Every fly tyer has a “Statue of Liberty” fly box on his desk, it’s featured prominently close to his vice. It contains all his huddled masses, his wretched refuse of accidentals, flies missing legs, tails, poor color choices, or merely tempest tossed and a great idea that didn’t live up to it’s full promise. After being held [...]

With specialization in fly lines comes unwanted redundancy and a paucity of superlatives left to describe the latest offering. We examine fly line tapers to determine, “are all these disparate fly lines warranted, or are we being beguiled by a lethal mixture of engaging box art and plastic polymer rhetoric?”

The pace is glacial but someone’s keeping their ear to the catcalls from the brown water… Summer is truly inhospitable and the combination of blazing daytime temperatures and chemicals in the water have bleached the SA Sharkskin and Cortland lines I’ve used in past seasons. It’s only a little bit less harsh on me – [...]

“Furlough Friday” had me on the prowl on the west side of the valley, I’d had the foresight to grab Sweetpea, got her grain-fed and rubbed down and while she gathered her possibles, I’d snuck a rod, vest, and waders into the cab while she wasn’t looking. It’s the old “winery” gambit, “I think there’s [...]

It’s unification of a sort, something that’s sure to unite the “X-stream” crowd with Blue and Brown water anglers. The Chinese call it a “Snow Trout“, it looks and acts like a Rainbow, only it’s a member of the Cyprinid family which contains both Carp and my beloved Pikeminnow. I can hear the collective groan [...]

The cake exists until the last slice vanishes, then we finger the culprit and demand satisfaction – despite our distended belly and inability to eat anything more. It begs the question, how does not inhaling the last slice exonerate us of eating the rest of the cake? Somehow our sense of proportion is out of whack, which isn’t surprising, [...]

Canadian scientists have noted at least two personality types in studies of newly hatched Brook trout, loosely described in lay terms as “Jocks” and “Couch Potato’s.” This shouldn’t surprise any of us – as we’ve been dealing with the human variants since infancy. “Jocks” feed actively in the water column, and “Tubers” feed in a [...]

One of the reason you buy copper wire by the pound versus the shop spool is so you can dominate the Spring runoff with forty-leven pounds of non-toxic, gutslammer nymphs. Dynamite is neither green nor legal, and on occasion something just as sinister is warranted. It doesn’t look like much but that’s three feet of [...]

I’ve always been comfortable with the Bull in the China shop approach, it’s a mixture of distaste for societal norms, tolerance for physical pain, and diminished IQ.   Ardor is useful for the young, but is often confused as evangelical when you’re older. “Religion” tends to breed cliques and the us-versus-them mentality, useful when you’re [...]

We’ve assumed we needed to preserve the outdoors for future generations, but we may have been hasty. These are urban sophisticates raised on Xbox and Halo, and angry bears and bolt action rifles may be too tame to sustain their interest for more than seven minutes. Thanks to science, I’m not even sure I want to go [...]