then cautiously two-stepping downstream along greasy drop-offs and over irregular boulders. Indeed, it is often said that “if you’re not swimming, then you’re not fishing the North.” Williams Creek. The Motts. Archie’s. Millionaire. To wade here is to wade among flyfishing legends, casting for distinct, native steelhead. To spend a day along “the North” is to pay homage to both its people and its fish. And yet, despite all the names remembered for their inspiration and significance, one name remains at odds with the others. Winchester. Even after decades of enduring conservation achievements for the North Umpqua—National Wild &…

I LOVE MY GARAGE. Not for cars, as that would mean less room for fishing gear, and no couch for watching football. Don’t all anglers love garages—especially other anglers’ garages? I got a call from my friend, Josh. “My neighbor is cleaning out his garage and has some vintage fishing gear he wants to get rid of. I think there’s a Hardy in there.” My ears perked up. I love old Hardy reels. Nostalgia is part of it, but it’s also the sound they make when a fish takes off. I’m not alone in this impractical passion, which helps explain why some vintage Hardys sell for two grand. I went over immediately, and sure enough, there was not only a Hardy, but a slightly worn Hardy St. George with the…

THE FISHING IS SLOW, but I mostly blame my easily distracted, ever-wandering mind. As much as I crave time spent fishing, the simple acts that accompany it round out the edges. A circling red-tailed hawk riding the wind; a rust-colored oak leaf drifting downstream; the mountains towering above me, standing with such authority that I half-expect them to speak. I wish they would. I’m worried about my son, barely a toddler, and if I can ingrain in him the habit of existing as a part of nature, rather than a distant observer. This nostalgic stance is nothing new—radio, television, gaming-console—all led parents to question the impact on their child’s development. But none compare to the social-media behemoth, evolving faster than any of us predicted, now functioning as an entire alternate…

MATT PERKINSON is the coordinator of “saltwater fishing outreach and education programs” for the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources (SCDNR). I know this because a friend of mine, Hal Clifford, sent me a photocopied story that Perkinson had published in the July/August issue of South Carolina Wildlife magazine. Hal, a writer himself, moved his family from Colorado to South Carolina in 2021, and now chases redfish instead of rainbows. He’d included a brief note, part of which read: “Perhaps you have someone who could take on this problem of redfish mortality.” In the story, Perkinson describes a precipitous drop in South Carolina’s redfish numbers over the past thirteen years. While SCDNR uses a variety of methods in data collection, Perkinson writes that “the single most important piece of the…

With half of my body suspended over the Red Fish Bay chop, the other half anchoring me to the inflatable bow of the ten-foot Zodiac, I had no way of knowing the essence of the coming weekend’s memories. Would they be foul or fond, would they fracture with neglect, or repeat identically and warm like a well-played VHS? From the nature of my position, one could wager a decent guess. Spray from Texas’ Laguna Madre kissed my squinting face. (This is Red Fish Bay, just north of Port Mansfield; not Redfish Bay, just east of Port Aransas.) Three of us were balancing on the edge of a glorified raft piled high with gear and three days worth of consumables. My last venture on this boat, I evacuated three Whataburger tacos…

IT BEGINS WITH the moon—faraway, looming. That keeper of tides; a friend we all love but frequently forget. I assess the lunar calendar a year or more out, noting optimal tides. Then comes my own personal and far-less-predictable schedule. Three days are eventually selected, wedged between personal obligations and peak hurricane season. Once booked, I begin the familiar yet fulfilling process of preparation. More than once have I overlooked what I thought upon arrival was a minor detail, only to later pinpoint it as the culprit, and crux of failure. (How deep into my backing did I really check? Is this the reel that once free-spooled on me, or was that my other one? Backup sunglasses for when I step on this pair my first day?) My fly box is…