Innehållsförteckning för No. 2 - 2023 från Field & Stream

THE REEL ARRIVED in a handcrafted wooden box with a shiny silver Z screwed to the top. Inside, the ZX2’s body was cradled in a custom compartment, the detached handle secured in its own nook by a leather strap. The way it was presented reminded me of a limited-edition pistol, which was fitting because this spinning reel, with its sharp machining and matte-black anodized finish, looked like a tactical weapon. I glanced at the serial number on the side plate—number 105 off the line. In 2005, Zeebaas emerged as the first competitor to Van Staal, which at the time made the most expensive spinning reel ever produced, with a price tag north of $1,000. For many years, Van Staal reels were more a status symbol than anything, but as…

GOOGLE, WHICH KNOWS all things, says that a close call is a narrow escape from danger or disaster. That’s fine, as far as it goes, but there are different kinds of close calls. There are fast close calls, for example, and there are protracted close calls. Al McClane, F&S’s late, great fishing editor, was once scuba diving when he saw a bull shark nearby. This is a highly aggressive predator that attacks people, and this one had its back arched and its pectoral fins lowered, which is the signal for attack. Al knew this. He swam frantically for his boat and flung himself in with such force that he broke his ankle on an oarlock. Had he not recognized an imminent attack and reacted instantly, he might have lost…

MICHELLE HAD SAID the alligator wasn’t dead, and I should’ve listened. But there was a hole right through the thing’s head from the bang stick, and we’d pulled it up onto the deck of my buddy Tom’s boat, and I’d even knelt behind it for a photo. At 8 feet long, it wasn’t a particularly big gator, but it was a decent one for public water and bowfishing gear, and my first one to boot. I told Michelle that the writhing tail was to be expected from a fresh-killed reptile. I’ve cleaned plenty of snapping turtles in my day, after all, and you can expect them to kick for an hour, even with their heads hacked off and tossed in a bucket. That this gator was reflexing didn’t concern…

EVER WONDER what guides really think of the average hunter’s shooting? One told me last year why he sold his operation in Canada. “Guides can’t carry a gun up there. I got tired of putting birds in front my hunters and watching them miss,” he said. “Now when I go to Canada, I get to shoot.” This spring, a snow goose guide friend of mine said, “We tell clients we’ll only shoot to back them up on cripples. The truth is, if we didn’t shoot, a lot of days we’d come home without any birds at all.” It’s a frustrating mystery to me that so many hunters never touch a shotgun in the off-season. I understand that shooting is expensive. But so are guided hunts—and hunting in general. If…

THEY OUGHT TO WRITE country songs about losing fish. As every angler knows, breaking it off with a big bass or untying the knot with a beautiful trout is as painful as any other split, and just as likely to drive you to drink. It doesn’t matter whose fault it is, yours or your equipment’s; the end of an attachment is always a heartbreaker. But until Nashville gets this right, these six stories about the fish that got away will help you commiserate. And when you’re ready to get back out there—and inevitably lose another one—try to remember that there are plenty of other…well, you know the rest. DEEP MYSTERY There are lost fish that sting; there are lost fish that haunt. But of all the varieties in the…

IN THE ALLEGHENY FOOTHILLS of my childhood, a boy had a choice between two doors. Open his front door, and there was the town—friends and enemies, fistfights and football—and down in the valley, the soot-blackened dragon that dominated the skyline, belching smoke and fire. This was Wheeling Steel’s 44-inch mill, where the opening scenes of The Deer Hunter were filmed. The Academy Award–winning movie got the grit of the valley right, but you can’t smell celluloid film, and the true nature of the mill was its odor. The rotten-egg funk, a mix of hydrogen sulfide and the headache-inducing scent of acid-treated steel, made it among the most obnoxious and unhealthy places to live in the country. Harvard scientists studying industrial air pollution in the 1970s and 1980s ranked my town…

I HAD JUST RETURNED from Homosassa, Florida. I had driven 10 hours each way to fly fish for tarpon. I had recently broken three ribs in what remains disputed as either a biking accident or a drinking accident, which required that I ride in the poling skiff with a full-size bed pillow clamped under my arm to cushion the fractures. It was not a “manly” look, and it was not comfortable in the least, and all this underscores how badly I wanted to catch a Homosassa tarpon. Imagine my disappointment when, upon my return home, my wife asked a ridiculous question: “Did you catch a tarpon?” I shook my head. Julie should have known better. But she didn’t, and it occurred to me that many others do not, either.…

WHAT SMELLS remind you of childhood summers? The sulfury smoke of a sparkler that just burned out? The nostril-stinging water at the public pool, loaded with enough chlorine to strip paint? Maybe it’s as simple as an overcooked hotdog on a charcoal grill. For me, it’s the combination of raw chicken fat and Avon Skin So Soft. The idea that the fragrant bath oil repelled greenhead flies was passed down for generations and accepted as fact in my family. My grandfather had a bottle stashed in every tackle box and glove compartment he ever owned, and he’d slather me in the flowery potion just before hopping on a dilapidated wooden rental boat at Trixie’s Marina. It took at least a dozen pulls to get the 9.9 horsepower outboard to…

AS A KID growing up in Athens, Alabama, Brandon Bailes used to spend a lot of time in his grandfather’s woodshop. His grandpa would cut a block of cedar for Bailes, then sketch something on it—the outline of a northern cardinal, for example—and hand it over to Bailes. “OK,” his grandpa would say. “Now that you’ve got an idea of what’s inside that block of wood, start carving and whittling away until it shows itself.” Decades later, Bailes is still whittling away at what’s inside. Only these days, instead of blocks of wood, he’s working with fluff balls of deer hair spun onto fishing hooks. And instead of cardinals or other critters, what ultimately wind up showing themselves are some of the most striking and meticulously tied flies imaginable. “It’s…

IT’S MORNING at Kooyooe Pa’a Panunadu, or Pyramid Lake, in Nevada, and I’m fly fishing for the biggest cutthroat trout in the world. It’s my first time at the lake, and I’m here with Autumn Harry, the first Paiute woman fly-fishing guide in its history. The pressure is on. The anglers down the beach just doubled up. I’ve yet to get bit, and my window of opportunity is closing quickly. On the other side of the lake, the sun is beginning to crest a series of rugged high-desert mountains. According to Harry, direct sunlight kills the fishing. On a clear day like today, most fish are caught at dawn and dusk, and we’re not planning to fish this evening. I lift the two-handed switch-rod handle up by my head and…

YOU MIGHT have heard about—or even tried—last year’s trendy Thanksgiving trick of slathering your turkey in mayonnaise before its turn in the oven. Eyebrows were raised, but hardly anyone could dispute the results: richly bronzed skin, uncommonly juicy meat, applause for the cook. Chefs have been using this tactic for years, and not just on holiday birds. The science behind it is simple. Mayo is an emulsion, so it sticks to foods better than other fats, such as oil and butter, which tend to melt off. And because of its chemical composition (specifically, the egg yolks), it yields super-enhanced browning—the Maillard reaction that grill nerds are fond of citing. It really can be a game-changer. Smear it on your grilled cheese, your grilled corn, your chicken breasts, your steaks,…

BROWN ISN’T WORKING TODAY. Neither is white. Even orange on a green jighead isn’t getting bit. It’s a chilly sunny April day and I’m out with Paula and Gordon in a Fletcher’s rowboat, bouncing tandem bucktail jigs for white perch. Every year the Potomac’s migratory species—shad, herring, and perch—swim up out of the Chesapeake Bay to spawn. Every year, the three of us go out to meet them. It’s how we mark the death of winter and the beginning of spring, the end and start of another circuit on the big merry-go-round. It’s how we honor the stupefying fact that all three of us are still alive to see it. No one says a word about any of this. That’s part of the ritual. We’ve tried several historically productive…