Anglers Journal celebrates the best writing, photography, illustration, design and sporting art on the topic of fishing. Come join some of the most prolific fishing editors and writers in the industry for the best angling experience on the water.
The fish don’t care about deadlines or meetings or whatever hoops you had to jump through to make time to chase them. When you hold a rod in your hands, the notifications and calendar invites melt away like late-morning fog. Your schedule, your commitments don’t matter. You are but a speck in the ocean, a grain of sand on the beach. Anonymous. As I stepped up to the casting deck of a heaving express boat some-where off southern Costa Rica, it took me a second to anchor my feet. I held my arms out wide, like a tightrope walker. I felt a million miles away from my laptop and keyed-in on what really mattered in that moment: the sound of dolphin leaping from the waves, marauding birds diving, yellowfin tuna…
Michael Carr is an English teacher and writer from New Jersey who chases stripers with a fly rod whenever and wherever he can. He is working on a collection of fishing essays in the off-hours between hikes, pond trips and driveway hockey with his sons. Michael writes about Pennsylvania guide Nick Raftas in “Land of Bronze Giants.” Retired Ohio University English professor Robert DeMott’s sporting books include Afield: American Writers on Bird Dogs, Astream: American Writers on Fly Fishing and Angling Days: A Fly Fisher’s Journals. His Conversations with Jim Harrison was revised and updated in 2019. Robert’s poem “A Trout in a River is no Less a Gift Than Two in the Hand” appears in this issue. Writer, photographer and tournament-winning angler Steve Dougherty has spent his life capturing…
Congratulations on Bill Sisson’s transition to executive editor at Angler’s Journal, and best of luck to Charlie Levine as the new editor-in-chief. Bill has, indeed, created a unique, entertaining and thought-provoking magazine. The Russell Chatham tribute in the Summer issue was superb [“The Longest Silence”]. I have enjoyed the recent articles about striper fishing in AJ [“The Wild Cape,” Summer]. I wrote a different kind of striped bass story titled “Striper Virgin,” with observations from the point of view of a novice surf angler, taking readers back to when they were just starting out. Kevin McJunkin Bill Sisson has been a wizard in guiding Anglers Journal. I hope this doesn’t change the flavor of this most excellent fishing periodical and its promotion of the artists, writers and poets who have…
Headwaters By Dylan Tomine Patagonia Headwaters is a book written by a recovering fly-fishing addict. It has the grace and beauty of all the books Patagonia has published — with beautiful illustrations, a focus on environmental activism — but at its core, Dylan Tomine has uncovered why writers like him want to celebrate and protect wild places and fish: because these places and creatures consume them. Tomine recalls a story of a steelheader in British Columbia who flipped his raft and drifted a quarter-mile through icy rapids, losing his rods, gear and nearly his life. When the angler told the other wader-clad folk at the local diner about his narrow survival, there was a pause, then the response: “Yeah, but was there any good water down there?” With quick delivery,…
On the shortest day of the year, midway last century, I pestered my mother into letting me off at a bridge over the Saugatuck River so I could fish the time away while she worked her job at Weston Center. “Catch a trout for dinner,” was all she said. At 9 or 10, I knew little about how the world worked except it was made for my taking: I carried a spinning rod and an early Christmas present, a shiny plastic box of jazzy, bright-colored lures — C.P. Swings and Dardevles — crammed in my jacket pocket. I loved its heft and weight and how its top snapped open and shut with a bossy click and how it held those can’t-miss spinners and spoons like so many bright promises. I…
The Airbnb was named “Tiny House,” a large shed customized with all the amenities one could need in a small space. As far as fishing accommodations go, I was in a five-star hotel: The bed was supple, and there was a refrigerator for beer. I could brew half a cup of coffee, and the bathroom sink accommodated one hand. With trout on my mind, I showered in a crate-sized bathroom and crawled into bed like a child on Christmas Eve. The next morning, my friend and I rolled into the parking lot at Horse Creek, a gravel lot dotted with potholes and refuse. Rain had dappled this northwest corner of North Carolina throughout the night. I hopped out of the truck and stretched, thinking I might throw some streamers in…
