Tabla de contenidos para Winter 2020/21 en The Drake

UNTIL JANUARY 4, I’d never even heard the term “float-n-fly.” It sounded like a kid’s ride at the fairground, or the street name for some illicit new drug. But I Googled it that day—the same day Oroville, California-based flyfishing guide Ryan Williams, and his partner, Logan McDaniel, won the Shasta Lake Wild West Bass Trail tournament. The first thing that popped up was a 2008 video produced by Kentucky Afield, a fishing and hunting show. And the first words out of the host’s mouth were these: “Everybody in the world is talking about the float-n-fly.” Apparently, it was time I reached out to Williams. “I learned from a guy who did it with a spin rod, a friend I took out steelheading about ten years ago,” he told me. “He…

MAINE IS A WILD AND RUGGED PLACE by East Coast standards, with much of the state being undeveloped, off the grid, densely forested, wet, buggy, and blanketed by snow more than half the year. It is also home to more than 700 self-sustaining native brook-trout lakes and ponds—making up the vast majority of what remains in the U.S. Nearly 600 of these are designated as State Heritage Fish waters, the largest inventory of formally recognized wild salmonid stillwaters in the nation. At a high level, much of the data associated with wild native brook trout populations comes from the Eastern Brook Trout Joint Venture. Beginning in 2004, this group worked with state agencies and others to create a series of maps showing where intact wild brook trout populations can be…

I LIKE PIKE. I like their lurky, predatory nature, and how you’re never quite sure if “bringing them to hand” is the right thing to do. I like how they often require a sinking line or sink-tip to chase them, but how, occasionally in the shallows, they’ll sprint three yards with their back out of the water just to hammer a popper. The fight they provide is rarely long or dramatic, but their aggressive eats can be spectacular. Problem is, pike find their way into a lot of water where they don’t belong. For the past few years in Colorado, anglers have been able to fish a couple of Western Slope reservoirs—Green Mountain and Wolford Mountain, both about an hour from Denver—and earn twenty bucks for each pike they bring…

Bobby Settles I met Bobby Settles in 2003, halfway through his 23 years of co-owning and managing Casa Blanca and Playa Blanca lodges, across Ascension Bay from Punta Allen, Mex. His energy left an impression. Six years later, I was back at Playa during the Swine Flu pandemic, and Bobby had covered the mouths of mounted permit with masks. That night, he drove us all up to Casa because a guest there was throwing a surprise 60th, and Bobby wanted it big. (He also flew a mariachi band down from Cancun, then drove the band across the bay, in the dark, to the party.) In 2011, Bobby moved to the then-new Grand Slam Lodge, where he continued delivering his unique and lively hospitality. Bobby died Nov. 2, in Harlingen, TX.…

MY FIRST TARPON on a fly was a stout, laid-up fish that ate my worm and broke me off an hour later. I was a teenager at the time, and fortunate to have a father who took me on an annual spring trip to the Keys. But as I grew older and started achieving some success on the bow, my focus shifted to permit. Like many permit anglers, my trips often ended with a long flight home, followed by a long-winded explanation to my wife about how I could spend three days fishing, catch nothing, yet still feel the trip was “a step in the right direction.” At the height of my addiction, I was focusing more on the seconds ticking away on my watch than I was on scanning…

IT ALL STARTED OUT SO WELL. I carry two strapped-down cinderblocks in the bed of my truck in wintertime Southeast Alaska, because 37 and raining during the day means freezing overnight. The additional weight helps with traction. Snow doesn’t hide its intentions; it’s more honest. Black ice is mean. One Saturday I was driving along on a sunny, sub-freezing morning, when the van ahead of me began sliding into the opposite lane, almost gracefully, completing a 180-degree turn before sliding back into my lane and coming gently to rest against the guardrail, facing me. The crash wasn’t violent; just gentle, uncontrolled gliding. I slowed, pulled to the side of the road, and checked on the driver. He was shaken up, but fine. The incident made me reconsider continuing down the…

Taylor Streit still has a hard time with the Red River. He grumbles as he walks along its banks in the last stretch before it joins the Rio Grande, deep in a black-walled gorge in northern New Mexico. It’s four miles to the confluence, but between hopping rocks, dodging branches, and keeping an eye out for mountain lions and rattlesnakes, it hikes more like eight. Taylor has guided all over the world, but says the rivers and streams here still rank among his favorites. In the Taos Fly Shop, which Taylor started and his son Nick now runs, a glossy 24-inch cutbow—a hybrid of the native Rio Grande cutthroat trout and introduced rainbow trout that pairs those freckled sage sides with a prominent red streak at its gills—hangs on the…

DURING A LONG SET OF YEARS, chasing trout all over this continent and a few others, I was always in frustrating pursuit of the single best pattern to match any given hatch. It became quite a quest: If I could find precisely the right fly to match the ubiquitous blue-winged olive dun, for example (also called Baetis), then I figured it would work whenever and wherever I might encounter trout feeding on them. This quest failed, of course. I was able to narrow down and select my favorite patterns for several hatches that I bumped into frequently—such as Craig Mathews’ Olive Sparkle Dun for those bluewings, or Bob Borden’s March Brown Parachute for widespread March browns. But while that may have helped reduce the crowded contents of my fly boxes,…

THERE ARE MORE OF US NOW. In fact, there are far more. More than ever before. We aren’t guessing; we know the number of fishing licenses sold in 2020 vs. 2019, and frankly, it isn’t even close. Two examples: Colorado’s fishing license sales increased by more than 200,000 from 2019 to 2020. And California sold 1,201,237 fishing licenses in the “resident annual” category alone last year—an increase of 19 percent. These numbers are consistent with research by the American Sportfishing Association, and backed by a nationwide survey released in November by the Recreational Boating and Fishing Foundation. Most estimates place the number of new U.S. anglers in 2020 at somewhere north of nine million. This growth was of course true across the greater outdoors community. Nobody could find an RV…

ON JANUARY 4TH, a disputed Wetlands Permit for the Aquila Resources “Back Forty” Sulfide Mine along the Menominee River was denied by a Michigan Administrative Law Judge. The ruling by Judge Daniel Pulter ends a heavily contested two-year review process that brought together multiple parties in a petition to defend the Menominee watershed, including the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin, the Coalition to Save the Menominee River, and a landowner whose property borders the proposed mine site. For years, the Menominee River was referred to as, “The River We Don’t Speak Of.” This trophy smallmouth bass fishery along the easternmost boundary between Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan was always a well-kept secret. But, when an 84-acre open-pit sulfide mine was proposed along the banks of the Menominee, the…

SAY YOU’RE IN SEATTLE. But you need to travel 1,300 miles to Denver, and you must crawl on your hands and knees to get there. The future of humanity depends on it. More than two grueling years later, having survived a battle with a mountain lion and two vultures over some nasty I-80 carrion, you finally reach the Mile High City, only to learn that you must repeat the journey two more times to assure the survival of your species. The Oncorhynchus mykiss version of this story involves a small lady steelhead—we’ll call her Helen—hatching from her egg, likely somewhere in Idaho during the summer of 2010. Helen hangs around her nest for a couple of years doing baby-fish things until she senses the need to swim to the Pacific…

I WAS STANDING in front of the floor-to-ceiling window of my hotel room in The Paris Las Vegas at dawn. The gigantic replica of the Eiffel Tower was before me, and a deep orange glow reflected off The Bellagio’s thousands of windows. A few pedestrians scattered the walkway of the Vegas Strip, but my gaze fell upon the unobstructed portion of Lake Bellagio in the distance. I thought I was still buzzed from the night before when I first saw what appeared to be a person lounging in a yellow pool-floatie on the water. “Only in Vegas,” I thought. Some drunk idiot ends up using Lake Bellagio as his personal swimming pool. But looking closer, I could see that the person was a man moving his arm back and forth…

I THINK THAT INGRID would want you to know—as she stands in her waders, stands by her weir, looking down at a dark mass of grayling that were trapped in the night—that there was a time when no one would’ve thought fish would ever need to be counted. But she’d also want you to know that these don’t have to be the last wild days. She would want you to know that not everything has been lost, and that there is still the hope of unknown waters. Ingrid hired me not long after she’d lost a hundred pounds and her first husband. She didn’t lose him the way so many Alaskan women seem to lose their husbands, though. There was no plane crash or drowning, no snowmachine accident, suicide, or…

THIS STORY ISN’T UNIQUE, except that it’s mine. Picture the Olympic Peninsula in all its storied history. Rain. Cold. A father and son with no prior steelhead experience, and a guide who is careful to set reasonably low expectations. A raft, rugged from past trips, equipped with standard-issue Yeti. Hand-warmers and knit caps and still the kind of cold that stays with you for days. As with every new steelheader’s story, we are shocked when the first strike happens, just moments after the son casts a spey rod for the first time. And, of course, he misses it, trout-setting purely out of surprise that fish are still in the river. Assume the standard aspects of oars creaking and bumping against the oar locks, constant drizzle, and wind just strong enough…

None of us guessed what was coming. Within hours of our leaving the river, the county would close all boat ramps and Oregon’s governor would implement stay-at-home guidelines. We were fishing on the last days of winter steelhead season 2020 and we didn’t even know it. Though something was clearly amiss from the start. We reached the river on a weekend in March—steelhead primetime—to find only one trailered rig parked at a boat ramp where last season I’d counted thirty. My initial elation at learning we’d have the water to ourselves morphed into queasy unease. Were we brilliant or stupid for fishing while a virus was jumping continents? This was still early in what had just been termed a “pandemic,” when it was still possible to think of the virus…

OVERVIEW I BEGAN TEACHING Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It in the fall of 2015, to my English 1A Composition and Rhetoric class at a community college so far removed from the rivers of Montana that many students didn’t understand the book’s cover photo. Eighty miles of irrigated farmland separates California’s West Hills College Coalinga from the nearest trout stream. WHCC is a rare bird (only 11 colleges out of California’s 115 offer dormitories), and it draws athletes and academics from around the globe. Each year, my night class is filled with locals, south-side Chicagoans, Floridians, Japanese, and a mix of other geographically dispersed students. When beginning to read A River Runs Through It, students quickly connect with Maclean’s weaving of family troubles, complexities of adulthood, offers of help…

THEORETICALLY, HE COULD’VE followed through on medical school, remained a Texas carpenter, or kept his only desk-jockey job selling insurance in Grand Rapids. Instead, when the pandemic hit Michigan last March, ace Muskegon River guide Jay Allen could do nothing but stand still. Forty guide trips lost—almost the entire spring steelhead season. If only that was the worst of it. Jay and his wife Heather are based in the old lumbering town of Newaygo. It’s a familiar story. The river marks one end of a faded downtown that never grew much beyond the ancient forestry days. A couple woodsy bars. A few youngins trying to make it with coffee shops and antique stores and such. And a few empty buildings, including a three-story, 13,000-square-foot hulk in the middle of the…

Salmon need a river, and right now, they don’t have one. We’ve spent 17 billion dollars trying to restore salmon runs, and the fact is, it’s not happening. And if we don’t do something soon, we can write off Idaho salmon to history. I think we’ll have a bill ready to go, possibly in the first quarter of this coming year. It will obviously be controversial. For the past three years, we’ve been asking the “what if” questions. If you took the dams out to restore salmon runs, how would you handle the grain getting to Portland? How would you handle the power loss? We’ve had more than 300 meetings with different organizations and stakeholders, but this time it’s going to be different. The stars are kind of aligned, also.…

PUGET SOUND LIGHTS up orange with the sunrise—slowly at first, just the peaks of the Olympic Mountains—and eventually the evergreen stretches of peninsula and the open water itself, where I strip a chartreuse baitfish fly as saltwater laps at my waders. I’m about to call it quits when a fish finally says hello. The searun cutthroat isn’t big, but she’s chunky. I take photos of her at all angles, capturing the number of hitchhikers along her back and lateral line to assist with the Coastal Cutthroat Coalition’s (CCC) Parasite Watch program, the findings of which are scheduled to be published this spring. In one year, the CCC collected 2,000 parasite reports from more than 150 anglers across Puget Sound and the Oregon and Washington coasts. I’m not a biologist, but…

I PUSHED OFF FROM the bank onto a patch of glass. My paddle sliced open the chilly water, dripped, then cut in again under a rising sun. A ring-necked duck dipped its beak before disappearing beneath the surface, then rose a moment later, drifted, and pushed off—the story of its departure spelled out across the water. My new Thomas & Thomas eight-weight rested between my legs. I had taken a firm stance that I needed to invest in another rod, and any opposing arguments were ignored by the unrelenting devil on my shoulder. This was our first trip together, and she was riding shotgun. I spent the next few hours drifting through a network of creeks, forever in search of skinnier water. There were few signs of fish beneath the…

THE DRONING HUM of an idling two-stroke is a wonderful way to start a morning. But I’m nervous. On the ride out, schools of redfish and mullet churn the water as we pass. My heart rate picks up when I come off plane and slow to the first spot. Sweaty palms and restless feet accompany my growing nerves, akin to asking that first girl to dance. “Fishing is supposed to be relaxing, right?” I ask myself. My stiff hands pull back on the throttle and switch off the motor. Like the windswept wake of a passing train, it’s suddenly calm—pure, tranquil, quiet. I recently purchased a well-used 1993 Hewes Bayfisher, partly because I love boats, but mostly because I thought it would help me catch more fish. It bears the…

“WELCOME TO THE NORDURA,” says a smiling Einar Sigfússon, manager of this fabled Icelandic salmon river. I sat down with my burly Scottish fishing companion, Euan, as we ate a hearty halibut broth and listened to Einar tell us about the Nordura. The first thing to know: it is pronounced, Nor-der-rau. Euan and I would be sharing a rod, defraying the toe-curling cost of Icelandic salmon fishing, which is generally reserved for tycoon types. Although it was June, this was only the second week of the season. Iceland kisses the Arctic Circle, and fish were only just starting to trickle into the river. Water conditions were good, though, and with each day the run of salmon was growing. The last three days had seen twenty-five fish landed. Einar was hopeful…

I WALK UP the gravel shoreline trying to avoid mounds of fresh bear crap underfoot, while still focusing my gaze on the water, looking behind the gaudy, red-and-green forms of spawning sockeye for a more subtle movement: a mere shadow on the streambed. I’m trying to pick out a rainbow or Dolly Varden sucking up the drifting eggs, with the hope of getting a cast in before the fish sees my shadow and slinks off into the deep. The river I’m fishing has no name—none that appears on a map, anyway, and none that my guide and friend, Glen Alsworth Jr., has ever heard. It’s just a skinny blue line in the vastness of Katmai National Park and Preserve; visible only if you know where to zoom into one shoreline…

WHEN ANGLERS SEE POPULATIONS of many fish in a particular area, they will sometimes say things like, “the fish here are fine, I see tons of them!” Problem is, by the time we actually notice declines in a fishery, the damage has often already been done, even if the fishing there seems unchanged. This is especially true at spawning-aggregation sites such as Florida’s Western Dry Rocks (WDR), a small-but-popular patch of coral reef and ocean currents about eight miles southwest of Key West. At its Dec. 16 meeting, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) approved its draft proposal to prohibit fishing in May and June in a one-square-mile area near WDR, and it is considering a four-month closure from April 1-July 31. From FWC: “A seasonal closure of…