My Dad and I have often visited a campsite in the same remote spot atop a state forest mountain for almost fifteen years now. The spring trip is a four or five day event focused on fishing for wild brown trout in the limestone waters at the bottom of the mountain, and...
My story, The Kid, is over at Hatch Magazine today.  Here are a couple excerpts... -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- ... The kid was ten years old and small for his age, but his legs were strong and he waded without fear. He fished hard. We shared a passion and a singular...
Sunup to sundown.
There’s nothing as simple and yet so full of variation as a full day on the water. The diversity of situations challenges the will of a fisherman: Exhaustion from the forces of water —  its speed, its numbing cold, the pressure of its depth. Weariness from the weather — the endless wind, the heavy rain, and the consuming heat of the sun. We soak in all the stages and moments that one single day brings, and we are alive through each one.
It was constructed by four muscular hands over two days and with one purpose — to float. Built to the specs of intricate line drawings printed on rough paper, the boat came to match the blueprints ordered from an ad in the back of a Popular Science magazine.
The builders used it for two seasons, and then it sat. The boat collected rain and bred microscopic life, providing food for mosquitoes and midge larva which hatched in their own time and fed the swallows nesting in the rafters of a nearby farmhouse turned post-war residence.
Year after year the boat sat, unused, lonely and forgotten.
Then it was sold — bartered actually — for enough groceries to fill one large brown bag. The hands of a builder passed ownership to the hands of a fisherman, having his own purposes for a boat . . .
My good friend, Chase Howard, writes the blog Dirt Roads and Blue Lines. I love his approach to trout fishing, and he pens some great stories. In his recent article, Fishing Roots, Chase writes about defining moments between a father and son ... "As we were headed...
So it's been a Troutbitten theme lately to do the unusual instead of the doing the usual. Burke started it a few months ago with "Out of the Ordinary October," and I think most of us jumped on the wagon and haven't gotten off.  It's a good wagon. If you are into...
My Dad got a new camper and he set up two fall trips, this being the first one. Â So, my uncle joined him for the whole trip and I joined them on Monday and Tuesday. We fished the first upper island on Monday and the fishing was ok. I played guide a little bit and...
Everything was too loud this week. Sometimes it feels like I wasn't built to be around people, and the simple interactions with others, even with my own family, stack and pile on top of me. My jumbled thoughts and endless worry needed to go away for a while, and I've...
One of these days I'm going to file an amazing night fishing report . . . I started about an hour before dark, and action was crazy good on nymphs. Basically, I was Frank Nale-ing it, but just imagine what I could have done with a gold bead white spinner. Right before...