Innehållsförteckning för Fall 2018 från Anglers Journal

At night from the rims above Billings, Montana, stars pattern the vault over the Beartooth Range. The Yellowstone River roils unseen in the darkness, and the sky is dusted white by the Milky Way, turning a slow wheel. I was lucky to get there early with my father; at sunset, a blood red line on the edge of the world parted the horizon under a granite swath of cloud, the whole sky lit from above, light blue becoming violet, becoming black. Then nightfall, and he and I are seated on rim rock, looking south toward the star fields over the mountains. In my mind’s eye I’m a boy again, and in the dark he’s calling me toward something I can’t see. “Going to Sylvan Lake tomorrow morning,” he says. “You…

Whether it’s called folklore, an old wives’ tale or common myth, fishing seems to have more than its share, and some beliefs are easily disproven but rigidly adhered to. Take, for instance, the belief that Atlantic salmon do not feed during their upstream migration to spawn. Nonsense. Atlantic salmon have mesmerized me since I hooked my first 25-pounder on a big, fluffy White Wulff dry fly at age 10. I can still recall the fish emerging from its bottom cover to inhale my offering. Since then, I have hooked, lost and landed thousands more — and I feel strongly that the theory about upstream feeding is incorrect. They may also take flies for other reasons, but feeding should not be ruled out. My first inkling about the truth came 60…

“Were it not for rainbow trout, I would have to fish for bass. Were it not for the season’s change, I would never see time pass.”—Bill Morrissey It seemed an appropriate comeuppance, to be waiting in the dark for my old friend Alex Lafkas. Twenty-five years ago, on our earliest fishing trips together, I blindfolded him before driving us to the hidden bass ponds and secluded stretches of smallmouth streams in industrial southern Michigan. It was a childish prank that I wrote off in the name of secrecy, and that he allowed because he lacked even a learner’s permit. A quarter-century later, with a morning to kill in Traverse City and a serious brook trout jones to boot, I was half expecting Alex — who has evolved into one of…

It’s a raw, cold October morning off North Carolina’s Barden Inlet. A shrimp trawler steams south with about 10,000 seabirds in tow. A layer of thick, gray clouds hangs low in the sky. A bone-chilling westerly stirs up steep, foam-capped waves. Anyone with even a smidgen of common sense is still in bed. Not us. High on the afterglow of the previous day’s false albacore fishing, my friends Hugh, Kendall and I want to get in a few hours of fishing before the real blow fills in. Hugh weaves us through the confused inlet chop while Kendall and I hold shut the hoods on our foulies. We’re making about 20 knots through the slop when we discover other crazies. At least 15 other boats line up behind the trawler like…

We're140 miles off Los Sueños, Costa Rica, aboard the 42-foot Maverick Dragin Fly with renowned billfish Capt. James Smith at the helm and mates Roberto and Berto working the cockpit. Dozens of tiny yellowfin tuna explode out of the water, with three blue marlin in pursuit. Two of them spy our teasers, abandon the chase and charge the pattern. The mates expertly tease them into casting range. Smith pulls the throttles into neutral and yells, “Cast!” I lift the flamboyant pink-and-white tube fly into a backcast and drop it in the wake slightly behind them. Both marlin attack. The larger one, more than 300 pounds, gets there first and engulfs the fly from above, no hook set required. The fish races straight away from the transom, taking 300 yards of…

I worked the river’s slick banks, grabblingin mud holes underneath tree roots.You’d think it would be dangerous,but I never came up with a cooteror cottonmouth hung on my fingertips.Occasionally, though, I leapt upright,my fingers hooked through the red gillsof a mudcat. And then I thrilledthe thrill my father felt when heburst home from fishing, drunk, and yelled,well before dawn, “Wake up! Come here!”He tossed some fatwood on the fireand flames raged, spat and flickered. He helda four-foot mudcat. “I caught it!”he yelled. “I caught this monster!” At first,dream-dazed, I thought it was somethinghe’d saved us from. By firelight, the fishgleamed wickedly. But Father laughedand hugged me hard, pressing my headagainst his coat, which stank, and glitteredwhere dried scales caught the light. For breakfast,he fried enormous chunks of fish,the whole house…

The first thing I learned from him was not to wade. The second and most enduring thing was not to cast. Anglers upstream and downstream might be wading, and others would certainly be casting, but Artie never began that way. Always, always, he began by standing on the bank, smoking ceaselessly, waiting and watching. On a bank, never in the stream, he would survey the water, sometimes for half an hour, sometimes longer, looking for things that made no sense to others but made complete sense to him. Quicksilver signs and minute indications, nuances of current, fleeting aquatic movements, clues that provided what he needed to become: a “trout’s nemesis, not its butler,” as he often put it. In the early days, I was unable to fathom what these various…

As the car winds down the leafy roads of Easton, Connecticut, James Prosek gazes out the window at familiar ground. He lives just two doors down from his childhood home. The first stop is the local general store for coffee. Next, a gravel pull-off just big enough for a single car. The caffeine starts to kick in as he pulls on his waders and boots. He assembles his fly rod, and we duck into the woods by the Mill River. Prosek is tall and lean, with a short laugh that punctuates his sentences. Once dubbed by The New York Times as a “fair bid to become the Audubon of the fishing world,” he’s been an artist since childhood, when he started fishing this stream for trout. “I fell deeply in…

“This river eats rods. You’ll want to stow them before you hit the rapids.” That warning from our shuttle driver came to mind as soon as I heard the whitewater rumble deep in the cactus- and scorpion-ridden badlands of southwest Texas. Five friends and I were about to embark on a four-day, 30-mile adventure down the Devils River, which crosses an unforgiving wilderness known as the Trans-Pecos. The Devils wends through rolling hill country, descends into the rugged Chihuahuan Desert and reaches its terminus at a reservoir on the Rio Grande along the U.S.-Mexico border. With no help in the area should we screw up, we approached the noisy boulder field with caution. The paddling would get more technical downriver. Still, with decades of fishing and paddling experience across our…

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Who knew that chasing wind-whipped Doritos through the cockpit of a cruising boat could trigger a flashback? I was grasping at the chips in the whirlwind, frantically trying to prevent an epic mess, when I had a fuzzy vision of myself at 3 or 6 or some other vaguely young age, sitting on the motor box of a Chesapeake Bay deadrise owned by a friend of my father’s. My chips had escaped the bag and were blowing across the deck. Dad was on his hands and knees grabbing at them, with a slightly aggravated look on his face. He had asked me not to make a mess. He heard me cry. He looked up from the deck and smiled. I blink, and the flashback ends. I look up from the…

It was early October when I landed my first job. I was between high school and college, undecided, uncommitted, a bit lost. The job interview occurred among barrels of skate and circling gulls. It lasted less than a minute. “Be here tomorrow morning at 4,” the captain said. And just like that, I was lobstering out of Newport, Rhode Island. That was nearly 30 years ago, and I didn’t have a clue. I’d fished plenty, or so I thought. Shark and tuna with my brother and dad, stripers and blues, the occasional weakfish. During my senior year in high school, I’d formed a fishing club in lieu of playing soccer and lacrosse. We caught a few trout, built our own fly rods and listened to the Dead. But this was…

There is nothing so delicious in the entire world of saltwater fishing as heading out on glassy seas in the warm, early-morning dampness aboard a party boat. A whole bunch of emotions become tangled into a ball, spiced with the heady aroma of fresh-cut bait, hot coffee and a touch of diesel as the big engines rumble beneath the deck — anticipation, a bit of trepidation, expectation at one level or another, a sense of competition that can barely be stifled, and a little nervousness wondering if the other 16 or 40 or 66 folks on board are friends or foes, compatriots or competitors. Just who are these people? But emotions soon evaporate into salt air. The captain finds the fish, positions the boat over them and sounds the horn.…

It lasted only a few hours, but they were three of the craziest hours of fishing I’ve ever experienced. When it was over, we’d raised 25 blue marlin, had 15 bites and brought nine fish to the boat ranging from 150 to nearly 400 pounds. We’d had a couple of double-headers with two other fish on the teasers at the same time. And for a few exciting moments, we were hooked up to three blues — and we never fished more than three baits or lures at one time. At one point, we watched dumbfounded as a “school” of 20 or more blue marlin crashed the surface like yellowfin, blowing up on small tuna about a quarter mile off the port quarter. “Now I’ve seen it all,” said Will Drost,…

I’ve owned boats for 50 years. I built them from wood and plans, restored basket cases in both wood and glass, and purchased them new. But for the past decade, I entertained a naval architecture fantasy that came to fruition earlier this year. My Regulator 23’s price tag exceeded what I ever imagined I would spend on a boat, but it had a number of things in the plus column that made writing the check much easier. I needed a heavier hull with a deeper vee that would afford me ocean access in a greater range of conditions. The Regulator’s weight and 24 degrees of deadrise filled that need. No more U-turns at the mouth of Manasquan Inlet because conditions outside were too snotty. She is a safe and solid…