Innehållsförteckning för Winter 2024 från Anglers Journal

Going Home “… This time when he released the permit, it stayed upright, steadying itself in equipoise, mirror sides once again purely reflecting the bottom.”Thomas McGuane Ninety-Two In The Shade Takeoff “The more accomplished casters understand that haste is not a fundamental component of fly-fishing.”Guy de la Valdène On the Water, A Fishing Memoir Fall Run “If there is an aristocracy of zealots among striped bass fishermen, it is surely made up of those hardy, adventurous souls who tackle the high surf.”Henry Lyman, Frank Woolner The Complete Book of Striped Bass Fishing…

TONY HUERTA LOVES FISHING OFFSHORE. He started chasing wahoo, dolphin and grouper from an early age. His father was an avid snapper fisherman in Miami, and he would take little Tony on overnight trips out of Key Largo. “My mom used to tell stories of him taking me on these trips when I was only 2 years old,” says Huerta, who is from Stuart, Florida. “He had a 23-foot John Allmand, a cuddy-style boat, and he didn’t like to use rods and reels. He used a yo-yo handline to catch yellowtail and muttons.” This lit the fishing fire under Huerta. When I met him in the early 1990s, Huerta owned a 23-foot Aquasport with a gas inboard that he fished out of Cape Canaveral, Florida, often running 40-plus miles offshore.…

I’M EARLY, AND THE RAMP IS PACKED with trucks, trailers and boats — a buzzing hive of activity. And like a nest of wasps, there is a hostility to it. Honking, yelling, profanity. Anglers jump the line, cause traffic jams and incite “ramp rage,” a close cousin to road rage. But everyone is going the wrong direction, and I’m relatively certain they’re utterly unaware. Not one boat is going in the water. They’re leaving the best fishing behind, and as I watch the chaos, tucked away in a distant corner of the lot, I sip my coffee and feel smug. Tom Kosinski, my guide for the night, arrives as the swarm of trucks and trailers has mostly thinned. He gets right to work launching as I hurry over. Kosinski is…

The timeworn fish weir on the East Branch of the Delaware River may have trapped its last eel. The stone-and-wood structure in Hancock, New York, has been operated for decades by Ray Turner, whom locals refer to as “The Eel Man.” Turner also runs Delaware Delicacies Smokehouse, where he sells a variety of smoked foods, from cheese to shrimp and fish, including the eels he captures in his weir. The weir has caught eels on the river for decades, according to Ben Rinker, 68, a fly-fishing guide who lives two miles downriver from Turner and has helped him maintain the structure. “The footprint has been there for a long time, at least 80 years,” and likely far longer, Rinker says. Damage from ice and water requires significant repairs each year,…

There is no shortage of good things in the world today. Thanks to the advancement of technology and manufacturing, good is everywhere. Good is the new average. Good is the new standard. Good is the price of admission. There’s nothing inherently bad about good. It’s only that it is so plentiful and, as a consequence, unremarkable. From this day forward, we declare good to be our enemy. If good is the enemy of great, then we will work tirelessly to flush good from our thinking and our rods. Starting now, we no longer accept the terms of good’s offer, no matter how easy, agreeable, practical, cost-effective, or efficient those terms may seem. Good has no guts Good doesn’t want to push the envelope. Good just wants to lick the stamp.…

You can’t see Flip Pallot’s home from the road. The driveway isn’t all that long, but the native cabbage palms and oak trees have created a hammock that blocks the sun’s harshest rays, allowing a soft light to filter through. The homestead has the aura of Old Florida set amidst the modern world. As I pull in, Flip steps out of the detached garage, his laboratory, keeper of the tools needed for a life spent in the woods and on the water. Antlers hang from studs along the walls, and shelves are stacked with buckets, boots, arrows and all the garage accouterments. His airboat is parked dead center. The garage, a simple construction made of concrete blocks, feels like hallowed ground. Many captains, students, friends and product developers have made…

Few people in professional bass fishing retire. In a sport that feels like a grab-bag of NASCAR, professional wrestling and tall tales, the prizes are too sweet, the spotlight too bright, the itch of competition too strong and the sponsorship deals too abundant for most diehard competitors to willingly call it quits. “There are plenty of people actively fishing today who were in the game before I started,” says Kevin VanDam, a 56-year-old angler widely considered the sport’s greatest competitor of all time. But unlike them, VanDam is moving away from the grueling schedule of a competitive angler. Rick Clunn, at 76, is still fishing and cashing checks on the Bassmaster Elite Series, the sport’s lifeblood tour. At 72, Larry Nixon is chasing the dream and doing the same. At…

The fishing around Cedros Island is similar to that in Southern California, but the yellowtail, calico bass, white sea bass, halibut and barracuda are bigger, stronger and meaner. After my August visit to this craggy, arid Pacific island about midway down the Baja Peninsula and 40 miles off the coast, I’d say Cedros Island is like SoCal fishing on acid. I marveled at acres of sardines roiling the surface with such ferocity that the melee sounded like a raging downpour. I caught two trophy calico bass on a two-hook stick bait. But the capper was a school of ravenous yellowtail that surrounded a blue shark and forced it to the surface, where they repeatedly rammed its belly with their noses, making the shark cough up its last meal for them…

Based in New York City, José Alvarado Jr. is a photographer pursuing a career in photojournalism and documentary photography. He expresses himself through imagery, and much of his work focuses on the small subcultures in his home state and his journeys to explore them. José’s work appears with “End of an Era.” 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 writes about an evening spent chasing giant striped bass from a small boat in “Deep Into the Night.” Ron Ballanti has worked in the marine electronics and fishing industries for more than two decades and…

AS I PULL INTO A PUBLIC PARK ON THE WESTERN EDGE OF BROWARD COUNTY, the sun is just peeking over the clusters of two-story McMansions that stop abruptly where the wilds of Florida take over. Corey Nowakowski is sitting in the driver’s seat of the only other vehicle in the parking lot. The world-record snakehead angler rolls down the window of his Toyota Tacoma to say hello. The “snakehead slayer” sticker on the rear window of his truck and the 10-foot jonboat sticking out past the tailgate gave him away. My glasses instantly fog up as I step out of my truck and into the muggy, August morning. Nowakowski, a 34-year-old native Floridian, invites me into his truck, and we drive a mile or two down the road before he…

Striped bass have a hard time saying no to an eel. Sharpies have been using these slimy, squirming critters to catch stripers for more than 100 years, and they’re still popular for those who cast, drift or troll for large stripers. Eels are a tough, durable bait with a history of attracting the largest striped bass found in coastal waters, from North Carolina to Canada. Three of the four world record bass taken since 1913 were caught on eels. That’s no coincidence. One story I was dressed in a shortie wetsuit, standing on a rock at the end of Earth. It was June, and the water still had a chill, especially after dark. A folded multitool was shoved under the neoprene of my left short sleeve and a dry eel…

Brookies. In every inch of this small stream where a fish could be — brookies. Fat, strong, eager. Blackjawed beauties with red bellies so bright I thought they were bleeding. Strikes so aggressive I could only imagine they were starving. Yet each stomach was swollen with grasshoppers, crayfish and stoneflies. The fish were ravenous, commanding every pool in the lowland creek choked with willows. Even as I fought the trout back through a run, others rose to mayflies that floated down the current. It was fantastic fishing. As a professed apostle of the church of brook trout, I felt blessed by the size and number of fish, immersed in a fantasy of dropping a fly in any stretch and watching it disappear in a swirl brushed by a speckled side.…

“Step forward while the light and shadows are still clear, the sun, low on the water, still steady. Enter the moment you seem to be living in.”Carl Dennis The full moon was a few days off, and steady 2-to 3-foot swells rolled over the empty point. I’m drawn to this long stretch of surf, sand, glacial debris and wind whenever cracks appear in my world. I’d lost two friends this fall, and my earliest fishing mentor passed the previous year. I was starting to wonder if this was a random patch of rough water or whether it foretold something more about my future. An hour earlier, I sat on my tailgate, pulled on my waders, put my headlamp around my neck and hit the sand. My idea was to find…