Fishing

Fishing

Looking Back on Summer Fly Fishing

8:45 PM. The pond is the color of fresh cantaloupe, with crimson neon-edged clouds low in the western sky. The light is fading, but it’s as if the sun were captured in the water, its surface glowing like last night’s embers. The smell of fireworks hangs in the air, and a blue haze wafts lazily over the black treetops.
As it darkens, the blooming bursts of fireworks can be seen through the wooded county properties, accompanied by enthusiastic hollers. I pull on my boots, grab my 6-weight fly rod, and hoof it as fast as I can to everyone’s favorite brushy corner spot. I tie on a tiny brown dry fly, mimicking the flying insects hovering around my face, reading the water with my eyes and hands. Amidst the tall reeds and slimy rocks, I roll cast next to a stump sticking out of the water, letting the fly drift lazily in the current, and a bluegill hits it like shotgun recoil. I admire its metallic rainbow colors, fine size, and dense little tank of a body. When I release it into the brown, mucky shallows, it takes off with a splash of the tail that sprays me in the face with water – such attitude!

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Fishing

Chasing Cats

While I had a conventional introduction to hunting and fishing in my younger years, it wasn’t until the last three or four years that my interest, involvement, and identification with hunting really took shape. I’ve also begun to learn that this relationship with the outdoors will likely always be evolving and adapting and that an individual’s hunting or fishing “ethos” is perhaps one of the most personal things; built and shaped by one’s experiences, mixed with opinions and localized social norms, and perhaps more contentious than even politics.

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Fishing

Three Keys to Mountain Stream Trout

Stepping into a reach I had never laid eyes on, water spilled across the floodplain through newly cut side channels, occupied new backwaters, and spilled through massive apex log jams. Beautiful pools formed below the jams and behind precisely placed root wads. Riffles spilled across cobble bars parallel to the head of the pool, forming textbook dry-fly dead-drifting waters, irresistible to inhabiting trout.

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