Tabla de contenidos para Winter 2023/2024 en The Drake

ARE YOU A GOLFER? Or do you, like me, just occasionally go golfing because your friends are going or because it’s some sort of dude-gathering like a fraternity reunion or bachelor party? In either case, imagine playing your next round with only a 7-iron. If you golf as well and as often as I do, then your score may not be markedly different than if you’d used every club in the bag. But the score isn’t what we’re discussing here. Real golfers, even if they could get the same score using one club, would never choose to do so, because part of the joy in golf is the feel of using a driver to send a little white ball 300 yards down a fairway. It’s the feel of using a…

A SMALL BAND of misfit guides are helping change the way people think of carp in central Wyoming. Armed with little more than bastardized flats skiffs and gumption, these guides forgo the blue-ribbon trout waters of the North Platte in order to stalk carp with their clients. These aren’t just a bunch of trout bums masquerading as saltwater guides. Okay, maybe there’s a bit of that. But a true passion—more like an obsession—has overtaken the group, led by Blake Jackson, co-owner of The Ugly Bug Fly Shop and Crazy Rainbow Fly Fishing. “It started off as just something fun to do with other guides on our days off,” Jackson says. “But when we had success, and enjoyed doing it so much ourselves, we figured there’d be at least a few…

ON JANUARY 30, 2023, after more than two decades of research, public input, litigation, appeals, and political controversy, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued its Final Determination for the proposed Pebble Mine area of Bristol Bay, in southeast Alaska, stating that mining of the Pebble deposit “will have unacceptable adverse effects on anadromous fishery areas in the Bristol Bay watershed.” Specifically, under Section 404(c) of the Clean Water Act, the EPA prohibited the use of certain waters and wetlands within the watershed to be used “as disposal sites for certain discharges of dredged or fill material associated with development of a mine at the Pebble deposit,” effectively killing the possibility of Pebble Mine. Further, the decision put restrictions on the size and scope of any potential future mining proposals in…

LAST WINTER, Pacific Northwest anglers anxiously awaited approval to fish for wild steelhead on Washington’s legendary Skagit River, which hadn’t opened in 2020 or 2022. January and February passed with no news. Finally, on March 22, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) announced that the 2023 season would open three days later, on March 25, and go through April 30. Steelheading was allowed five days a week, Saturdays through Wednesdays. The welcome-but-tardy news marked a milestone: the first year of a ten-year Skagit River steelhead resource-management plan (Skagit RMP), approved by National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) for a state-managed catch-and-release steelhead fishery on the Skagit and its major tributary, the Sauk. In 2018, after more than two years of collaboration between WDFW, the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community, the…

I’M NOT ONE TO BRAG about my fishing accomplishments, but what few trophies I’ve labored to accumulate while flyfishing lay strewn about my home and yard—placed strategically out of sight, as deemed by my wife. Below a juniper shrub near the shed sit three ceramic Better Homes & Gardens dinner plates found submerged—stacked and fully intact—in a shallow pool of Big Cottonwood Creek while fishing pocketwater for browns. The great white shark hand-puppet gathers cobwebs in my garage, a few feet from a partially deflated volleyball, both recovered pre-runoff from the same home-water stream. Nearby, wedged into a bundle of cardboard, stand two arrows—one found in Millcreek Canyon as I plied skinny water for Bonneville Cutts, the other plucked from behind an Upper Provo boulder while casting ants to brookies.…

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME. Ninety years old. Few believed I’d still be here. Yet, here I am. It’s like that old joke: “If I knew I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself.” I started as a shack in a man-camp, home to a few hundred itinerant workers hired to build the world’s tallest dam. Those men performed back-breaking labor for twelve hours or more every day, working on the dam, railroad spur, irrigation canals, and pipelines. They were paid $4 for each of those days. From that, $1.50 was deducted for lodging and board. But they were grateful for the work in the early years of the Great Depression. I housed Bureau of Reclamation employees overseeing construction. Nothing about me is special.…

I JUST FELT naughty. The steelhead I held under the water was so chrome she was practically glowing. It had slammed my fly in the middle of the swing and tail-walked her way into my backing before I got her under control. I should have felt elated—and I did—but as I turned the fish loose and watched her jet off upstream, I also felt a tinge of guilt. Upside: It was my sixth fish of the day. Downside: I was in New York, so these weren’t real steelhead. I’ve been in a committed relationship with wild West Coast steelhead for more than a decade. It’s a liaison built on understanding, trust, even love. Every year, when guide season ends in Montana, I head west for steelhead on a spey rod.…

“My name is Miguel,” the man said. “And I’ve got a fish story.” I’m not typically a fan of guys in bars who just start telling stories, on account of how such stories usually involve the misdeeds of ex-wives or become tedious boasts about the storyteller’s own bad-assery. But I had time to kill before catching the day’s last puddle-jumper off the island, so I gave the bartender a sign that I’d have another and turned slightly on my stool to give Miguel my attention. The story began with Miguel walking up the beach on the north end of the caye, searching for permit. He was walking slowly, trying to avoid stepping on plastic bottles and flip-flops and other assorted flotsam washed up on the beach, while looking out over…

ON JANUARY 2, 2024, Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket containing the first Starlink satellites capable of sending signals directly from space to smartphones. The SpaceX/T-Mobile collab will first provide only texting, but satellite-to-cellphone service is coming. Meanwhile, dozens of remote fishing lodges have added Starlink WiFi over the past three years. “With Starlink, Christmas Island Lodge has the fastest internet in Kiribati,” the lodge boasts on its website. From Alaska’s Alagnak Lodge: “Our Starlink connection is fast and reliable. Clients and staff enjoy full use of smart phones.” Pesca Maya Lodge, Mexico; Estancia de los Rios, Chile; Nass Base Camp, B.C.; Outpost on the Nush, AK—all use Starlink. Musk might be a weirdo who does some stupid stuff. But he is crushing the satellite game. The U.S.…

IN THE SUMMER OF 2010, filmmaker RA Beattie and I bought a 1974 Mercury Marquis. We named it Clyde and put it in a movie, Guiding Goes Gangster (still on YouTube). In the fourteen years since, Clyde’s keys have been passed from writer to writer, crossing the country at least four times. More than fifty different drivers have piloted Clyde, many of them woefully unprepared for the experience. Meanwhile, Beattie and I had occasionally discussed making a second film with Clyde. And now, that encore film has finally been made. Just not by us. If you plan to take in this year’s IF4 flyfishing film event, you will see “A Ride with Clyde” in the lineup. Made by photographer Andrew Gilbert and Tailer Trash Fly Fishing mastermind Larry Littrell, the…

IT’S ONE THING to have written a book on steelhead flyfishing. It’s another thing to have written the book. Trey Combs did, twice. First came his 1976 classic, Steelhead Fly Fishing and Flies, with the not-kept-wet steelhead lying dead in the grass on the cover (the ’70s were different). Combs followed that up in 1991 with the cultish Steelhead Fly Fishing, which was devoured more than Playboy in every West Coast campground for a generation. His latest is Flies for Atlantic Salmon and Steelhead, published in August by Combs’ longtime collaborator and coconspiritor Tom Pero, at Wild River Press. This book sees Combs widen his aperture a bit. At nearly four hundred pages, with a thousand photos, he covers a lot of ground. Yet his original idea was so ambitious…

IN THE BELLY of the eleven-floor dormitory, my knuckles thumped on Mark’s door. He had a mischievous smile when he opened, turned to his desk, and clutched a miniature fly rod barely longer than his hand. “My parents got me this for Christmas,” he said, stripping off some thread. “The reel works and everything. We need an aquarium.” Three rules governed Aber Hall: no alcohol, no guests of opposite genitalia after 9 p.m., and no pets. But the pet rule didn’t apply to fish. They don’t bark and they don’t shit on the floor. Mark and I jumped into his Durango and drove across town to Walmart. Streetlights illuminated the snow that had accumulated after the fall semester’s finals. Like many freshmen sporting Simms shirts, I’d come to the University…

IN THE DUSTY pile of abandoned hobbies in my garage lay a fly rod and an old canvas vest with boxes of rust-stained flies in the pockets. The vest was a gift from my sister-in-law when I was a teenager and wanted to be a flyfishing novelist. Like many other dreams and hobbies, this one got diluted down to nothing but fragments of imagination. As I built a family and a career, fly-fishing became discarded and abandoned. When the world shut down for people like me, I took to the water. It was summer 2020. There was no teaching and there were no students. My college had sent both groups home in March and we finished the year to increasingly fatigued, and fewer, faces on Zoom. We sloppily ended the…

Death echoes through Gardens of the Queen. From the anchorage lagoon beyond our ten-room live-aboard, I hear a detonation. Something big—a shark maybe, or a barracuda—is attacking in shallow water. It sounds like bodies dropping off a bridge. Closer by, a squadron of jacks noisily carves up a baitball on the surface. But fifty miles from the port town of Jucaro, the sounds only whisper up the steel sides and across the open deck. Then silence. It really is just us out here, far off the southern coast of Cuba. Billy burns a hole in the night with the hot end of his Partagas. His son, also Billy, has refilled with Havana Club rum, though he’s not here to drink. “I came to catch big tarpon,” he says with a…

My days on the river are marked by chapters. The first chapter ends when the fishing does, and the second one begins when I climb the mossy trail from river to camp, filling a primal need for connection and celebration following the hunt. The fire ring will be stoked until it is blazing, orange flames flicking light off into the forest, beckoning the rest of our crew. Words and tempers heat up around the campfire, but the conflicts are only a test of worthiness. To an observer, it would seem that we hate each other, but after a lifetime of surviving these steelhead camps, we are the last men standing. We are loyal to this ritual, regardless of crushed feelings and roiled emotions. Weaker hearts left the ring years ago…

IF YOU FISH in the Rocky Mountain West, your success on many waters is often dictated by the Bureau of Reclamation (BuRec). Nowhere is this more evident than in the Snake River watershed in Wyoming and Idaho. Bureau managers have a lot of demands to meet. Flood control, irrigation, and municipal water use are of prime importance, probably in that order. Way down the list—and I mean way down—sits ecological concerns and recreation, including fish and flyfishing. For decades, BuRec had a terrible reputation in fishing circles. Due to the havoc their flow regimes created on the waters of Wyoming and Idaho, some in Snake River country referred to it as the Bureau of “Wrecklamation.” Extreme high flows could be the norm for weeks at a time, only to see…

ANGLERS HAVE REASON to be wary when a mining operation comes to town, particularly near Missoula, Montana. By the time the Clark Fork River reaches city limits, its water has already flowed past a string of Superfund sites filled with the toxic aftermath of large-scale hard-rock mining. So when corporations sought gold in the Blackfoot in the 1990s, and copper near the Smith (still an ongoing battle), Montana’s outdoor community launched a bare-knuckled brawl to stop them. Now there’s yet another threat looming. In January 2023, U.S. Critical Materials (USCM) announced it had found the country’s richest deposit of rare-earth minerals deep in the headwaters of the Bitterroot River, one of the top five most-fished streams in Montana. The proposed Sheep Creek mine sits about a hundred miles south of…

Q: Dear Trask, Didja catch me on the YouTube in January? I escaped from a pet-rescue kennel, tried to let my friends out, opened a human-door, and met a cool cop. It got me thinking: rather than paying kennels, owners should pay people to take us fishing! Voilà! No kennels for us, and anglers can say, “I must go fishing, honey. It’s my job!” —King in Tempe A: Dear King, Wow, you really are an “extremely clever pup!” That is the greatest idea in the world. We’ll call the company “Kennelingus”—and you can work your magic to free any dogs left behind bars in the kennel world. (Except for the cool kennels with pools and spas.) There’s a potential prob: not all dogs are fishing dogs like us. But we’ll just stick…

I TOOK SOME time off one spring to fish. Weeks earlier, as I tied flies and rigged my truck for camping, my wife began referring to the coming downtime as my “sabbatical.” That felt generous; a characterization more befitting of priests and tenured professors, not a bored, half-assed attorney. Still, I liked the sound of it. I certainly wasn’t convinced that replacing work with a stint as a jobless fly angler would suddenly yield significant revelations. Chasing trout and smoking weed, despite what noble sportsmen and Deadheads might tell you, will only get you so far. Yet, I was confident that a break from my every-day routine would be meaningful. So, through a bit of innocent trickery, I quit my old job, found a new job, and swindled a little…

WHEN WOODSMOKE TWIRLS above chimneys and tires spin at stoplights, winter has settled in. These are the “fiddlin’ months,” and it’s the season for gearheads everywhere. Fly lines get cleaned or replaced. Reels get lubed. Boat boxes are stocked with favorite patterns. Whether due to cabin fever or in spite of it, messing with our gadgetry is a preoccupation that harkens back to one of our most primal impulses, one that we share with crows, otters, and pack rats: Let me stare at my pile of rocks and arrange them into little groups by size and shape and color. In all walks of hobbyism, gearheads abound. For my grandmother it was tea spoons. For my wife it’s books (I am complicit). Rabbit holes exist wherever we care to look, and…

Pyramid Lake is at least a twelve-hour drive from Livingston, Mont., in good weather, with a tailwind. As we chip our way south along the frozen, snow-covered road to West Yellowstone, it’s feeling like this journey will be closer to fifteen. Can’t turn back, though. We’ve had this trip planned for months—Kubie, his brother Sam, and I. We certainly aren’t going to let a little whiteout keep us from getting to the Land of the Lahontan. We’ll just take it nice and slow and tell more fishing stories, something Kubie excels at. We made the same trip last year, and I caught a fourteen-pounder the first morning. It’s hard to ask for a bigger one—who gets that lucky two years in a row? But that’s the thing at Pyramid: almost…

THE A1 OUT of Harare must be the worst highway in Zimbabwe, if you can even call it a highway with its tractors and goats and cattle, and old Japanese hatchbacks dodging semis and cement mixers and steel-laden flat beds—to say nothing of the road itself: a cratered, shoulderless garden of gravel and asphalt worked over daily by a parade of industrial traffic. For eight hours I didn’t take my eyes off it, terrified I’d be taken out by a tandem trailer grinding and swaying its way up from the Zambian border. Note to Jesus: if you choose to return here—to this highway—in your second coming, I am telling you that it will not end well. You will be sacrificed again, this time killed in traffic. So I prayed as…

HE DIPPED HIS HAND into the live-well that rarely gets used for bait. What he pulled out was beautiful. “Look what I have,” he said, using his index finger and thumb to dangle the crab in front of me, as if holding a used tissue. What legs it had left were clacking against its body, and when he stuck it back in the tank, I heard the others clawing up the walls trying to escape. It sounded like a hoard of typists banging away on the keys, trying to meet a deadline. The whole situation seemed unfair for everyone. Unfair for the crab, as it was defenseless against the hook about to enter its body; unfair for the permit, as they are powerless to the tempting rattle of a crab…