Innehållsförteckning för Fall 2019 från Anglers Journal

The Mars Bay Bonefish Lodge on Andros Island is south of other fishing lodges, saving anglers and their Bahamian guides 10 miles of rough water and a trip around “The Point,” where several boats have capsized. Andros Island is known as the “Bonefish Capital of the World,” with hundreds of pristine flats, many fish and few anglers. The lodge had been recently renovated. Of strategic importance, the central hallway leads directly into the local bar, where strangers like me, if they cloak themselves in the quiet harmony of the room, may gain insights into Bahamian spiritual beliefs. Conversations during fishing centered on wind, tides and fish; occasionally women and liquor. Personal topics like religion or superstitions are taboo. Mars Bay guides are known for their ability to put an angler…

Turtle-shelled by two backpacks and with a four-piece rod in my free hand, I set my mind to Isle of Skye browns and not the armpit I faced in the London Underground. If there was an art to nonchalance, I had not mastered it. I had come to the United Kingdom to visit my brother, who at the time was a conflict-management and peace-building specialist for war-torn areas. Glen had spent only three of the preceding 90 nights in his rented London bed, the remaining divvied between East Africa and the Middle East. Three days prior to my arrival, Manchester was bombed: 23 fatalities, 119 injuries. This was Glen’s world, a world of attacks and strategic response; lockdowns, evacuations and hostile-takeover training. Riding the Tube from Heathrow Airport, he told…

It is the third week in September, and I am up at 4:45 a.m. and on the road a smidgen after 5 o’clock. Second car in the lot. The temperature dropped into the low 40s overnight, and the sky is as clear as new fond ice. I am surprised to see how much the swell has built — 3 to 5 feet and larger on the o_ shore reefs. The waves are fast and powerful, and they break in clean, hollow tubes that turn a translucent silver-green once the sun reaches the right height. I fish beside two out-of-state guys who hiked out to this frothy reef in the dark, hours earlier, and already had a decent fish of maybe 25 pounds on the sand. The striped bass hang just…

The bite happens in a flash, so try not to blink. It’s easy to lose your focus to a wayward tuna grabbing some hang time, or to a marauding boobie dive-bombing the fray inches from the boat. Keep your eyes on that piece of plastic you flung into the madness. You don’t want to miss the bite. The ambushes are both impressive and entertaining. The best bites occur when the tuna attacks from below — the explosion as a bullet-shaped fish as big as a 96-quart cooler launches clear out of the water. We were right in the thick of a riled stretch of water that frothed with all sorts of life. I wanted to ask my buddy if he felt as if he were standing in a Sir David…

Buttercups posing in dew cascade down a mucky bank at dawn. My father has pointed them out with the tip of his cane pole as we glide by in lemoned light and shifting silences. He is a man who sees all that moves — even the tender grip of the sun on flowers and the vanishing hand of the moon among the ferns — along these yawning bayou banks. The pole is a wand in his hand, and it roams in vertiginous loops, as though he might be inscribing the path of the Southern Cross as it cleaved through the sky last night. But he is conjuring fish. “Around this bend last year,” he says, “I hooked me a monster.” My father paddles one-handed from the front of the boat,…

Loons broadcast their haunting, ethereal calls while a pair of bald eagles gossip in a raucous twilight chatter. Buried nearly a foot deep under layers of thick blankets on a screened porch, I slowly peel back the covers from over my head and squint across Sabaskong Bay on Lake of the Woods, which is calm and covered by a thick but shallow layer of fog. A cacophony of metal breaks the silence. Rods, pistons and valves drum in a rhythmic, deafening march as the de Havilland Beaver we’ll ride into the wilderness makes its way toward the island. Loaded down with outboards, fishing rods and tackle boxes, with a Grumman sport boat strapped to one of the boats, we lift off through the mist, and I get a bird’s-eye view…

As we shoved off, I sensed only that launching the drift boat, or any boat for that matter, had been a hasty call, one that was unimpeachably mine. Rock Creek several Junes ago was treacherously high. It was also the first time I saw Dan Lahren row a drift boat. Having guided since the 1970s on burly Western rivers, Lahren was the right companion to have aboard. For all but the least sensible, Rock Creek is raft water in June; we had chosen the drift er, though, because our fishing partner and mutual friend Jim Harrison had grown too old and unstable to fish out of a rubber boat. At peak runoff, with its boulder gardens covered by stained water, a Western freestone like Rock Creek in southwest Montana can…

Although it is a cold evening,down by one of the fishhousesan old man sits netting,his net, in the gloaming almost invisible,a dark purple-brown,and his shuttle worn and polished.The air smells so strong of codfishit makes one’s nose run and one’s eyes water.The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofsand narrow, cleated gangplanks slant upto storerooms in the gablesfor the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on.All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea,swelling slowly as if considering spilling over,is opaque, but the silver of the benches,the lobster pots, and masts, scatteredamong the wild jagged rocks,is of an apparent translucencelike the small old buildings with an emerald mossgrowing on their shoreward walls.The big fish tubs are completely linedwith layers of beautiful herring scalesand the wheelbarrows are similarly plasteredwith creamy iridescent…

Chuck Bowie is 86. He lives alone except for a diabetic cat named Zoomie who requires two insulin shots a day. His house sits deep in the woods on the Eastern Shore of Maryland along a road lined with towering pines that is so narrow, two cars can barely pass each other. He and his wife, Ruthe, moved here 25 years ago to be closer to their granddaughter. Ruthe passed in 2014, but it is not her absence that fills the silence between the ticks of the clock that hangs above the rocker. It is not the weight of her loss that presses down on the plaid pillows. On the wall below the stairs hangs a small, square picture, an old snapshot of a little boy standing on a dock,…

Becky-D’s old-school Chrysler 318 V-8 rumbles inside her 39-foot juniper-on-oak hull. Her owner, Capt. Ed Darwin, walks down to his dock on Mill Creek in Annapolis, Maryland. Capt. Jim Stickney, the mate, busies himself in the cockpit, setting out jigging rods. Photographer Jay Fleming readies his cameras. Charlie Bryan Jr. and Fred Brooks sit by the kerosene heater, munching doughnuts and talking with Capt. Tom Wagner, who lives next door. It’s late November, and this is a trip for friends, though we might “market-fish” a couple of schoolie stripers to pay for the fuel. Becky-D should make anyone’s short list of the finest charter boats on Chesapeake Bay. A wooden deadrise, she was built by Deltaville Boatyard in Virginia and is fishing her 52nd season. She cruises at 10 to…