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...
2:15 pm. Conditions are perfect and the trout should be active, but I’ve caught so few fish that I still know the slim count. Six. That’s four wild browns and two stocked rainbows that found their way here from only God knows where. But stocked bows have no regard for...
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...