Innehållsförteckning för Winter 2022/2023 från The Drake

DESPITE THE ODDS, with the country being in the throes of conflict, I made it to Russia for steelhead season this fall. Even better, I made it back, although my mother and sister had their doubts. It wasn’t easy, to say the least. But I wanted to be there, and I felt it was important that I be there. Obviously, I do not in any way support the invasion of Ukraine. But I also don’t blame my friends in Russia for their government’s decisions. I’m the only American who made the journey this year. I’m also the only one who tried, which wasn’t a surprise. This season, only Russian anglers visited the Kamchatka Steelhead Project—an initiative started twenty-eight years ago to protect Asia’s only population of these special fish. They…

WHILE HAVING A BEER on the deck of the Riff Raff Brewing Company in Pagosa Springs, Colo., I spied a fly shop I’d never heard of before. Since I simply must check out every new fly shop, I stopped in—and learned that it’s not a fly shop. The first thing that hit me was the smell of wood, and what appeared to be a full-blown carpentry shop in the back, that smelled of bamboo. After a quick walk around, I introduced myself to the owners of PJ’s Fine Bamboo Rods—Paul J. Dufour and his wife, Rosanna. “We became a full-time business in late 2019, when I began giving one-on-one instruction, with the hope of hosting multi-student classes,” PJ said. “Unfortunately, that dream was put on hold with Covid, but we…

WHILE DEALING WITH a tumultuous time in my early parenting life, I vented, bitched, and moaned to a family psychologist. How I felt trapped; how each day seemed an endless roundabout of work, chores, and trying not to be an asshole father; how I needed fishing; how there surely had to be something in this absurd rat race for me. “You have made your choices, and this is your life now,” she replied. “You have responsibilities, and you shouldn’t shirk them.” Sucker-punch. Jesus wept. And for a time, I hated her. But, with time, I did accept shouldering that responsibility and not feeling bitter about it. One late summer day, my wife Rebecca asked me to make a trellis for her tomato plants that were struggling out on our balcony.…

THE HEAT PUSHING OFF THE ENGINE was obvious, radiating through the vents and steaming up the windshield. “Are all those lights usually on like that?” asked one of the clients, who was deeply concerned with the health of our vehicle, but also with my casual response to the flurry of warning lights that flashed when I keyed the ignition. I assured him and his friend that there was nothing to worry about because this rig had been through much worse. Both of them seemed irrationally at ease trusting the words of a twenty-two-year-old first-year guide with no knowledge of cars. But at least I could blab about intercepting a migration of salmon as old as Earth itself, which kept them entertained while we waited for help. There were two options,…

Drive around Anchorage and you will see weed shops and pawnshops, drive-thru espresso huts and homeless shelters, breweries and Baptist churches. You’ll also see specialty stores: Alaska Fashion Wigs, The Ammo Can, Granny’s Guns—all of them scattered over a sprawling grid of city streets laid out like the squares of a gill net. But as you climb above the city, into the foothills of the Chugach Mountains, that grid begins to unravel, giving way to a tangle of hairpin turns, gravel roads, and switchbacks that curl higher into the hills. Up here you’ll find the trophy homes, where you can look down over it all, onto a city that many find beautiful only from this distance. Anchorage, like so many cities, is also full of broken men. When I pulled…

My wife, Jess, grew up behind the West End levee in Warren, Pennsylvania. The Allegheny River runs along the base of this levee, and the river here is scalloped with gravel bars and boulders and fishes well for smallmouth in the summer. I fished there a lot before I met Jess on the Internet. This is pretty far from the good trout water, so take it with a grain of salt, but my wife’s brother, Joe, claims he caught the biggest trout of his life there on a rooster tail. Jess’ dad, Joseph “Pittsy” Muscaro, lived in Warren his entire life, in three different houses on Pine Street. His dad’s parents came from Italy in the 1880s and his mom came in 1907, when she was 3. A combination of…

ALMOST DUE NORTH of Caracas, Venezuela, with the Dominican Republic to the west and the British Virgin Islands to the east, lies relatively unexplored Puerto Rico. The flyfishing rumor mill began churning out reports this past spring about what South Florida boys Cooper Beckett and Matt Pourbaix had cooking down in southwestern P.R.—the next unknown hotspot for permit and tarpon lovers to pre-spend their 2022 tax refund. Pourbaix had spent six years exploring the Puerto Rican fishery starting in 2013, living there while his then-girlfriend now-wife was attending medical school. He convinced Beckett to join him on a scouting mission in January 2022. After a month of searching, they’d seen enough big tarpon, schools of bones, and tailing permit to know it could work. But it was a later permit…

CAN WE STOP KEEPING SCORE? It is time for a slow-fishing movement, and Stephen Sautner’s story (“Numbers Game,” Fall '22) was a refreshing break from the how-many-and-how-big flyfishing mentality. We all should step back and appreciate the beauty of our sport. Sautner hit it out of the park! Dick Watts, West Richland, WA TRUMP FILES! ER… TRUMP FLIES After reading the piece in your Summer ’22 issue regarding “The Trumpy” humpy-style dry fly, I had to send you my variation on the Capt. Joe Blados Crease Fly: The Donald J. Trump Crease Fly—saltwater companion pattern to The Trumpy. I developed it more as a gag than anything, but I did find that, while most stripers took this fly gently, all bluefish absolutely demolished it—they hated it! I can only surmise…

“WE HAVE TAILS AT ONE O’CLOCK,” Andrew tells me. I’m standing on the bow of a seventeen-foot skiff as our guide, Andrew Murphy, points at a large school feeding in front of us. The scene is textbook bonefish: the boat, the clear shallows, and the tanned, mellow guide. Except we’re in Québec, two thousand miles north of Nassau and the nearest conch fritter. This is the Baie de Chaleur (Chaleur Bay), a southern arm of the Gulf of St. Lawrence into which more than twenty famous Atlantic-salmon rivers flow, including the Restigouche, Bonaventure, and Grand Cascapedia. The bay sits on the easternmost part of Québec’s Gaspé Peninsula—a knotty thumb of land at the geological north end of the Appalachian Mountains. Here, you trade Bahamian Kalik beer for French-Canadian poutine, an…

THERE COMES A TIME in the dregs of winter when I just have to get out. In my undergrad days, after I invented alcohol, a group of us would get up before dawn and go down to the still-frozen lake to drink beer from a keg. Most of us thought we were pretty cool just to be up so early, but Malzone took it up a notch when he rushed the ice. He was amped-up in a loony, intense way, and got about ten yards from the beach leaping from ice chunk to ice chunk before he began to sink. He stopped, turned to us, raised his arms and screamed: “They said only Jesus could walk on water!” Then he fell in. We fished Malzone out of the lake, held…

WHEN FLYFISHER types touch down in Cancun, they typically head south to do one of three things: take a shot at their first bonefish in Ascension Bay; attend a hipster wedding or tequila tasting in Tulum; or head down for a few sporty DIY days of casting to nervous permit on the flats of Xcalak. All three have potential, but we chose the route less double-hauled. We went north, to Tarpon Cay Lodge in Rio Lagartos, a coastal village on the Rio Lagartos lagoon sitting just over three hours from Cancun. Ascension Bay is an excellent home for bonefish and permit, but if you’re looking for five- to twenty-pound baby tarpon—certain times of year even full-grown adults—and the occasional snook or ’cuda, the north coast of the Yucatan Peninsula stretching…

Who wouldn’t like to wet a line in Salisbury Cathedral? After all, standing beneath its vaulted ceiling, watched over by stained-glass angels and saints, while working a fly through its secret waters, could be the peak experience of angling in England. Go for it. The thirteenth-century structure, a fluent example of English Gothic, was famously painted by John Constable in Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows (1831). The artist depicted it in the distance, with its spire, England’s tallest, thrust up like a defiant finger to a stormy sky. A wagon and team of horses ford a foreground river, a tidy biblical rainbow topping it all off. Aside from the nags and the hit-or-miss atmospherics, the same view is still available today. You pause on a footpath in the watery meadows,…

LIKE MOST days in Great Falls, Montana, it was windy on Wednesday, February 19, 2014. Fifty-mile-an-hour gusts made the mid-thirties temps bite even harder than usual. Under mostly cloudy skies, authorities leaned over the rails above the Missouri River spillway at Black Eagle Dam, using long poles to break apart ice so they could reach the frozen body of 24-year-old Graham Macker. Nearly three months earlier, Macker had walked off from his pre-release program, escaping a manhunt of sheriff’s deputies, police dogs, and a Homeland Security helicopter. But he did not escape the Missouri River. I spent a lot of time in Great Falls as a kid. Seasonal stocking of nub-finned, pellet-fed fish destined for a cooler was the extent of the trout fishing in my native Austin, Texas, so…

THE FIRST EMAIL arrived on July 14. “Reaching out to pass along some fresh ‘industry happenings’ from the heart of Bolivia’s golden dorado region,” it began. “I figured the Drake might be interested in looking into it.” The “happenings” had occurred nearly two months earlier, on May 25, when the Angling Frontiers (AF) lodge owned by Bolivian-born and Dallas-based outfitters Patrick Taendler and Federico Marancenbaum was burned to the ground in the Bolivian jungle. One might assume that this initial email, along with the stream of texts, in-person probing, and inquisitive phone calls that followed it, would’ve all been asking the same two-part question: Who did this, and why? But the question many were asking was far more specific: Was AF’s torched lodge the work, directly or indirectly, of competing…

FLYFISHING FOR CARP holds about as much appeal for me as getting a face tattoo. But what if my ancestors—or yours—were doing just that at the dawn of civilization? University of Connecticut anthropology professor Natalie Munro hypothesizes that this may indeed have been the case among the prehistoric people who regularly visited an ancient lake in what is today northern Israel. In 2014, an international team of scientists, including Munro, started excavating an archaeological site along the Jordan River, and began finding remarkably well-preserved items used by ancient anglers: hooks from animal bone, stone sinkers, even strands of animal hair used in making line. The site, called Jordan River Dureijat (JRD), eventually revealed “the largest collection of fishing technology from the Epipaleolithic and Paleolithic periods,” according to the team’s groundbreaking…

FOR DECADES, the United States Forest Service (USFS) and Trout Unlimited (TU) have worked together to protect coldwater fisheries. The Feds contributed technical expertise and millions in funding. TU used the money and legions of local staff and volunteers to restore thousands of miles of streams and protect hundreds of thousands of acres of national forest and grasslands. Now the partnership is going big. In an effort to accelerate the pace of freshwater restoration, the Forest Service will be giving TU up to $40 million over the next five years, funding an array of watershed projects in many of the 154 national forests, where forty percent of the country’s best trout steams are located. “Our agreement with Trout Unlimited continues our joint success as stewards of national forests and grasslands,”…

THERE IS AN OPAQUE Irish notion that humans can exchange atoms with inanimate objects. This usually enhances one at the expense of the other, and it happens almost imperceptibly slowly. My fellow Irishman, the novelist Flann O’Brien, wrote about the transfer between policemen and their bicycles back when bicycles were a new technology. The police did not grow wheels—it’s much more gradual and subtle than that. Fly rods offer a good example. A favorite rod is a trusted friend, its cork worn to the hand so that a rod improves over time at delivering what’s needed. The right rod grows on us as we grow into it. O’Brien would recognize this. It’s a relationship that works in our favor because we choose a rod for the fisherman we think we…

I'M NOT A SOUTHERNER And my steelhead addiction likely means that I’ll never become one. But if I was to ever leave the West for the culture and food and fishing of Dixie, South Carolina would be high on my list. And the two days I spent fishing on and around Brays Island last spring did nothing to change that assessment. Sitting roughly halfway between historic Charleston, S.C., and the beaches of Savannah, GA, spread across 5,500 luscious Lowcountry acres, Brays is ideally situated to back up its claim as “America’s premier sporting community.” But even after accounting for the golf, the shooting sports, the food, and the pickleball (of course), Brays’ marketers might be underselling it. I came to chase redfish, naturally, planning to share heroic stories of my…

Years ago, upon my first publication in Gray’s Sporting Journal, editor Jim Babb suggested I look up a friend of his in Anchor Point, Alaska. I was just starting out, and Jim thought my writing to be “windy.” He thought I could learn a thing or two from a seasoned writer who fixated about the same things I did, like working-class values and fishing trips that didn’t turn out quite right. He told me that Rich Chiappone lived in Anchor Point, and was a fabulous chef with Italian leanings. I had read Rich’s essays and short stories for years in Gray’s and elsewhere. His piece, “The Liar’s Code,” remains one of my favorite fishing essays. But I wasn’t about to bum-rush a guy on a trout stream who I didn’t…