Tonight was a really fun night: we had tons of people come out for the Holiday Meet-Up at West End Johnnie’s. Thanks to Cory at The Fly Pack and Ted at Cheeky Reels for taking the lead in organizing — and for everyone who came out!
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It was perfect–a warm late-October day, skating a Bomber on a glassy glide, a savage take and a wonderful fight–replete with cartwheels and runs… She was a lovely wild fish, 38″x 20″, and probably around 20 pounds.
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A friend of mine had a 20+ albie day last week off Cape Cod. I repeat: a day of more than 20 albies caught, personally. That’s cause for fishing retirement, if I’ve ever heard it; you’ll never have such a good day again.
Read More >>One of the reasons I love fishing is that it takes you to beautiful places in search of beautiful things. If you’ve ever held a tuna, or a salmon, or a trout, or any number of other fish, you know that these can be beautiful creatures.
New photos from aerial photographer Wayne Davis help make this point. Flying over Cape Cod bay recently, he spotted huge schools of striped bass. So numerous are the stripers, that they remind me of the sight of a large flock of starlings against the sky. They’re awesome, in the true sense of that word.
One of the things I love about these photos is how they elevate bass. In my opinion, striped bass often do not rise to the top of the list of “beautiful” fish. Their stripes are geometric, their color palette more limited, more two-toned, than many of their hard-tailed saltwater companions. This doesn’t diminish my admiration for them, or my love of chasing them. I just don’t think of them as stunning in the same way as opalescence of a false albacore. These photos make a different case.
Salt: Coastal and Flats Fishing Photography by Andy Anderson, a new coffee table book exclusively about saltwater fishing, captures the beauty of these places. Published by Rizzoli, who specializes in high-end coffee table books like this, the book is the nicest I’ve seen on the subject.
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A tour around the shop is a crash course in fly fishing history. Those reels there? Pieces of a Bogdan, or a Vom Hoffe. That tool there? It was originally owned by Everett Garrison, the great American rod maker with whom my dad wrote his book on bamboo fly rod making. That bamboo there? Bamboo sourced from a remote region in China. And that there? Me, trying to learn a fraction of what my dad knows.
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The Marlborough Fly Fishing show 2014 proved to be an exception. In conversation with a few people, all noted how they thought this year’s show was bigger, and how more people attended. The only question was: will it be the exception, or the beginning of a trend?
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In 2013 I was fortunate to have some great days on the water — including one of my best ever. But all of this was marred by persistent bad news about the continued decline of striped bass (more on that later). What follows is a short summary of some key trends, trips, and events from 2013.
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Last week, I had the pleasure of fly fishing for false albacore ofd Cape Cod with two good friends, Eoin and Bob. We hired Tom Rapone, a long-standing fishing guide cum lawyer who, this fall, experienced a relapse into guiding — and to our great benefit. Tom is one of the finest guides I’ve ever fished with, and is a great guy to boot. While I understand the lure of the law, I do hope he continued to experience relapses for years to come.
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“Toward the end of the twentieth century, we began to see a disconnect between the art of Atlantic salmon fly tying and the sport of Atlantic salmon fishing. In the right hands, a workhorse fly pattern like the Jock Scott became a large, immaculately crafted object, suitable for framing and hanging on one’s wall. Though many like it have hooked thousands of salmon over the last century and a half, this particular fly will never see water, much less the business end of a dime bright Atlantic salmon.”
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