Innehållsförteckning för Summer 2020 från Anglers Journal

Easter Sunday 2020 was unlike any in recent memory. No church services. No large family gatherings. And for Capt. Marty Lewis, who with his wife, Katie, owns Main Attraction Fishing Charters, no clients. Based in Marathon, Florida, and with the Keys shut down because of the coronavirus pandemic, Lewis was going on week three without charters. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t fishing. “We’d been fishing for swordfish and doing family trips and fishing with employees,” he says. “You’ve got to pass the time somehow.” The day before Easter, Lewis and Katie took their young daughter out to Marathon Hump to fish for blackfin tuna from Main One, their 49-foot custom Carolina-style sportfish. They caught plenty of fish for the family, and on the way back in, Lewis noticed the…

Fifteen Junes ago, I guided a wealthy gentleman who was itching to employ a bamboo fly rod he had recently purchased at an even wealthier late-gentleman’s estate sale. He threw persistent tailing loops even with a standard 9-foot, 5-weight graphite rig, a mechanical casting flaw that would only be exaggerated by the shorter, slower vintage piece. Citing the lower Clark Fork’s heavy braided currents, and the large golden stoneflies we were imitating, I urged him against the swap. He said it wasn’t about the fish, and at lunch, he swapped out the graphite for the $10,000 bamboo Payne. On his first cast with the ’boo, he hooked a sizeable rainbow trout that leapt once and then, upon returning to the water, went board-stiff, openmouthed, apparently brained by the hook point…

With summer winding down in northern Finland, two men begin gathering pine tar wood well before dark. The dried, weathered pieces of aged stumps will soon be ignited, the flames casting a flickering light on an ancient method of fishing whose practitioners may have dwindled to just these two. Spearfishing by firelight is not a not particularly effective technique — it’s far easier to flick on the beam of a headlamp than to build and maintain a fire on a metal grill hanging over the water, connected to the bow of a boat. But that misses the point. Henri Turtinen and Esa Saarela continue to stalk and spear pike, bream and perch to keep the old ways alive. “If no one fished with live fire anymore, the tradition dies,” Turtinen…

Anyone who’s familiar with the Florida Keys fishing community no doubt knows the name Capt. Robert R.T. Trosset, the legendary skipper who has been guiding out of Key West since 1975. Among the fish-filled flats, backcountry, and waters of the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic, Trosset raised two sons. His older son, Robert, who now runs a dive business, was never a fanatical fisherman, though he enjoyed working on his father’s boats and engines. Chris, on the other hand, was bitten hard by the angling bug early on and never recovered. These days you can find him guiding clients under the Reel Fly Charters banner. “For as long as I can remember, I’ve been fishing with my dad,” Trosset says, “but he never pressured us to go. It was…

Recently, my brother, who lives in South Florida, sent me a photograph of a tarpon he’d caught off Islamorada. “I practiced socially distant fishing,” he said. No need for a mask. There was no one else aboard his boat, let alone on the water. “The lack of boats on a Sunday morning was eerie,” he told me. In a neat trick of maritime multitasking, Andy piloted the boat, fought the 110-pound fish, photographed it and released it. I confess to a twinge of envy. I live in Washington, D.C., an inconvenient distance from good, fishable waters, and I don’t own a boat. Anyway, my favorite fish are trout, which are far from an urban pursuit. Usually during this time of year, I’d be streamside in Devon, England, casting for browns,…

“I’m not obsessed with fishing like you are, Dad,” my 14-year-old son, Finn, oft en tells me. And he is right. Unlike his father, Finn chooses not to rise at 4 o’clock in the morning to chase a tide. And he definitely does not linger on a trout river well past dark wiping no-see-ums from his arms by the dozen while waiting for mayflies to hit the water. My own father, born and raised in New York City, hard by the banks of the East River, is a fully citified non-angler. Perhaps fish-obsession, as they say with musical talent, skips a generation. But for one glorious week each summer, Finn joins me in a 14-foot skiff on Newboro Lake in southern Ontario, where my wife’s family has owned a cottage…

As I lie awake next to my wife in the comfort of a friend’s cabin on the East Branch of the Delaware River, where I have come to fish, I try to reassemble a dream that has just escaped me. I close my eyes again, and as I begin to doze, the story reappears. It starts with a phone call from my Uncle Manolo, who lives in Miami. It soon becomes clear that he has bad news to deliver. He can barely finish his sentences without stopping to compose himself. As I hear the news that my father has passed, my eyes well up, and my mind fills with thoughts and emotions. My overarching concern is for my mother and the grief she must be experiencing. I wonder what happened,…

It’s a little after 2 p.m. on a crisp March afternoon in Scottsboro, Alabama, and Cody Hollen is chasing shadows as I look on. Day one of the 50th Bassmaster Classic, widely considered the Super Bowl of bass fishing, finds us 35 miles north of the starting line on Lake Guntersville. Hollen tells me this spot, an out-of-the-way creek with grassy cover, reminds him of a spot on his home waters of the Columbia River in Oregon. I listen and nod because that’s about all I can do. As a tournament marshal, I’ve signed a waiver that limits my involvement to documenting each catch using the BASSTrakk app on my phone, which is uploaded to a leader board that tracks the entire field of anglers in real time. Hollen is…

At a fishing clinic years ago, I was asked to close my eyes and visualize my favorite water, holding the image in my mind as a source of strength. I remember that exercise and return to it now to anchor myself, at a time when I feel unmoored, conjuring in my imagination places that have been my sanctuaries for the last few years — places of comfort, places of peace. Riding in a jetboat back to camp after a long day on the river chasing big fish, my best fishing buddy and I sit on the riveted aluminum bottom, leaning back against the bench with our legs propped up La-Z-Boy-style, sharing a beer. The evening hatch pelts us in the face, and we have our buffs pulled up to avoid…

You don’t read much about Atlantic mackerel in fishing magazines these days. The handsome little metallic blue-green critters haven’t changed much since Salt Water Sportsman ran the occasional article about catching them back in the 1950s and ’60s, but they’ve fallen out of favor as a target species, replaced by sexier, open-water speedsters such as bonito, false albacore and snapper blues. About a half-century ago, well-meaning outdoor writers tried their darndest to whip up enthusiasm for Scomber scombrus. “Taken on a freshwater fly rod, mackerel will delight the most ardent light-tackle angler with their sizzling runs and stubborn resistance,” gushed a fishing scribe from the day, “and if tied tail-to-tail with a brook trout, will pull the brookie around backward all day long! Furthermore, if prepared properly, they make excellent…

With a century of history in its wake, the simple yet effective cedar plug is still a go-to lure for tuna anglers around the globe. In a world of exotic plastics, glitter-infused paints, synthetic fur and 3-D holographic appliques, the venerable cedar plug is remarkably simple. And while it may be old-school, it remains a preferred ed tuna lure among professional and recreational anglers alike. Torpedo-shaped and graceful in its no-nonsense design, a typical dar plug has few parts: a lead head, a body made of natural cedar and a single barbed hook. A leader connects directly to the hook through the center of the lead-and-wood body. The plugs range from 4 to 8 inches in length, and although you can find them painted in a dazzling array of colors…

It was about 23 years ago that I first heard about the false albacore bite that goes off every fall in the waters around Cape Lookout, North Carolina. I was hanging out at a local fly shop when four or five guys described the hot top-water action, with little tunas smoking off fly line to the backing and hours of bent fly rods. When I finally got around to making a plan and researching online how to make it happen, I kept seeing the names Sarah Gardner and Brian Horsley, a husband-and-wife guide team who work out of Harkers Island, North Carolina, during the fall season. “If you want to catch albies, go see Brian and Sarah,” one old-timer piped in on a fishing forum. I made a couple of…