Latest Blog Posts

Back on the sticks

Maybe I was wrong to turn my back on drift boats all those years ago

by Todd Tanner - Monday, Jan 4th, 2021

Photo: Chad Shmukler

I have an uneasy relationship with boats.

There you go. Now it’s out in the open.

I suspect, though, that most folks who share my views about watercraft come to their ambivalence more honestly. Maybe they’re afraid of water. Perhaps they’re uneasy in a vessel that can tip over in a high wind, or be swamped by waves, or that will take on water and sink if the boat’s structural integrity is breached, or if its weight limit is exceeded, or if there’s a serious operator error.

fish envy | fiSH ˈenvē

noun (pl. fish envies): a feeling of discontented or resentful longing aroused by someone else’s fish

by Todd Tanner - Wednesday, Dec 9th, 2020

A saltwater flat (photo: Chad Shmukler).

I’m not usually afflicted with envy or jealousy, at least not when it comes to angling. I guess I’ve caught enough fish over the years that I root for other folks to be successful regardless of whether I’m sticking a few myself.

To the bone

We are all caught up in the music, the song is inescapable

by Johnny Carrol Sain - Monday, Nov 30th, 2020

Photo: Johnny Carrol Sain

I’m a little squeamish when it comes to eyeballs and brains. You’d think that after dismembering hundreds of carcasses — cutting into both warm and cold body cavities, pulling out intestines, livers, kidneys, hearts, lungs, etc. — I’d be more stoic in the matter. But those eyes, the window to the soul as Shakespeare said, and that gray matter where the soul (or what we think is a soul) resides, trigger uncomfortable emotions.

Imprinted

The ocean calls to me. Now and then, it needs an answer.

by Chris Hunt - Saturday, Nov 28th, 2020

Photo: Captain Tom / cc2.0

“In your belly you hold the treasures few have ever seen.”
— Jimmy Buffett, ‘A Pirate Looks at 40’

When your foot presses into firm, wet sand, it leaves a brief, but detailed imprint on the earth. And though, with the next wave that washes over the beach, that footprint is gone, there’s no shame in knowing you left your mark on this place, at this moment in time. And a fleeting moment it is.

Angry birds

Karma on the flats of Long Island

by Chris Hunt - Thursday, Nov 12th, 2020

Photo: Chris Hunt

It happened in a split second, and I'm sure it was karma jumping in to kick my ass.

For four straight days while wading the flats off of Deadman's Cay, we'd been hounded by nesting black-headed gulls — it's understandable that the screaming, squawking, black-headed birds would be threatened by us as we walked quietly among their nesting islands in search of bonefish, and I think it's understandable that, after a time, the birds began to drive us nuts.