Innehållsförteckning för Fall 2021 från Anglers Journal

I had my first clue about what my life as a fisherman’s wife would be when I found myself chest deep in a stretch of Alaskan whitewater pushing an inflatable raft upstream. This was before Bill (the editor of this magazine) and I were married, when I was spending the summer in Alaska, backpacking in my usual quest for magnificent alpine scenery. Bill was up for a few weeks and had popped the question several days earlier, fresh off a hike over Resurrection Pass on the Kenai Peninsula. I’d said yes, and now that he had me hooked, he had yanked me off the mountain. We were traveling by raft in the shrubby riparian lowlands and sleeping on gravel bars while he cast for king salmon. Searching for a campsite…

Fall is a never-ending blur, with birds, bait, fish and fishing folk in constant motion, chasing one another from sunrise to sunset and through the night. It’s a time to be dialed in to the hunt, with multiple migrations overlapping as predators chase prey, and flocks of gulls and terns and sheets of escaping bait point to the action. The choices are many: striped bass, bluefish, tuna, tautog, albies and bonito, and red drum. Boats whiz in and out of launch ramps and marinas at all hours. Four-wheel-drive trucks comb the beaches. Rock hoppers line up along breachways and wherever glacial debris lays piled up and the current is moving. Some years it starts slowly, before the equinox, when the fishing patterns and weather resemble summer more than fall. But…

South African guide Dean Scott piloted the 18-foot skiff to a flat on the near side of Saint Francois, the primary fishing atoll in the Seychelles and a 25-minute ride from Alphonse Island. It had taken four flights, two and a half days of travel, and eight months of suspense to finally set foot in this pristine spot in the Somali Sea, and I was about to make my first cast. I waded through knee-deep, turquoise water shimmering over white sand. Gray shadows zipped under the rippled surface in all directions. I made a cast into the shadows with my 8-weight and stuck a 2-pound bonefish on my second strip, the first fish of a productive morning. I fished one school until Scott chuckled and instructed, “Turn around,” only to…

The first installment of “My Boat My Life,” in the Winter 2014 premiere issue of Anglers Journal, featured Tom Delotto and his 1997 Regulator 26, Nifty2, which he had purchased in August 2013. “It took a lot of work to get her to where I wanted her,” Delotto says, “but she ended up being a great fishing machine for my wife and me, as well as our two sons and the grandkids.” Delotto says Nifty2 was perfect for stripers and other fish he pursues around Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, but keeping the twin-outboard boat up to snuff started to wear on him. “A 26-footer is a big boat and requires an extra level of upkeep,” he says. “I had a guy come up to me out of the clear, blue sky…

Jerry Audet is a writer, photographer and lifelong fisherman residing in Massachusetts. Dedicated to shore-based striper fishing, he writes about and takes photographs of a wide array of angling disciplines up and down the East Coast. The managing editor of Surfcaster’s Journal, Jerry takes us to a spot he calls “Bizarro Beach,” where he pursues big bass. Phil Fibiger grew up fly-fishing for trout with his father in upstate New York, but now mostly fishes the saltwater flats of Florida’s east coast. When he’s not on the water or spending time with his wife and two sons, he leads product development for a medical device software company. “A World Away” is Philip’s recounting of a once-in-a-lifetime trip to fish the Seychelles. Andrew Miller is a photographer based in the western…

When I first started fishing for red snapper, the species was not entangled in the mess of red tape that it is these days. Snapper season extended more than a couple of weekends, and you could put some fish in the cooler without regulations and seasons that seemingly change with each flip of the calendar. Like other species that make fine tablefare, red snapper is highly regulated. Wading through the data and brouhahas that spark like wildfires each year is akin to moderating a political debate. It’s easy to get bogged down in the miscalculated catch limits and overreaching commercial influence, but I try to tune out some of that noise. I focus on opening day and planning a red snapper trip with friends. Although we all live within a…

Anglers have a propensity for coming up with absurd nicknames for every little nook and cranny they fish. It’s a way of reminding themselves of what the spot produces, its characteristics, or something profound or comical that happened there. For many striper surf casters, spots are also named in an effort to hide their true identities, a way to ensure that they stay secret. “Bizarro Beach” is one such spot I discovered in Massachusetts four years ago, and it still makes me shake my head. Upon first assessment, it appeared devoid of life and undeserving of a single exploratory cast. No boulders, no troughs, and on most nights, very little wave action and zero current. Just a long, shallow, uniform sand flat stretching seemingly into the infinite. As I discovered,…

I just killed a thing I love. A living thing I revere. But it doesn’t belong here in Montana. It’s more than 2,000 miles from its home range, that place in the Appalachian Mountains where I’ve lived much of my life, falling in love with its graceful movements, with its spectacular colors — speckled, as the old folks say. I’ve hiked mile upon mile, tracing tributaries with my feet, scanning the waters along the Allegheny Front, to catch brook trout, to hold them for the briefest of moments in my hand and say a prayer of praise before opening my fingers to feel their finely muscled bodies wave-splash back into the current. And now I’ve taken my index finger, pushed it into the throat of this fish, bending the flailing…

Goggle-eyes don’t hold bankers’ hours. They move under cover of darkness. That’s why they have such big eyes; so they can stick together and evade predators. Technically speaking, it’s a bigeye scad, or if you’re fishing south of the border a caballito, which translates to little horse. It’s an opportune nickname because wrangling this prized baitfish requires an understanding of tide, current, moon phase and water temperature. Weekend warriors typically don’t have the time, or drive, it takes to load up on gogs. They rely on a network of strong-willed bait men to keep them stocked. And like other commodities, the price of goggle-eyes fluctuates with demand. Come tournament time, you may pay $10 or more per bait. That adds up quickly when you need several dozen in the tank…

“I don’t know how y’all normally like to fish, but I was taught to take turns between trout and pools,” David Joy says with a smile as he steps into waders next to his pickup. Here, in the mountains of western North Carolina, the sun is beginning to warm the air through the thick, green canopy of May. Hidden behind the tangle, a brook trout stream tumbles over a series of falls toward the valley miles down the mountain. My dad and I say taking turns suits us just fine. Standing 6-foot-5 and with a rusty beard, Carolina foothills accent and camo shirt, Joy might not be what most people think of when they imagine an Orvis-style fly angler. Mostly a full-time novelist, he jumps on a construction crew to…

The biologists at the fisheries office in Nome, Alaska, gave me a tip: There were still late-run sockeye 40 miles inland on the Nome-Teller Road at the outlet to aptly named Salmon Lake. The drive was one of those peak experiences you never forget. At that latitude, the sun shines at a sharp angle all day, which makes the rust-and-umber foliage of the landscape luminous. And as I drove, I viewed it through the cracked-in-three-places windshield of an old mud-encased Jeep while listening to my new favorite radio station, KNOM, for as long as the signal held. Because Alaska is so big, the region-by-region weather forecast takes almost 10 minutes. Then comes the salmon report: Chums are way up the Yukon River and in bigger-than-usual numbers. Another preoccupation is the…