Indholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2017 i Anglers Journal

“But my mind, it just kept wandering like some wild geese in the West.” John and Alan Lomax I Know You Rider Tarpon, Grand Cayman Photo by Marc Montocchio “Hidden in the glorious wildness like unmined gold.” John Muir White Marlin, Norfolk Canyon Photo by Harry Hindmarsh “You’re the predator right up until you’re prey.” James S.A. Corey March Steelhead Upper Wynoochee, Washington Photo by Arian Stevens “There is never the hardness and bitter cold of winter fishing in March, but the month has a wild competitive savagery of strength suddenly aroused from sleep.” Roderick L. Haig-Brown…

It’s 5 a.m., and my dialogue with the 16-year-old at the bait shop is robotic. “How many?” “Two dozen.” He scoops, counts and hands me the keeper. “Nine bucks.” I drive off into the darkness to the marina, thinking about the 24 brave, little soldiers in the back of the truck who are about to lay down their lives to put flatfish on the table tonight. Thirty minutes later, as the sunrise breaks a crystal-blue, razor-straight horizon, I slip out of the inlet, into the Atlantic, and head for the reef. Mummies, killifish, fluke candy, fish magnets — call them what you will. They are the workhorse of the melange of baits offered up by anglers to entice a variety of species, from edibles such as fluke and flounder, sea…

Nowadays it’s just another sandbar in a New Jersey bay where boaters and PWC riders haul up in the summer to play their radios and drink Coronas. At high tide not much is visible — just a narrow sliver of sand that seems to bob in the low breakers like a corpse. But it wasn’t always this way. Twenty five years ago I knew it as a remnant coastal island — a small chunk of short dunes, Atlantic cedar trees, sumac and beach plum that had separated from the mainland. Oystercatchers would probe the mud flats along the spartina grasses that lined its leeward shore. Gulls loafed among the dunes. Rafts of brant honked and croaked in its coves. And off the southern point of this diminutive island was the…

There’s a spot in Chilean Patagonia near the confluence of two rivers, one aquamarine-clear and the other the color of earthen tea, where Pancho Salas and his family call home. Both rivers are lined with large, fallen southern beech trees, carnage that stems from a conflagration in the early 1900s that burned more than 7 million acres. This land of mountains and rivers on the west side of the Andes receives 115 inches of annual rainfall. Unlike western U.S. rivers that rely on winter snowpack to deliver cold summer stream flows, these Patagonia rivers receive a steady amount of rain. Pancho has a thick salt-and-pepper five o’clock shadow, and coarse dark hair flows from under his camouflage hat. We spent the day floating the Aysen River, launching streamers with sink…

Rush hour on Virginia’s Tangier Island begins about 3:30 a.m. On land, the only tip-offs that people are stirring are the switched-on kitchen lights and the faint aroma of freshly brewed coffee waft ing on the predawn breeze. Down at the waterfront, the sound of cascading water pouring from the crab shanties is broken only by the blappity-blap-blappity-blap of diesels from the deadrise workboats slowly motoring out into Chesapeake Bay to work the crab grounds. Indeed, life on Tangier Island ebbs and flows with the blue crab and oyster fisheries. Washed by fertile, emerald-green waters — a perfect intermingling of sweet water from the Chesapeake’s tributaries and a briny influx from the Atlantic — Tangier’s wild, marshy islands and their expansive surrounding grass flats support what is widely considered one…

I was with the fish for less than a second, but everything was perfect. The free-swimming blue marlin was so lit up from the sun that there were hues of green and blue and stripes and patterns all over it. The shot pictured here had been in my mind for years. This is the holy grail of billfish photography, and the experience with this fish was the pinnacle for me. My quest for this sequence of photos began nearly a decade ago when I asked the boats I was working with to take the hooks out of their lures and basically forgo any shot they had at catching fish. I remem ber I flew over to Bermuda, and I said to the crew: Look, this is what I want…

II’ve caught fish everwhichaway they can be. On the Chattahoochee River I’ve used nets, gigs, trot lines, and bare hands. Even electricity. One day Braleigh and me caught so many that two-ended punt boat nearly went under. We were boys and didn’t know any better. Catfish were plentiful as water for all we could figure. That was back then. We’d wrap the copper pipe and drop it in, then use the telephone battery to make a wet cell of that whole muddy dogleg of the river. The small channel cats would rise, then recover, but big whites and blues would float, belly up, and we’d haul ’em in, fill the boat to the oarlocks with fresh fish to eat or sell. Their backs shined so bright it was a wonder.…

Two hours before dawn, the end of Avalon Pier is a murder scene. Yellow light buzzing from a halogen lamp falls on corpses slumped over the benches, sprawled in camp chairs and curled up on the wood-plank deck. It’s hour 30 of a 36-hour marathon red drum tournament, and these bodies are dead tired. The scream of a line-out alarm cuts through the whistling wind. Bodies jump to life and scramble to a row of 12-foot rods leaning against the pier rail. A big redhead grabs his rod, thumbs the drag and runs backward, wildly jerking the rod tip to set the hook. When the long rod bends like a tree in the wind, the living dead burst into cheers. Young Jake Worthington is hooked up again. This is his…

The rods were loaded, the fuel tanks topped off and the throttles pegged. With 1,200 horses behind us, we sprinted across Tampa Bay at 70 mph in Brian Londeree’s 37VH Freeman power catamaran. As we trolled for grouper, Londeree showed me the vast expanses of his fishing grounds on the plotter. Dozens of waypoints filled the Gulf of Mexico from Pensacola, Florida, to the Keys. “It’s the speed in rough water — that’s the great thing about this boat,” says Londeree, who is 38 and hails from Ellenton, Florida. “We can fish where we want, when we want. I’ve done 60 miles in 4- to 6-foot seas at 25 mph. It’s unbelievable.” Of course, not all cat owners run as far or fast as Londeree, but most rave about the…

At the risk of offending the people I fish and bread bread with, I’m just going to say it: I don’t get Michigan in the winter. There’s the gray sky that begins in October and lasts until May, and all of that flat landscape covered with too much snow to walk around in, but too little to actually have any fun with. And yet, I know fishermen who swear they would never leave the state. I’m visiting from the West, and each morning when I look out and see the same frost-heaved ground, I mutter that I can’t believe anyone actually chooses to live here — let alone fish here this time of year. And then I make a call to Josh Greenberg, owner of Gates Au Sable Lodge, for…

Capt. Billy Joe Curtis was the real deal, no fluff, a pioneering flats guide so good at catching bonefish, tarpon and permit that he became known as the “grandmaster” — albeit a curmudgeonly one — of South Florida flats fishing. “Bill was gruff and cranky and yelled at you a lot, but at the end of the day you were a better fisherman and caught a lot of fish — and you asked him, ‘When can I book you again?’ ” says Pat Ford, a Miami lawyer, angling photographer and avid tarpon fisherman. Curtis’ wife, Adrienne, described him in the Miami Herald as “an outlaw, a nonconformist, a walking rejection of the corporate man.” That seems about right. The Herald went on to quote Curtis himself: “Man was born to…

My ongoing fascination with the Florida Keys in general, and the town of Islamorada in particular, began early. My father, a lifelong, diehard angler, began traveling to Islamorada from his central Florida home to fish in the early 1950s, before I was born. When I showed up some years later, his only son, he naturally brought me along. On one of those early trips, I took my first steps as a toddler beneath a coconut tree while a baby sitter looked on. Dad and mom missed the event because they were off shore, trolling for dolphin. The resort where this all went down is still there and looks exactly the same as when I was a kid. Back in the late 1950s and early ’60s, the resort owner used to…

I’m casting flies at schools of breaking false albacore off Cape Lookout Shoals, North Carolina, when I hear a frantic, coded holler come across the VHF radio: Wavy gravy, wavy gravy, red alert! Instantly my guide, Capt. Sarah Gardner, says, “Pull in your line and get your rod stowed; there’s a red drum feed on.” We race to an undisclosed location codenamed the “salad bowl” but arrive too late for the party. Still, there is plenty of evidence of what took place — the water is stirred up with fish scales, and the smell of feeding fish and menhaden permeates the air. A school of red drum had walloped a mess of bunker before vanishing into the emerald-green brine. It would be a year before I’d witness the marvel of…

Tom Lynch calls it the “Thanksgiving Day Massacre,” a 10-hour blitz of striped bass that corralled and bashed vast schools of peanut bunker along 13 miles of Jersey shoreline, right at the beach’s edge. The bunker were stacked top to bottom in small breaking waves, so thick that Lynch could hardly see water. More juvenile menhaden, pushed by bass and thrown up on the sand by surf, carpeted the beach. Gulls — thousands of them — feasted on the beached baitfish. Some of the stripers were as large as 30 pounds. “I’ve never seen them attack so aggressively,” says Lynch, a Seaside Park, New Jersey, photographer, photo gallery owner and fisherman. “They were jumping out of the water, flying by me, running into me. I have a picture of a…

II’ve had some great fishing boats, including a 32-foot 1985 Blackfin flybridge, but this one may very well be the best. I’m talking about Summer Place, my 33-foot 2016 Southport center console with twin Yamaha F300s. I racked up 190 hours last season, fishing with family and friends and competing in tournaments. We caught hundreds of stripers, along with bluefish, tautog, sea bass and false albacore. One trip stands out, though. I had some experienced anglers on my boat for a tournament, so the pressure was on. It turned out to be an epic day. I took them to a spot where there were acres of albies. She does 52 mph wide open. I’m getting better fuel economy than the Blackfin at a faster cruise — 35 mph. The Blackfin’s…