Latest Blog Posts

Brook trout trouper

Circling back to fly fishing

by Tom Davis - Tuesday, Jul 18th, 2023

Joan plies the waters of Grouse Creek in search of brookies (photo: Tom Davis).

The sound of air being forcibly expelled from the human body, usually represented in print as oof or umph or something along those lines, is unmistakable. And when I heard it from the area close behind me where my wife, Joan, was picking her way towards the happily murmuring waters of Grouse Creek, I had a pretty good idea, before I turned around for visual confirmation, of what had happened.

A more perfect day of fishing

Some fishing days are perfect, and a few of those are “more perfect.”

by David N. McIlvaney - Thursday, Jul 13th, 2023

Photo: David N. McIlvaney.

Oh, it’s such a perfect day;
I’m glad I spent it with you.
— Lou Reed

There are fishing days where everything goes wrong. I once arrived at the check-in counter at LaGuardia for a saltwater trip only to realize that I left my rod case leaning against my apartment door.

Forgotten gear, broken rods, blown-out water. When it happens, you try to laugh it off with some bullshit angling line like – A bad day of fishing is better than a good day of anything else. It’s not.

Don't be afraid of the dark

I should avoid being alone in the dark. But I can’t—I’m a dry-fly fisherman in Michigan.

by Tim Schulz - Monday, Jun 26th, 2023

Photo: Alyse Backus / cc2.0.

In my younger days, the old people didn’t fear the dark, or at least that’s what they said. “Don’t be afraid of the dark,” they’d tell me as if it was something I could just do. Washing my hands before eating, putting my dirty clothes in the hamper, lifting the toilet seat, closing the toilet seat, and saying “thank you” when someone did something nice were things I could just do. Being unafraid of the dark was not.

Fishing the Panama Canal is kind of weird

In the zone with accidental tarpon

by Stephen Sautner - Thursday, Jun 8th, 2023

Kurt Duchez fishes the Panama Canal Zone while a giant container ship lumbers by (photo: Stephen Sautner).

Sometimes we find ourselves in strange places, and without a fly rod.

Like the Panama Canal. Surrounded by tarpon.

It was a work trip and an important one. The 19^th conference of the parties of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES CoP19) gathered in Panama to decide the fate of hundreds of wildlife species threatened by trade – everything from African elephants to tiny glass frogs.

On golden dock

The fish know better than to disturb the moment

by David N. McIlvaney - Thursday, May 25th, 2023

Image: @foundin_an_attic / cc2.0 modified.

There’s a small lake at the end of a gravel road in Northern Ontario. It’s much like a thousand other Canadian lakes, ringed with cottages, perfectly shorn birch and maple that the deer can reach from the ice to help get through a long winter, and a multitude of docks—from concrete and steel to rusty nails and pallets.