Indholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2017 i Anglers Journal

Headstrong “He was indeed a wild, strange creature from the deep. His color was a dark amber, very rich and glossy. … The sail was black, with spots.” Zane Grey Tales of Fishing Virgin Seas, 1925 Perspective “Sometimes a view can change a life. A person climbs a hill, gazes out at the landscape, and is never quite the same. A vista has become a vision.” Kirk Johnson The New York Times At Last “The fish of a thousand casts is, in my experience, more like the fish of ten thousand casts. Yet I can’t stop … dreaming about them [Atlantic salmon].” James R. Babb Fish Won’t Let Me Sleep…

It happened in January 2008, a day after the Buccaneer Cup Sailfish Release Tournament off Palm Beach, Florida. I was aboard a new Viking 60 Convertible with fellow scribe Vince Daniello for a day of chasing sailfish and testing the boat for magazine reviews. The wind was howling, the seas were big, and the fishing was spectacular. Sails crashed the kite baits as fast as we could get them out. Capt. Ryan Higgins worked his magic, maneuvering the big boat over and around the comers as we fought fish after fish. Spray drenched us as we danced around the pitching cockpit. I was in seventh heaven, as any angler would have been, until I felt a twinge in the middle of my back. I’d lived with back problems for years,…

“Jody, let me try moving something.” “Just hold on, let me get a few more shots.” The banter between Anglers Journal editor-in-chief Bill Sisson and photographer Jody Dole is the result of their long relationship. Though they’ve collaborated on myriad projects, they’ve never attempted something like this. They lean over the tackle box, fussing about the placement of an item. A Heddon lure box falls outside the trays just so. Jars of Uncle Josh pork rinds sit in the corners. An assortment of plugs, spoons, bobbers, weights and other dusty paraphernalia sits undisturbed as the men shift lights and scrutinize digital images on a monitor. It’s not easy to tell the story of an angler who has gone to his reward through the tackle he left behind. But that’s what…

I love fishing with bait. There’s something about using bait to catch a fish that has always appealed to me. Maybe it subconsciously brings me back to my Neanderthal roots. Or maybe it’s just the honesty of it. In my opinion, using an artificial lure or fly to trick an animal with a brain the size of a grape into biting what it thinks is a legitimate meal borders on outright dishonesty. You are presenting something that you know perfectly well has no nourishment to a critter that doesn’t have the cranial capacity to figure that out in a timely manner. Casting an injection-molded, thermoplastic, hologram-adorned swimming plug armed with three sets of 3X stainless treble hooks in an attempt to fool some poor fish that’s about to faint from…

A lone longhorn gazes out over a farm pond in Mansfield, Texas, as the sun bends lower in the late aft ernoon sky. The smooth, watery dimple in the landscape reflects the lush grassland that surrounds it. Hugging the shoreline in a wellworn 12-foot aluminum rowboat are Drew Perkins and his 87-year-old father, Al. The pair skillfully sling floating Rapalas and crank baits with ultralight tackle toward the structureladen shoreline. In the water behind them trails a stringer loaded with the shiny, emerald-green largemouth bass they’ve caught for the table. This is stock-tank country, a landscape dotted with low spots dammed to store rainwater for livestock. “Stock” refers to the livestock the ponds support, and “tank” denotes the storageoriented nature of these relatively small bodies of water. Although the Perkins…

Unlike my wife and daughter, my son and I are content to drive for hours without saying more than a sentence or two. It was a pleasant surprise when, during one of our long trips to a favorite stream in Pennsylvania, Diego said, “Papi, that was a nice trip we had in Iceland.” It had been a few months since our return. As I maneuvered the truck through the winding roads of Allegheny National Forest, my 14-year-old recounted his adventures from the land near the Arctic Circle. Amid the sound of rattling metal fly rod tubes in the back seat, he described his feet slipping on the rocks as he walked across a swift glacial stream in an attempt to reach what looked like a productive eddy. He chronicled his…

With adams, caddis, tricos, light cahills, blue-wing olives, royal coachmen, chartreuse trudes, green drakes, blue duns, black gnats, Nancy quills, Joe’s hoppers, yellow humpies, purple chutes, prince nymphs, pheasant tails, Eileen’s hare’s ears, telicos, flashbacks, Jennifer’s muddlers, Frank bugs, sow bugs, zug bugs, autumn splendors, woolly worms, black buggers, Kay’s gold zuddlers, clippers, tippet, floatant, spools of leader, tin shot, lead shot, hemostats, needle nose, rod, reel, vest, net, boots, cap, shades and waders, gortex shell and one bent Macanudo — I wade in a swirl of May-colored water, cast a fine gray quill, the last tie of my father.…

And for all this, nature is never spent. — Gerard Manley Hopkins Tan caddis begin to fall into the river’s current as the street light on the opposite side of the tracks crackles to life, ghosting the purple blossoms of bull thistle along the gravel railroad bed. I’ve already broken down my rod when my friend Kurt hooks his first trout, the familiar sound of flesh fighting against water breaking the stillness of early evening. Under the circle of light beneath the street lamp, I tie on a size 16 elk hair caddis and scamper back down the bank to cast toward the white splashes that interrupt the steady flow of black. Three hours earlier, I had crawled under a stopped train to reach the water. The rail yard is…

That permit took us miles off shore into deep water and rough seas. Fishing for permit aft er a long leave of absence can be like meeting an old friend. It can also feel like an awkward first date. It is humbling at best. Or, depending on how much rust has accumulated since those last days on the water, it can be just plain humiliating. Either way, casting a fly at a permit is a rare privilege that is not easily forgotten. There was a time when I would run my skiff nearly every day to the Marquesas Keys west of Key West to meet this old friend. For a couple of decades I looked tirelessly for permit as I guided equally obsessive anglers more than 300 days a year.…

A strong back and a weak mind. With weary laughs, Maine seaworm diggers invariably tell an outsider that those are the two most important qualifications for this job. There certainly is truth to the first attribute. Digging worms is lumbar-bending labor. You spend three or four hours at the bottom of a tide bent over at the waist, standing in mud halfway up your shins or deeper, swinging a short-handled hoe with one hand and plucking sandworms or bloodworms out of the mud with the other. You get paid by the worm: 20 cents for a sandworm, 35 cents for a bloodworm. You dig in all the elements coastal Maine throws at you: heat, cold, sleet, drizzle, fog. And if you get sloppy, the worms might even give you a…

The bruised sky over Mishaum is drained of color, storm clouds roiled white over black like an old-style photo negative — Hurricane Hermine’s slap on New England’s ass as she hurries past Dartmouth, Massachusetts. East wind means no stripers, but no matter. It’s false albacore time. On cue, blood-warm September water erupts — a wolf pack of albies strafe the outer bar, pulverizing peanut bunker into protein. And like that, they’re gone, the cove now showing no sign of having ever harbored a fish. Had I been looking down to change flies, I’d have missed the whole thing. A quarter-mile of casts later, my arm starts to complain. I reel in and wonder where the 20-year-old me is hiding — the one who would have cast to the end of…

Of all the scombrid fish species in the sea (mackerel, bonito and tuna), I posit the theory that the mysterious wahoo is the coolest of them all. To be sure, their close cousins, king mackerel, get more attention as the quarry in many a big-dollar fishing tournament. And their more distant relatives, yellowfin and bluefin tuna, serve as unlucky targets of relentless fishing pressure worldwide thanks to their brute strength, which attracts recreational attention, and their high value and delicious flesh, which brings both recreational and commercial pursuers. Much is known about the other family members due to their dollar value, but wahoo are different, like your weird cousin everybody mostly likes but nobody really understands. Wahoo rarely school, but they do aggregate around structure at times. For most anglers…

A Atlantic salmon anglers are, by nature, gluttons for punishment. My friend Matt Breuer is not. He is, however, a glutton for all sorts of other vices, not the least of which is gluttony itself. If there’s a 24-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon in your fridge that needs finishing, Breuer is your man. During a recent visit to my home he volunteered that he’d taken inventory and found himself the proud owner of 41 top-shelf fly rods. Fortyone. When pressed, Breuer asserted with a shrug that “only an asshole” would own any fewer than 25. An ascetic Breuer is not, but a salmon fisherman he is — and a very good one at that. Atlantic salmon anglers fall into a peculiar subculture of fly fishers who, with rare exception, expend…

Our most life-changing moments oft en involve exposure to something magnificent, electrifying, wonderful and mind-boggling: a musical performance, an athletic feat, a finely engineered example of quickness and beauty. Encounters with blue marlin — the frantic wail of the drag, the greyhounding behemoth bounding for the horizon — are all of the above. The evolutionary adaptations and everyday capabilities of these apex predators defy imagination. Slots and grooves for neatly folding the dorsal, pectoral and pelvic fins into the elongated, fusiform body help this fish attain speeds of 72 mph, swim thousands of ocean miles and plunge to great depths. Twin caudal peduncle keels accelerate water flow during the tail sweeps, inducing leading-edge suction. The efficiency of countercurrent mechanisms that heat the brain and eyes, and extract oxygen from seawater,…

It was the late 1980s, and Joan and Owen Maxwell were on a quest to find themselves. The couple were wandering around an Experimental Aircraft Association fly-in in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, when Owen had an idea. “Let’s just build boats. That’s all I want to do,” he told Joan. “Maybe Albemarle still has one of the 21 molds. We can just work off that.” This was the moment of conception, so to speak, for Regulator Marine, which today is one of the most respected names in the fishboat business. Within a few months, Joan and Owen began an exhaustive search for someone to draw the company’s first boat. That’s when Lou Codega — then a Navy engineer — entered the picture. Codega worked nights and weekends on the design, and the…