Indholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2017 i Anglers Journal

Crossroads “Anglers have a way of romanticizing their battles with fish and of forgetting that the fish has a hook in his mouth, his gullet or his belly.” Ernest Hemingway Sublime “It is spring again. The earThis like a child that knows poems by heart.” Rainer Maria Rilke Hunters “The animals who play with the most abandon are the predators. … The prey are almost never safe enough to play.” Brenda Cooper Unending “I still don’t know why I fish or why other men fish. … But I do know that if it were not for the strong, quick life of rivers, for their sparkle in the sunshine, for the cold greyness of them under rain and the feel of them about my legs as I set my feet hard…

SUBSCRIBE TO ANGLERS JOURNAL Call (800) 877-5207 or visit anglersjournal.com. Subscriptions are $20 for one year (four issues: Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall). Please send letters and comments to Anglers Journal, 10 Bokum Road, Essex, CT 06426, or email wsisson@aimmedia.com. MEETING A MASTER Your recent issue reminded me of the great work Anglers Journal does. Great design, writing and images! I saw your article awhile back on Arthur Shilstone [“Master of the Moment,” Spring 2015]. I met him about a year ago at his studio. I had always wanted to meet him, and I felt as though I’d better do something about it before it was too late. I sent him some samples of my work and asked if I could visit him sometime. He does not email, so we corresponded…

I’ve been on the road since midnight, and the sun is about to rise at the boat ramp. I’m running on adrenaline and caffeine, and squinting at red taillights as the brakes on the truck lock up and the boat slides off the trailer. It hits the water, and I instinctively trim the outboard and turn it over. As we head out into Cape Cod Bay toward Race Point, a cold, salty mist sprays our faces. Finally. We scarf down bagels during the 30-minute run to the point, attentive to the slightest splash or diving bird. It’s been a long winter, and much like the fish we chase, we have made the migration to quench our hunger for striped bass. This is cutthroat, play-for-keeps fishing with a crew of accomplished…

You will be the cook. In addition to wheel watches, working on deck, unloading fish, fueling up, filling fresh water, mending nets, grocery shopping whenever you come to town, you will also prepare three meals a day and two hearty snacks to go with coffee. You must keep the kettle on the stove full and the juice jug and two gallons of milk in the fridge. You will learn to slice vegetables, prepare a marinade, cook pasta and fillet a salmon in twenty-minute intervals while the net is out. You will learn to ignore the other crew members sitting at the galley table reading. You must know how to create a corral in rough weather, so pots of soup don’t end up dripping down the firewall behind the stove. You…

Early morning is mirrored on the pale blue surface of ponds, lakes and streams, many without names, as we buzz across cloud meadows and gaze at mountain peaks topped with snow. I look down at all the water and wonder, Fish? A rough beauty, Alaska remains a vast, unforgiving land, one with an “unfenced” quality that is sometimes best viewed from the seat of a de Havilland Beaver, a workhorse floatplane of the unpaved world. Today we are flying south for an hour from Rainbow King Lodge in Iliamna, southwest Alaska, to a small river on the coast to fish for silver salmon. It is a lovely morning; the sun climbs the backside of a mountain range to the east, and from time to time the light breaks through the…

Longtime Martha’s Vineyard surf fisherman Paul Schultz remembers the advice he received more than 50 years ago from a seasoned island angler. “I asked an old-timer when I started surf fishing, ‘How do you get a 50-pounder?’ ” recalls the 70-year-old Schultz, who has fished the storied Massachusetts island since he was 15. “He said, ‘Keep fishing.’ Sure enough, I did. As I went along, I picked up some tricks of the trade.” And sure enough, in time, the big striped bass came. Schultz has taken five stripers larger than 50 pounds from the shore, the largest weighing 57 pounds. They ensure plenty of memories, not to mention bragging rights. A modest man, Schultz says the key to success is old-fashioned stick-to-itiveness. Fish hard, keep your eyes open and learn…

Although I’m a fishing writer, I’m not going to stretch the truth. In fact, I’m going to state up front that I’m no expert when it comes to billfishing. Not only have I failed to raise a long-nose on 90 percent of my tropical bluewater outings over the years, but also the few I’ve been lucky enough to hook — or should have hooked — have left me scratching my head. I don’t know what it is about marlin and sailfish, but I just can’t seem to manage a nice, clean catch of a reasonably sized fish on normal tackle — something I can brag about during those after-hours get-togethers on someone’s boat back at the dock, when crews gripe about tips, taxidermy cuts, cheap absentee owners and the guy…

I sat in the same spot on Idaho’s Silver Creek for three or four days tracking may flies so I’d know when one was going to pass a feeding fish. I’d wade out and set my tripod, but then I would spook the fish and have to wait another hour before they started rising again. I’d get out, have something to eat and go back in. Sometimes I spent five or six hours in the water. Yes, I can be obsessive. I like to shoot across from a fish to keep from spooking it, but I also like that angle because it’s similar to the perspective I see as a fisherman. After locking my camera’s focus on a fly, I tracked it and shot at 2,000th of a second. I…

The first rainbow trout I ever saw caught in a river was a 5-pound Skamania steelhead. My best friend, Nick Popoff , hooked it in the Red Cedar, where we normally targeted blue-collar smallmouth not far from the chained General Motors factory gates in Lansing, Michigan. It was mid-August; the crankbait’s trebles rattled as the buck leapt through the humid air. That both the water and our typical quarry were earthen in color only served to visually amplify the gillred stripe running the length of the cartwheeling summer run’s lateral line. Some hundred miles from its Lake Michigan residence, the fish had struck at the base of what we called “the spring” but what was, in all likelihood, our town’s waste draining from a rusty culvert into the river. Later,…

Sometimes all it takes is a chance encounter to change the course of a life. For Donald Scarpone, that seminal moment occurred 25 years ago when a friend took him surf fishing for the first time on East Beach on Martha’s Vineyard. “We ran into a school of bluefish,” recalls Scarpone, 56, who at the time was an avid freshwater fisherman and homebuilder living in Danbury, Connecticut. “It was a bluefish blitz. It was something I’d never experienced before.” He caught about two dozen blues between 7 and 15 pounds on a $49 entry-level Shakespeare rod-and-reel combo his wife bought for him. “It was unbelievable,” says Scarpone, who has been pounding the surf for striped bass and bluefish ever since. That outing on East Beach altered his life. About five…

A soda can rattles down the street. The Nathan’s Famous hot-dog stand is shuttered. Souvenir shops are padlocked. A biting wind whips from the west; to the east, the sun is just cresting the horizon over Brooklyn, New York. Most of Coney Island’s 25,000 souls continue to slumber while a dozen or so stoic fishermen line the Pat Auletta Steeplechase Pier. In the summer the pier is a favorite spot for tourists, its original 1950s timbers rebuilt after Hurricane Sandy in far tougher, recycled, plasticized lumber. But on this morning, more than a dozen anglers are spread out along the 1,000-foot pier, tending a couple dozen tired rods. Some are missing a couple of guides or the tip. No matter. The ragtag crew faces east, away from the wind. It’s…

Ernest Hemingway returned from the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, a time when fishermen were landing giant bluefin tuna on rod and reel in the shallow waters off Nova Scotia. But they found it nearly impossible to land giants or marlin in the deep waters off Bimini before sharks “apple-cored” them. Hooking the fish wasn’t the problem; it was hauling them up to find nothing more than a head, tail and backbone. The sharks were like piranhas, feasting on the hooked fish before the anglers could get them to the boat. Hemingway’s solution, albeit often more macho than effective, was to shoot at the sharks with a Tommy gun or pistol. Although his method was, at best, quirky and, at worst, dangerous — Hemingway once shot himself through both…

In a halo of light and broken shadows lives a piece of falling water. Years ago, brazen and young, we laid our clothes on a log and swam there naked. Flights of modesty compelled us through the shallows, and together we dunked in the chest-deep water below the plunge. The cold caught our breathing and dimpled our skin. We popped up, threw our heads back and found our footing, and our arms touched as we stood there in the mist of the pool. We were too numb to feel anything other than a remote presence, but the intimacy of it sparkled nonetheless. She covered her breasts with crossed arms and shivered, and shy-smiled. Not wanting to embarrass her, I dove again and held my breath. I pulled myself down on…

No other fish can match a tarpon for the show it puts on when it’s trying to throw the hook. Whether they’re 3 pounds or 200, they jump the same: violent head shaking, backflips, turning, greyhounding. They swim through the air, upside down and right side up. If there’s a jump a fish can possibly make, a tarpon will make it. They’re just crazy, and crazy-looking — prehistoric, like dinosaurs. I caught tarpon fever in 1990 while fishing the flats off Miami with Capt. Bill Curtis. We got up at zero-dark-thirty, ran across Biscayne Bay in the pitch black and set up off Elliott Key. At daylight, schools of tarpon started showing up on the flats. I saw a 5- or 6-foot fish rise up, swing over and open its…

The list of sport fish is long, but the list of perfect sport fish is short. Sure, anglers obsess about everything from mud suckers to black marlin, but that doesn’t earn either species a spot on my list. To me, the perfect sport fish is large enough to offer serious pullage without causing a heart attack. The fish must test an angler’s technical and tactical abilities without frustrating every attempt at capture. Most important, the ideal sport fish must be a handsome animal that lives in an area of unqualified beauty and power. In my book, that puts yellowfin tuna at the top of the list. The International Game Fish Association’s fish database says yellowfin tuna are found worldwide in deep, warm water. American anglers catch yellowfin in almost every…

On Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, an island known for producing exceptional anglers, Cooper Gilkes III stands tall. In his neck of the woods, Gilkes, whom everyone knows as “Coop,” has just about done it all. He’s caught a couple of dozen bass over 30 pounds on the fly from the shore, he’s landed six stripers over 50 pounds from the suds on surf gear, and he still gets fired up about fishing the offshore canyons for blue marlin, swordfish, tuna and mahi-mahi. For a time, the versatile waterman made a living as an inshore commercial fisherman: clamming, trapping eels and pin-hooking scup, striped bass, sea bass, fluke and blues for the market. For more than 30 years he and his wife, Lela, have run Coop’s Bait & Tackle in Edgartown, growing…

Capt. Steve Quinlan’s 29-foot center console, Strike Zone, Quinlans 29 fo of a well-worn chew toy. Bo tattooed with crosshatch cut clean throughas the look Both sides of her once-gleaming white hull are crosshatched patterns of teeth. Several of these wounds through the gelcoat, right down to the underlying fiberglass. He remembers with fondness the occasion of every gash and gouge, once pointing out with glee the saber-like tip of a mako tooth stuck into the hull, just below the gunwale. “When I grabbed the leader, that fish went berserk, turned her head to try to take a chunk out of me,” says Quinlan, who is 57 and from Long Beach, California. “Ended up getting a mouthful of boat instead and broke that tooth off for her trouble.” I never…

The first Atlantic salmon I ever hooked was a bright fish traveling up the Matapedia River on Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula. This was in the early ’80s, and I was the guest of friends who’d brought me to the region to experience something they felt was both vital and perhaps already disappearing. That they proved right on both counts is bittersweet. The region then had a darker, cooler presence, for logging had yet to fully alter the native mix of trees. Black spruce, white pine and cedar still mantled the steepest hillsides, whose pitched and runnelled flanks caught light in dramatic fashion. The air retained — seemed to amplify — aromas of deep forest and hidden spring seeps, issuing forth spiraling fogs and ethereal river mists. The place dripped with moss…