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.
Eighty to 100 miles out, where the canyons lie at the edge of the continental shelf, warm-water eddies spinning off the Gulf Stream meet the colder, plankton-rich waters of the North Atlantic. That’s where the squid and halfbeaks hang, out along the break between the warm and cold water. It’s where I love to be when the tuna are biting. The sharper the break, the better for attracting baitfish. Sometimes it can be 66 degrees on one side of that break, 73 on the other. Tuna — yellowfin, bluefin, bigeye — like the warm water, but venture out of their comfort zone to feast on the small baitfish feeding on plankton in the colder water. I use satellite-generated ocean temperature charts to find these breaks. Then I’ll search around, looking…
Islamorada, Fla., is my favorite place in the whole world. It’s where I hunt 100-pound tarpon with light tackle — an 11-weight G. Loomis fly rod and Tibor reel. Fighting a tarpon is epic. The first time I saw a monster tarpon ripping offline, jumping like crazy, it changed my life. That’s what it’s all about: a fish hitting the fly, then exploding out of the water. It’s the coolest thing you’ll ever see. I fish 75 days a year in Islamorada. I do it with guides — both backcountry and ocean — on a 17-foot Maverick HPX Kevlar flats boat with 115-hp Yamaha 2-stroke. When we fish the muddy backwaters, we do it with big flies — sometimes 6 inches long with a 2.0 or 4.0 hook. In crystal-clear…
They call me “Crazy Alberto,” not because I’m crazy in the head but because I have a passion for fishing. Why else would I perch on a boulder the size of a VW — at night — in November, with the surf washing around my waders and a cold northeast wind whipping spray in my face? I’ve been known to hike out to the south side of the Montauk Lighthouse — the deep-deep south side — to hunt the elusive cow striper as it makes its way south past the easternmost point of Long Island toward Chesapeake Bay. Montauk is a surf-fishing Mecca, and November is the time to make the pilgrimage there to catch the monster striper, the 40-, 50-, 60-pounder. The wild September and October blitzes are over,…
I’ve spent my life fishing for snook. The greatest thing about it is you do it early in the morning or late at night, far from the madness of the interstates. You see the sunrises, the birds, the vegetation, the fish popping in the solitude of the Everglades or mangroves, or in a moon-lit inlet. When I was a kid growing up — we were a family of nine — my job was to make sure the freezer was full of snook, and I did that. I killed thousands of snook, but we ate them. They never went to waste. Some will disagree, but with season closures, size limits and a fish-a-night limit, snook fishing is better today than 30 years ago. Golf pro Andy Bean and I caught and…
When you’re young, you think its just about the fish — the most, the largest, the strongest, the farthest afield. As you get a bit older, you discover its about that and more, such as the company you choose. For this venture onto the water, we’d like to invite you along. It is with a deep sense of fraternity that I welcome you to the first issue of Anglers Journal, a fishing publication that strives to capture the art and science, the beautiful and bloody elements of our dolled-up Pleistocene pursuit. We have tried, in the words of the late Russian writer and theorist Viktor Shklovsky, “to make the stone stony.” I hope you enjoy spending time with the sundry crew we’ve assembled, all of whom have a good bit…
Barry Gibson, a former editor of Salt Water Sportsman magazine, has spent more than three decades in federal fishery management in the Northeast and owns and operates a charter boat in Boothbay Harbor, Maine. C.J. Chivers is a reporter for The New York Times and part of a team that won a 2009 Pulitzer Prize for reporting from Afghanistan. A former Marine, he is also the author of The Gun, a social history of the AK-47. Kenny Wooton, whose professional focus for the past 25 years has been marine journalism, is the editor-in-chief of Yachts International magaline. A passionate boater, he is a member of the New York Yacht Club and an avid outdoorsman. Tom Delotto is a licensed captain. certified marine mechanic and former commercial fisherman. He also is…
