Innehållsförteckning för Summer 2018 från Anglers Journal

The sun is just rising over the horizon. The air is damp and heavy. I walk down the bustling dock of the Abaco Beach Resort with my colleagues Bill Sisson and digital director John Turner. Crews are busy prepping baits and boats for day one of the Custom Boat Shootout, an invitation-only tournament staged this past May. A 30-knot breeze has been building for days, kicking up 6- to 8-foot seas with some 10-footers thrown into the mix. “It’s good to be going out on the biggest boat in the fleet,” Sisson says, to which I mumble in agreement. We meet the owner of the new Jarrett Bay 90 Jaruco (pronounced ha-ROO-ko) in the cockpit. “What’s the plan for this morning?” I ask. “Survive,” is his not-so-comforting reply. As the…

It’s plentiful, if you know when and where to look. It’s a surface-dwelling, migratory, carnivorous critter that roams offshore pretty much everywhere there’s a warm ocean. It will eat just about anything, an appetite that makes it angler-friendly. It has a long, slender body built for speed. It is sexually mature at four to five months, with females spawning three or four times a year and producing 80,000 to 100,000 eggs each time. It rarely lives more than four years but can reach weights close to 100 pounds; while a 40-pounder is a trophy, the official International Game Fish Association all-tackle record is 87 pounds. A pelagic wanderer, mahi live fast and die young. Its coloring is magnificent: light blue when unstressed, changing to green and yellow when hooked. If…

“Who’s Madison?” the girl asks, lifting her head and shock of red hair from your chest. You raise your bare shoulders from the floor of her parents’ van, the rough carpeting peeling from your skin, and hoist yourself up by the elbows. “I’m sorry. What?” “You just said Madison in your sleep. Twice, actually.” You’re 18, and it’s barely spring in Michigan, but it’s decidedly humid in the back of the vehicle parked illegally at the trailhead of a forest preserve. If you answer truthfully — that you were dreaming about a river in Montana — she might believe you. You weigh an explanation against a faux confession. Chance it? If she takes you at your word, she just may be the one. She wasn’t, of course, but Montana, with…

Dan Sharley’s man cave has no flat-screen television, leather sofa or beer. On one side of the room, a well-worn easel holds a partially finished watercolor painting. Next to it is a drafting table littered with sketches, and a quick glance at the drawings might clue you in to what’s across the room: a fly-tying table. Sharley, an insurance company manager, has been drawing since he was a kid. He discovered watercolor as a teenager, and the medium has entranced him ever since. He calls it “highly interactive” because, he says, “You can understand how the color’s going to work with the water, but there’s always a variable that you don’t fully control. For some reason that really appeals to me.” Some might say the same about fishing. While Sharley…

Three light-tackle anglers and their sage captain were looking for big kingfish about 60 miles northwest of Key West at a spot in the Gulf that sometimes produces magic, but they couldn’t conjure a single king. That’s fishing. Still, we were having a good time catching flag yellowtail snapper when a nice amberjack appeared in the chum slick. Capt. Robert R.T. Trosset judiciously tossed the fish a few live pilchards to keep it interested while Rufus Wakeman got his fly rod ready. Wakeman presented a large streamer to the fish, which showed no interest in the offering. Wakeman removed the fly from the water, and Trosset went to work. He squeezed a couple of pilchards between his thumb and forefinger to stun the baits before feeding them to the amberjack.…

Cars and trucks rumble past the pond at 40 mph. On one side is a gas station, and on the other are rows of uniform apartments. It’s not the kind of place you’d expect to meet a mixed martial arts star for an afternoon of fishing. Gregor Gillespie, followed by his friend Nick Karamoshos, makes his way to the pond with a brown bag clenched in his fist. He sits on a bench, takes a frozen yogurt out of the bag and scarfs it down, pausing only to sprinkle M&Ms on top. If you told me this is how my afternoon with a guy who punches people in the face for a living was going to start, I’d call you a liar. The snack and small talk are dealt with…

Brian Turner owns multiple businesses on Florida’s west coast. When he wants to fish for marlin and sailfish, he takes his outboard-powered center console about 130 miles to “The Steps” in the Gulf of Mexico. “I like to go fast, and I don’t get a whole lot of time off,” says Turner, 43, of Bradenton, Florida. “I’ve always liked the speed and the fishability that come with the center console.” He got his first center console, a 42-foot Yellowfin, about five years ago and last year had the company build him a custom carbon fiber version with triple 350-hp Yamaha 4-stroke outboards. Haulin’ Grass runs at 65 mph in good conditions and at about 55 in rougher stuff. “I’m trolling for marlin in two and a half hours,” Turner says.…

My only son Diego is 17 and will be leaving home in a year. The impending change is what put us inside the small, thin-shelled, plastic and aluminum cabin of a Robinson R44 helicopter. We are slowly descending into a valley in New Zealand where the Māori hunted herds of South Island giant moa to extinction. Today, the river that flows between two chains of mountains in the Southern Alps is teeming with brown and rainbow trout that Europeans introduced in the 1800s. Seated amid the thunder of rotating helicopter blades, I think back to an argument my wife and I had 17 years ago. The young man seated in front of me is the result of that spat. I was in my early 40s when Janiel and I had…

We were hoping to find king mackerel that could be chummed to the boat with live pilchards so we could take a crack at them on fly. Veteran captain R.T. Trosset ran about 60 miles west of Key West on this late-winter day, where we found the mother lode. Rufus Wake-man and I caught more than 20 kings between 25 and 37 pounds on fly. The action was so good that R.T. started casting a hookless plug to entice the fish into skyrocketing for the camera. I was shooting with my Canon 1D Mark IV, matched with a 70-200 lens, set at ISO 400, f/8 at 1/3,200, high-speed shutter (10 frames per second). I caught this jump just right and recorded multiple shots of the acrobatics. Ron Romano, a friend…

For three weeks, I’ve taken a running inventory of my fluke-fishing experiences to lay out a rational case for my obsessive 20-year campaign to put a cutting point on my doormat-catching skills. For most of my rod-and-reeling career, I’ve been forced to defend the honor of my target species of choice. Fluke fishing is bottom fishing, and bottom fishing, according to so many striper specialists and bluewater blowhards, is brain-dead simple: If you locked a chimpanzee in a broom closet with a couple of rods and a tackle box, he’d emerge a week later as an accomplished sinker-bouncer. Yeah? If I locked a chimpanzee in a closet with a half-dozen 50-wides and some spreader bars, he’d come out still a chimpanzee. And 90 percent of your Mensa-grade tuna would still…

No one forgets his first white marlin. Mine came 50 miles off Virginia Beach, Virginia. We were trolling naked ballyhoo on my buddy Ken Neill’s boat. Wind-whipped cobalt water danced toward a pale blue horizon. I was standing next to the right flat line when a pair of iridescent pectoral fins appeared behind the bait. The world went into Matrix slow motion. I picked up the rod. The marlin batted the bait. I put the reel in free spool and let the fish eat. With line disappearing, I felt the whole crew watching. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi. I counted until I felt the unaware fish move off with the bait. “Hook ’em!” Neill yelled from the bridge. I pushed the lever drag to strike, held the rod tip…