Innehållsförteckning för Winter 2021 från Anglers Journal

Winter Way Stream-Bound Blue Ridge Mountains “The poetry of the earth is never dead.”John Keats Favorites Bluewater Baits Pacific Panama “There is a great pleasure in being on the sea, in the unknown wild suddenness of a great fish. …”Ernest Hemingway Essentials Backcountry Fishing Interior Alaska “The art of moving gently without suddenness …”Isak Dinesen Dogged King Salmon Ecstall River, British Columbia “Perhaps fishing is, for me, only an excuse to be near rivers. If so, I’m glad I thought of it.”Roderick L.Haig-Brown…

MY PLUG FOR A PLUG I really enjoyed the cedar plug article in the Summer issue [“Oldfangled”]. We use cedar plugs here in northwest Oregon for albacore tuna, and I recently was spooled by what I believe was a giant bluefin, but I will never know. Let me tell you how much I enjoy the format and quality of Anglers Journal. I look forward to every issue. Keep up the outstanding work. Jock Vondeling I always pulled a cedar plug for options. It was very effective. Douglas J. Holloway via Facebook PRIZED CATCHES I worked as a mate for a long time, charter-fishing in North Carolina. Wahoo were always a welcome sight, as well as a headache [“Perfect Predator,” Spring]. Sometimes they’d cut off your bait off by cutting the…

With a flash of its flawless silver sides, the steelhead turns into the current, and the rod bends. The fish pulses, and the reel sounds its wonderfully familiar squeal. I lay on the pressure, hoping to land her quickly and ensure a full recovery. This is my first steelhead of the season, and a mix of joy and the anxiety from possibly losing her fill me. While I fight the fish, my mind rolls through some of the many steelhead I have landed or helped my clients land. You’d think that netting yet another fish wouldn’t carry such importance, but the first catch of the steelhead season is always special. It confirms that nature continues to provide its bounty. Every season, these majestic fish poise themselves in Lake Erie at…

“See him?” I was repeating the question just asked by my Bahamian guide, who stood next to me on the bow platform of his flats skiff. “How could I miss him?” After a couple of hours spent squinting to spot elusive gray ghosts — the bonefish that every flats angler wants to target — I had no trouble seeing the dark shape of a 4-foot barracuda. It was laid up next to a mangrove shoot in the clear shallows, though it could have been mistaken for a log by someone who didn’t know better. Certainly, a log would have been as animated. Of course, that is a credit to the barracuda as an apex hunter, an ambush predator that remains motionless until it strikes. this guy wasn’t going anywhere in…

I love fishing in Alaska, especially in September, when huge rainbow trout move out of lakes and into streams to fatten up on sockeye eggs. I enjoy the silver salmon run, too, but what I like most is sharing rivers with bears and my camera. In September, Alaskan brown bears fatten up for winter, and sockeye salmon are their main source of nourishment. That means rivers with the most sockeyes also have the most rainbows — and the most bears. The perfect combination. My favorite bear destination is the Kulik River in Katmai National Park. It’s a 1½-mile stretch of wadable water between two lakes, and it’s loaded with bears, some of which come close to 1,000 pounds. It can be a bit intimidating to watch a huge bear chase…

It was January when I moved into a dilapidated trailer in the vineyard country of Sonoma County, a young writer looking to live cheaply while he finished his first novel. Mice scuttled through the heating ducts, but I ignored them as I did the leaky roof and faded shag carpeting. The Russian River, one of the most productive steelhead streams on California’s north coast, was less than 50 yards from my back door, and I was willing to overlook almost any privation to fish it at my leisure. I knew very little about steelhead at the start. They belonged to the same family as rainbow trout, but I had no idea how tenacious they are. They don’t always die after they spawn, as salmon do. Some steelhead make the river-to-ocean…

The Atlantic blue marlin: a perfect mix of strength, attitude and pure beauty. “If there’s a cooler fish,” Richard Gibson says, “I haven’t found it.” Gibson’s love affair with blue marlin began in St. Thomas in the late 1970s. He had landed on the island sort of by accident. After graduating from Morehead State University in Kentucky with a degree in photojournalism, he applied to nearly every daily newspaper in his home state of Florida but hardly got a sniff. Dejected, Gibson visited the Caribbean island to see a friend and recharge. Turns out that St. Thomas had an award-winning daily newspaper, The Virgin Islands Daily News. “I was pretty good at applying by then, so I decided to try my luck, went in and applied,” says Gibson, who lives…

The holes that ice fishermen cut in a lake refreeze overnight, creating fertile ground for nature’s wild, artistic side, says photographer Erik Hoffner, whose Ice Visions series of images are part of an exhibition at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center in Brattleboro, Vermont. These perfectly augured circles become worlds at once interstellar and cellular, dreamlike and tactile. In the morning light, with tiny bubbles from below fixed almost magically in place among new ice, these scenes come to life as eyes, galaxies, stars or mitochondria when rendered in fine detail in black and white, according to Hoffner, who has spent 20 years exploring New England lakes and ponds with a camera. Colombian-born photographer and part-time Vermont resident Federico Pardo in 2016 began documenting ice shanties on a frozen floodplain…

I kissed a man. It happened unexpectedly about 10 years ago, but this is not a coming-out story. We’d met in the parking lot of the condominium where we both winter in the Florida Keys and immediately hit it off. Our mutual interests centered primarily around guy stuff. We both fished, and that dominated the conversation. Good spots, good baits, the right tides and techniques. He outfished me and many others who have ever held a rod, but it was never a contest. Claudio Facchini was a big guy — 6-foot-2 and north of 230 pounds — but he could move around a pitching deck in 4-foot seas like a Balanchine-influenced ballet dancer. A former college lacrosse player, he was in shape for his age. And he was brawny. So…

“You’re in my knife zone,” Vella Sorensen warns as an angler noses in on his halibut. He backs off, people chuckle, and Vella smiles, making precise cuts with a Dexter fillet knife that seems to lift every millimeter of precious white flesh. “Thank you,” the man says. “You’re damn good. How about a beer?” “I’d love one,” Vella nods, happy to accept a drink during a long session at her busy fish-cleaning station in Newport, Oregon. “To your fish,” she toasts. A powerful woman with long dark hair tied behind a star-spangled headband, Vella dons black Grundéns bibs, white cotton gloves and a blue meat cutter’s gauntlet that brings to mind Won-der Woman’s deflecting bracelets. Vella may clean 1,000 fish in a single day — rockfish, lingcod, halibut, salmon and…

The first time I saw a grizzly bear chasing a man was the last time I saw a grizzly bear chasing a man. It happened about 30 years ago, which should dispel the notion that bears are hiding in every willow patch, itching to rip off one of your limbs. That said, seeing a grizzly closing the distance on a man running bat-shit crazy down a mountain does provide an aha moment when you might think, That could be me. There were three men, actually, me and two guys I’d fished with commercially, who had shot a Sitka black-tailed deer on southeast Alaska’s Baranof Island. They were waiting a few minutes before walking up on the animal. As they watched, another animal charged off the mountain and through the fog.…

Sometimes I just stand on the ice, caught between the poles of the present and the past. The cold winter air does that to me. All that sunlight, all that snow. I will never be a great ice fisherman and have no ambitions as such. I auger my holes by hand. I don’t own a shack. But each December, my son and I check the morning ice on the way to his school. We estimate its thickness, brave our feet across it, inch by inch, until one morning, miraculously, there we are standing on it. Winter has arrived. Ice fishing is different for the singular difference: You’re standing on the freaking water, and the fish are below your feet! It’s insanely physical: I hear the crunch of my feet. I…

We were casting to pods of false albacore sipping bait off the surface near Atlantic Beach, North Carolina, when reports of a greyhounding Atlantic bluefin tuna crackled over the VHF radio. The 800-pounder was apparently gobbling up 20-pound blackfin tuna like breakfast sausages and making hash browns out of false albacore. “I didn’t know a Volkswagen Bus could fly,” my friend Kary Via piped in over the radio. I didn’t get to see the bluefin that morning last year, but the reports reminded me of another large fish that is something of a YouTube favorite, the goliath grouper. I remember watching a video showing an angler in South Florida leadering a shark next to the boat as a pair of brown blobs swirled beneath it. In an instant, a goliath…