I'll get right to the point: Your best bet for catching trophy trout is with medium to small flies. More specifically, large nymphs or small streamers are the perfect size. I’ve written about making the choice between going for big fish or for a bunch of fish, arguing...
The longer a trout tugs, turns and flips at the end of your line, the greater the chance you’ll lose it. We don’t need a study in probability theory to know this is true. No, we all have enough firsthand stories about the desperate emptiness that accompanies a long...
We talk a lot about big wild brown trout. The search for these extraordinary fish is what keeps us going. It’s part of the Troutbitten culture. And the inch marks of Whiskey (20+) and Namer (24+) are ingrained here. To some of us big fish are everything. But to all of...
I’ve often said that my best strategy for catching a big brown trout is to fool a bunch of trout, and one of them will be big. But I don’t believe that so completely anymore. Let me say, right up front, that I have some friends who seem to accomplish high numbers and...
— This is the companion chapter to The Shallows Above, published a few days ago. ... I’ve done this nighttime thunderstorm thing before. Two summers ago, on a dark night in July, I was surprised by another thunderstorm. And once again, it was one of the most memorable...
The thunderstorm came from nowhere. I’m not much for weather reports, and I hadn’t checked. I’d simply walked out of my garage and looked at some clouds in the sky at dusk. No moon, either. So it would be a dark night with only patches of starlight between the clouds:...
That pivotal moment when everything changes. The event that makes the trip. The defining instance that separates all the memories that come before from the ones that come after. It’s what I wait for — what I look for every time I’m out there — and it’s why I keep fishing . . .
My story, Thirty-Inch Liars, is over at Hatch Magazine today. Here are a few excerpts..... -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- ... I once read through a publication that printed, "Thirty-inch wild trout are common in this stretch of water." Now, I don't care what river in...
The light of the last day of the year began to fade, and I reminisced a bit. It’s been an incredible year for me, full of life lessons that I probably needed to work on for some time now.
Here’s to living the next year vividly . . .