Innehållsförteckning för Fall 2022 från The Drake

ON A RECENT TRIP to British Columbia, I hooked a steelhead. The steelhead then became unhooked (this happens). But the encounter nonetheless left me very excited. So excited, in fact, that after semi-sprinting down to the next run, I entered the river several yards higher than I should have and attempted to wade through rapids I was incapable of wading. I was not successful. Understand: I knew exactly where I was supposed to enter the river; we’d been fishing that run for two days. But I was so excited to make my next cast after hooking a fish on my last one that I didn’t think—I just marched. Because that’s what flyfishing can do: Narrow our focus to the point of delirium, reducing our cognitive capacity to little more than…

SEPTEMBER 13TH WAS a great day for a long-suffering stretch of Colorado’s South Platte River. After a two-year battle with Colorado’s Water Quality Control Commission, a group of stakeholders including Colorado and Denver TU groups convinced the commission to reverse a 2020 ruling that had weakened protections for the “Segment 15” portion of the Platte, as well as the lower section of Clear Creek where the two meet. This area is a favorite of Denver’s obsessed carp-on-the-fly community, plus a growing number of smallie chasers. The unanimous approval by the commissioners gives a nice boost to one of Denver’s fishiest but historically abused sections. Segment 15 begins just north of Denver, nearly 250 miles from the river’s headwaters south of Breckenridge, and flows northeast toward Nebraska for 26 miles. The…

OUT OF AN AUGUST fog came a convoy of five rafts, one kayak, and one stand-up-paddleboard, all of them floating the Chattahoochee River along the Alabama-Georgia line. Rowing the raft I sat in was Rowell Guevarra, a former Army Ranger instructor at Fort Benning, Ga., (part of the base is in Alabama), who now volunteers as lead mentor for the Auburn, Ala., Mayfly Project, a national non-profit using flyfishing “as a catalyst to mentor and support children in foster care.” The goal of the Auburn Mayfly Project is to mentor ten children by the end of 2022. Guevarra has more than a dozen other mentors on his team, and some were rowing the three foster children who were the focus of this trip. He was meticulous in his planning, right…

Q: Dear Trask, I’m wanting to learn how to be a better fishing dog, because my captor gets mad whenever I jump into what is obviously a great swimming hole. Do you have any advice on how I can just sit there and watch him fish the hole first, and then go swimming? I’m finding this skill very difficult to master. —Finn, Los Gatos, CA A: Dear Finn, Sure, I could tell you. But I won’t. Because all of our captors secretly want us to hop in that hole, thus providing them a convenient excuse for why they didn’t catch the fish that they weren’t going to catch anyway. Look, we’ve all been the “good dog” that sat obediently on the bank watching sexy, easily retrievable sticks float by as the “angler”—too…

I KNEW PATRICK had a wedding the night before, but I didn’t know he’d be coming straight from it. His wine-stained dress-shirt hung untucked over his pants. He had no bag; he walked up my driveway from our mom’s car just after 5 a.m. with a five weight in one hand, a pair of cowboy boots in the other, and a hip pack and a pair of jeans slung like saddlebags over each shoulder. “Jesus,” I said. “Get in.” He woke up four hours later as I pulled into a Walmart near our put-in on Arkansas’ White River. I am nearly six years older than Patrick. We were always close, but looking back, which I do a lot now, I see how that gap often placed us at different life…

THREE DECADES of earnestly hunting smallmouth and I still marvel at the places I find them. The obvious spots—in deep runs; throughout pools; in riffles and depressions behind boulders; and in eddies that trout would relish—all make perfect sense to that part of my mind that understands trout streams. But I’ve also found them well off from a river and utterly exposed in dead-end, dead-still, shallow, clear-water channels, the sort of place no trout would go; in swift riffles free of sheltering boulders, water seemingly too fast for trout; and once I found them in a transparent disk the size of a small pond, mostly knee-deep, fed and drained by hardly a trickle off the main river, yet there they were, swarming. Despite the differences in where trout and smallmouth…

FOR MY 60TH BIRTHDAY, my wife Lynn gave me a copper bracelet made by Alaska Native artist, Rob Martin. I’d been having an ongoing issue with soreness in my left wrist, and wearing copper around it seemed to help. The bracelet has two salmon on it, a male and a female, facing each other. It was one of the most beautiful gifts I’d ever received. I lost it the following spring. By the time I realized it was gone, my fishing partner Steve and I were already heading back to Ketchikan after fishing the Karta River for four days. I’d assumed it had come off my wrist while loading the Zodiac inflatable onto the roof of Steve’s boat. If so, the bracelet was now ninety feet deep at the bottom…

Hours into the float already, we’d chucked green and yellow, chartreuse and pink, and black and purple—some with big reflective eyes and others with barred feathers that enticingly slip and slide behind the body of the fly. Nothing was working. Brett, my musky copilot, and I weren’t moving fish like I thought we would, considering the cold mornings that fall had been delivering. So we anchored our raft among a toothy, login-fested section that we’d both come to love and hate over the past year. We then went about the task of choosing a new fly from several I’d tied a few nights earlier. Our simple process was based on three factors: Does it look good in the water; is the hook sharp; and is it big enough? “This one…

I CAST MY CLOUSER out on a sinking-head, counted to ten, then started a fast retrieve. Halfway back to the boat, the line stopped, a strip-strike followed, and my backing was soon flowing out through the guides… Question: Where was I? Striper fishing the Northeast? Chasing jacks in the Keys? Peacock bass in Brazil? The answer is likely one of the last places you’d guess: Cleveland, Ohio. And the fish would likewise be far down your list, if on it at all: freshwater drum. Other than a few select tributaries, the Great Lakes—at least from a flyfishing viewpoint—are still pretty much untapped. There are a few recognized places, like Beaver Island in Lake Michigan for carp, or Lake St. Clair on the Michigan/Ontario border for smallmouth and musky. But of…

LIVING IN EASTERN IDAHO allows me to fish some of the finest trout water in the country, from the South Fork of the Snake to the Madison in Montana. But lately, nostalgia has drawn me south, to northern Utah’s Logan and Blacksmith Fork rivers, both of which flow through the fifty-mile-long Cache Valley where I grew up. Each of these rivers had healthy salmonfly hatches when my grandpa was a kid, but now only the Blacksmith Fork does, and few people seem to know why. The Logan’s annual salmonfly hatch used to be as large and reliable as nearly any in the West. But this hatch began to wane throughout the ’60s and ’70s; it’s now nearly impossible to find an adult salmonfly anywhere along the Logan. Conversely, the still-robust…

CLOUDS AND RAIN threatened as I stepped from the single-prop onto the tarmac at the Alaskan village of Galena, home to a few hundred residents along the north bank of the Yukon River, 270 air miles west of my home in Fairbanks. Waiting for me in the parking lot, leaning against his vintage Toyota pickup, was Wyatt Snodgrass, fisheries biologist for the Innoko, Koyukuk, and Nowitna National Wildlife Refuges (combined acreage: 9,450,488—the size of six Delawares). I was visiting in my capacity as a fisheries ecologist for the NYC-based Wildlife Conservation Society, here to help Wyatt with a pike research-and-monitoring project in the Innoko River, Alaska’s fifth-longest at 500 miles. Our plan was to document the population’s diet, age, genetic information, and levels of contaminants. I felt fortunate to be…

BONEFISH AND TARPON TRUST (BTT) is celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2022, and while many anglers are likely familiar with the work this Miami-based nonprofit has done to benefit the two fish in its name, the data BTT has gathered and the conservation work it has accomplished on behalf of our beloved permit is equally impressive and important. To be clear: A quarter century ago, virtually nobody was doing this work. Broad, practical, science-based research on bonefish and tarpon—and especially on permit—just wasn’t happening at a meaningful level. In the mid-1990s, the group that would eventually become BTT consisted of just a half-dozen anglers who’d noticed that bonefish numbers in the Keys had dropped and that little was being done to figure out why—much less reverse the trend. With some…

THE BIG NEWS this fall in college football is that schools UCLA and USC will move from the West’s Pac-12 Conference to the Midwest’s Big Ten Conference in 2023. This followed the announcement last fall that Texas and Oklahoma would move from the Big 12 Conference to the Southeastern Conference in 2025. This got us thinking: What if we could steal any two fisheries from states within each of the “Power Five” college football conferences? Here are a few options we found. PAC-12 SIX STATES: Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona, Utah, Colorado. (Twelve schools). FISHERIES WE’D STEAL: Oregon’s Deschutes River. Steelhead and trout, occasionally some salmon, while camping, rafting, and fishing in a T-shirt. Utah’s Green River. One of the West’s finest, troutiest tailwaters. Wildcards: California Delta for stripers, Truckee and…

THE TARPON’S FINS scissored back and forth as it searched for baitfish, and as I watched from the deck of a panga, sixty feet away. It was working the outside edge of a miles-long smear of brown-gold “macro-algae”—a form of seaweed called “sargassum.” I’d first noticed the field of free-floating weed from the air, as we flew to Belize’s Ambergris Caye. From far above, it looked like blobs in a lava lamp. Up close, it was more like an oil-slick made from side-salad, piled chest-high on the beaches. Sargassum is not a new occurrence; Columbus recorded it in his first voyage in 1492, when he crossed through the great Mid-Atlantic “Sargasso Sea,” which modern scientists have compared to a floating rainforest. The algae suspends itself on the surface with natural,…

IN FALL OF 1993, then-President Bill Clinton signed Executive Order 12866, requiring all Federal regulatory agencies to publish a list of anticipated rulemaking actions for the upcoming twelve-month period. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS) is such an agency, and its rulemaking process requires four-steps: Publishing a proposed rule in the Federal Register; Inviting public comment; Considering the public comments received; Publishing a final rule in the Federal Register. On Sept. 15, USFWS published its final rule on “2022-2023 Station-Specific Hunting and Sport Fishing,” outlining planned changes at eighteen national wildlife refuges in thirteen states. Later that day, the American Sportfishing Association (ASA) shared how “deeply disappointed” it was in USFWS’s “final rule announcing the prohibition of lead fishing tackle on certain National Wildlife Refuges that are being opened…

LIFE IS A JOURNEY through contradictory quotes. Minimalists say memories are more important than stuff. I agree: Get rid of the stuff. But Donald Miller wrote that if you can’t remember it, then it’s like you never did it. And stuff can remind you of things you might otherwise forget. So I should keep the stuff. Reality is a mix of both keeping and tossing, a decision often based on context. Miller wasn’t advocating for keeping everything you’ve ever owned, he just had a friend who wrote down all the cool things that happened in his life, so he wouldn’t forget them. Nor do minimalists believe in a possession-less life, they just feel an increased value in their stuff that comes with having less of it. My childhood home in…

“PROB HOOKED 50.” The words felt strange as I texted a quick report to my friend Dave. But it was true; I’d spent the better part of the afternoon Euro-nymphing, and the fishing was indeed ridiculous. Within the first hour, I had already hooked more than a dozen; by hour two, I lost count. Wild browns—nice fish up to 18 inches—with the occasional thick, foot-long brookie mixed in. In the evening I switched to twitching attractors in some fast runs and landed another ten or so until I finally quit at dark. By the time I hit send, the day had basically become a blur of hooksets, thrashing fish, and rapid-fire releases. A few hasty photos of larger trout cradled in my half-submerged hand served as documentation of the day,…

On Oct. 1, 2015, Dave Hall’s best friend was murdered. But nobody in the tight-knit community of Glide, Oregon, could stop by his place to console him, because Dave’s house had burned to the ground twelve days earlier. “It was a log home with a shake roof, and we hadn’t had rain in four months,” he tells me, as we sit on a bluff looking over Oregon’s famed North Umpqua. “The fire inspector said it was the hottest house fire he’d ever seen. Said it melted things he’d never seen melted.” Dave burned both feet trying to rescue his cat from the fire. He didn’t succeed. “I was certain that would be the saddest day of my life,” he says. “Then Larry died two weeks later.” Lawrence Peter Levine was…

“Before I sought enlightenment, the mountains were mountains and the rivers were rivers. While I sought enlightenment, the mountains were not mountains and the rivers were not rivers. After I reached enlightenment, the mountains were mountains and the rivers were rivers.”—Zen Buddhist proverb In countless photos of a flyfisher holding a steelhead—in books and magazines, on Instagram and Facebook—most grasp their fish in the standard glory pose: lifted just above the water, one hand behind the pectoral fins and the other around the tail. Some fish are bright silver, so fresh from the ocean that sea lice still cling to the body. Others have a vivid orange band down the side of their fat bellies. Sometimes there is a scar; a dark line left from a run-in with a commercial…