“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

MOM AND DAD were both farm kids raised in the Missouri Ozarks, Mom was among twelve siblings and Dad one of eleven. The aftermath of WWII eventually drew them and many siblings into the closest big city, St. Louis, for jobs and the beginnings of thei

A MAN WALKS into a Colorado fly shop. A kid looks up from behind the counter. “Hey!,” the kid says, “What’s going on today?” The man scans the room like he left his keys there. “I’m going to Turneffe. Where are your permit flies?” Fly Shop Kid moves

Ever made fishing plans with buddies only to have those plans derailed? It happens too often. The German military commander Helmuth von Moltke summed it up: “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” Consequently, four flyfishing friends—Ben P

VIEWED FROM ABOVE, Northern California’s Eel River looks like two hundred miles of indecision; a waterway that couldn’t quite decide whether it wanted to reach the ocean or not. It’s a salmon and steelhead river running through a Mediterranean climat

HEY, OLD FRIEND. I was standing by myself on the leeward side of a flat the other day and thought of you. The water was calm, without a breath of wind. Almost as if the quiet was too quiet, and I needed a disruption. I don’t usually write these kinds

Q: Dear Trask, Wassup with Biden’s dog? Is he taking the name “Commander” a bit too literally? Twenty-four times he’s bitten Secret Service agents? President Biden has eleven agents assigned to him, and Commander has bitten all eleven! He’s giving th

IN FALL OF 2023, Elias Thorarinsson stood alone on the banks of a small river in the remote western fjords of his native Iceland. He was looking down through the country’s famous crystalline waters at a large Atlantic salmon. It was a monster, and it

URI WOLLNER REALLY LOVES BARBEL. Especially the Damascus barbel, a native to rivers of northern Israel like the Hasbani, the Banias, and the Dan, all of which feed the upper Jordan on its way to the Sea of Galilee. Barbels occupy a slim branch on the

I WAS PUTTING the final wraps on a size 18 Sparkle Dun when he looked over my shoulder and said, “Nice bug.” I, of course, bristled at the word “bug,” but this being my first visit to the Clearwater Fly Tyers Wednesday night fly-tying gathering, chos

A YOUNG ANGLER lands a nice-ish trout and wants to share the photo, not only because of the fish, but because of the location: at the base of a waterfall, beneath a big bridge and a gondola, in downtown Spokane, Washington. He posts the photo and get

SOME YEARS AGO I developed an absurd craving for a bamboo rod. I couldn’t afford one, so I’d visit a tackle shop just to wave one around until someone asked me to leave—like the car buff who stops at a dealer to sit in an Alfa Romeo he’ll never own.

AS A 30-SOMETHING with a young family, I’m like many millennials making homes in communities far from our birthplaces. Home is now defined by a confluence of factors that differ from prior generations. Millennials are settling down where they got tha

You don’t hear much about the Spanish Pyrenees as an international trout-fishing destination, what with Patagonia and New Zealand dominating the travel catalogs. But with two weeks in Spain and a few days to myself in our itinerary, I found an outfit

“NEXT YEAR I want you and I to go bonefishing together,” Dad says from his chair as I walk by him. I’m frozen in my step and dread fills my gut. I’m unable to form words for a response. He fumbles with the tablet in his blanketed lap and, with trembl

It’s six a.m. on a July day in the Spanish part of the Pyrenees and I just left a beautiful inn with my backpack and fly rod to start a fishing day with my friend, Iván Tarin. There is no one on the streets. The temperature is cool but pleasant. We w

THE REAL WARMTH arrives in late April. By dawn, backlit vapor rises from the edge of lily pads; at noon, turtles sunbathe on every exposed log; just after 2 p.m., a quilt of gray clouds arrives from the south. It’s beer-time on your local largemouth

IT FLOATED DOWN to us, riding the surface-current faster than we were. Closing the distance, the bobbing object became identifiable. We were looking at half of a bullhead. And it was very much alive. Its back half was gone, the severance marred by te

SOMETIMES, CATCH-AND-RELEASE flyfishing can feel dogmatic, with unending imagery of anglers coddling fish just before a pre-ordained release. I get it: putting fish back may be the single-most effective act of individual conservation we can make. So,

LAST SUMMER, The New Yorker ran an essay titled “The Case Against Travel.” The writer, Agnes Callard, expressed some fair viewpoints about touristy activities, like the underwhelming impact of over-hyped attractions (the Mona Lisa comes to mind). Cal

Shaped by natural selection to swim in their home waters, steelhead are like a river’s fingerprint. When ascending British Columbia’s Dean Canyon, it helps to have a massive tail and high mitochondrial density, for producing energy. Similar considera

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 sa

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 f

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 D