Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2024 i The Drake

IN SPRING OF 2003, John Gierach wrote a story for this magazine called “High Country.” The issue came out just before a flyfishing show of some sort, and not thirty minutes went by before an esteemed member of the editorial class marched up and reprimanded me for spelling Gierach’s name wrong—on the cover. “I mean, it’s John Gierach,” the man said, disgust dripping from his lips. “How could you?” I’m an accomplished cover-botcher, so the fact that I’d made this unforgivable error didn’t shock me. What did, is that I’d run into Gierach himself ten minutes prior and he simply thanked me for running his story, never mentioning the misspelling. This was quintessential Gierach. You can respect me, even admire me if you must. But don’t revere. Don’t make a…

We’ve all been there: mid-afternoon on the water, the action is just heating up, and suddenly… your fishing day is over. Time to head back to the lodge. But what if it wasn’t over? What if your lunch break included a siesta, leaving you recharged, refocused, and fishing an evening bite. Welcome to snoozer trips. Brazil: Sight-fishing to Peacock Bass in the Amazon American Michael Williams, a former flyfishing guide and sales rep, first fished the Amazon sixteen years ago. Now, as Director of Nomadic Waters, Williams operates several trips a year on Brazil’s massive Rio Negro, the far smaller Rio De da Lua, and the Rio Tatuagem, which Nomadic began offering in 2024. All three offer floating, houseboatbased fishing camps, primarily for peacock bass, including some true monsters. The…

Q: Dear Trask, Not sure what you know of President Trump, but the fact that he’s never owned a pet makes me suspicious. On the bright side, since Biden’s shepherd bit everyone it met, I’m already looking good by comparison. My question: I like fishing, and heard there are snakeheads here. Deets, please. —Atlas, J.D. Vance’s cool-looking German shepherd A: Dear Atlas, Glad you weren’t just rented as a campaign prop! You heard right, snakeheads snuck their slimy asses into the Potomac like twenty years ago, and have been around ever since. Lucky for you they breath air, like tarpon do, so you’ll see them sticking their dumb, duck-looking heads out of the water. Like many in DC, snakeheads like weed, so they aren’t usually too far from grass. Now, I know…

In my defiance I’ll know defeat.I cast then step. Working my way down the run toward the tailout. The rod heavy with ice and the line stiff.Following the drift down into the swing. Nothing. Is it possible? Sure. In the past month, three fish have been caught and one other hooked in this vein that feeds the great Pacific basin. I even convinced myself I saw one move on the edge nine or ten days ago. Is it possible? Sure. I step then cast. The running line snaps sharply against the rod and echoes my defiance. It is possible.…

LIKE MANY FIRST-TIME ATTENDEES, he sat in the back for several nights, drinking coffee and working up the nerve. I noticed him, but I’ve seen plenty of his type come and go. Some have hit rock bottom and are ready to deal with their problem. Others know the truth but aren’t ready to accept their dependency until it destroys everything they once held dear. When you’ve been to as many meetings as I have, you learn not to get attached to the dabblers. I think it was around his fifth meeting when I noticed him looking nervous and remember thinking that this would be the night. An hour later he sheepishly walked to the front of the room. “Hello,” he said. “My name is Michael, and I’m a musky fly…

AHAB WAS AN AMATEUR. If you want real obsession, you need to cast farther. You need to climb down root-ladders and weave through briar bushes to the river just as spring melt is ebbing, then low-crawl under massive logs and scamper over wet river-stones more slippery than a candidate’s promise. You need to fall and gash your shins to the bone, blood flowing freely then cleansed by the cold clear water that trout love. How bad does an infection need to be for you to actually quit fishing? Is gangrene even a thing anymore? You need to promise just one more cast for five hours, then just one more fish, then the internal one-sided negotiation, all thesis, no antithesis: “Just one more, well, maybe two, OK, three.” And on and…

Fish size can be difficult to judge. Lightrefraction, sun angle, wind-chop, current speed, depth—all these variables conspire when staring through the fluid lens of a flowing river. You know a big fish when you see one, though, and I had one in my sights. It was swaying in less than two feet of water behind a particular boulder with which I have a complex relationship. Every time I fish this run, a large brown trout hovers and glides over and around the light-colored rock, allowing me to watch the fish nod left and right, snatching passing invertebrates. Yet I’d never hooked one here. It’s tricky water. You get one shot if you’re lucky, before an unnatural drift or misplaced shadow causes the fish’s posture to stiffen. They’ll continue to sit…

ONE NEEDN’T WALK FAR into the high country before spotting streaks of carrot-colored rock, or streams running rust-orange, milky white, and other strange colors, the remnants of decadesold abandoned mines that are now perpetual sources of toxins. Forty percent of western headwater streams are impacted by these old mines, which unfortunately concentrate near the cold, perhaps once-clear feeder creeks where native fish live. Utah has an estimated 17,000 abandoned mines; Colorado, an estimated 23,000. State agencies and nonprofits like Trout Unlimited (TU) have been interested for years in reducing these pollution sources, but held off because doing so meant accepting legal and financial liabilities that could, in theory, bankrupt a nonprofit. “I don’t think, when the Clean Water Act was passed in 1972, that the legal liabilities were intended to…

IN THE SPRING OF 1951, I was baptized into the Roman Catholic faith. During the ceremony, the priest asked if I would forsake sin. I had no understanding of this, and did not reply, having been rudely pulled from my mother’s womb a short six months earlier. After my family agreed on my behalf, I wailed with displeasure when water was poured over my head. Sometime in 1968, I picked up a copy of Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America. Soon thereafter, I purchased a seven-foot, six-inch fiberglass rod built by Fenwick. With many of the most prolific hatches occurring during Sunday service, I became a lapsed Catholic, my attendance dwindling to those Sundays before and after trout season. It wasn’t long before I reduced my church-going to only Easter…

I’M RIDING A WAVE. A series of boulder-strewn riffles, barely cresting, on the river near my home. The “geopiety of the eastern seaboard,” as Jim Harrison referred to it, once led me away from these bustling suburbs of Washington, D.C. to western Montana, where I would fish and trek alone in the woods for what seemed like eternity. I immersed myself in a wilderness that is, by any measure, one of the last best places on earth. But for all the wonder that wilderness evoked, the whole thing stunk of self-loathing. To my friends back home, I became “the guy who left for Montana.” To my new friends in Montana, the question would always linger: “When are you heading back home?” It presented an existential crisis: Do I spend my…

If you’ve seen the 2002 post-apocalyptic horror flick, 28 Days Later, then you’ll understand when I tell you that the film’s deserted-street scenes look much like downtown Calgary on a Saturday morning in September. Save for a few zombie-like transients, the city was empty. Google maps said I was within forty feet of a fly shop, but all I could see was a twenty-story building with a barber shop on the first floor. Then I noticed a middle-aged man in flip flops and a Simms vest walking confidently into the building. He wasn’t quite Cillian Murphy in hospital scrubs, but I figured he could lead me to Bow River Troutfitters. This man, Trevor, shared the code to the employee restroom while he turned on the fly shop lights—the first of…

Growing up, I was not a camper. I never spent a summer away from home, sleeping in a rickety bunk, singing campfire songs, and receiving instruction in illicit drug use. Believe me, the opportunity to supplement my sexual resume with fictitious camp lovers would have been useful. Instead, my first supervised outdoors group-experience occurred later in life, when I found myself at a steelhead lodge in northern British Columbia. They say converts are the most zealous, and that is surely true in my case. Instead of being dropped off by your parents, a week at steelhead camp begins on the airstrip, where the sorrow exhibited by the departing group mingles with the excitement shared by the one arriving. Incoming guests receive hasty river reports from the poor souls headed home.…

TOMMY BATUM is a cool, funny, flytying, fish-spotting, permit-obsessed flyfishing guide in Xcalak, Mexico. He would have a wonderful story to tell if he could tell it. But he cannot, because he is deaf and mute. So RA Beattie and friends at Off the Grid Studios decided to tell Tommy’s story for him, in their most recent film, Silent Spotter. With wit, honesty, and a touch of irreverence, director Beattie provides a glimpse into Tommy’s remarkable journey, one that might leave you questioning who the real “heros” are in the world of saltwater flyfishing. Tommy’s story is one of innovation and resilience, family and tradition. For him, flyfishing isn’t just a source of income: It is his passion and sanctuary, it’s where he finds comfort, serenity, and community. Apprenticing under…

DAN SOLTAU is owner of the Plano, Texas-based fly shop Dirty Water Fly Company. He also hosts fishing trips, and recently returned from hosting his sixth group at Anglers Inn, located in the Mexican state of Sinaloa. One of the many nice aspects of Anglers Inn is that it has lodges on both Lake El Salto and Lake Picachos, two of the finest largemouth lakes on earth. A typical hosted trip would see all of the guests staying together at one of the two lakes, with maybe a chance for a day trip to the other one. But this would not be a typical hosted trip. On December 8, 2024—the first full day of fishing for the twenty-four clients that Soltau and his partner Brett Wedeking had brought to the…

FLY BOXES ARE FULL OF FUR. Hare’s Ears. Streamers with Zonker strips. If a Parachute Adams is tied with all natural materials, it may have body hair from three different animals, not including the hackle. So it should be no surprise that anglers in Denver were worried this fall that their fly boxes and fly-tying desks might be on the ballot in the form of a proposed ban on fur sales. The measure, backed by animal-rights groups, would have prohibited the sale of new fur products in the city. Clothing was the main target, but a coalition of cowboy-hat makers and flyfishing industry folk raised concerns that the ban would go too far, and they came out on top. The ban failed. Furs in Denver are safe for now. It…

I WAS THREE CASTS IN when I heard the first explosion. Looking up, I saw smoke rising from the snowbank above me, and three men standing there with pistols and AR-15s. I hadn’t seen the guns when I pulled into the parking spot along the South Fork of the Snake. “We’ll just be another twenty minutes,” they said sheepishly. “OK. I’ll walk down and work my way up. Take your time.” They did. By the time I reached the top of the downstream tailout, the fellas up above the bank lit into their first can of Tannerite, a brand of exploding targets. Not that I have anything against Tannerite. I tried it once myself last year on a late season sheep hunt in New Mexico. Couldn’t get the can to…

NO ONE IS TRULY HAPPY to be leaving the Bahamas. Some anglers may claim they want to “get back to the family” or whatever, but it’s all a front. It’s been fifteen days since I was last in this airport. Between then and now, I caught close to twenty bonefish, lost about the same, and sent more flies to their death than I normally would in a year—some to ’cudas, some to snappers, some to a thousand tiny bites from mystery fish. I’ve been in this bar for two hours. My bags are checked, so the only logical thing to do was grab a drink or three between flights from Eleuthera to Nassau, and Nassau to home. So here I sit, swilling the last of my beer and spinning a…

The Pets of Farquhar are browsing just beyond the boat ramp. A lazy carousel of angling possibility, they’re cycling away the afternoon among the anchored skiffs. Slack tide, dead wind; the scene as clear as an aquarium. These are truly giant trevally, some stretching to five feet long, azure blue or iron black and forged into stark relief by the brightness of the white-sand bottom. I’m having trouble with what I’m seeing. For most of us, the species is captivatingly elusive. Yet here they are, in big numbers and in easy casting range. “Ha-Ha! No, you don’t!” says the head guide, Joshua, on the friendly bounce of his Seychellois accent. “Our pets are off limits!” Some folks call GTs the “gangsters of the reef,” and if you’ve seen them bullying…

My first Baja experience was in 2012. I’d taken a job as a spearfishing guide and dive instructor for an outfitter in La Ventana, a small town about twenty-five miles south of La Paz, on the southern tip of Baja. My family had mixed feelings about my move, and it didn’t help that I was driving down the peninsula alone in a 1996 two-seater Ford Ranger. I was nervous, too, but when I arrived in La Ventana, I was warmly welcomed by a close-knit community. During my nearly two years of living in this fishing village, I spent six to eight hours a day underwater, and became captivated by the diverse marine life in the Sea of Cortez. As a spearfishing guide, I frequently heard stories from locals about Pez…

KNOWN FOR ITS DIVERSE coastal ecosystems and abundant marine life, my home state of Florida stands at the intersection of natural beauty and urban expansion. More than half of the coastline is either developed or no longer natural, with nearly eighty percent of the state’s population living in coastal counties. As neighborhoods and condos continue to grow along its edges, Florida’s once-pristine fishing grounds face dynamic transformations and challenges. Many agree that these changes have been for the worse, but hidden pockets of paradise still exist that support our state’s most treasured creatures and landscapes. As a fourth-generation Floridian, my journey as a waterman is still in its adolescence. But even in my meager 23 years, the delicate balance between nature and urban growth has never been more clear than…