Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2020 i Anglers Journal

Before heading out for a fishing trip, most anglers monitor the weather closely, hoping for calm seas and light winds. The same cannot be said for those who target winter sailfish in Florida. These anglers pray for blustery cold fronts with winds cranking out of the north-northwest and a drop in temperature that will have you donning extra layers underneath your bibs and rain boots. Whoever says it never gets cold in Florida is dead wrong. Windswept spray on a 45-degree day will send a shiver down anyone’s spine. And when it does get cold, a switch flips and the sailfish action heats up. The Atlantic sailfish is not a true offshore billfish like its white and blue marlin cousins. This wily creature prefers to hunt on near-shore reef edges…

Russell Chatham was known for his evocative landscape paintings, whose muted tones grace the covers of books and have been featured in myriad galleries. The self-taught artist, author and fisherman died Nov. 10. He was 80 years old. An accomplished writer in his own right, Chatham surrounded himself with some of the most celebrated fishing authors of his time, including Jim Harrison, Thomas McGuane and Guy de la Valdène. His books reveal an idiosyncratic man who loved fishing and art but was often lost in his thoughts. Confusion and loneliness became frequent demons, and I was troubled by the question of whether or not there was a place for me in the world,” Chatham wrote in One Hundred Paintings. “I had no notion of earning money by being a painter,…

The centerpiece of the room is a long, white table with chairs for 15. A teal bookcase lines one wall; on another are old photographs. Every chair is occupied. It’s the weekly meeting of the Yale University Fishing Club in New Haven, Connecticut, one of the oldest university fishing clubs in the country. Edward Migdalski, the longtime director of the Yale Outdoor Education Center, founded the club in 1948 and passed the torch to his son, Tom, who has been in charge since 1984. Tonight, however, Migdalski isn’t running the show; Sean Callinan, a locally renowned fly fisherman, is at the head of the table, and he’s teaching students to tie a woolly-bugger. Callinan, who is 32, is earnest and patient. He guides the students, each equipped with their own…

It started with a 27-hour boat ride from Guanaja, Honduras, to a blip about 160 miles to the east and roughly 50 miles off the Mosquito Coast — an 80-yard-long piece of sand with a few palms, a couple of outbuildings, stacked wooden lobster traps and some Caribbean pines I rode out to Faraway Cayes aboard Captain Dennis, a 40-foot snapper boat that was loaded with food, fuel for the fishing skiff s, mattresses, an oven, a freezer, a generator and lots of miscellaneous supplies for the first official season of helicopter fishing in this remote, sometimes perilous area. I accompanied a small team of guides, a cook, a few assistants and the owner of the operation, Steve Brown, a Colorado guide who runs the Fly Fish Guanaja lodge on…

Even before the first ribbon of light had hit the canyon rim, runners began crawling out of tents and trucks and into the cold morning air. Overnight, a small village had formed in the sagebrush field along the banks of the Gunnison River’s Lake Fork tributary in Colorado. Bundled in down jackets and wool hats, runners packed rods, reels, flies, food and water into their packs. As the sun climbed toward the canyon’s ridgeline, the runners made their way to the start line. Hugs and hellos were passed around. Longtime fishing friends Cary Pugh and Laura Dowd had flown in from Washington, D.C., and San Diego two days earlier. Several years ago, Dowd had read about the Flyathlon. Knowing Pugh wasn’t a runner but was game for fun, Dowd had…

PREP THE FISH AND HEAT THE GRILL 2 fish, 1 to 1 to ½ pounds each2 to 3 tablespoons canola or grapeseed oil1 teaspoon kosher salt Rub the fish evenly all over with oil (don’t drench it). Sprinkle the salt all over. Give the grill bars a good scrub with a metal brush, then wipe them down with an oiled rag. (A grill with a thicker grate works better than the classic Weber, but you can work with whatever you have.) Fire up the grill; you want medium-high heat. Temperate, even heat is the goal. Too hot, and you’ll lose control. You’ll need a pair of tongs as well as a metal spatula. GRILL THE FISH Olive oil for drizzlingLemon or lime wedges Find a spot on the grill with…

I live in the heart of big snook country on Florida’s east-central coast, where rivers meet the sea. Snook flourish in the warm, brackish waters that flow through our lagoon system, bays and far inland at sea level. I live with snook as I live with my other neighbors, though with a bit more affinity for the fish. Snook are intrepid, resilient and bold. Shovel-snouted, slope-backed and with a broad powerful tail, a snook changes hues with its waters. Surf snook are bright silver, backwater fish show the brown of their tannic habitat, and river fish are dark green-blue, the melded color of changing tides. All have the distinctive black lateral line running the length of their bodies and big, yellow, night-vision eyes. A fish larger than 40 inches is…

Last fall, stripers pulled a no-show for the weeklong trip to Block Island, Rhode Island, my friends and I have been taking since the early 2000s. By day three, it became apparent that bass were not in their usual nighttime lies in any numbers (part of a troubling coastwide trend). So we faced two choices: cry in our beer, or pull on our big-boy waders and enter the scrum known as daytime surfcasting for bluefish. We chose wisely. Thirty-five years ago, when striper populations were crashing up and down the East Coast, blues rushed in to fill the breech. They saved the charter industry, which switched to trolling umbrella rigs and wire line for “gorilla blues.” Surfcasters adapted, too, though some scorned bluefish as “stinkfish” and “yellow-eyed devils” that destroyed…

Few things compare to the thrill of hooking a blue marlin on a fly. I was standing at the stern of Tuna Trappe, a 57-foot Island Boat Works captained by Chris Sheeder. Behind me, a 300-pound blue marlin was tail-walking, completely out of the water, for maybe 20 jumps. This adventure was born more than a year ago when Sheeder posted a photo of his boat’s 26 marlin releases over a three-day trip to Costa Rica’s fish aggregating devices 70 to 130 miles into the Pacific. I’d heard about these FADs perched on seamounts, and when Sheeder had a cancellation last year, Rufus Wakeman and I jumped at the chance to join him. I also had heard horror stories about melted drags and broken rods, and charter captain Jake Jordan…

4 (6-ounce) white fish fillets with skin (such as striper, redfish, rockfish, or snapper), patted dry with paper towels1½ teaspoons kosher saltCanola or grapeseed oilUnsalted butter if necessary½ lemon Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Season the fillets with the salt. Slick a large cast iron skillet with oil and heat over medium-high heat. When you see a wisp of smoke, lay a fillet in the pan, skin side down, and immediately apply even pressure to it with a fish spatula, if you have one, or whatever stiff spatula you have, pressing against the hot surface of the pan for 30 seconds. You might feel a subtle change as the flesh relaxes a little and stops resisting. At this point, you can release the pressure. Check the skin by gently…

SUBSCRIBE TO ANGLERS JOURNAL Call (800) 877-5207 or visit anglersjournal.com. Subscriptions are $29 for one year (four issues: Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall). Please send letters and comments to Anglers Journal, 10 Bokum Road, Essex, CT 06426, or email wsisson@aimmedia.com. SPECIAL PLACES Bill Sisson’s happily dazzling editorial in the Fall issue brought back memories of camping rough in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia when I was young [Between Fish, “Happily Dazzled”]. Thanks for the 15-minute escape into sweet reverie from a whirlwind deadline-driven week. I read it twice, then a third time, reveling in the evocative prose. I’m setting it to the side of my desk in case I need another medicinal dose. Jim Rhodes Anglers Journal just showed up, and I read Bill Sisson’s editorial. He tells a marvelous…

Diego greets me at the small airport in Neuquén, Argentina. He looks at my overpacked suitcase — almost too heavy for me to lift — and my hefty carry-on. “I am your guide, Diego,” he says. “Wait here. I get the truck.” He looks unhappy. Right now, the other guides at the ranch are fishing the Limay River with their guests. Diego will have spent his morning driving two-plus hours to pick me up, his new client, a girl with too much luggage. Of course he’s unhappy. We head southwest over high desert. It is New Year’s Day. I made a promise to myself long ago that I would always fly-fish on the first day of the year — not as a resolution, but because I thought this would somehow…

“What’s the biggest redfish you ever get?” I carefully unclamp one hand from the rod grip and point a crooked finger at the sharply arced tip. “That would be the one at the end of my line right now,” I say to guide Todd Seither. Everyone laughs, but the joke will be on me if I can’t keep this bull red from spitting the hook, here in Breton Sound about 70 miles south of New Orleans. The laughter will come as often as the speckled trout and redfish on this August trip to the marshes and islands of the Mississippi River Delta, though the Cajuns and other Louisianans who live and work here have plenty of reason to weep. Hurricane Katrina passed through here 14 years ago as it roared…

Dogs, it has been said, tend to look like their owners, often sharing personality traits. Ned Baldwin — chef and fisherman — doesn’t have a dog; he has a boat: a seaworthy and dependable 27-foot Eastern. It’s a traditional lobster-boat design, and most assuredly not what you’d call flashy. “When you get down to it,” Baldwin says, “it’s a floating pickup truck, a 1985 Ford F-150 with bench seats and manual windows.” Like his boat, Baldwin, who is 48, isn’t particularly flashy, either. His restaurant, in an out-of-the-way corner of Manhattan, is called Houseman, a name he chose in celebration of home cooking. He earned his toque under the cooking legend Gabrielle Hamilton at Prune, where he started as a Sunday brunch egg scrambler and worked his way up to…

Last winter, photographer Jay Fleming spent eight days aboard a 79-foot fishing vessel, Italian Princess, dredging for sea scallops about 60 miles southeast of Cape May, New Jersey, in an area known as the Elephant Trunk. The hours are long, and the hard work can be dangerous in heavy winter weather. The crew put in 18- to 20-hour days, a couple of them in rough conditions. On the third day, seas climbed to 17 feet, and temperatures dropped to the low 30s. “It’s a psychological and physical test to work on these boats,” Fleming says. “It’s definitely a grind. That’s the way they describe it.” The crew was made up of seven men, including Capt. Charles Wiscott. “I’m 31 years old, and all these guys were right around the same…