Innehållsförteckning för Summer 2024 från The Drake

“REAL FLIES DON’T FLOAT.” Photographer Tosh Brown said that to me on a saltwater trip one time. We made a T-shirt out of it. I loved the line in part because it goes so against the grain of every pipe-smoking, tweed-wearing, overly uptight dry-fly guy in the history of flyfishing. But still… For three of the four seasons in much of North America, while you may have occasions to tie on a floater, subsurface typically catches more fish. But summers are when dry-fly experts win this game. For all you trout maestros out there who have focused your entire skillset on being a badass streamer-chucker, a ninja Euronympher, a king of swing, or a master of all things Thingamabobber, if you consider yourself an expert flyfisher but never tie on…

MY FIRST ROCKY MOUNTAINS BASS was nothing special. She came from a deep impoundment called Ririe Reservoir, just east of Idaho Falls, and measured a whopping ten inches. It was a feisty specimen but compared weakly to the fifteen-inchers I hooked into regularly while a grad student in Texas. A year later, I caught my first Rocky Mountain carp on another Idaho reservoir, called Blackfoot. A twelve-pound, fat-lipped bastard hooked while cruising slowly in two feet of water. These were average-sized fish at best, but the two experiences are memorable because I grew up less than seventy miles from the waters they inhabit, I’d ignored both reservoirs my entire life, and I was already well into my thirties. Well-known anglers in the flyfishing community had introduced me to these reservoirs;…

IT IS LATE SEPTEMBER, mid-1980s. Once again, I’m spending most of my meager annual leave steelheading Oregon’s Deschutes, near Maupin, staying in a small cabin at the Oasis Cabin Resort. Clearing my head of too many deadlines and meetings. I love the feel of these modest cabins under the cottonwoods. The closeness of the interiors with the limited space reminds me of a post-college experience living with my English setter in my VW bus. Just enough room if one’s needs are spare. Chatting with Oasis owners Mike and Gloria McLucas at late breakfasts or lunches is solace for me. I often fish alone and soon tire of my one-sided conversations during the long, step-cast-swing of steelhead mornings and evenings. Sometimes, the chukars keep me company. They talk to me also,…

I’D WALKED INTO a local fly shop, one of three on Main Street, as a new, enthusiastic flyfisher. This was my second visit, having been in the night before when I was a preferred customer, their “favorite kind,” I was told. But this day was different. I’d selected about ten flies, placed them on the counter, and then patiently waited a long time before anyone even acknowledged my presence. When a man finally walked toward me, I was loudly admonished: “Get those flies off of my counter.” I was taken aback. I’d been expecting the warmth the shop guys had shown the prior evening, when I’d anointed this as my shop. Yet there my dumbass stood, expectant. To understand these back-to-back days, you must understand back-to-back weeks, and the improbable…

I WAS SKEPTICAL. I never really understood the hullabaloo around cicadas. Maybe it’s my upbringing in Florida, where they are just an annual reminder of how hot it is. Or maybe it’s that the redfish, tarpon, and snook we target don’t waste energy on bugs. Still, who wanted to miss the fabled 2024 dual cicada-emergence? So, as Memorial Weekend lined up perfectly for cicada-ing, I joined a couple friends on a trip to East Tennessee so we could see what all the hype was about. After an early breakfast of chicken biscuits and Bo-Rounds at Bojangles, Andrew, Greg, and I headed for the ramp with the windows down. Not one cicada hum could be heard. “Maybe they’re still drying out?” Andrew offered. Meanwhile, my skepticism over this acclaimed emergence was…

DTU Carp Slam 2024 It’s been seventeen years since Jeff Byrd and Clem Rinehart won the Slamateur and the Pro categories, respectively, at the inaugural Denver Trout Unlimited Carp Slam in 2007. This social, highly competitive event has contributed many thousands of dollars toward DTU’s vision for the South Platte as it flows through Denver: “a healthy, urban river with a multi-species gamefish fishery.” The Slam also helps support DTU’s Trout-in-the-Classroom program, but some of the event’s biggest impacts have come from funding DTU’s long, ongoing battles against South Platte pollution. Please consider participating, volunteering, and/or donating. —TB CARPSLAM.ORG Mountain Gazette 201 Seventy bucks is a hefty tag for a mag. (Per issue, not per subscription.) After ordering my sub to the “new” Mountain Gazette—around in various forms since the…

AT THE END OF A MUGGY SUMMER NIGHT there is no early-morning chill. At this level, the rocks become an alien bed of seaweed, barnacles, and mussels that crunch underfoot. For years I’ve returned to this same section of shoreline, delighted to plant my boots on the same stone shelf. In spots, the rocks have eroded into blade shapes that can shred your waders if you slide over them just right. When conditions are calm, the North Atlantic is so clear that you can cast a white fly as far as your abilities allow, let it sink, and still watch it work all the way back in. But the whitewater crashing against the rocks is where the action is. It’s on those cloudy, rough-water days—when I question if it’s even…

PILING SIX GUYS onto a tiny Wisconsin spring creek is normally a recipe for disaster. I just didn’t know it would happen off the water. We’d all gathered for a work function and half of the anglers in the group had never fished in the Midwest, so we took advantage of the subsidized company travel and stayed an extra day to introduce them to the wonder of the Driftless Area. Once the week of meetings wrapped, we all hit the road to get streamside by dusk; it was June and there were risers to be had. The top priority was getting JT his first trout on a fly. Spend enough time in the Driftless and you’ll undoubtedly get up close and familiar with livestock—it’s just that kind of place (they…

“If we go in there, we won’t return,” the grey-bearded Miskito captain says. Tight wrinkles on his face read fear and frustration. Ignorance is bliss for us anglers, but our captain’s knowledge, whether fact or folklore, has him terrified. Our pursuit of tarpon and big snook had led us to many lagoons and rivers deep in the Moskitia jungle, but according to our captain we’d reached the point of no return. Swarms of blue-and-red butterflies rise and flutter away, evacuating. A flock of parrots flies overhead, not singing Beethoven’s 5th, but rather the random and chaotic song of the wild. Screams can be heard from a lone howler monkey hanging high from the canopy. All of which seem to validate our captain’s warning. A pair of toucans flies across the…

TWO DAYS before leaving on a nine-day float trip down Alaska’s Lake Creek, I got a text from my fish-crazed, Alaskan brother-in-law, Nino, telling me what I should bring on one of the fishiest rivers in the Last Frontier. He was lending me his 8-weight setup, along with a box of streamers and, of course, beads (orangish for behind silvers, whitish/peach-colored for behind chums). All I had to buy was some leaders, tippet, egg hooks, Peg-its (for pegging bead an inch above the hook), and some split shot. I don’t often flyfish with egg patterns back home in Colorado, in part because I don’t often flyfish. I’m primarily a whitewater boater. Knowing this, Nino was setting me up for early success. At the Lake Hood Airport, I meet up with…

THE LEES FERRY STRETCH of the Colorado River in Arizona was for years considered one of the finest tailwaters in America, and surely the most scenic, flowing for sixteen miles beneath the twelve-hundred-foot walls of Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, just upstream from the Grand Canyon. In its heyday of the 1980s and ’90s, Lees Ferry consistently appeared on top-ten lists alongside the likes of Utah’s Green, Montana’s Bighorn or Beaverhead, New Mexico’s San Juan, and Colorado’s Fryingpan. While the tailwater has endured—and rebounded from—a variety of difficulties since rainbows were first planted there in 1964, a recent run of misfortune and mismanagement has this legendary fishery facing some of its toughest challenges yet. Glen Canyon Dam operates under the Glen Canyon Dam Adaptive Management Program (GCDAMP). Lead agencies are…

IT’S AUGUST ON THE OREGON COAST. Three friends and I pile into Captain Rob Perkin’s twenty-three-foot dory, Vision, a style of boat similar to what Portuguese fishermen first used to launch into the surf, and that later inspired every driftboat from the McKenzie River to Martin Litton’s Grand Canyon Dories. We were seeking coho on fly rods. No downriggers or cannon balls. No flatfish or flashers. No shrimp, sardines, spinners, or cut-plug herring. Just flies. Rob and his wife, Erin, live in Pacific City, home base for Connect Outfitters, one of the few operations offering guided flyfishing trips on the Pacific itself. Their carefully crafted boat, colored bright turquoise and trimmed with mahogany, is built specifically to be launched from a sandy beach. Pacific City is one of just a…

“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry I DON’T KNOW what I was expecting. Over the past year, I’d been volunteering twice a month at the Sepulveda Veterans Center for our local Project Healing Waters group, and the experience had been interesting and positive. Confusing, but good, and ultimately helpful, certainly for me and hopefully for some of the veterans with whom I was privileged to work. At first I’d encountered some difficulty fitting in. No one knew me, I didn’t know them, and the other volunteers were roughly the same age as the veterans, making it hard to know who was who. But most of the vets carried some reminder, on their cap or vest or tattooed on…

I DON’T FISH AS MUCH AS I USED TO. My local friends all have young kids and are too busy with little league or golf. My brother-in-law is three hours east in Montana and still fishes his ass off, even with three kids. But when my wife and I go to visit, it’s all about family float trips. Good times, but not the same as a full fishing day that ends with late night whiskey at Harold’s. The wife wanted to go wine tasting in Walla Walla this spring. “Sure,” I said. It’s warmer down there than in Spokane. Plus, we had bottles to pick up from our fancy little wine club. The winery sits just south of Dayton (pop. 2,500). We stop in and try the latest offerings, hear…

I WALK OUT of Obo’s with my usual: coffee and stale donuts. They never taste as good as they look in those shiny plastic containers. After driving through two hours of darkness, the pink-and-purple hour is running its course, waiting for the summer sun to rise. I left hundreds of miles of cooler weather, iconic landscapes, and happy trout in hopes of hitting a hopper-lobster bite in the barren Wyoming desert. Nick is calling. Cell service here is intermittent, so I answer. “Sorry man,” Nick says, “I couldn’t find a third for today. Seems everyone’s guiding. I’m ahead of you. See you in about forty minutes.” He starts to tell me where our campsite is, but the call drops. Doesn’t matter. I know his camper and skiff will be at…

JULY 16, 2024, is St. Clare of Assisi’s birthday. She would be eight hundred and thirty years old. But her name (with a different spelling) lives on thanks to what might be, for freshwater flats fishing, the greatest of the non-Great Lakes. Lake St. Clair—just east of Detroit, sandwiched between Lake Huron to the north, and Lake Erie to the south, is part of the Great Lakes system but is overlooked outside the local area. To some it is a stand-alone body of water, often called the “sixth” Great Lake. To others it is a northern extension of Lake Erie. To anglers in the know, it is four hundred and thirty square miles of shallow, fish-filled water, famed as one of the world’s top smallmouth and muskie fisheries. With an…

I CAN’T REMEMBER THE GUIDES NAME. I do remember pulling into a primitive cove at zero dark thirty and hearing the dinky radio perched on the gunwale playing an oddly familiar tune sung in Español. The pan-flute melody was wafting through the dense air, distorted by the tinny speaker. The song teased me, dredging up hazy flashbacks, but I was stumped. My brother Charlie and I shuffled over to a gaggle of sleepy locals materializing from the darkness. We transferred rods and gear to the panga while our guide wiped down a glistening new outboard hanging from its transom. I was confident we’d be streaking across shallow water in no time. Directions to this Yucatan outpost involved counting a particular number of speed bumps south from Cancun, then blindly turning…