Articles

The gar hole

Repentance on the banks of Point Remove Creek

by Johnny Carrol Sain - Friday, Oct 20th, 2017

Photo: Johnny Carrol Sain / Edits: Chad Shmukler

Point Remove Creek's slow, warm currents dawdle in the lazy hot days of mid-summer. The creek bottom's damp air dawdles, too. It's stagnant, amplifying smells of life and death, and the soured odor of death is strong today. Metallic green and blue bottle flies swarm and cover the corpse of a shortnose gar lying on the silty creek bank. The mucous coating of a fish is irresistible to flies.

The road to Samarra

That night was like a late afternoon tempest on a hot summer day

by Steve Zakur - Tuesday, Oct 17th, 2017

Photo: Joe Cummings

I fished up above Tom Creek last night. Over the course of an hour I fished back down to the run where I had come in. A tree, felled in a spring flood, lay blocking half the flow. As I cast into the near seam my peripheral vision caught movement by the bank. When I got both eyes on target I saw a good-sized trout struggling in the flow. It slipped and rolled into the fast current disappearing into the riffle below. ‘That one is screwed’, I thought.

From lure to fly: Fly fishing for spinning and baitcast anglers

How to make a convert

by Dave Karczynski - Monday, Oct 16th, 2017

Photo: Arek Kubale

History is full of great conversion narratives. Saint Paul on his way to Damascus. Brett Favre on his way to Minnesota. Me on my way to a specialty Chicago tackle shop to pick up my first fly rod.

Korkers: New WRAPTR boots will last longer, fail less often

New boot construction method aims to change the way boots are built and bought

by Chad Shmukler - Wednesday, Oct 11th, 2017

The new Korkers WRAPTR boot (photo: Chad Shmukler).

Most anglers probably think of boots as fairly blunt, unsophisticated tools. Talking boots with Korkers' CEO Brian Chaney might change that impression. Chaney talks boots much the same way reel and rod designers talk disc drag coefficients and graphite-resin mixtures: with excitement. And product designers and company executives typically get excited when new technologies and designs solve problems and offer new possibilities.

The ghost of Bob Arnold

Patience is rewarded more than action

by Steve Zakur - Tuesday, Oct 10th, 2017

Photo: Chad Shmukler

Running up the passage between the rock garden and the shore, I open the outboard’s throttle. Five horses give me all they've got. There are three buoys which delimit the boulder water. I cut inside the first one knowing that the shark fin boulder on my left is only a sentry. There’s still plenty of deep water before the real peril. Cutting right just a few yards from shore, I cruise through the shallow water. Someone watching from the far shore would think this run reckless, but they can’t see me in the fog.