Anglers Journal celebrates the best writing, photography, illustration, design and sporting art on the topic of fishing. Come join some of the most prolific fishing editors and writers in the industry for the best angling experience on the water.
I’ve met all types of people while fishing: fanatics, dabblers, uberwealthy, independently poor, loudmouths, quiet and reserved, drunks, adrenaline junkies, gearheads, attention seekers and a long list of solid, good-natured men and women who have become my lifelong friends (and in some cases de facto life coaches). No matter where I fish, I have one simple rule whenever I step aboard a boat with someone for the first time: Learn something new, even if that one thing is, I don’t ever want to go fishing with this person ever again. Watching how someone reacts to losing a fish can be a solid indicator of who they are at their core. Do they pout and stomp their feet like a child? Do they shrug it off with a smile and rebait…
Jerry Audet is a writer, photographer and lifelong fisherman residing in Massachusetts. Dedicated to shore-based striper fishing, he writes about and takes photographs of a wide array of angling disciplines up and down the East Coast. The managing editor of Surfcaster’s Journal, Jerry shot the images that accompany “Debunk the Chunk.” Michael Carr is an English teacher and writer from New Jersey who chases stripers with a fly rod whenever and wherever he can. He is working on a collection of fishing essays in the off-hours between hikes, pond trips and driveway hockey with his sons. Michael takes us to the foggy flats of Maine’s Casco Bay to target stripers from a poling skiff. Stephen Collector began a career as a freelance photographer in 1975. In 1992, Clark City Press…
THANK YOU, JOE BROOKS My father gave me my first fly rod 70 years ago, and I came to know of Joe Brooks not long after that [“Last Chance,” Winter]. Though I never met the man, I admired and respected Brooks. I will always be grateful for his ability to inspire so many of us to better-appreciate the gentlemanly pursuit of fly-fishing. Frank Sharpe Burtonsville, Maryland INTELLIGENT LIFE I picked up the Fall issue of Anglers Journal on a flight from Houston to Virginia. It was my companion for the flight. Two stories really made an impression on me. The first is Charlie Levine’s “Weighing In” [“The Great Escape”]. This is a description of my soul. I often tell my wife there are three F’s in life: food, fishing and…
Trout Spey & the Art of the Swing By Steven Bird Swing the Fly Press From America’s premier spey-casting magazine, Swing the Fly, comes the new authority of trout spey fishing. Typically viewed as an Atlantic and Pacific salmon tactic, spey casting uses two-handed rods, shooting line and even the surface tension of a river to throw a fly the great distances needed to reach the many holding lies of a big river. Trout Spey and the Art of the Swing is a complete book that delves into the history of spey with roots in wet-fly fishing, equipment and its advantages in American rivers. Steven Bird argues that this growing technique is no longer reserved to the shores of the Columbia and the Snake, but can be utilized on smaller…
ANCIENT GREEK PHILOSOPHERS STRIVED TO ESTABLISH what they called summum bonum, “the greatest good to which all human effort in life should be directed.” I learned this from a 78-year-old angler who described himself as an Epicurean. My wife, Leigh, and I had arrived in the Florida Keys in February, having made the tedious drive from Colorado for a two-month stay in Marathon. While fly-fishing from foot along a narrow causeway on Middle Torch Key, I saw a guy poling another angler in what appeared to be a small skiff. The seated angler was tangling with a large fish. I had waded out onto a flat on the incoming tide, trying not to stumble on small coral heads or step on sea urchins. The water was clear and knee-deep. I…
PLACE TIES US TO ONE ANOTHER, STITCHES OUR MEMORIES TOGETHER with a fine hand. It stands, like a witness tree on a long-ago family farm, marker to love and death and loyalty. For the last decade, we’ve made a pilgrimage together, father and son, to a stream in Montana, a mountain tributary miles and miles away from the valley and the river it eventually feeds. Willows and dogwood drape the banks. The undergrowth too thick to consider bushwhacking because the drainage is plentiful with grizzly bears. There are pools where the water is forced downhill at breakneck speed, where light refracts, painting the surface turquoise. Here, snowmelt runs clear as a grandmother’s window in spring, blue-veined hand having wiped away winter with vinegar and water. After months of snow and…
