JOSH MILLS’ fly-tying room doubles as an office, so there are two desks—laptop on one, vise on the other. The desk with the vise is covered with stickers and the sort of semi-organized chaos familiar to any fly tyer. Wire, thread, and hooks sit in sm

“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 pursui

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.

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

I recently visited an old friend. Aunt Jenny opened her door and there was George, looking frail but wagging his long black tail with a white tip, staring at me the same way he always had. Intent eyes filled with love and wonder and obedience. He did

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 ai

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 A

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 m

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

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 s

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-weig

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.

I have found the place that I want to dig in deep and immerse myself. I want a baptism, a conversion, a rebirth so I can feel that I belong. I know I cannot be one of them—a local. I have the wrong name, the wrong birthplace, and definitely the wrong

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 vis

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

Bret Rutherford’s “Us and Them: Field Guide to Steelheaders” (Spring ’24) was such an inspired piece of feature writing that I immediately Googled him to try and figure out why I’d never encountered his byline before. (Google wasn’t helpful.) The fie

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

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 ult

Q: Dear Trask, I don’t wanna get anyone in trouble or whatever, but do you know what the law says about how drunk my owner and his buddy need to be on the river before I can legally take over on the oars? Like, if they both fall out a second time, I

On the Upper West Side of Manhattan, by the riverside park where the great green breast of spring has just begun to reveal itself, I walk into the handsome sixteen-story prewar building and introduce myself to a nattily attired doorman. “Mr. Lyons is

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 int

“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 gu

EARLIER THIS YEAR, I was reading an article posted on NOLA.com, a website dedicated to news from the New Orleans region. The story was written by staff writer Mike Smith, who described a recent hearing about proposed changes in Louisiana’s recreation

“FISH THE TAILS. Fish. The. Tails.” Finally, on the third cast of the third run in what felt like the third hour of fishing, my sulphur landed gently in the tail of a deep plunge pool, floated for three seconds, and a brook trout grabbed it just befo

LIKE MOST COLLEGE students, I spent as little time studying as possible, preferring instead to be out with friends. My older brother tried teaching me the importance of scheduling my week so I wouldn’t have to spend weekends trapped inside. Yet there

IT’S MID-JUNE at Pirate Camp in Michigan’s River Country, happy hour, a while before prime time. We grab a quick dinner around the fire circle—tossing paper plates into the pit for fuel later—and disperse to fish the Au Sable. I drift solo and find t