A life on the Umpqua:62 Musky hunt:72 NorCal steelhead:84

TEN BUCKS
$20 for bait fishermen

FOR THOSE WHO FLYFISH

display until 1.30.23

Fall 2022 23
INSIDE: Colorado’s South Platte, Alaska’s pike, $10.00
Oregon’s smallmouth, Virginia’s bitchy redfish, ($14 CAD)
Massachusetts’ Swift River, Cleveland’s fresh- VOL. 24 ISSUE 3
water drum, sargassum in Belize, slow-fishing
movement, and conference realignment for fish! 6 02648 99860 4
WE DON’T JUST FISH FOR THE FISHING, WE FISH TO FEEL IT IN OUR SOUL.
T H AT ’ S W H Y, F O R O U R E I G H T H R E V O L U T I O N I N G R A P H I T E ,
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 GUTS

Features
62 Losing Larry
Larry Levine was a writer and a steelhead guide on
Oregon’s North Umpqua. He left quite an impression.
Story by Tom Bie

72 Musky Flies
We all know it can take awhile to catch a musky, but
twelve months? A tale of diligence, resolve, and a fly.
6WRU\E\*DYLQ*ULIƋQ

78 Witness to a Killing
Ever wish you could fish with an audience, so everyone
could watch you perform? Welcome to the Swift River.
Story by Benjamin Carlisle

84 Return to the River

How to fish for steelhead: Get in your car outside San
Francisco, then keep driving north until it feels right.
Story by Zack Wohl Photos by John Sherman
Drake

6
The

Fall 2022
 The
7
Drake

MORNING IN GUANAJA.
PHOTO BY NICK PRICE.

Fall 2022
Drake
GUTS

8
The

Fall 2022
 Departments
14 Put-in
Cognitive dissonance and steelheading.

21 Rises
This ain’t no spelling bee.

22 Scuddlebutt
Conference realignment in flyfishing; help for the
South Platte; Caribbean sargassum situation;
’Bama’s Mayfly Project; casting championships;
Ghost Trap Rodeo; and ASA’s obsession with lead

42 Tippets
East Coast rally; anti-hoarding; seeing smallmouth;
an objective landowner; slow-fishing; finders givers;
and the most heartbreaking Tippet you’ll ever read

60 Redspread
The mental toll of chasing uninterested redfish.
By Dallas Hudgens

90 City Limits
A highly underrated fishery lurks in Cleveland.
By Jerry Darkes

94 Bugs
Salmonflies are ghosting us on several western
rivers. A Missoula nonprofit aims to change that.
By Beau Davis

96 Backcountry
Alaska’s Innoko River has some of the best pike fish-
ing on the continent. Two biologists investigate why.
By Kevin Fraley

104 Permit Page

The Bonefish and Tarpon Trust, at twenty-five years.
By Tom Bie

The
9
Drake

CADDISTROPHIC.
PHOTO BY JEREMIE HOLLMAN

Fall 2022
T&T Ambassador Alec Gerbec on the Snake River Wyoming
 the next generation

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HANDMADE IN AMERICA
 PUT-IN
)O\ƋVKLQJ'HOLULXP
On a recent trip to British Columbia,
I hooked a steelhead. The steelhead then
became unhooked (this happens). But the
encounter nonetheless left me very excited.
So excited, in fact, that after semi-sprinting
down to the next run, I entered the river
several yards higher than I should have and
attempted to wade through rapids I was
incapable of wading. I was not successful.
Understand: I knew exactly where I was
supposed to enter the river; we’d been fishing
that run for two days. But I was so excited to
make my next cast after hooking a fish on my
last one that I didn’t think—I just marched.
Because that’s what flyfishing can do: Narrow
our focus to the point of delirium, reducing
our cognitive capacity to little more than fire
and food and the water in front of us.
I doubt I’m alone in this affliction, as many
among us have been rendered incapable
Drake
of simply tying on a fly when surrounded
by feeding trout at dusk. But as a “creative
14
type,” being both blessed and cursed with an
The
already muddled mind, it’s possible I’m more
susceptible to these symptoms than others.
I once stood in a driftboat at twilight along
Wyoming’s North Platte, surrounded by
BRYAN GREGSON
2022 VERSION 24.3
When a trout chooses to prey upon what
he thinks is weaker than himself, the
angler ought not to be blamed for it.
ˑ*(25*(:$6+,1*721%(7+81(˖˗
DARCY BACHA
EDITOR
SOMETIMES WE TOM BIE
DO DUMB THINGS.
(',725ˎ(0(5,786
GEOFF MUELLER
THE PODFATHER
You would think, after stringing-up a rod ELLIOTT ADLER
incorrectly on your first try, that you would
:(%0$67(5
slow down enough to be certain you got it COREY KRUITBOSCH
right on the second. It took me four.
These moments have many variations: &,5&8/$7,21352'8&7,21
KALIN REHM
Backing your driftboat into the water and
forgetting to put in the plugs; making your DESIGNER
first cast and having your reel fall off; driving MARK LESH
to the river with your rod still in the garage. 6(1,25&2175,%87256
Not that flyfishing has cornered the market 5\DQ%URG0RQWH%XUNH3DWULFN%XUNH%HQ&DUPLFKDHO
on turning devotees into dumbasses. A friend -RH'DKXW7RP+D]HOWRQ+LOODU\0D\EHU\3HWH
0F'RQDOG(OL]DEHWK0LOOHU*HRUJH5RJHUV
and I pulled into the parking lot of Utah’s
Snowbird ski resort one morning after an ARTISTS AND PHOTOGRAPHERS
all-night storm dropped two feet of light, dry, 'DUF\%DFKD&DVH\%UHHGV /HH&KXUFK-RVK(QJODQG
bottomless snow on the Wasatch. We were so 0DUN)U\W%U\DQ*UHJVRQ%ULDQ*URVVHQEDFKHU0DUN
+DWWHU-HUHPLH+ROOPDQ'DYLG+RUNH\+DQVL-RKQVRQ
stoked as we booted-up, grabbed our ski gear, -LP.OXJ-HII/LVNH\.DUHQ0DGDFKLN&DURO$QQ0RUULV
and headed for the tram. Fifty feet from the 7RE\1RODQ%ULDQ2Ś.HHIH1LFN3ULFH7LP5RPDQR-RKQ
truck, I looked back at my buddy and asked, 6KHUPDQ-RVK6PHOW]HU$ULDQ6WHYHQV$XVWLQ7UD\VHU
“Dude, where are your poles?” (',7$'9(57,6,1*&,5&8/$7,21
The perhaps-too-accurate analogy here is 32%R['HQYHU&2
that of a two-year-old retriever fetching a ball. info@drakemag.com
Is there a dumber mammal on Earth than :::'5$.(0$*&20
an overly exuberant pup with eyes glued to
a tennis ball? Maybe: A flyfisher facing an 68%6&5,37,21,1)250$7,21,)<28:$177+(
1(;7,668(6˖<($56˗6(1'72
insta-blitz of albies ten yards from the bow, THE DRAKE
or another seeing a two-foot feeder emerge P.O. BOX 11546, DENVER, CO 80211
within casting range, or the one who steps
extra-fat feeders as I attempted to string-up
a fly rod. I can’t recall why I was doing this at
that point in the evening, but I remember the
result: I missed a guide. So I pulled out the
line and re-strung it. But I was so charged-
up and distracted by slurping browns that I
missed a guide again. Three times I did this.
Fall 2022
to the front of a flats boat at the precise
moment a school of permit veer out of deep
water and onto the flats—eighty feet away
and incoming. Or, apparently, a still-shaking
steelheader racing down to the next run, with
the potent sensation of a double-thumper
grab still pulsing through his hands. —T.B.
The Drake (USPS 006-270)YROXPH,VVXHLV
SXEOLVKHGTXDUWHUO\E\%LH0HGLD'HQYHU&2
3HULRGLFDOVSRVWDJHSDLGLQ'HQYHU&2DQGDGGLWLRQDO
PDLOLQJRIƋFHVPOSTMASTER:6HQGDGGUHVVFKDQJHVWR
32%R['HQYHU&2
COVER: Jeff Currier with a proper Saskatchewan pike.
Photo by Austin Trayser
LEAVE THE CROWDS

outcastboats.com | 844.243.2473
Drake
1,000 WORDS

16
The

Fall 2022
 The
17
Drake

AUTUMN IN MINNESOTA.
PHOTO BY HANSI JOHNSON.

Fall 2022
 THE BEST FEELING IN
THE WORLD, N0 MATTER
WHERE YOU ARE.

Y FI S
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IT’S THE ANTICIPATION FOR WHAT THE DAY WILL BRING. IT’S THAT MOMENT WHEN YOU PUT ASIDE
YOUR EVERYDAY RESPONSIBILITIES AND WORRIES—WHEN YOU TUNE OUT THE WORLD, TUNE INTO
THE FISH—AND ENJOY YOUR PASSION. LET US MAKE YOUR ESCAPE A REALITY.
WHO’S READY TO FISH?
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RISES LETTERS FROM THE FAITHFUL
WHY WE HATE LATIN BUG NAMES
As a self-professed bug nerd, it physically
pained me to see BAETIS spelled wrong
in your Summer issue. While not a life-
impacting concern, it was hard to see
an article that claimed such reverence
for a specific hatch, only to see BAETIS
spelled incorrectly on both the contents
page and the heading of the story itself.
Shame! But thanks for producing an
otherwise great magazine! I’ll now return
to cranking out size 20 baetis cripples for
my beloved Silver Creek. Go Beavs!
Scott Rogers, Northeast Oregon
Ed’s note: Beat it, nerd! Know why insects
are given Latin names? Because Latin is a
“dead language.” So let it die already! Not
counting Joan Baez, “bael” is the only other
word in the English language that starts
with “bae.” (Bael: either a fruit from India,
or the first king of hell.) But yes, Go Baevs!
WAIT, IT GETS WORSE...
While reading “Hex-Mania” in the Summer
issue, I found a mistake on page 95, line
16. It reads: “hoodies and baklavas are
standard attire.” I’m pretty sure the correct
word is “balaclavas.”
Nevertheless, I hope a few
people take that advice. I’ll
be really disappointed
if I make it up to
Grayling and don’t
see Mediterranean
desserts on at least
a few heads.
Cole Glover, Dayton, OH
REPPIN IN THE WOLVERINE STATE
I just returned from my in-laws’ lake
cottage in the middle-west, where I
spotted a Drake sticker on a 4-Runner with
Michigan tags. Thanks for doing what you
do. Between your mag and Scoop Casimiro
(Steve Casimiro, editor/publisher of
Adventure Journal), print media still has a
solid foothold in the outdoor world.
Michael Israelson, Eldorado Springs, CO
SADPOD
Don’t normally shed a tear on the way to
work. The latest Drake podcast was one
of the best. Thanks for that.
Sean Cooleen, Bowling Green, KY
THE NOTORIOUS SMALLMOUTH
Loved the “Biggie Smalls” article by Jim
Lampros and Kendrick Chittock (Winter
’21-’22). Both are good friends who I’ve
known since they were a lot younger.
Migratory smallmouth are interesting.
Jerry Darkes, Strongsville, OH
DRAMAPOD
I was in the car on Saturday and heard
the podcast with the Glengarry piece
(“Glengarry Glen Mykiss” Fall ’21). I
thought the dramatization was awesome.
Scott Ferguson, San Francisco, CA
FAN OF CUTTHROAT RECOVERY
Please thank Elizabeth Miller for her
wonderful story on returning Rio Grande
Cutts to Sand Creek, Colo. (“Return of
the Natives” Summer ’22). It reminded
me of my aunt’s story about her father,
Ralph Shellabarger. He was the first
superintendent for the national forest
there, stocking trout fingerlings (that I
assume were a cutthroat species) in the
early 1900s in creeks north of the dunes.
They would walk with horses that were
carrying them in milk cans. The jostling
of the water helped aerate the fish. This
method might be less strenuous that
backpacking them in plastic bags!
George Paine, Reston, VA
MORE CASH FOR CONSERVATION
The Drake subscription you recently
donated fundraised $1,100 this week
for the Driftless Flyathlon! That’s money
going toward coldwater conservation
projects in Iowa. Thank you!
Ryan Rahmiller, Charles City, IA
MIRACLE ON 36TH STREET
It’s nothing short of a miracle that a first-
rate print magazine like The Drake can
endure in the twilight (it seems to me) of
American literacy.
Parker Bauer, Ocala, FL
THOSE POOR CUBICLE DWELLERS
I love skiing and flyfishing and was sad
when Powder mag ended. The Drake is my
favorite. For those of us stuck in cubes,
not lucky enough to live in mountain
towns, your mag is from heaven.
Jay Rena, via Facebok
Fall 2022
 SCUDDLEBUTT RUMOR, HUMOR, NEWS, AND REVIEWS

Conference Realignment
,IDOORZHGWRUHORFDWHDQ\WZRƋVKHULHVLQWKHFRXQWU\

The big news this fall in college football is that schools UCLA
and USC will move from the West’s Pac-12 Conference to
the Midwest’s Big Ten Conference in 2023. This followed the
announcement last fall that Texas and Oklahoma would move
from the Big 12 Conference to the Southeastern Conference
in 2025. This got us thinking: What if we could steal any two
fisheries from states within each of the “Power Five” college
football conferences? Here are a few options we found. —TB

MORE THAN STEELHEAD

ON OREGON’S DESCHUTES.

FAT SMALLMOUTH FROM

LAKE MILLE LACS, MINN.

3$&ˎ BIG TEN

SIX STATES: Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona, Utah,
Colorado. (Twelve schools).
FISHERIES WE’D STEAL:
Oregon’s Deschutes River. Steelhead and trout, occasionally
some salmon, while camping, rafting, and fishing in a T-shirt.
ELEVEN STATES: Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Indiana,
Ohio, Illinois, Nebraska, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Maryland, New
Jersey (fourteen schools—hockey and lacrosse don’t count).
FISHERIES WE’D STEAL:
Michigan’s Manistee, Pere Marquette, Au Sable, Jordan,

Utah’s Green River. One of the West’s finest, troutiest tailwaters.
Wildcards: California Delta for stripers, Truckee and Kern for
trout, Castaic Lake and Lake Casitas for largemouth; Colorado’s
Colorado (with the Roaring Fork); Washington’s Yakima River.
*Reserve right to alter selections should Montana Grizzlies or
Montana State Bobcats ever join the Pac-12 (now plausible).
Drake
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: BRIAN O’KEEFE, TOM HAZELTON, HANSI JOHNSON, TIM ROMANO
Fox, Boardman, Black (and White) rivers for trout.
Minnesota’s Lake Mille Lacs, Wisconsin’s Sturgeon Bay,
Ohio’s Lake Erie, Michigan’s Huron River for smallmouth.
Wildcards: Driftless Area, Boundary Waters, all muskie water,
rest of the Great Lakes, Raritan Bay stripers (thanks, Rutgers!).
*If deemed an unfair trade for UCLA/USC... B1G® drew First Blood.

BIG TEN TAILWATERS MIGHT

HAVE A FEW LESS BOATS
7+$13$&ˎ7$,/:$7(56
22
The

87$+Ś6%(ˎUTEˎ,)8/
GREEN RIVER TAILWATER.

Fall 2022
 BIG 12
FIVE STATES: Texas, Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma, West Virginia
(ten schools; four from Texas).
FISHERIES WE’D STEAL:
Texas Coast for redfish near Port O’Connor/Matagorda Bay/
Port Aransas/Rockport/Laguna Madre. And for monster jack
crevalle wherever you can find them. (State record: 50 pounds.)
Oklahoma’s Lower Mountain Fork, West Virginia’s
Cranberry River (backcountry section) for trout.
Wildcards: Texas’ Guadalupe River (bass & trout); Kansas’
Flint Hills NWR (bass & crappie); Iowa’s Coldwater Creek (’bows
& browns); West Virginia’s Seneca Creek (’bows & brookies).
6287+($67(51&21)(5(1&(˖6(&˗
ELEVEN STATES: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia,
Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, South Carolina,
Tennessee, and Texas (fourteen schools; one from Texas).
FISHERIES WE’D STEAL:
Louisiana’s redfishing. LSU may be up in Baton Rouge, but
we’re still swiping all the redfishing south of New Orleans.
Arkansas’ White River. Best big-brown fishery in the US?
Double-articulated streamer-tying taught in grade school here.
Wildcards: Buffalo River, Ark.; Dale Hollow and Pickwick
lakes, Tenn., for smallmouth; Alabama and Mississippi
coastlines for redfish; all of Georgia’s largemouth fishing.

SEC GETS SOONERS FOOTBALL.

WE GET THE BAYOU. DONE DEAL.
ABOVE LEFT: MARK HATTER; TOP RIGHT: WILL GRAHAM; BOTTOM RIGHT: DAVE SKOK

THIS FISH IS NOT A GIANT

TREVALLY. BUT IT’S CLOSE.

$7/$17,&&2$67&21)(5(1&(˖$&&˗ JUST EAT IT ALREADY!

TEN STATES: Massachusetts, North Carolina, South Carolina,
The
Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Indiana, Pennsylvania, New York,
23
Virginia (fifteen schools; none from Texas).
Drake

FISHERIES WE’D STEAL:

North Carolina’s Outer Banks for false albacore (Oregon
Inlet, Barden Inlet, Harkers Island, Shackleford Banks, etc.).
Florida’s tarpon fishery. The SEC may have University of
Florida, but they can keep its landlocked Gainesville location.
We’ll take what Miami and Florida State have to offer: tarpon
fishing from the Keys to Apalachee Bay.
Wildcards: Massachusetts coast for stripers, and its Deerfield
River for trout; Pennsylvania’s Penns, Kettle, and Spruce creeks;
Georgia’s Chattahoochee; Virginia’s Mossy Creek; New York’s
Ausable, Delaware, and Beaverkill; Kentucky’s Cumberland
River; North Carolina’s French Broad and Davidson rivers.
Fall 2022
 SCUDDLEBUTT
Carp Reclamation Project
Protecting Denver’s South Platte River ǫȂȀDzǵǵǻDzǬǮ
September 13th was a great day for a long-suffering stretch
of Colorado’s South Platte River. After a two-year battle
with Colorado’s Water Quality Control Commission, a group
of stakeholders including Colorado and Denver TU groups
convinced the commission to reverse a 2020 ruling that had
weakened protections for the “Segment 15” portion of the
Platte, as well as the lower section of Clear Creek where the two
meet. This area is a favorite of Denver’s obsessed carp-on-the-
fly community, plus a growing number of smallie chasers. The
unanimous approval by the commissioners gives a nice boost
to one of Denver’s fishiest but historically abused sections.
Segment 15 begins just north of Denver, nearly 250 miles
from the river’s headwaters south of Breckenridge, and flows
northeast toward Nebraska for 26 miles. The section used to
experience extremely low oxygen levels during the summer
months until a series of rocky drops were constructed in the
1990s to increase aeration. It now has a high fish-per-mile
Drake
count despite spending decades as a sacrificial lamb for the city,
receiving (purposely or accidentally) various effluents from
24
the Suncor crude-oil refinery, the City of Denver’s wastewater
The
treatment facility, and—via Clear Creek—the Coors brewing
plant in Golden.
At the 2020 hearing where the protections were originally
removed, one commissioner expressed his circa 1970s view that
higher levels of water-quality protection were never intended
for urban rivers like the Denver South Platte. These protections,
he asserted, were reserved for “pristine mountain waters”
elsewhere in the state. One of the flaws with this argument,
obviously, is that “pristine mountain waters” can sometimes be
difficult or expensive to access for residents of metro Denver.
As is often the case with convoluted water law, the nuance
Fall 2022
of interpretation
is complex. Thus,
attorneys were soon
involved. “The general
rule under water-quality
laws is that the quality
cannot be degraded
unless there are
compelling reasons to
do so, as shown through
a public process,” said
Mely Whiting, legal
counsel for Trout
Unlimited’s Colorado
Water Project.
If the water quality in
a particular river section
FIGHTING A GOLDEN
GHOST ON SEGMENT 15. is deemed too poor to
be preserved beyond
minimum levels, then
protections can legally be lowered to meet those levels—like
dropping full coverage on an old car. But sometimes old cars
are refurbished. This is what happened to the South Platte.
Protections were lowered, but the water quality on Segment
15 had actually improved, meaning it earned—and was finally
granted—the higher, anti-degradation protection it deserved.
Then why were protections ever rolled back to begin with?
According to Whiting, the commission simply ignored its own
rules, designating portions of the South Platte downstream
of Denver as “use protected”—a designation that “allows
dischargers to degrade water quality that is currently above the
floor set by minimum standards.”
The issue of improving urban water-quality, whether for
drinking or swimming or fishing, is clearly one that many states
and cities around the country have faced, and will continue to
face. In nearly all of these cases, the fundamental question is
this: Should a city, state, municipality, or government agency
be able to abandon a river or section of river that has been
historically abused, giving effluent dischargers a green light
to put even more pollutants in the water? Should fishing,
paddling, and other river-based recreation opportunities be
ignored or disregarded just because the river happens to flow
through an urban environment?
“The Water Quality Control Commission’s decision highlights
that no river is beyond repair,” said Josh Kuhn, water campaign
manager for Conservation Colorado. “These protections
recognize decades of work to restore water quality on the South
Platte and Clear Creek from impacts of industrial pollution,
and it’s an important step toward ensuring all of Colorado’s
communities have equitable access to clean water.”
The decision in Denver to downgrade protections should
never have happened in the first place. But the process to make
WILL RICE
it right, while complex, slow, and sometimes expensive, can
perhaps serve as a blueprint for anglers in other cities who care
about water-quality issues on rivers close to their home.
 Imagine if someone put the
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Deleting Derelicts
Ocean Aid 360’s Ghost Trap Rodeo ǫȂdzǸǮǭǪDZǾǽ
The last week in July can be one of the worst weeks to live in
the Keys, as the two-day “mini lobster-season” draws anyone
with a boat looking to pillage the tropical spiny lobster, endemic
to the tropical watershed. This free-for-all harvest is notorious
for arrests, injuries, and good old-fashioned Florida stupidity.
While the event gives a boost to the Keys’ economy, the
resource usually suffers.
To combat the craziness, photographer and flyfishing traveler
Brian O’Keefe flew from Idaho in July to participate in Ocean
Drake
Aid 360 and Eleven Angling’s Ghost Trap Rodeo (GTR). The
event involves a grassroots group of locals, anglers, and captains
26
that set out on boats to collect “derelict ghost traps”—as the
The
Florida Wildlife Commission (FWC) has deemed them. “It’s
actually very fun to do,” O’Keefe told me, “being out on the
water with a captain or commercial fisherman, you learn a lot.”
The idea behind the GTR, funded in part by the National Fish
and Wildlife Foundation, is for volunteers to remove traps that
are left for dead. Traps that are moved, cut loose, or shift from
their original position are not only deadly to the marine life
they entrap, but to larger species of fish, turtles, and porpoises.
A trap can be defined as derelict if it stays in the water during
a closed season, or if it is in the water during an open season
without a buoy, adjacent line, or proper licensing. These traps
Fall 2022
TAKES A BIG TRAILER
TO HAUL 625 TRAPS.
can only be moved or tampered with when there’s an organized
out-of-season hunt for them. This is vital, as oftentimes an
abandoned trap can do its job too well, taking in sea species it
shouldn’t and greatly diminishing marine life in a given area
by capturing and killing organisms that should be alive. To the
naked eye, ghost traps can often be camouflaged on the ocean
floor, but once uncovered, they typically reveal a medley of
critters inside.
As destructive as leaving ghost traps is to marine life, it’s a
relatively common practice among commercial lobster, stone
crab, and blue crab fishermen. Not that they’re left behind on
purpose; traps springing loose from their buoys is simply an
unfortunate reality of commercial fishing, something that is
often unavoidable. Collecting these traps is just one way to
combat the rubble of the profession and help rewild some of the
pristine water, since traps that are cut free—either from storms
or boat propellers—can last in the ocean for years, becoming
more hazardous as time goes on.
Out-of-season or abandoned traps offer a palpable, tangible
target for volunteers—kind of like fishing. Traps are often
washed up against mangroves and can be found anywhere
between three to eighty feet of water. The GTR offers people
who care about their resources a chance to get their hands dirty
while making a noticeable difference. “It’s structured so simply
that anyone off the street can sign up, do a good deed, and then
go on with their lives,” said O’Keefe, who told me there were
625 traps taken to the dump after this year’s event.
While gathering a group of volunteers to collect abandoned
crab traps is merely a drop in Florida’s large bucket of water-
quality issues, the organized cleanup also helps bring awareness
to many other issues that plague the waters of coastal Florida
%5,$12Ś.(()(˖˗
towns. The Keys are not the only target for the GTR, as the
event has grown to cover a good portion of Florida’s water.
As the bad practices of humans continue catching up to us,
community cleanups of our oceans, estuaries, rivers, and lakes
help inspire a variety of solutions on a local level.
 SCUDDLEBUTT
Sargassum Surplus
The Yucatan’s other weed problem ǫȂȃǪǬDZǶǪǽǽDZǮȀǼ
The tarpon’s fins scissored back and forth as it searched
for baitfish, and as I watched from the deck of a panga, sixty
feet away. It was working the outside edge of a miles-long
smear of brown-gold “macro-algae”—a form of seaweed called
“sargassum.” I’d first noticed the field of free-floating weed from
the air, as we flew to Belize’s Ambergris Caye. From far above,
it looked like blobs in a lava lamp. Up close, it was more like an
oil-slick made from side-salad, piled chest-high on the beaches.
Sargassum is not a new occurrence; Columbus recorded it
in his first voyage in 1492, when he crossed through the great
Mid-Atlantic “Sargasso Sea,” which modern scientists have
Drake
compared to a floating rainforest. The algae suspends itself on
the surface with natural, berry-sized gas chambers, allowing it
28 to soak in both the sun’s rays and the nutrient-rich waters of
the ocean. Far out to sea, it serves as a nursery for baby pelagic
The
fish, attracting and sheltering them, and it is widely viewed as a
good thing. It is even edible if prepared properly. What is new is
its presence in such large swaths in the Western Caribbean and,
increasingly, in the Gulf of Mexico. For residents and visiting
anglers, it is becoming a bad thing.
Starting in 2011, the great sargassum patch that was
previously confined by ocean currents to the Mid Atlantic,
suddenly began growing. Over the course of the next decade, as
NASA tracked it with satellite imagery, the “patch” became more
of a belt, eventually extending from the West African coast of
Fall 2022
NOT FUN TO PULL A
TARPON FLY THROUGH.
Sierra Leone all the way to the shores of the Yucatan Peninsula.
By 2019, the growth had so exceeded historic norms that
researchers coined the term “Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt,” in
a peer-reviewed article published in Science.
For locals, sargassum is mostly a smelly annoyance. The
seaweed itself doesn’t stink, but it tends to capture small fish,
crustaceans, and other critters, which then get ensnarled in
the weed and die, filling the air with an aroma of rotting fish.
The other problem, at least along the Yucatan, is that there is
just too much of it. By 2022, some resort owners were renting
backhoes to cart away the sand-dune sized hills of seaweed
slowly decomposing on the beaches.
This material has some useful purposes, like landfill to help
raise home sites, or compost after being leeched of salt. Some
companies are exploring applications as diverse as seaweed
salad or face-lotion. Even for fishermen the seaweed can be a
mixed blessing. Tarpon seem to love it, but near-shore flats
fishing is all but impossible.
My Belizean guide, Neison Graham, explained what we were
seeing, as the tarpon waved its fins in the air: “They love this red
water,” he said, gesturing to the tannin-stained area extending
a few dozen yards offshore. I could see the source of the color—
tiny bits of sargassum, shredded by wave action, stained the
water like fall leaves in a trout stream. “It reminds them of their
=$&+0$77+(:6˖˗
nursery zones up in the mangroves,” he figured. “They follow it
in from off-shore.”
Florida anglers have another theory—that the decomposing
weed lowers dissolved-oxygen levels, stressing the smaller
baitfish that are a tarpon’s primary food source. And because
tarpon themselves can breathe air, they have the advantage
over their suffocating prey. Consequently, the easiest way to
find tarpon in these seaweed-stained waters is to watch for
their backs when they roll, which they do frequently.
GUARANTEED TO MAKE YOUR HEART SKIP A BEAT
“Go ahead and cast,” Neison said, positioning me for an easy
downwind shot. I sent my white toad to the hard edge of the
sargassum mat, then twitched in my retrieve. At twenty feet off
the prow, a respectable thirty-pounder swatted the fly. When I
promptly farmed the hookset for at least the third time, Neison
gave me an exasperated look and told me to cast again.
Exactly why the Sargasso Sea has evolved into the Great
Atlantic Sargassum Belt is still being debated, but most
evidence points to climate change. Paradoxically, sargassum
actually grows best in cooler water, but changing ocean
currents—likely driven by overall global temperature rises—
have increased upwellings of cold, nutrient-rich water from
the depths of sargassum’s Mid-Atlantic nursery zone.
The other big factor is deforestation. Most of the surface
runoff that reaches the sargassum nursery zone comes from
the Amazon and the West African coast. In both places, large
swaths of forests have been replaced by farmland, increasing
the runoff of both soil and agricultural fertilizer, thus
creating a massive sea-based sargassum factory.
A larger tarpon nailed my fly a few minutes later, ripping
line through my fingers before jumping and throwing the
hook. The school soon scattered, no doubt to the relief of
the few remaining suffocating baitfish. Our tarpon-jumping
window was closed, but the fish will be there again—as will
the sargassum.
order at drakemag.com
 SCUDDLEBUTT
Master Mentor
5RZHOO*XHYDUUDDQGWKH$ODEDPD0D\ƌ\3URMHFW
ǫȂdzǸDZǷǪǰǻDzǬǸǵǪ
Out of an August fog came a convoy of five rafts, one
kayak, and one stand-up-paddleboard, all of them floating the
Chattahoochee River along the Alabama-Georgia line. Rowing
the raft I sat in was Rowell Guevarra, a former Army Ranger
instructor at Fort Benning, Ga., (part of the base is in Alabama),
who now volunteers as lead mentor for the Auburn, Ala., Mayfly
Project, a national non-profit using flyfishing “as a catalyst to
mentor and support children in foster care.”
The goal of the Auburn Mayfly Project is to mentor ten children
Drake
by the end of 2022. Guevarra has more than a dozen other
mentors on his team, and some were rowing the three foster
30
children who were the focus of this trip. He was meticulous in
The
his planning, right down to the PowerPoint presentation. “We’ll
be fishing for anything that swims,” Guevarra told me the night
before. “But this fishery is known for its shoal bass.”
Guevarra grew up spearfishing in Southern California and
was so close to the LA riots following the 1992 Rodney King
verdict that he could see the palm trees burning from his
Filipino parents’ balcony. The man has a certain swagger, and
his team is devoted to Guevarra’s brand of organic magic, as
team members have worked to assist other nonprofits using
flyfishing as an antidote for trauma, including Casting for
Recovery, which helps women recovering from breast cancer;
Fall 2022
ROWELL GUEVARRA AND
A NATIVE SHOAL BASS.
and Project Healing Waters, which assists disabled military
personnel, both active duty and veteran.
Guevarra is an excellent teacher, capable of subtly mitigating
against overly high expectations. He can laugh at himself,
and does so even when he could be laughing at you. There
were strong suggestions of Boogle Bug poppers on our boat,
but we swung for the fences with meaty streamers instead.
We all caught fish; even and most importantly, the kids. As
I interviewed Guevarra, kids squealing with angler-joy often
interrupted our discussion, as did his frequent exclamations of,
“Oh, there was one.”
Guevarra also volunteers with the OARS Foundation, a group
that works with past and present military personnel, as well as
first responders. “Using flyfishing to help reduce trauma isn’t
exclusively for veterans,” Guevarra says. “First responders also
experience things that nobody should have to go through.”
After building trust and familiarity with one of the OARS
participants struggling with alcoholism, Guevarra asked him
whether Veteran Affairs was aware of his needs. He eventually
convinced the man to go to the VA for help. In other words,
'$9,'+25.(<˖/˗-2(78&.(5
Guevarra isn’t just a fishing guide or a mentor—he can become
a life coach when necessary.
Jess and Laura Westbrook founded the Mayfly Project in
Arkansas in 2015. It went national the following year, when
the Westbrooks partnered with Kaitlyn Barnhart, a mental-
health professional in northern Idaho who’d been taking foster
children flyfishing for a decade. While Mayfly Project national
has much of the planning and supply needs figured out, they
 GUEVARRA, GIVING HIS
CREW SOME INSTRUCTION
AND ENCOURAGEMENT.

depend on lead mentors like Guevarra

to run the nearly 70 “projects” scattered
across the country. “We all love Rowell,”
says Barnhart. “He brings such positive
energy and patience, and he exemplifies
what flyfishing can do for those who
need to decompress. We couldn’t ask
for a better person to care for the kids
in our first Alabama program.”
The Auburn-based project is going so
well that Guevarra hopes to help set up
others in Huntsville and Birmingham.
Each project involves a standard
curriculum that guides the children
through five phases, from “egg stage”
to “big catch” phase, learning subjects
along the way like bugs, fly-tying,
knots, and conservation.
Guevarra retired from the Army in
2016 as a Senior Operations non-
commissioned officer (NCO) with
the Ranger Training Brigade at Fort
Benning. He is rightfully proud of his
military service, but this mentor for
the Mayfly project has an antidote for
what ails another significant segment
of society—fishing for native Alabama FlyFishingInsurance.com
redeye bass and shoal bass.
Insurance for Guides, Outfitters, Lodges, Fly Shops, Manufacturers & Nonprofits
 SCUDDLEBUTT
Casting Championships
The world’s best gather in Norway ǫȂȃǪǬǴȀǸDZǵ
“Casters! Are you ready?” A man called from a rocky
outcropping. I stood twenty feet away, balanced on the edge of a
floating dock with the grip of my rod nestled in my hand.
“Not yet!” I yelled back. My coach made final preparations,
Drake
laying my thin mono shooting line on the dock and cinching
down the blood knot connecting it to the reel. I felt my heart
32 beating and the breeze on my back. Two rows of buoys extended
from the dock across the choppy Norwegian lake. I’d trained for
The
months, spent weeks testing tackle, and traveled halfway around
the world—all in preparation for the next four minutes.
“Casters, begin! Time is running!” the man declared. I took a
deep breath and roll-casted my long, red shooting head to lay it
out straight. Then I lifted it from the water and began to false
cast, feeling the weight of the line as I hauled. Like I’d practiced,
I threw a needle-sharp backcast and turned my neck to watch
the loop unfurl. Then I sent it high. The wind carried my loop
down the lane as the chartreuse mono shot through my guides.
Eventually, the yarn at the end of my line plopped onto the
Fall 2022
LONG CASTS FEEL
BETTER WITH BEER.
water. A judge rowed
over in a cataraft to
mark the distance.
“That cast
made your round,”
my coach said.
It measured 45
meters—nearly
150 feet. For me, it
was indeed great.
But when all the
competitors had
finished at the Sixth World Championships of Fly Casting, my
distance still left me deep in the middle of the pack. The longest
single-handed cast that day was an astonishing 187 feet—about
four yards shy of an NHL Hockey rink.
Ninety casters from twelve countries converged on a central
Norwegian ski lodge at the base of a towering mountain. We
competed in six casting events: one accuracy, two spey, and
three overhead-distance. I carried the American flag during
opening ceremonies, and at the end of each day, a victorious
caster stood at the top of the podium as their country’s anthem
played. We Americans fared well, coming in second to Norway
in total medal count but taking the most golds. We dominated
the accuracy event, winning every division, and I was thrilled
just to have made the final. Maxine McCormick, the reigning
women’s champion, again broke records, shooting a perfect
score in accuracy—the first time it has ever been done at a
world championship in any division, men’s or women’s.
Throughout the tournament, it felt like I never stopped
hand-tying leaders, trimming flies to regulation, wrapping
fresh grip tape over cork handles, shuttling rods, reels, and
lines from hotel to dock, and, of course, casting. At the end I
recalled the question many of my friends had asked me during
the months leading up to the event, when I passed on trips to
the mountains in favor of time casting at the pond: What does
tournament casting have to do with flyfishing?
I’m still not exactly sure. But once the last medal was
awarded and the local beer started to pour (“Aass Pilsner”), the
chatter about rods, lines, and casting strokes turned to talk of
Scandinavia’s just-ending salmon season, the Pacific’s upcoming
steelhead runs, and the brown trout that continually rose in
the lake as we competed. Like fly tyers who hunch over vises all
winter; entomologists who memorize Latin names of mayflies;
or collectors that meticulously curate reference libraries of
vintage bamboo, casters seek to extend the limits of the loop.
The beauty of a fly line sailing through the air is what drew
=$&.:2+/˖˗
many of us to this sport for the first time. Some of us just can’t
seem to stop chasing the singular sensation of a perfect loop
coming off the tip of our rod.
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 SCUDDLEBUTT
Questionable Criticism
Why is the ASA still defending lead weights? ǫȂǽǸǶǫDzǮ
In fall of 1993, then-President Bill Clinton signed Executive
Order 12866, requiring all Federal regulatory agencies to
publish a list of anticipated rulemaking actions for the
upcoming twelve-month period. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service
(USFWS) is such an agency, and its rulemaking process requires
four-steps: Publishing a proposed rule in the Federal Register;
Inviting public comment; Considering the public comments
received; Publishing a final rule in the Federal Register.
On Sept. 15, USFWS published its final rule on “2022-2023
Station-Specific Hunting and Sport Fishing,” outlining planned
changes at eighteen national wildlife refuges in thirteen states.
Later that day, the American Sportfishing Association (ASA)
shared how “deeply disappointed” it was in USFWS’s “final rule
Drake
announcing the prohibition of lead fishing tackle on certain
National Wildlife Refuges that are being opened to fishing.” (It
34 was ASA’s third statement on the rule, following similar releases
on June 9 and July 11. All three shared similar messaging.)
The
The first problem with ASA’s assertion is that it’s false. None
of the eighteen National Wildlife Refuges included in USFWS’s
final rule are “being opened to fishing.” Of the 567 National
Wildlife Refuges in the US, this rule affects tackle on two of
them, both of which were already open to fishing: Patoka River,
in Indiana; and Erie, in Pennsylvania. The new rule simply
expands fishing opportunities within those refuges, adding four
miles of bank access along Dead and Muddy creeks at Erie, and
seventy-four acres of access at Patoka River, some of which
includes creeks and ponds.
Fall 2022
PATOKA RIVER NATIONAL
WILDLIFE REFUGE, IN
SOUTHWEST INDIANA.
Draft reviews of the plans for both refuges were open to
public comment for more than two months, and the USFWS
received a dozen comments. None came from the ASA.
What’s curious about ASA’s public statements on lead is that,
while the words “ban” and “prohibit” are sprinkled throughout,
nowhere do they mention that this rule won’t take effect for
another four years—in fall of 2026. Until then, it’s voluntary.
This reliance on dubious messaging to its audience is part of
what makes the association’s stance in this matter all the more
troubling. Its statement on June 9 read in part: “... the proposed
rule would arbitrarily ban lead fishing tackle in several refuges
based on unfounded and overgeneralized assumptions.”
Perhaps the ASA has its own definition of “arbitrarily.” From
page eight of USFWS’s rule: “The best available science, analyzed as
part of this proposed rulemaking, indicates that lead ammunition and
tackle may have negative impacts on both wildlife and human health.”
One definition of arbitrarily is “without cause.” The USFWS
has plenty of cause for implementing a ban on lead, with no
shortage of available science to back its position. An abundance
of research on the dangers of lead poisoning has been compiled
over the years by some of the nation’s most highly respected
institutions. A 2019 study published in the National Library
of Medicine found that more than thirty bird species have
ingested lead fishing tackle. Findings from a 2017 study at
Oklahoma State University titled “Impacts of Lead Ammunition
and Sinkers on Wildlife” concluded that nearly 4,000 tons of
BRENT WALTERMIRE
lead sinkers are purchased in the US each year; that up to one
hundred lead sinkers per square yard exist along heavily fished
shorelines; and that ninety percent of the mortality of a swan
population in Britain was due to lead poisoning from tackle.
Tufts University in Massachusetts has been studying the
 scientificanglers.com

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SCUDDLEBUTT
effects of lead poisoning in wildlife for more than three decades,
and their research has shown that, in the US, more than fifty
percent of loons, twenty-five percent of bald eagles, and more
than thirty percent of swans die from lead poisoning. Many of
the loon and eagle deaths occurred after the birds ate a fish that
had itself died from ingesting lead.
And, of course, lead is also highly toxic to humans. According
to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, in thirty-
eight cases reported to US poison-control centers in 2016,
the item ingested was specifically recorded as “lead fishing
tackle.” Twenty-eight of these cases involved children under
six. According to the report: “It is highly likely that the poison-
control center numbers underestimate the total number of
children exposed to lead via this route.”
Also from ASA’s June statement: “This proposal provides no
evidence that lead fishing tackle is harming any specific wildlife
populations in the proposed areas.” This is true; it does not.
Because fishing has never been allowed in the proposed areas,
no evidence could have been provided. It’s like arguing to build a
new road without stop signs or speed limits because “there’s no
evidence that anyone has ever crashed on it.”
ASA’s position could be seen simply as a trade association
looking out for the manufacturers it represents. Problem there
is, most major manufacturers of lead weights, including South
Bend, Water Gremlin, and Eagle Claw—all of which count
Walmart among their retailers—already make non-lead weights.
ASA’s view also discounts the larger benefits of increasing
angling opportunities overall. And where the final rule adds new

By keeping Colorado’s rivers flowing, we provide fish:

• Clean, cold water
• Healthy and diverse habitat
• River connectivity to migrate & spawn
• Stable food supply

JUST ADD WATER

www.ColoradoWaterTrust.org
 waters to fish, like at Erie NWR, the association is decrying the
USFWS for banning a use that never existed in the first place.
“The entire foundation of USFWS should be based on data
and science,” reads a line from ASA’s June statement. I agree,
but it also needs to be based on the law, and the Act that grants
the Department of Interior its statutory authority over refuges
is guided by the doctrine of compatibility, which permits only
those uses on a refuge that are “compatible with the purposes of
the refuge and Refuge System mission.”
Some may wonder why a National Wildlife “Refuge” allows
hunting or fishing at all. Here’s why: One of USFWS’s mandates
is to “maintain the environmental health of the Refuge System
for the benefit of present and future generations of Americans.”
Simply put, certain species—deer or elk, for example—can
outgrow or outmow the habitat provided. Thus, limited, tightly
regulated hunting results in a healthier population overall.
As for fishing, some of our country’s finest trout water just
happens to flow through a wildlife refuge. Restrictive seasons
and other regulations protect these populations accordingly.
From the ASA: “Anglers should have the option of choosing
non-lead tackle alternatives but it is important to recognize that
these alternatives generally come with the tradeoff of higher
cost or poorer performance.” This is true of the alternatives,
but I ask the American Sportfishing Association: What is the
“tradeoff” of a dozen dead birds for a few hundred sinkers sold?
ARAPAHOE NATIONAL Which is the “higher cost”: anglers using existing alternatives to
WILDLIFE REFUGE, IN
NORTHERN COLORADO. lead (steel, tin, tungsten, bismuth, brass) or a child getting lead-
poisoning after swallowing some split-shot?
 SCUDDLEBUTT

ASK TRASK
Q: Dear Trask,
I’m wanting to learn how to be
a better fishing dog, because
my captor gets mad whenever
I jump into what is obviously a
great swimming hole. Do you
have any advice on how I can
just sit there and watch him
fish the hole first, and then go

MARK FRYT
swimming? I’m finding this skill
very difficult to master. “OH, WERE YOU GONNA
—Finn, Los Gatos, CA FISH THIS? MY BAD.”

A: Dear Finn,
DARCY BACHA

Sure, I could tell you. But I won’t. Because

all of our captors secretly want us to hop in
that hole, thus providing them a convenient
excuse for why they didn’t catch the fish
that they weren’t going to catch anyway.
Look, we’ve all been the “good dog” that sat
obediently on the bank watching sexy, easily
retrievable sticks float by as the “angler”—too
lazy to change flies—prepares to delicately
present a Chernobyl to a midge-sipping trout.
And what happens? He makes nine false casts
before hooking the bushes on the other side,
forcing him to wade across our swimming
hole himself, while cussing. Just jump in.

VER BAIT ’EM

“Hunger doesn’t drive modern anglers. It’s the connection. No other blood sport has it. The
hunter isn’t physically connected to the deer, the elk, or the duck, but an angler is connected to
his prey—connected not only to the fish, but also to all that the fish is connected to.”
ˑ/$55</(9,1(,1$(66$<)25GRAY’S SPORTING JOURNAL

“It’s not an overstatement to call the Pittman-Robertson Act the foundational piece of the most
successful and significant wildlife-restoration model the world has ever seen.” 
 ˑ0,.(%87/(5&(22)7+(7(11(66((:,/'/,)()('(5$7,21
6+$5,1*7+28*+7621&21*5(660$1$1'5(:&/<'(Ś6Ŝ5(7851$&7ŝ

“This ‘put it on the credit card mentality’ is in part why we find ourselves nearly $17 trillion in debt.”
—7+(1ˎ&21*5(660$1521'(6$17,6,121:+<+(927('
$*$,167$%,//72$,'+855,&$1(6$1'<9,&7,06,11<$1'1(:-(56(<

“Dear Mr. President: I request that you issue a Major Disaster Declaration for the State of Florida as
a result of Hurricane Ian, and authorize all categories of individual and public assistance.”
—)/25,'$*29(5125521'(6$17,6216(37

Fall 2022
Greys Fin Euro Nymph Fly Combo
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Champion, this combo features a light, flexible tip action
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SCUDDLEBUTT PROPS
JIM KLUG
Clean Water Act
Oct. 18th marks the 50th anniversary
of the Clean Water Act (CWA), perhaps
the most far-sighted environmental
legislation in American history. The
CWA established the first permits for
regulating discharge of pollutants into
“waters of the U.S.” (Though which
waters fit that description has been
debated ever since.) Prior to 1972,
states had the authority over water-
quality standards, and the push for a
federal law was sparked—literally and
figuratively—by Cleveland’s Cuyahoga
River catching fire in 1969. While
much progress has been made over the
past five decades in cleaning America’s
rivers, a few recent court rulings and
some iffy legislation have shown that
persistent diligence is required. —TB
Lefty on the Lake
The legendary Lefty Kreh, who died March 14,
2018, at the age of 93, is an honored member
of three fishing halls of fame. And he is surely
the only angler to have his signature fly put on
a U.S. postage stamp (Lefty’s Deceiver, 1991).
Yet there is no official recognition for Kreh in
his birthplace of Frederick, MD. The group,
Friends of Lefty Kreh (honorary co-chairs Tom
Brokaw, Michael Keaton, and Bob Clouser), aim
to change that by erecting a bronze memorial
statue of Kreh in a corner of Culler Lake, inside
Frederick’s 58-acre Baker Park. The artist will
be Maryland-based Toby Mendez, whose
other notable works over his thirty-year career
include sculptures of Thurgood Marshall, Carl
Yastrzemski, and B.B. King. The Kreh statue will
include a sign detailing his history and many
contributions to flyfishing and society. —TB
FRIENDSOFLEFTYKREH.COM
Denver’s Golden Ghost
River North Brewery, with two
taproom locations in Denver, recently
launched the Golden Ghost IPA in
support of Denver Trout Unlimited
and the South Platte River. “I saw this
collaboration as a great way to help
support Denver’s major waterway,”
says Matt Malloy, Head Brewer at River
North. “My goal was to make an East
Coast-style IPA that was light, bright,
and juicy. It’s lighter than traditional
eastern IPAs, and the recipe used a
portion of malted and flaked oats.” In
addition to conjuring a tasty hazy IPA
for Mile High carp junkies and the
flyfishing crowd, $1 from every pint
sold is being donated to Denver Trout
Unlimited. —Will Rice
RIVERNORTHBREWERY.COM

The Shoaling
Should you find yourself near NYC this
fall, consider taking a short drive west
to Summit, N.J., and the Reeves-Reed
Arboretum. The Shoaling, an art exhibit
featuring the work of William Durkin
Jr., includes nearly forty fish sculptures
made with found items like chopsticks
or old buttons. It is a broad collection
of species, from stripers and steelhead
to tarpon, tuna, and dorado. Durkin’s
medium is often not what it appears to
be. “People get intimately involved with
my pieces because the visual requires a
full investigation,” Durkin says. “At the
right distance a fish might appear to be
a painting, but up close they are three-
dimensional sculptures, and people want
to figure out how they were made.” —TB
THEARTWORKOFWILLIAMDURKINJR.COM
Salmon Wars
Much has been written on the dangers of
open-net salmon farming, but no book
or series of reporting dives as deep as
Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins do in
this title, released earlier this year. Frantz
shared a Pulitzer at the New York Times,
where he was a reporter and editor; and
Collins worked as a prize-winning foreign
correspondent for the Chicago Tribune.
After hearing about the environmental
catastrophes of open-net salmon farming
at a public meeting in Nova Scotia, the pair
dedicated the next two years to intensively
researching and documenting not only
the unhealthy and unsustainable practices
of the industry, but the lengths to which
its proponents will go, and have gone, to
discredit and undermine its critics. —TB
SALMONWARSBOOK.COM
EMMA
2022 Muskie Ball
Wisconsin muskie guide Brad Bohen had
himself quite a spring. His wife, Natalie,
is from Ukraine. They met over Skype
in Feb. 2014, in the midst of Ukraine’s
Maiden Uprising. Their daughter, Emma,
(who, being a North American/European
hybrid, Bohen calls his “Tiger Trout”)
was born in Kaharkiv, Ukraine, in May
2015. In May 2022, the war left Natalie
and Emma trapped in Ukraine. Like any
muskie guide, Bohen has experience with
difficult extractions. He flew to Poland,
met Natalie and Emma at the border,
and eventually got Emma to Italy, where
she began 2nd grade in September. This
year’s Muskie Ball is happening Nov. 5, in
Tony, Wis. (population 117), and it will
serve as a fundraiser for Emma. —TB
#HELPEMMAKAY
 TIPPETS HOME OF THE ESSAY

Full Boat
Brothers on the water ǫȂǼǮǪǷǯǸǵǮȂ

I KNEW PATRICK had a wedding the night before, but I didn’t

know he’d be coming straight from it. His wine-stained dress-shirt
hung untucked over his pants. He had no bag; he walked up my
driveway from our mom’s car just after 5 a.m. with a five weight in
one hand, a pair of cowboy boots in the other, and a hip pack and a
pair of jeans slung like saddlebags over each shoulder.
“Jesus,” I said. “Get in.”
He woke up four hours later as I pulled into a Walmart near
our put-in on Arkansas’ White River. I am nearly six years older
than Patrick. We were always close, but looking back, which I do a
lot now, I see how that gap often placed us at different life stages.
The gap narrowed exponentially once he hit college—time
condensed faster than it expanded. When this trip took place, Patrick a nod—the nod big brothers give little brothers once a
I was 33, Patrick was 27, and we’d been fishing together often decision is made; a nod I’d given him for 27 years.
enough to justify the used Clackacraft I was towing. “No,” he said.
“Go get something you can wear in a boat, in Arkansas, in “Get in. I’m not holding here forever.”
July,” I told him. “Because that’s where you are and that’s what “Fuck,” he said, resigned to the caste chosen for him. He set
month it is.” down his rod, slipped off his tank, and leaned over to grab a
“I know what month it is.” visual on the decade-old rope, frayed and broken and pulsing
Ten minutes later he came out wearing basketball shorts and downstream. It rested four feet below on a bed of river grass that
Drake

holding a shoebox. He stopped in front of the truck, pointed to
his feet, and held up a box that said “Zapatos Excursiones.”
42
“Adventure sandals!” he screamed, although all my windows
The
may recall its former life on the bank of a little smallmouth river a
couple generations ago, before the concrete came upstream.
The anchor came back over first, then Patrick. “Boy howdy!” he

were down. He gave a double thumbs up.
“Well done,” I said. Patrick got in, eyed the cooler, and an
hour later, we were in the water, streamers rigged on the eight-
weights, and hoppers on the sixes. For three days, we addressed
issues with the boat and our abilities as boatmen. We produced
said. “Thank God for these Zapatos Excursiones, huh?” He reached
for the big fish-flask I’d tossed him.
We fished only a handful more times before Patrick relocated to
New York. By 2020, he had settled into his life there, and my boat
had settled into my garage.
BRIAN GROSSENBACHER

memories, if not fish. Someone kicked out a rusted boat plug on
a hard bank. “While I don’t own a boat,” Patrick said, “I suspect
the water should remain on the outside?”
Farther downstream, the used anchor-rope snapped at the
exact place one would have assumed it would snap had one
bothered to inspect it. Keeping us steady with the oars, I gave
While the boat didn’t move, it got plenty of use. I now had two
boys: Eamon, our oldest, and Peter, who pulled the ultimate little-
brother move by being born exactly two years later, thirty minutes
before his older brother’s second birthday party. My boys shared a
birthday, and got one joint party.
We spent hours in that boat. Peter sat on my lap and pulled

Fall 2022

at the tails of olive and yellow double deceivers I planned on
teaching him how to throw. Eamon hung over the side netting
imaginary fish. I dreamed of real rivers.
That was all my hopes were though—dreams. On July 4, 2020,
Peter died in an accident. He was eighteen months old. I was with
him and took him in my arms. The gravel road we were on ran
above a seasonal ditch. The rocks were moist when I laid down
and placed my hand on his chest. I will never leave that ditch.
As I drove away from the hospital, I called Patrick. He was
fishing the salmonfly hatch in Ennis, Montana. We’d been doing
this trip together for the past three years. I’d skipped this one.
“I just got done fishing. Why did you and Mom call me so
much?” he asked.
“Peter died.”
“What? What?” His voice shook as it trailed. “No…”
Patrick was on the next flight from Bozeman. He spent the
next five months in my home. He lived with me. For me, I think.
Trauma and grief enveloped me in a fog that didn’t burn off
once the sun got high. Sadness, anger, confusion, and paradox
are governing principles for a world that has your car and your
house but which you don’t recognize. The rearview mirror shows
one car seat. “Daddy, is that the garden where Peter is?” Eamon
asks when we pass a cemetery. Why can’t he sit back there and
talk to Pete again like he used to?
The therapists tell us that, since Eamon is so young, his
development may be largely unaffected by Peter’s death. Am I
to feel lucky that one son may be too young to remember his
brother? I cry with my brother about my son not having his.
Patrick left a few days after Christmas, not knowing what we
had just learned. On Christmas morning, my wife found out she
was pregnant. Later, when we were opening presents, Eamon
asked for “another baby named Peter.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I get it, pal. But if we have another baby, it
might be a girl.”
“I don’t want a girl; I just want a Peter.”
In August, my wife gave birth to our third son, and we named
him Conall. Seeing Conall was like seeing my friends the day
Peter died. Real love and deep suffering look the same now. “I’m
sorry for you” and “I’m happy for you” travel in gazes and hugs
and translate anyway to “I love you.”
What I now know is that life, death, and resurrection circle
each day, within each day even. Spring’s greens here in Missouri
turn to summer’s browns, then everything falls apart once the
sun starts setting earlier than I’d like. Suffering done well softens
you; life, at this point, is a tenderizer, you are the meat, and
you’re not holding the handle. After being beat on for a while,
I began to see suffering everywhere, which is right where it’s
always been. The incessant news of car wrecks or shootings, or
seeing a child in a wheelchair, stops me now. I feel my friend’s
divorces as they sit and tell me about their lives falling apart, too.
Conall is now just over a year old, and an incredible joy and
gift. He is walking and looking like his brothers. And I am happy
and sad too. Two years ago, I would have called that inconsistent.
But now I know that grace travels like a remora on the underside
of destruction. Grace is not earned, but accessed. It is moments
The
and experiences that affect your understanding of your life. But
it’s also the willingness to observe them, and the courage to trust
43
them. And trust you should because they are yours and no one
Drake
else’s. I’ve been given those, and I am thankful to have noticed
some of them. The person I was before is gone. Suffering has
broken me. On my best days, though, it makes me invincible.
I look at the boat almost daily. I dream that Conall can be with
Eamon when he needs it, like Patrick has been with me. I dream
Conall fills a seat and that I tie on something olive and yellow
and that it works and that Eamon nets his fish. If the world gifts
me with boys in each seat, I will row and be happy. But my boat
won’t be as full as I expected it to be. Maybe no boat is.
SEAN FOLEY is a writer and Assistant U.S. Attorney in Kansas City, Mo.
Fall 2022
 TIPPETS
Autumn Madness
Make the most of your fall. ǫȂǫǪǻǻȂȀǸǸǭǼ
Unlike March Madness, which elicits endless flat-
screen hoops watching, autumn madness is fueled by
a metaphoric sense of life’s end. By late September, no
matter where I live, I always get a quickening pulse.
Living now in Oregon, I am a bit separated from its
source: the Atlantic Ocean and the world’s greatest
migration of living creatures—bunker, herring, false
albacore, bluefish, and striped bass—which collect along
the coast and, sensing the shortening of days, begin
gathering together and sweeping in a gigantic movement
southward before the ocean’s great cooling.
In Maine, the migration has already begun. Bass leave
the bays, inlets, coves, and rivers, and combine by age and
size to form football-shaped hydrodynamic clouds and
begin moving. I have witnessed this in many forms and it
is both exciting and sad. Exciting to witness the feeding
frenzies necessary to fuel this occurrence. Sad, because we
know what follows—months of cold and hollowness to
Drake
44
The
Fall 2022
test our spirit until the spring renewal.
And yet, I have a fondness for autumn. I realize, now
that I am pushing fifty, how limited our vision of these
natural miracles really is. I see that we have a kindred
spirit with the fish, which only respond to stimuli we
otherwise can only guess at. It is, after all, metaphoric of
our own mortality: Each year that passes brings us closer
to a conclusion we have little control over. If I knew I
could fish for another fifty years, the sight of blitzing bass
or false albies might lack some of the poignancy that gives
it such richness.
And so, for those living on the edge of the Atlantic, I
say get out there and enjoy this moment. The best fishing
of the year is upon us, and you will need these memories
to get you through what follows.
BARRY WOODS has since returned to Maine, where he is the
Director of Electric Vehicle Innovation for ReVision Energy,
JOSH ENGLAND
 TIPPETS

Alaska since 2013, so

those are both from
my previous life in
California, driving
down dirt roads to
fish for browns and
rainbows. I look at the
flies in my rarely used
box, “Lower 48,” which
has become something
of a filing cabinet for
river memories. Did
I buy that fly for the
Owens? Or was it that
trip to the Yuba, or the
Upper Sac, or maybe
the Truckee?
I’ll inevitably
remember something
that had been buried in
the clutter of hundreds,
perhaps thousands, of
SO THAT’S WHERE MY outdoor experiences
GINK DISAPPEARED TO!
since then. There’s the
hopper I used on the

About Stuff
An angler weighs what matters ǫȂdzǮǯǯǵǾǷǭ
LIFE IS A JOURNEY through contradictory quotes. Minimalists
say memories are more important than stuff. I agree: Get rid of
the stuff. But Donald Miller wrote that if you can’t remember
it, then it’s like you never did it. And stuff can remind you of
things you might otherwise forget. So I should keep the stuff.
Reality is a mix of both keeping and tossing, a decision
often based on context. Miller wasn’t advocating for keeping
everything you’ve ever owned, he just had a friend who
wrote down all the cool things that happened in his life, so
he wouldn’t forget them. Nor do minimalists believe in a
possession-less life, they just feel an increased value in their
stuff that comes with having less of it.
Drake
White River in Arkansas when I was caravanning across the
U.S. with my brother. I kept setting the hook before the fish
would close its mouth. It’s funny now, though at the time I
was pissed.
Flies are one thing; Dad’s baseball glove is another. Useless
except for reminding me that he’s been dead for more than
a decade. During brutally cold and rainy spring little-league
games he’d be out there filming with his shoulder-mounted VHS
camera encased in plastic and duct tape. Dad Engineering. I
don’t remember ever watching much footage. Maybe he just did
it to keep him from yelling or getting too nervous.
There are his tools and relics from the garage, and of course,
pictures. Do I just want to keep things because they were his?
Do I need that sweet retro Hawaiian shirt he wore when he was
in college? How did he even still have it?
I wasn’t wrestling with feelings of “finality” or “acceptance,”

My childhood home in Klawock, Alaska, is being sold. So I
spent the weekend wading through more than thirty years of
46
accumulation, deciding what would stay in the family as my wife
The
as I’d come to terms with the reality years ago. I’m fortunate to
now be living with great memories and sad facts rather than
coping with the trauma of ICUs and cancer treatments.

and I build our own house in Ketchikan, a short drive and a
three-hour boat ride from my hometown.
What do you keep, and what gets entombed or discarded
with the same indifference as diapers or emotionless, single-use
plastic? It was remarkably easy to throw away trophies. No one
cares about my high school sporting achievements, not even
When Dad passed, we had a tough time getting rid of things.
It felt cold to just throw away his stuff, but it wasn’t serving
much of a purpose. Over time we’ve consolidated meaningful
things and that’s what my wife and I will bring into our home.
Stuff doesn’t matter; memories do. But it’s nice to have enough
stuff around to help you remember.
CHRISTOPHER JONES

me. But I discovered other items that, somewhat surprisingly,

carry much more weight. JEFF LUND is a high school teacher and freelance writer in Ketchikan,
I have two flies stuck into the roof of my truck that always Alaska. His book, A Miserable Paradise: Life in Southeast Alaska is
survive cleanings and purges. One is a foam grasshopper, the available on Amazon, and his podcast The Mediocre Alaskan, is available
other is a huge salmonfly. My truck hasn’t been outside of wherever you get your podcasts.

Fall 2022
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 TIPPETS
Smallmouth Hunting
Where trout dare not go ǫȂǼǴDzǹǶǸǻǻDzǼ
Three decades of earnestly hunting smallmouth and I still
marvel at the places I find them. The obvious spots—in deep
runs; throughout pools; in riffles and depressions behind
boulders; and in eddies that trout would relish—all make perfect
sense to that part of my mind that understands trout streams.
But I’ve also found them well off from a river and utterly
exposed in dead-end, dead-still, shallow, clear-water channels,
the sort of place no trout would go; in swift riffles free of
sheltering boulders, water seemingly too fast for trout; and once
I found them in a transparent disk the size
of a small pond, mostly knee-deep, fed and
drained by hardly a trickle off the main
river, yet there they were, swarming.
Despite the differences in where trout
and smallmouth lie in streams, there are
similarities enough between the two fish
Drake
that we can sometimes fall into thinking
of smallmouth as just bristle-scaled trout.
48 Understandable, really: Smallies take trout
flies, sometimes on small hooks, and they
The
rise to mayflies as sedately as trout do.
But trout they are not. Three years ago, fishing a desert river,
I got a solid reminder of this. Three of us were spread along the
water, walking the baking banks of rock and sand and scrub,
staying alert for rattlers. I’d had a good day, finding smallmouth
in side-channels; scattered through the long length of a mostly
dead, shallow pool; in a riffle not even knee-deep; and in other
places both plausible and peculiar. Then I came to a big, wide
pool. Like the rest of the river, it was clear as Ketal One.
Standing in the thin water just below the lip, I surveyed the body
Fall 2022
NOT WISCONSIN.
of the pool. Though I could hardly detect a current, I saw a fish
upstream feathering to real depth. Above the lip, the pool’s tailout
spread wide before me. I’d often found smallmouth in the tails of
pools, so I began working this water, but with low expectations
since every stone on the bottom was easy to see under the high,
clear sun. It seemed crazy for any smallmouth to be in such an
exposed spot. But crazy is what smallmouth are.
By the time I was wading to the tops of my shins, I’d caught a
couple tiny smallies from the center of the tail. Then I dropped
my crayfish onto some wavy lines of barely perceptible current
along the right bank, and as I began hopping it back, I hooked a
much larger, thrashing smallmouth.
After catching another decent fish from the same spot, I
quietly moved back downstream until the
water was plainly too shallow, then began
working my fly through the same wavy
current line. I fished the length of that soft
current by inches rather than feet, and
caught several smallmouth of eleven to
thirteen inches. Thirty feet upstream from
the first fish, it was over.
I returned to where I hooked the lowest
fish, and then waded up what was simply a
long depression, maybe eight to ten inches
deeper than the rest of the run. It had a plain cobble bottom
with no boulders or ledges, just a slight trough in the middle of
a wide, shallow tail. Yet smallmouth held throughout its length,
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ignoring all of the dark, deep water only a few yards upstream.
I can’t imagine what drew those smallies to such a place;
water that no sane trout would consider. It was simply another
reminder that smallmouth and trout are truly two different fish.
SKIP MORRISLVDQDXWKRUVSHDNHUDQGDFFODLPHGƌ\W\HUZKROLYHVZLWK
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 TIPPETS
Airbnbass
A landowner leans toward benevolence ǫȂǽDzǶDZǸȀǵǪǷǭ
When spring fishing season would arrive sixty years ago, the
Drake
banks of Owego Creek were lined with anglers of all ages. This
was especially true where the creek passes through our farm.
50
Access to the stream was limited by pasture fences, so my father
The
built gates, making it easier for people using the stream to come
and go through the fences. It was obvious that our cattle would
get out through any gates left open, but the gates were always
closed by those who used them.
On hot summer weekends, swimmers’ cars lined both sides
of the road. The bridge over the stream narrowed the channel,
and the current created a deep, downstream pool, perfect for
swimming. On weekdays the local public school bussed kids to
the stream for afternoon swimming lessons.
By fall, cooler temperatures cleared the water, and from the
bridge there were always fish to see in the pool below—usually
Fall 2022
),1$//<$35,9$7(ˎ3523(57<6,*1
:(&$1$//+$33,/<67$1'%(+,1'
smallmouth bass and suckers, with an occasional
trout or pickerel.
On winter weekends, after the ice had sufficiently
thickened, country-style hockey games were played on
the frozen creek. The puck was typically a flat, round
stone, and slightly curved tree branches served as
hockey sticks.
But then things started to change. Some fishermen
would rather break down a fence than go out of
their way to pass through the open gates. And the
proliferation of backyard pools led many to regard
the stream as unsafe for swimming.
On warm summer nights, car speakers would
blare. Beer cans, bottles, and other garbage were
thrown into the pasture or just left along the road.
Finally, after several years of increasingly disrespectful
and belligerent visitors, my father took out the gates
and put up “Posted” no-trespassing signs. Following his
untimely death from melanoma, our mother lived alone
in the farmhouse and used her retired teacher’s pension
to keep up the farm as best she could.
Since she passed a few years ago, money from
renting the fields has produced the farm’s only
income, an amount that doesn’t even cover the taxes
on the fields being worked.
So my siblings and I faced the difficult decision of
what to do. After many challenging and frequently
emotional conversations, it was decided that we’d try
and keep the farm in the family. We formed an LLC
and started to rent the bedrooms through Airbnb and
VRBO. It quickly became clear that there is a market for
peaceful country destinations.
The “Posted” signs, however, seemed to be out
of place and inconsistent with our efforts to create
a welcoming and inclusive setting. It took some
lengthy and difficult discussions, but we finally came to the
somewhat anguished decision to put up “fishing permitted”
posted signs, overcoming our genuine concern that we would
be inviting an invasion of beer-can throwing, stereo-blaring,
fence-stomping intruders.
But what we are seeing is quite different from what we’d
anticipated. On fair days there are dog walkers. Spandex-
outfitted bicyclists with brightly colored helmets seem to slow
as they silently pass the farm. Trash is rare, and what little
appears is sometimes collected by flyfishers and other visitors.
Our fences are intact. Last week, an angler stopped by the
house after walking the stream to report that he’d pulled an old
tire out of the creek, so we’d know where to collect it when we
made our streambank-cleanup run.
The broad range of considerations when landowners provide
TIM HOWLAND
stream access can be complex and, sometimes, even surprising.
TIM HOWLAND is a doctor of endocrinology in Binghamton, New York.
For some of us, fishing isn’t just about how many or how big—and it’s
not about nailing the photo. It’s about the landscape, the friendships,
and those hard and hilarious moments that fuel a lifetime of tailgate
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 TIPPETS
Numbers Game
,WŚVWLPHIRUDVORZƋVKLQJPRYHPHQW
ǫȂǼǽǮǹDZǮǷǼǪǾǽǷǮǻ
“Prob hooked 50.”
The words felt strange as I texted a quick report to my friend
Dave. But it was true; I’d spent the better part of the afternoon
Euro-nymphing, and the fishing was indeed ridiculous. Within
the first hour, I had already hooked more than a dozen; by hour
two, I lost count. Wild browns—nice fish up to 18 inches—with
the occasional thick, foot-long brookie mixed in. In the evening
I switched to twitching attractors in some fast runs and landed
another ten or so until I finally quit at dark.
Drake
By the time I hit send, the day had basically become a blur
of hooksets, thrashing fish, and rapid-fire releases. A few hasty
52
photos of larger trout cradled in my half-submerged hand served
The
as documentation of the day, but little else. Any poetry of a perfect
cast, soft take, or arcing leap was lost in the sheer numbers.
Before last season began, I found myself with an unshakable
urge to make my fishing days more “epic.” Maybe it was those
ads in fishing magazines that said I needed to “Crush Variables,”
or that “Failure was not an Option.” Or videos that showed cool-
looking dudes repeatedly hooking-up and fist-bumping in high-
def. Whatever it was, my own modest fishing success suddenly
felt anemic. It was time to level up.
First, I made key purchases: top-of-the line prescription
sunglasses with low-light lenses; wading boots with carbide
Fall 2022
TO SLOW YOUR ANGLING PACE,
CHANGE FLIES EVERY 6 MINUTES.
studs that I individually tightened with a socket wrench and
a drop of super glue; a heavy-duty collapsible wading staff that
came in a quiver I could unsheathe like a sword. Then I tied
dozens of tungsten-beaded nymphs and CDC everything and
inserted them in my fly box like bullets in an ammo clip.
I learned new super-fast knots and studied how to swap
out leaders more efficiently as conditions changed. Previously
“lucky” fishing shirts were replaced with camouflage hoodies so
I could melt into streamside vegetation.
By opening day, I had transformed into an angler-assassin.
And it paid off, I guess. The new gear allowed me to approach
fish I had surely been missing or spooking, and the techniques
I learned minimized wasted time previously spent fussing with
fly changes or clumsily retying a new leader. By the end of the
spring, I had probably caught more wild trout than in the past
five years combined. From bluelines to bigger rivers, I wielded
my new gear with great affect, swashbuckling through pools and
runs and racking up impressive numbers. Sure, I still got skunked
in tough conditions, or found risers I couldn’t fool, or casts I
couldn’t make. But when I was dialed in, the fish came… and
came. Gigabytes on my phone were filled with the same image of
my submerged left hand holding yet another trout.
But it also began to feel a little, I don’t know… gluttonous.
When fish number eight becomes fish number 28 and you
still want to cast for number 48, then wake up in the morning
TOBY NOLAN
and go for number 58, and then eventually 98, you may have
crossed the threshold from gentle sport to the dark side of
mindless fish-counting.
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 TIPPETS
WHENEVER POSSIBLE, SKETCHY
WADING SHOULD BE EMBRACED.
I noticed something else, too. I started catching the same
fish over again. When I scrolled through images of certain trout
from certain rivers, I recognized identical spot patterns from
fish caught the week before or the previous month. One day
I landed a foot-long brown that had my nymph still stuck in
its upper jaw from a week earlier—a break-off from a double
header on a tandem rig (so much for barbless hooks falling out
in 24 hours). The fish stared back at me from the net, now with
two Frenchies in its mouth. Its expression seemed to say: “Hey
bud, what’s your problem?” That’s when I also started to feel, if
not guilty, then maybe a little silly, all decked out in my angler-
ninja gear, hellbent to catch every trout in the river. Twice.
Consider today’s astonishing technology available to
anglers: 8x fluoro leaders, sunglasses with “sweat management
Drake
channels,” satellites orbiting the earth beaming real-time data of
stream levels and water temps directly into our phones. Perhaps
54
a thousand years’ worth of instructional videos that show every
The
fly ever tied, and every trick, slackline cast ever thrown, are but
a URL away. We’ve got rods with “smooth loading, quick recover
action that allow precise accuracy at short distances without
sacrificing the power and backbone necessary for punching flies
at longer distances through the wind.” If you can’t catch a fish
with that, better take up pickleball.
So, it’s no wonder I caught fifty trout that day. It wasn’t even
that hard, and I’m no Landon Mayer. I was in the right place,
the fish were turned on, and I just kept catching them. It was
that simple. But it got me thinking about all the other would-
be Landons, Leftys, and Aprils out there, not to mention the
Fall 2022
guides and lodges all putting their sports onto “whacking days”
of unlimited hook-ups. And therein lies what could be a problem:
how many angler-ninjas can a wild-trout population take?
Maybe not that many. On my home waters here in the
Northeast, some of the trout are starting to look a little beat
up—a mangled jaw here, missing scales there. Others seem
to fight timidly, as if their wildness was broken from that
last release, measurement, and photo-op. And these are the
survivors. I recently read a stat that said catch-and-release
mortality for trout can vary from as little as one percent to as
much as twenty depending on conditions. So, if you whack fifty,
anywhere from half a trout to ten can wind up as crayfish food.
But mortality isn’t necessarily measured in the grisly poundage
of dead fish on the bottom of a river. Weaken a trout enough
through rough handling or multiple releases and it may become
a merganser’s breakfast. Maybe that’s why places like Labrador
make you stop fishing for the day after you’ve released three
Atlantic salmon (two on some rivers). They don’t want you to
feed the seals.
So, what can we do? I’m not expecting us all to turn in our five
weights, but as enlightened anglers, perhaps our goal should be
this: use our technically advanced gear, data, and knowledge,
yet collectively not catch so many trout. Instead of landing fifty,
throttle back a little. Relax. Breathe. Study the river. Fish more
HANSI JOHNSON
but cast less. Let’s call it the “Slow-Fishing Movement.”
This is tough to imagine, I know. Who doesn’t want to catch
every trout in the pool when the hatch is on and fish are crushing
bugs on the surface? But then I think about the first modern fly
 TIPPETS
angler who landed a big wild steelhead, considered it for a few
moments, and then had the audacity to return it to the river.
Imagine how his fishing buddies must have reacted, each of them
dragging a rope stringer of dead fish. But worlds turn on such
seemingly small actions. Today, if that same angler intentionally
killed a big wild steelie, his friends might toss him in the river.
That same discipline is needed to make a slow-fishing
movement work. Maybe we should take a cue from my friend
Dee who, after she releases a nice trout, sits by the water,
unpacks a bowl from her sling pack, and smokes. Then she gazes
at streamside trees, listens to the gentle chuckle of a riffle, or
watches clouds float by. After what seems like a long, luxurious
time, she gets up, saunters back into the river, and continues
fishing. Her casts—when she makes them—are measured and
Drake
thoughtful. She treats the stream like a farm-to-table tasting
menu, not the all-you-can-eat buffet at Golden Corral.
56
Another friend told me about his brother, who’d reached a stage
The
in his fishing evolution that allowed him to stroll to the river with
a good bottle of wine and enjoy a glass or two while watching trout
rise. His rod remained at home. To that I say, cheers.
Slow fishing can mean challenging yourself to only go for the
best (or hardest) fish. I’ve been thinking about a well-known pool
on the Upper Delaware. On a typical evening in May or June,
maybe fifty sippers come out, and driftboats line up and take
shots at them. I’ve joined the cue from shore and had amazing
evenings of multiple releases. Meanwhile, just downstream, in a
certain tailout away from the fleet, one, maybe two big browns
power up from a downstream riffle and gulp mayflies against a
Fall 2022
72%(676(59(7+(6/2:ˎ),6+,1*
MOVEMENT, STARE AT WATER FOR AT
LEAST TWO HOURS PRIOR TO CASTING.
grassy bank. When they show—and often they don’t—you can
hear them slurping bugs from forty feet away. It’s a tough drift,
but if you fool one there’s a good chance you’ll see your backing.
Next spring, I vow to pry myself away from the more reliable
sippers for shots at these mighty but mercurial fish. Even if that
sometimes means never making a cast.
Another idea: ditch the Euro-nymphing and its gillnet
efficiency for a day and instead swing some wet flies. Work on
your midge game. Bring binoculars to watch trout rise or to look
for warblers along the stream. If you’ve never zoomed in on a
mayfly the moment it vanishes into the maw of a big trout, you
are missing one of angling’s great joys. Plus, you might learn
that they are taking #18 olives, not #16 sulfurs. Recently, I have
taken to fishing enormous hair-wing spiders because violent,
water-throwing takes are much cooler than another twitch of
my indicator. I can probably hook ten on the nymphing rig for
every one on the big dry, but the latter is far more rewarding.
As I continue considering ways to personally fish slower, I
want to be clear to my fellow anglers: I am not judging. This is a
philosophy, not an edict. And to those who have not yet guzzled
from the goblet of fifty-trout days: Continue to fish hard and
you will likely someday achieve that goal. If you do, feel free to
stroll down the mountain to a gentler river, where, hopefully,
some of us former assassin-types will be making slow, measured
casts, or perhaps none at all.
TOBY NOLAN
STEPHEN SAUTNER is the author of A Cast in the Woods: A Story of Fly
Fishing, Fracking, and Floods in the Heart of Trout Country.
 TIPPETS
Lost and Found
Reclaiming Alaskan jewelry ǫȂǴǮDzǽDZȀǪǭǵǮȂ
For my 60th birthday, my wife Lynn gave me a copper
bracelet made by Alaska Native artist, Rob Martin. I’d been
having an ongoing issue with soreness in my left wrist, and
wearing copper around it seemed to help. The bracelet has two
salmon on it, a male and a female, facing each other. It was one
of the most beautiful gifts I’d ever received.
I lost it the following spring. By the time I realized it was
gone, my fishing partner Steve and I were already heading
back to Ketchikan after fishing the Karta River for four days.
I’d assumed it had come off my wrist while loading the Zodiac
inflatable onto the roof of Steve’s boat. If so, the bracelet was
now ninety feet deep at the bottom of Karta Bay.
The Karta River is on Prince of Wales Island in Southeast
Drake
Alaska, across Clarence Strait from Ketchikan. The entire
watershed is protected inside the nearly 40,000-acre Karta River
58 Wilderness, one of America’s more recent Wilderness Areas,
being designated in 1990. It lies within the Tongass National
The
Forest, the largest in the US, at 16.7 million acres.
There are two Forest Service cabins on the river; a 12x14 at
the mouth and a 12x12 on Karta Lake, about a mile and a half
upstream. The two cabins are available though a reservation
system and are very popular, especially in the spring. Steve had
the uncanny ability to beat out other applicants for the most
desirable cabin dates, which happen to coincide with the peak
spring steelhead-run. I felt extremely privileged when Steve
would invite me along on a three- to four-day Karta trip.
The buoy for the Karta River Forest Service cabin is about a
Fall 2022
ROB MARTIN IS A
TALENTED FELLA.
quarter mile out from shore. During high tide we could get Steve’s
boat up to the beach in front of the cabin to easily load or unload
our gear. But tidal swings in Southeast Alaska can range as much
as twenty feet every six hours, and on the day I lost my bracelet,
our departure time coincided with low tide. We needed to drag
the Zodiac down to the water, load it with all of our gear, and
then motor out to his boat tied up to the buoy.
We always packed heavy for cabin trips, but managed to get all
of our gear loaded into the Zodiac so we’d only have to make one
trip. Steve ran the outboard while I sat on top of our mountain
of gear. When we reached our mothership, I climbed aboard and
Steve started handing me drybags, coolers, and packs—each
exchange happening over deep water—until everything was
stacked like Jenga towers inside the boat. Once the Zodiac was
empty we lifted it onto the roof of Steve’s boat and headed back to
Ketchikan. That’s when I noticed that my bracelet was gone.
That fall, Lynn traveled to Scotland with two of her friends, Ann
and Phylis. They all left Ketchikan on different flights, then met
in Boston before sharing a plane to Glasgow. In a coffee shop the
morning of the flight, Lynn noticed a copper bracelet on Ann’s
wrist and asked where she bought it.
“I didn’t,” Ann said, “I found it.”
“On the Karta River?” Lynn asked.
“How’d you know?”
Ann said she’d been hiking along the Karta over the summer
when she noticed something shiny in the moss on the side of the
trail. She gave the bracelet to Lynn so Lynn could return it to me.
Now I owe Ann a bracelet.
KEITH WADLEY
KEITH WADLEY is a recovering steelhead addict who recently moved from
Southeast Alaska to Northeast Oregon. (Still within steelhead country!)
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 REDSPREAD
Swindlers
7KHFROGKHDUWHGLQGLIIHUHQFHRIUHGƋVK
ǫȂǭǪǵǵǪǼDZǾǭǰǮǷǼ
Living near the Blue Ridge Mountains has its benefits,
with solid trout fishing in the mountain streams and decent
smallmouth in the rivers. But I needed some saltwater, so I
headed to the coast for redfish.
Technically, that’s not true. I drove to the beach with my
wife and son for a family vacation. But since we were there,
Drake
and already spending too much money, I decided that I hadn’t
spent enough money on me. I booked a guide for a frugal-
60 sounding half-day trip, forgetting that redfish are frauds.
The guide put me on reds all day—reds cruising shorelines,
The
reds sitting on oyster beds, reds tucked back into creeks. I made
perfect cast after perfect cast. I varied my retrieve: strip-strip,
pause; strip-strip, pause. I tried burning it in. I even tried letting
it float with the current like a caddis. Know what I didn’t do?
Catch a redfish. Why? Because redfish are dumb.
I paid good money and they weren’t biting. Are they not
aware that I just placed a beautiful shrimp pattern perfectly
in front of their faces? You know, close, but also far enough
away? They swam right over the top of it, again and again.
Redfish think they’re the coolest fish on the flats, with
Fall 2022
NOT A FACE YOU CAN TRUST.
their long, drag-burning fights, blueish tails, and black specs,
all coppered-up like a red cent. They’re actually just stupid. I
mean, how smart can they be if they refuse to take a perfectly
stripped topwater bug? One of them even bumped my popper
with its nose. How can a redfish even survive just by bumping
prey with its nose? It’s baffling.
By the end of the trip, the guide had done his job and I
had done mine. Guess who didn’t do theirs? Swindlers, all
of them! One even followed my fly right up to the boat. I
should’ve figure-eighted my shrimp like I was musky fishing.
That red probably would’ve eaten it, too, because redfish are
too dumb to know what their food looks like.
Once they figured out that I was trying to catch them, they
sent an undersized flounder over to eat my fly. I know it was
them, too, because—as I was stripping in that undersized,
not-legal fish—I saw them belly-laughing at me from behind
the oyster beds. Who does that? If you’re going to punk me, at
least send me a flounder I can keep, so I could’ve come home
LEE CHURCH
as a conquering hero, fried it up in some cornmeal, and served
it to my wife and son, thus salvaging a sliver of my dignity.
 ®
LET THE OUTSIDE IN
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Co-owner of Tom Morgan Rodsmiths and custom fly rod maker Joel Doub picks the perfect pattern for a morning on the Madison River near Ennis, Montana // Tom Attwater
 ARIAN STEVENS

SOLITUDE ON THE UMPQUA.

62 The Drake Fall 2022

L O S I N G
L A R R Y
The extraordinary life and tragic death of a steelheader
ǫȂǽǸǶǫDzǮ

O
n Oct. 1, 2015, Dave Hall’s best friend was murdered. But
nobody in the tight-knit community of Glide, Oregon,
could stop by his place to console him, because Dave’s
house had burned to the ground twelve days earlier. “It
was a log home with a shake roof, and we hadn’t had rain in four
months,” he tells me, as we sit on a bluff looking over Oregon’s
famed North Umpqua. “The fire inspector said it was the hottest
house fire he’d ever seen. Said it melted things he’d never seen
melted.” Dave burned both feet trying to rescue his cat from the fire.
He didn’t succeed. “I was certain that would be the saddest day of
my life,” he says. “Then Larry died two weeks later.”

Fall 2022 The Drake 63

 L
LARRY LEVINE AS A STRAPPING awrence Peter Levine was born on April
YOUNG LAD, AND AS AN ADULT
TYING FLIES NEAR GLIDE, OREGON.
Fools’ Day 1948, to a Jewish family in the
Bronx. He was the second child of Marion
and Eddie Levine, and he lived with his
parents, grandmother, and older sister, Joanne, on
the third floor of a six-story apartment building.
Larry attended public grade school at PS 105
where, according to Joanne, only twenty-nine of
the thousand children at the school were non-Jews.
Being a family from the Bronx, everyone was a
Yankees fans. Eddie worked as a dress salesman
at a showroom in downtown Manhattan, and
through a chance encounter, met and became
friends with another Eddie—five-time World
Series winner Eddie Lopat, who spent twelve years
as a major league pitcher, most notably for the
Yanks. Lopat pitched in the 1951 All-Star game,
and in 1953, led the American League in both
winning percentage and ERA. He was also Larry
Levine’s godfather.
So, naturally, Larry became a ballboy, for the
Yankees, during that era. He went to many games
with his dad, getting to meet greats like Mickey
Mantle, Yogi Berra, Phil Rizzuto—all idols of
every boy in the Bronx. This exceptional childhood
64 The Drake Fall 2022
experience gave Larry an early love of baseball
that he would carry with him the rest of his life.
Larry’s family left the Bronx and lived briefly
in the largely Jewish suburb of New Rochelle,
before departing for California when Larry was
twelve. Fifty years later, as a writer, Larry talked
of his childhood in a 2011 essay for Gray’s Sporting
Journal: “I was raised a city boy—NYC, West Los
Angeles. A golf course was about as close to nature
as I got. I didn’t catch my first fish until I was in
my early 30s, on the banks of the Rogue where
Fruitdale Creek comes in, below the house where I
lived. Possibly I had been reading Hemingway—A
Moveable Feast, maybe, where the young
Hemingway is always fishing one European river
or another and always stashing a couple bottles
of white wine in the river to chill for lunch. I was
down with the wine stashing, but I’d never fished.”
-2$11(35(66˖/˗'$9(+$//
In Los Angeles Larry’s family settled into a
similarly Jewish neighborhood—the “poor”
part of Beverly Hills—where Larry attended
Beverly Hills High School and played golf for
the high school team. “Why all this emphasis on
Jewishness?” his sister, Joanne Press, asked. “It
is to let people know how far Larry strayed from
his past, with its attendant expectations. We were
city people, surrounded by friends and family. No
one could have predicted a son from this family
spending his adult life in the Pacific Northwest,
becoming what Larry became. He was the only
Jew in Glide.”
What Larry became was a writer, teacher, friend,
and flyfisherman, eventually guiding on one of
the West’s most famous and difficult rivers—the
North Umpqua, along Oregon’s southern coast.
But it took awhile. “Larry didn’t grow up with
flyfishing, but he took to it right away,” Dave
said. “He loved it. He loved the aesthetics of it.
If you flyfish for steelhead, then you know it’s
mostly about casting and covering water well. But
Larry liked that, because he was very slow and
methodical. He wasn’t a move-through-the-water-
quickly guy. He fished like he wrote; he did tons of
research, and he took his time.”
Larry and Dave first met in 1967, in Eugene,
when both were students at University of Oregon.
Dave was a pitcher on the Ducks freshman
baseball team, and Larry made the golf team as a
walk-on. “We met through a mutual friend, and as
soon as Larry found out I played baseball, that was
it. We hit it off right away. We watched the All-Star
game together for thirty years.”
Both had started their high school years in
Southern California, but Dave’s family moved to
Oregon his senior year, while Larry’s stayed in
Beverly Hills. “My family grew up in a wealthy
neighborhood,” Dave said. “My dad was in the
motion-picture industry. Then we moved from LA
to Elkton. [Elkton, Oregon, pop. 198] to get out
of the city. I graduated in a class of 18, and in LA
would’ve graduated in a class of 3,700.”
Having roots in LA provided both Larry and
Dave privileged California connections throughout
their lean college and post-college years. “Larry had
plenty of options,” Dave said. “I mean, he went to
high school with Richard Dreyfus.” And yet, both
chose relative poverty along the Umpqua instead.
Larry’s take on the City of Angels was not
an opinion he minded sharing. “When Uncle
Larry would roll into town, he made no secret
of his disdain for Los Angeles,” said John Press,
Larry’s nephew. “And this showed us that some
things were more important—that, for example,
tying a great fly had value. We wondered at
his determination to fish for only the most
difficult fish in the most difficult places, but we
understood that he experienced deep satisfaction
while doing that. Personally, I was frustrated
with everything in life at the time, and this
provided me with a great reality check.”
Dave left University of Oregon after two years,
and enrolled in the Art Center College of Design,
in Pasadena. He always knew he wanted to be an
artist, but he also wanted to learn the business
side, something he wasn’t getting in Eugene.
“Lots of people can be creative, but I wanted to
be trained, I wanted some structure,” Dave said.
“The art school gave me that. The average age of
students was 27, no jeans were allowed, no long
hair, no beards, three unexcused absences and you
were expelled. I couldn’t even wear tennis shoes,
and I was coming from Eugene, in 1968, where half
the students were on LSD.”
After art school, Dave took a job in Kansas
painting huge murals on the walls of big bank
“WE WERE CITY PEOPLE, SURROUNDED
BY FRIENDS AND FAMILY. NO ONE
COULD HAVE PREDICTED A SON FROM
THIS FAMILY SPENDING HIS ADULT LIFE
IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST, BECOMING
WHAT LARRY BECAME.”
buildings. The job lasted one year, and when the
murals were finished, he decided he’d move to the
North Umpqua, where he’d always wanted to live.
“Everyone kept telling me, ‘There are no jobs there;
there’s no place to rent.’ But I came back to town
and had a couple of beers in the Narrows Tavern
[in Glide]. People would ask my story and I would
tell them I was looking for a place to live. And as
soon as you say you’re from Elkton—or any of
those little towns down there—then you’re in.
They turned me onto a place to rent, and a friend
from Elkton and I ended up buying it. I’ve been
here ever since.”
Meanwhile, Larry had graduated with a Master’s
in creative writing from University of Oregon and
married his college girlfriend, Barbara Rice. (“She
came from a fundamentalist Christian background
but had left the fold,” Joanne said. “Neither of
their families were happy about the marriage.”)
The couple moved to Southern Oregon because
Barbara was from Grants Pass, a town along the
Rogue River about an hour north of the California
border. Larry had been trying to make it as a
writer, first with poetry—publishing a few small
poetry books—then, later, as a fiction writer.
None of his work had sold well.
Fall 2022 The Drake 65

LARRY LEVINE, IN HIS ELEMENT.
WHEN NOT ON THE RIVER OR
WRITING, LARRY COULD OFTEN
BE FOUND IN THE WOODS PICKING
MUSHROOMS. “LARRY WAS AN
EXPERT IN IDENTIFYING WILD
MUSHROOMS,” SAID HIS FRIEND,
DEAN SULLIVAN. “HE INVITED ME
ALONG ON SEVERAL ‘MUSHROOM
EXCURSIONS’ IN THE UMPQUA
VALLEY WATERSHED.”
66 The Drake Fall 2022
“Larry was kind of struggling down in Grants
Pass,” Dave recalls. “The writing wasn’t paying
the bills, so he decided to start guiding. Here you
have this thirty-year-old, who hasn’t fished much,
deciding he’s going to pick up—not only flyfishing,
but also rowing and guiding. And he wants to do
this on the Rogue, which has some gnarly rapids.
So he had a big learning curve to deal with.”
By this time, Dave had become a guide on the
“North” himself, and remained one for twenty
years, from 1983 to 2003. But he’d first put in
plenty of fishing time on his own. “I worked hard
at learning the river,” Dave said. “Nobody would
show you shit. I eventually got to know it well,
and was catching fish, but it was pretty much just
summer guiding back then, nobody was doing
much in the winter. So you needed another job.”
Dave’s other job was his artwork. Down in
Grants Pass, Larry also picked up a second job, at
a famous biker hangout called the Wonder Bur,
where he bartended for several years. One summer
evening in 1986, Larry called Dave and told him he
had a couple rare days off from both guiding and
bartending, so he wanted to come up and fish with
him. “He’d never fished the North Umpqua,” Dave
recalls. “So Larry drove up, and we walked about
four hundred yards from my house to the Tavern
Pool—because it was just behind the Tavern, where
we’d be drinking afterwards—and Larry got his
first Umpqua steelhead right there.” Larry drove
back to Grants Pass the day after landing that fish,
and called Dave as soon as he got home. His first
four words: “I’m moving to Glide.”
T
he North Umpqua is not an easy river to
reach even for most Oregonians, much
less those coming from elsewhere. So, to
those who may be unfamiliar: It is big. It
is pushy. It is fast, slippery, uneven, and unruly.
It is intimidating; with deep, emerald-colored
water crashing around massive boulders and into
flood debris stacked two stories high. And while
it is surely one of the most beautiful rivers any
angler could ever lay eyes on, it can also be scary
looking, especially when the sun is high, allowing
you to see just how deep that hole is below the
ledge you were casting from at dawn. There is a
reason that properly presenting a fly along several
of the North’s finer runs requires standing on
one specific rock. Larry once wrote of the North
Umpqua: “I have a friend who has fished the river
even longer than I have and admits that he goes
out the first week of each summer season and falls
in a couple of times just to get used to it.”
The Umpqua is not a “coastal river” like the
dozens of salmon and steelhead streams to the
north of it, all of which, save the Nehalem, flow
from Oregon’s Coast Range; and most of which,
save the Nehalem, are fifty miles long at best.
Both forks of the Umpqua are more than twice
that length; they come from the Cascades.
While the first fish camps on the North
appeared in the 1920s, it was adventure writer
Zane Grey’s trips to the river in the early ’30s that
first made it famous. Twenty years later, in 1952,
a nearly thirty-four-mile section of river above
Glide was designated as fly-only water, a rule
enforced as much by tradition and principle as by
law. Like a handful of British Columbia rivers, the
North Umpqua has long attracted a certain type
of steelheader: a committed one, with a devotion
driven almost wholly by the process over the
prize. Larry Levine was this type of steelheader.
There was a small house for rent across the river
from Dave’s place. It sat on a high bank overlooking
a long pool, and Larry moved into it. A couple of
years earlier, his wife had become his ex-wife, so
he lived there alone—still writing, still working on
his book, but also fishing a lot. Larry mentioned
'$9(+$//
this home in some of his writing: “My house is
perched a hundred feet above the river, and as I
look down at it, it looks up at me, most likely with
 less appreciation.” —Northwest Fly Fishing
“I’m always on the river at dawn. I don’t have to go
anywhere. I have this wonderful deck where I can sit
and drink coffee and watch the sunrise over a wide
expanse of river. I can look down from the deck to
where the steelhead hold.” —Gray’s Sporting Journal
Larry was still planning to be a guide on the
Umpqua, but he understood that this would take
some time. He needed another job, and he found
one as a substitute teacher at Glide High School.
Meanwhile, Dave and others began showing
him the river. “Anyone who’s waded the North
Umpqua knows that one of the most difficult
aspects of fishing it, much less guiding it, is
knowing where to walk,” Dave said. “It’s dangerous
wading.” He advised Larry to fish all of it on his
own before fishing any of it with a client. “Get
to know that water really, really well,” Dave told
him. “Because there are ways into these pools
and there are ways out. And nothing looks more
unprofessional as a guide than wandering around
on the rocks for ten minutes trying to find a spot.
You need to be able to tell your clients, ‘Step on
that rock, then that rock, then that rock.”’
At the time, a handful of guides including
Dave Hall had established the North Umpqua
TOM BIE
Guides Association, mostly because it got them
a group insurance rate. Other notable charter
members included Joe Howell, longtime owner PORCH VIEW LARRY HAD OF THE
NORTH UMPQUA, FROM THE CABIN
of the former Blue Heron Fly Shop in Idleyld HE LIVED IN FOR MANY YEARS.
Park, and Tony Wratney, who’d spent summers
as a teenager working for Jim Van Loan at the
Steamboat Inn, and whose “Summer Run Guide
Service” was the longest-running guide operation
on the fly-only water until his untimely death
this past April at age 59.
When the Guides Association was founded, the
group chose to limit its membership. By the early
’90s, Larry had learned the water. He started his own
business, and less than a year later “River Wolf Guide
Service” was welcomed as one of only ten members
in the North Umpqua Guides Association.
While earning these credentials, Larry had also
discovered just how much work is involved with
guiding the North Umpqua. “It’s exhausting,” Dave
agreed. “You’re not guiding from a boat here, so
you’ve got to climb the banks with your clients.
And, like flyfishing almost everywhere after A River
Runs Through It came out, you were giving casting
lessons half the day or just trying to keep your
clients from falling on their ass.”
Indeed, Brad Pitt shadow-casting across the big
screen in 1992 changed a lot for guides of that era.
“All of a sudden, Chevy Trucks had flyfishing, Coke
had flyfishing, everybody wanted to be a flyfisher,”
Dave said. “Larry wisely took advantage of that,
Fall 2022 The Drake 67
 giving up his teaching job at the high school so he
could guide full time.”
But by the mid-2000s, after a dozen years of
rowing clients down the North, Larry ultimately
decided that it was guiding taking too much time
away from his writing. He stopped the year-round,
full-time guiding and took a job as the packaging-
department manager at Umpqua Feather
Merchants (UFM), a position previously held by his
friend, Dean Sullivan. “I’d moved on from that job
to work in bulk materials, supplying the facilities in
Chiang Mai, Thailand, and Sri Lanka,” Sullivan said.
“Larry and I fished the North Umpqua many times
together. He’d also taken my daughter, Rubi, on
a few guided trips, which helped her get involved
with the Steamboaters and the protection of the
river in general.” (The Steamboaters is a non-profit
based in nearby Idleyld Park, that “works tirelessly
to protect the fragile North Umpqua River.”)
“WHEN LARRY BROUGHT HIS COOKING
STUFF ON ONE OF OUR TRIPS, IT WAS LIKE
BON APPETIT ALONG THE DESCHUTES.
IT WASN’T JUST FOOD; IT WAS A MEAL.
IT TASTED NOTHING LIKE THE CRAP WE’D
HAVE BEEN EATING IF HE WASN’T THERE.”
Larry’s place above the river sat just downstream
from the home of Dennis Black, the founder and
then owner of UFM, and he would caretake for
Dennis and his wife, Maew, when they were out
of town, which was frequently. Larry’s job in the
company’s packaging department didn’t last long.
Umpqua Feather Merchants was one of the largest
employers in Glide from 1972 until the mid-2000s,
but the company left Oregon in 2006 shortly after
being sold, and relocated to Louisville, Colorado.
This change prompted Larry to focus even
more on his writing. He had an agent in New York
and knew some publishing people in LA, but his
novel (Timber Town) never received any serious
consideration from major publishing houses.
Yet plenty of his friends and family had read it,
along with his other work. “Larry’s writing was
often Socratic,” said his nephew, John. “A big-city
wheeler-dealer gets a heap of philosophy from the
unassuming fishing guide. Slowly, the client learns
patience. And, throughout, the reader learns that
most of us aren’t truly seeing nature or life, and
68 The Drake Fall 2022
that we need to slow down to do it.”
What made Larry’s dedication to writing even
more admirable is that he had no shortage of
other skills that could have provided a living.
“Larry was an excellent cook,” Dave said, “partly
because, like his fishing and writing, he spent
a lot of time doing it. If he’d invite you over for
spaghetti, he’d be working on that sauce for three
days. And it would be like no spaghetti you ever
tasted. When Larry brought his cooking stuff on
one of our trips, it was like Bon Appetit along the
Deschutes. It wasn’t just food; it was a meal. It
tasted nothing like the crap we’d have been eating
if he wasn’t there.”
Joanne has equally fond memories of meals
with her brother. “I visited him in the summer,
so there would always be the background noise
of a baseball game,” she said. “He loved to cook,
especially barbeque. We would stand on the
deck of his place over the Umpqua, looking out
at the river, and I can still hear the screen door
slamming as he went in and out to check on
whatever was cooking. He would often grab his
binoculars, spot various birds, deer, fish, or cloud
formations, all of which he could talk about
with great authority. He liked to drink wine as
he cooked. Since he lived as close to the bone
as possible, his wine came in a box. He would
dispense this cheap wine into bottles and then
chill it. He kept glasses in the freezer because the
wine tasted better when it was almost frozen.”
Despite his culinary skillset, Larry Levine had
no desire to become a chef. By all accounts he
took his writing seriously and was determined to
keep at it whether it was paying the bills or not.
“Larry had writing in him like I had being an artist
in me,” Dave said. “And he would do anything to
maintain that—live at any level.” For Larry, “at
any level” meant going without health insurance
in his mid-50s. It meant living for several years
at the Susan Creek Mobile Village, a far cry from
the cabin overlooking the river that he eventually
came to caretake. And by the late 2000s, a couple
years after Umpqua Feather Merchants had left
town, Larry’s writing finally started to pay off.
“I had all these magazines I was drawing for—
Fly Fisherman or Fly Rod and Reel, or the Amato
publications,” Dave said. “I was doing illustrations
every month, and I told Larry that these
magazines were always looking for writers.”
Problem was, flyfishing magazines at the time
weren’t publishing the kind of stories that Larry
liked producing. “He’d want to write an essay
about an old pair of waders, and the magazine
would want instructions on how to tie a PMD,”
 said Dave. “I’d be talking to John Randolph, editor
of Fly Fisherman at the time, and I’d say, ‘John, I’m
so tired of the same stuff. For Chrissakes—every
year you’ve got the same story about the trico
hatch on the Delaware. Don’t you want to at least
try something different?’”
Larry finally did make a submission. “And sure
enough, Fly Fisherman picked one up, then Fly Rod
and Reel, then Gray’s,” Dave recalls. “Larry was like,
‘Wow, this is pretty cool.’ And I was like, ‘Larry,
that money was sitting there for years.’”
The money may indeed have been there for
years, but Larry wasn’t willing to write the “how-
to, where-to” articles that previously dominated
flyfishing mags. He didn’t want to sell out just
for the meager money; he wanted to write stories
that he believed in. “My brother was loyal to his
own writing,” Joanne said. “He worked various
jobs, but writing was a priority, a consideration
/((&+85&+
in determining what he would or wouldn’t do.
He was dedicated to it. It kept him poor, but he
became the excellent writer he wanted to be.”
In 2010, Fly Fisherman gave Larry his first CONTEMPORARY NORTH UMPQUA
STEELHEAD GUIDE RICH ZELLMAN,
published story—an essay about fishing hats. SENDING A CAST OVER A STRETCH
The following year, Gray’s ran a longer essay on OF HALLOWED WATER.
steelheading doldrums. And by the winter of
2011-2012, Larry had parlayed his writing and
teaching credentials into another part-time job,
as a writing instructor at Umpqua Community
College in Roseburg.
“His first three years there, all he wanted was to
get his own class with his own writing curriculum,
about the outdoors,” Dave said. “And in the summer
of 2015, he finally got it.”
Before the beginning of the 2015 school year,
officials at UCC told Larry that he could teach
his own class. “It was a creative writing class on
outdoor stories—he was so excited,” Dave said.
“We went over to his house to celebrate, and he
told us: ‘I can finally teach all the things I’ve been
wanting to teach. And my classes are full.’”
The over-heated blaze that destroyed the Hall’s
home had come in mid-September 2015. “We
were still pretty freaked out by the fire. A friend
Fall 2022 The Drake 69
 &(175$/25(*21ˎ%$6('
GUIDE AND OUTFITTER MARTY
SHEPPARD, SWINGING A STRETCH
OF THE NORTH WHERE LARRY
LEVINE SPENT MANY DAYS.
70 The Drake Fall 2022
and I were over at the house sifting through the
remains,” Dave said. “My wife, Lisa, brought some
sandwiches and Gatorade over, and as she was
leaving, she turned around and said, ‘Hey, I just
heard on the radio that there was a shooting out
at the college?’ My friend turned to me and said,
‘Isn’t Larry teaching out there this week?’”
T
he first 911 call came at 10:38 a.m., on
Thursday, Oct. 1, from Snyder Hall, on
the campus of Umpqua Community
College. It was the fourth day of the new
school year. The caller reported gunfire in room
15, where the writing classes were held.
A 26-year-old male student, enrolled in Larry’s
class, used two handguns to kill eight students,
Larry, and himself. It took ten minutes. Larry was
the first to die, at point-blank range. Eight others
were injured, three of them critically. It remains
the deadliest mass shooting in Oregon history.
“At first we didn’t put two and two together,”
Dave tells me. “But within an hour… it was awful.
We kept getting little blurbs—that Larry was the
teacher, that he’d been killed first...”
Dave and I are sitting outside above the river,
on the back deck of the house where Larry lived.
“When we finally got the official word, we were
still in so much shock,” Dave says. Then he looks
up at me. “Larry was the first one over. He was the
very first person to come see us after the fire.”
Dave describes how he and his wife let friends
of Larry’s go through his clothes. “It was so weird,”
he says. “I mean, it wasn’t like someone with a
terminal illness, where you have time to prepare.
We had a set of his keys, so we were here, at his
place, letting his friends go through his stuff.”
He sees me glance inside at Larry’s answering
machine and its blinking light. “He must’ve had
'$5&<%$&+$
fifty phone messages,” Dave says. “So many people
calling, saying, ‘Are you OK? Are you OK.’ People
who’d heard about the shooting.”
 One of those messages was mine. A few months
before he was killed, Larry sent me an essay about
a rod he’d built and later used to catch a steelhead.
I printed out the story and wrote his number and
email on it, without looking too closely at the email
message itself. I called the number in mid-October
2015 to tell him that I planned to run his story. After
leaving a message, I went back and found his original
email. The last line read: “I’m a former fly fishing guide
on the North Umpqua River and currently teach writing
at Umpqua Community College. lpl” (Larry’s essay,
“Then and now, fly rod redemption on the North
Umpqua” ran in our Winter 2015 issue.)
Joanne and the rest of Larry’s family arrived a
couple days after the shooting, in order to arrange
for a coffin, gather his things, and plan a memorial
for Lawrence Peter Levine, which was held on Oct.
7, at Wilson’s Chapel of the Roses, in Roseburg.
A different kind of memorial was held later that
evening for “Larry”—along the banks of the North
TOM BIE
Umpqua, at Baker Park, where he liked to go in the
summers to read and to swim. LARRY’S BENCH, ERECTED IN 2017,
SITS IN BAKER PARK ALONG THE
In 2017, Joanne had a memorial bench built UPPER NORTH UMPQUA RIVER.
at Baker Park, facing the river at one of Larry’s
favorite spots. Somewhat miraculously, “Larry’s
Bench” was not destroyed in the horrendous
Archie Creek Fire that burned more than 125,000
acres as it swept through Glide in September
2020. “All of the nearby trees were badly burned
and the area surrounding it was devastated,”
Joanne said. “It was quite poignant.”
Through conversations with Joanne, it became
clear that many years had passed before she truly
comprehended her little brother’s life choices.
“Larry was so different from friends and family
that we could never fully believe the person who
came for visits in LA was who he pretended to be,”
she told me. “In other words, ‘our’ Larry was not
the ‘real’ Larry. The real Larry went his own way:
solitary by choice, poor, an admired outdoorsman
and writer, finding spirituality in his beloved river.
Living the good life. A different but good life.”
Fall 2022 The Drake 71
 MUSKY
FLIES
Playing the long game
ǫȂǰǪǿDzǷǫǰǻDzǯǯDzǷ
BRETT MEANY

72 The Drake Fall 2022

H
ours into the float already, we’d
chucked green and yellow, chartreuse
and pink, and black and purple—some
with big reflective eyes and others
with barred feathers that enticingly slip and slide
behind the body of the fly. Nothing was working.
Brett, my musky copilot, and I weren’t moving
fish like I thought we would, considering the cold
mornings that fall had been delivering.
So we anchored our raft among a toothy, log-
infested section that we’d both come to love and
hate over the past year. We then went about the
task of choosing a new fly from several I’d tied a
few nights earlier. Our simple process was based
on three factors: Does it look good in the water; is
the hook sharp; and is it big enough?
“This one looks juicy, dude,” I’d say to Brett, as THE AUTHOR HOLDS HIS
+$5'ˎ($51('086.<
I spun the fly around in my fingers, stroking it “GREAT WORKS ARE
into that perfect fish profile. For every confident PERFORMED NOT BY
STRENGTH, BUT BY
statement like this I’d ever made about a fly while PERSEVERANCE.”
it was in my vise, I’d contradict it with another one ˑ6$08(/-2+1621
once we got on the water. “Actually, it looks like
shit now,” I’d say aloud to myself, when just hours
earlier I was showcasing it at the boat launch as if
it were made of gold. When hunting musky, doubt
comes with the territory.
One thing I did know is that my ‘little’ natural
fly had moved my last four fish in these sections.
Those fish were in March. It was now late
September. More than five months had passed
since anyone in our group had thrown at these
fish. There’s typically a seasonal change in fly
Fall 2022 The Drake 73
 5(/($6,1*-86721(086.< selection, but in this case, I thought this spring-
'85,1*$'$<257:2217+(
:$7(5,67<3,&$//<&216,'(5('
tied beauty would work.
$:257+<$&&203/,6+0(17 I confidently grabbed the eight-inch fly—a
successful pattern eventually stolen by my brother
on a musky trip to Pennsylvania. It is considered
small in musky circles, and maybe even poorly
tied, since it had no bulkhead—a feature viewed
as essential on most musky flies for its ability to
displace water in front of the fly’s head. Musky
can feel this displacement on their lateral line,
the sensory system running from head-to-tail
that fish use to detect when prey is close. The
fly’s wispy tailfeathers were repurposed from a
trout streamer, and its natural tan bucktail was
sweetened with yellow, orange, and crystal flash
that quivered as it moved. It was everything I
remembered the old fly being, but half a foot
shorter than patterns used by other anglers.
The average musky fly can be upwards of twelve
inches, getting as long as eighteen, with the
general rule being to build bulk without adding
weight. The single hooks used in flies are large,
allowing your thumb to slide into the hook gap
without nicking your skin on the barb. As with
patterns for other fish, confidence in a musky
fly can greatly affect results. The difference with
musky is that your confidence must be strong
enough to keep you casting a foot-long fly into
74 The Drake Fall 2022
a cold and rainy November wind, through the
pain of sore shoulders, wrists, and forearms.
During those moments when physical depletion
is imminent, perseverance requires more than a
friendly reminder that “it only takes one.”
I
’d run more than fifty float trips in the
past year, totaling more than four hundred
hours on the water—equal to flying eighty
times from L.A. to NYC. I’d spent at least
a hundred more hours in tying and travel, plus
thousands of dollars on musky-sized rods and
reels, bucktails, hooks, licenses, gas, beer, food,
lodging, and giant nets impractical for anything
but musky. I’d crossed three state lines fishing
with anglers who knew those waters and had
dozens of musky in their nets to show for it.
They’d taken me to their secret spots, places that
have taught them to understand musky like I
wanted to understand them. Yet there are still so
many things I don’t know about this fish, and it’s
the kind of knowledge that only comes with time
on the water.
I’d been playing the probability game: I knew
where they lived and what they’d eat, so—the
GAVIN GRIFFIN
theory goes—I’d have to connect with a fish
eventually. I’d had them on my hook for split
seconds. They’d followed my flies for thirty feet,
 and then dropped off. I’d even managed to go tight in the sun. They can actively hunt from morning to /,.(67((/+($'253(50,725
$1<27+(5+$5'ˎ72ˎ&219,1&(
on a big one and fight it to the boat, only to have it night, or will suspend themselves all day against the ),6+7+(',)),&8/7<2)+22.,1*
swim right through the bottom of my net like its banks, or in the backs of eddies, or beneath log jams $086.<,60$7&+('21/<%<
7+(-2<2)/$1',1*21(
teeth were hot knives in butter. I was so close, but looking for redhorse suckers, bass, and trout. The
so far away. way I figure it, musky are predictable one percent of
The musky is a fish of contradictions: powerful, the time, a hundred percent of the time.
yet lazy; incredibly elusive The chilly weather is
but periodically social; partly why I’d chosen
sensitive and picky, yet THE MUSKY IS A FISH to go out that day. I
dangerously predatory.
Musky will occasionally
OF CONTRADICTIONS: could see my breath,
and water temperatures
commit cannibalism on POWERFUL, YET LAZY; were cooling—meaning
juveniles, or eat baby
ducks or frogs off the
INCREDIBLY ELUSIVE, BUT happy musky ready to
feed. I’m not saying I
surface. A musky will PERIODICALLY SOCIAL; saw into my future, but
bring its duck-shaped bill
of a mouth right to the
SENSITIVE AND PICKY, I felt and proclaimed
at the launch that our
backside of a fly, stalking YET DANGEROUSLY session was going to
it so closely that a single
thrust of its tail would
PREDATORY. produce. I’d even given
a big speech in the
allow her to inhale it. They shuttle over about how
can also ambush from the depths, shooting a fly serious we would take this season—not letting
into the air like a great white ramming a seal. any opportunities go to waste. But regardless of
I’ve seen musky explosions three feet from the motivation level, sometimes you just hit the wall.
JOSH SMELTZER

side of a raft, their unhinged aggression fearless There’s never really a break with only two
of our presence. I’ve also seen them gently breach anglers on a musky float. Someone is always
the surface like a tarpon gulping for air, the crest of rowing and the other constantly chucks line.
their mossy-green and pale-yellow backs glistening Camaraderie helps compensate, as the sport’s real

Fall 2022 The Drake 75


7+(67$1'$5'/(1*7+2)$
086.<)/<)$//6620(:+(5(
%(7:((17+$72)$%$1$1$
$1'$72,/(76($7,)<283/$1
217+52:,1*)/,(6)5207+(
833(5(1'2)7+,663(&7580
<28&28/'35$&7,&(%<&$67,1*
$:,3(5ˎ%/$'($//'$<
76 The Drake Fall 2022
struggle is forgotten in lieu of deeper relationships
built on the water. Still, denial after denial with
nothing but a glimpse from these fish will wear
on any angler’s psyche. It takes good boatmates to
make it through a day, much less a week.
By this point we’d been on the water six hours,
with slowly lowering expectations of seeing and
moving a fish. Fatigue was setting in for us both,
as we were just getting back into musky shape
after taking the summer off, allowing the fish to
survive seasonal stresses beyond angling. Brett
had started in the front of the boat, with our new
fly clipped onto an eighty-pound fluoro leader.
He’d made cast after cast until his feeble arms
wore out. Now visibly drained, he simply looked
back at me, dropped the rod into the well of the
boat, and said, “Gavin, you’re up.”
H
alfway into my bow time, we were
approaching a section of river where,
coincidentally, our mentor had solo-
landed a fish of a lifetime. Brett had
walked down the bank to find Alan holding a
fifty-inch female—what most consider a game-
ending catch. As one of the few double-doglegs
on the river, it’s an easily identifiable stretch,
with enough water to work a fly deep from top to
bottom. It feels very fishy.
While stripping in from the bank, I saw a musky
trailing just inches behind the fly. “She’s here, Brett,
she’s here!” (He later told me I repeated that line
several times, louder as she got closer. Sometimes
the adrenaline rush causes me to black out.) During
these moments, reality in the boat suddenly shifts.
GAVIN GRIFFIN
If you’re drunk, you’re now sober. If anyone’s eating
a snack, they’ve dropped it. Everyone is up, alert,
and watching the fish behind the fly.
 Great flyfishers eventually graduate
from being a responsive angler—merely
reacting, usually improperly, to chaos
unfolding in front of them—to being a
predictive angler shaped by experiences
and time on the water, able to read
the scene and be prepared for the next
move before it happens.
I’m still a responder with musky. I
have time on the water, but not time
with musky on my line. This is why so
many anglers lose hard-to-catch fish:
They’re hesitant in the fight because
hooking one is so rare, but by treating
the fish like a precious metal, they
actually decrease the chance of landing
it. Generally speaking, the longer any
fish is on your line, the lower your
chance of landing it becomes.
As the musky neared the boat I kept
my strip-cadence in rhythm to help
prevent it from turning off of the fly.
I heard the audible click of my flyline-
to-leader connection sliding through
the first eyelet. It’s a sound all musky
fly-anglers listen for, because it’s the
sign to begin phase two of the show—
the famous figure-eight—requiring me
to transition the fish from swimming
gracefully behind my fly to racing
aggressively after it. Around and
around the fly goes until the musky
either attacks or fades back to the
depths. These fish will stay in a figure-
eight pattern from mere seconds
to—from what I’ve heard—up to ten
minutes. It’s the sport’s iconic move,
and hailed as the top predatory trigger
for musky. When done wrong, the jig
is up right there and then—mark it on
the board as a lost opportunity.
I’d missed fish by screwing up this
(9(1$086.<Ś6Ŝ'8&.ˎ6+$3('
scenario in the past, but I’d visualized a crazed hunchback stirring a giant cauldron. %,//2)$0287+ŝ&$1/22.
its success hundreds of times, creating countless She’d already tried to strike the fly three times, ,17,0,'$7,1*$)7(5,1+$/,1*
$1(1250286)/<3/,(5625
scenes that could play out for me or a client. It’s at one point disappearing off the side of the boat )25&(36$5(5(&200(1'('
no different than when I’m actually fishing: Every for a few seconds while my rod frantically swirled
cast is affected by my imagination the moment the to keep her engaged. She returned with murder in
fly hits the water. her eyes, and with one more turn of my rod, she
“She’s in the figure-eight, Brett!” I yelled, probably opened her mouth and ate. My rod ripped across
also more than once. I ran my rod below me with the water as I strip-set, and the line went heavy.
sweeping turns, making sure to give the fish plenty She was the first musky I’d put into a net in
JOSH SMELTZER

of room to turn around on the sides. For once, I was the year since I’d started my hunt. I know what
doing everything right. The fish was staying with happened that day was a mix of preparation,
the fly. If someone had taken a picture of me at that pursuit, and pure dumb luck. But it still felt really
moment, my facial expression probably looked like good to know that all that work wasn’t wasted.

Fall 2022 The Drake 77

 WITNESS
TO A
KILLING
7URXWƋVKLQJDWWKH&RORVVHXP
ǫȂǫǮǷdzǪǶDzǷǬǪǻǵDzǼǵǮ

CASEY BREEDS

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),567322/%(/2:7+('$0

78 The Drake Fall 2022

 O
ne of the best things about the Swift
River’s flyfishing-only section is
the help you get from strangers out
strolling on the streamside paths.
Contrary to their reputation, New Englanders can
be a friendly and outgoing people, and I find that
most are willing to do their bit to help an angler
maximize his or her experience. Usually, you don’t
even need to ask.
I had a typical encounter recently while working
a part of the river that I call the canyon, though
I don’t think anyone else calls it that, since it’s
not a canyon. For half an hour I’d been drifting
midge patterns through a current that was clearly
loaded with trout, and I was already starting to get
frustrated. Suddenly, I heard a rustle in the bushes
behind me.
An elderly couple appeared on the bank,
about five feet above my head. The man had a
bushy walrus-style mustache and carried a long
wooden walking staff, thickly coated in varnish.
The woman wore a fanny pack and had her arm
hooked around a tree for safety. I could hear
them whispering as all three of us followed my fly
through its drift, and when I glanced up for my
backcast, I saw them pointing into the water.
“How many you caught?” the man asked in a
gruff voice.
“None so far,” I said.
“Really?” he said, sounding incredulous. “You’ve
got, I’d say, six good-sized fish—”
“More,” his wife said.
FISH & FLY
“You’ve got maybe a dozen fish in that stretch of
water right in front of you.”
“I know,” I replied, trying to sound pleasant. 75<,1*7262/9(7+26($/:$<6ˎ
75,&.<&855(176%(+,1'$/2*
“That’s why I’m fishing here. But so far they’re not
interested.”
“Really?” the husband repeated, sounding
concerned on my behalf. It just makes no sense,
his tone seemed to say. A man ought to be able to
catch a trout with a dozen to choose from.
“Happens sometimes,” I said. “The fish here get
pretty finicky.”
“You tried a royal coachman?” the man asked. “I
used to fish here when I was younger. Always had
good luck with a royal coachman.”
“I haven’t,” I said, “but maybe I will.”
It actually wasn’t such a bad idea, I thought to
myself, as the couple wandered off. Trout in the Swift
certainly don’t see many quill-winged flies. Besides,
who was I to dismiss any suggestion? I fished the
Swift regularly, and while I had my share of good
days, there were others when I flogged the water
fruitlessly for hours. And I knew there were lots of
other anglers whose results were about the same.
Most flyfishers are accustomed to failure, but
the Swift is unusual in that it allows an angler to
fail in a public forum. Quabbin Reservoir—into
which the east, west, and middle branches of
the Swift all flow—is the largest body of water
in Massachusetts, making it a major tourist
attraction in the warmer months, when people
flock to the paths surrounding it and the river just
below Winsor Dam. The Swift below Quabbin has
a park-like atmosphere: It feels managed, but in an
understated way, so you can still convince yourself
that you’re getting out into nature. Which you are:
On quiet days, fishing in the shadows of white
Fall 2022 The Drake 79
 +(0/2&.6/,1(7+(%$1.6,1$
'2:1675($06(&7,212)7+(
6:,)77+$7/,9(683727+(
5,9(5Ś61$0(
80 The Drake Fall 2022
pines and hemlocks, you might see bear, otter,
mink, or eagles. Walking back to your car after
dark, you might hear a whip-poor-will call from
the clearing by the power lines.
The first three quarters of a mile below the dam
is catch-and-release flyfishing only. Considering
the number of anglers who swarm the place on
weekends, 1,300 yards is not a lot of river. The
layout is tight, almost intimate, with a mere fifty
cfs of placid water flowing under steep banks.
Observers, standing above the angler, look down
into thin, clear water, and see everything: the way
the fly settles on the water, the way a fish reacts
(or doesn’t), the way the angler covers it.
The flyfisher may feel like a performer, at times,
or like a gladiator on the floor of the Colosseum:
You will triumph publicly or die publicly, there
is no in-between. Of course, the real defeat of
an angler takes place over many hours, as hope
fades and focus begins to fray. No observer has
the stamina to stick it out, cast after cast, through
all the little mistakes that add up to true failure.
Instead, people make snap judgements. They
watch a half dozen casts and then wander off.
Nothing much happening there, they seem to say.
Hopeless case, they seem to say.
I can’t help feeling a little injured by these
judgements. “Hey,” I want to shout out to them,
“you should know I netted a nine-inch brookie
only four hours ago!”
Still, I can’t begrudge people their curiosity,
because when I’m walking the banks of the river,
I do the same thing: I stop and watch, though I’m
a little more subtle about it, hanging back in the
trees and peeking through gaps in the foliage. I
do this partly to avoid spooking fish, and partly
because I don’t want to seem overly interested. In
my psyche, other flyfishers exist somewhere on
a continuum between ally and competitor, their
exact placement being dependent on superficial
things, like the kind of vibe they’re giving off.
I don’t want to show weakness to a potential
competitor, but at the same time, I’m always dying
for information. So, when I see an angler working
a stretch of water I know well, I like to see how he
or she is approaching the problem.
In the flyfishing-only section of the Swift,
all the problems are well known. I’ve come to
think of them as being like the conundrums that
generations of aspiring mathematicians have
struggled with in hopes of proving their genius.
Instead of the Riemann hypothesis, you’ve got the
stagnant backwater of the overflow arm. Instead
of the Poincaré conjecture, there’s the downed tree
on the shallow straightaway. As in any river, each
piece of water offers unique challenges, but with
only three quarters of a mile in total, the number
of problems in this section is limited. An angler
can try most of them in a single day, which creates
an unusual degree of familiarity.
Take that tree on the shallow straightaway.
About a third of the way up from the Route 9
bridge to the dam is a place where, years ago, a
mature deciduous tree toppled from the east bank
ADAM WILLIAMS
and landed in the streambed, perpendicular to the
current. The trunk of the tree lies in silty shallows,
but its canopy drapes across the midstream zone,
the system of branches half submerged, creating
 a sieve that the current both flows through and
accelerates around. These branches are a magnet
for fish, especially the big rainbows that the DFW
stocks in the Swift. Usually you can see a few of
them playing grab-ass at the upstream edge of the
tree, jockeying for position, or nipping each other
in the fins while darting in and out of the woody
debris. Sometimes, if you look closely, you can
also see a single brown trout—solitary, stationary,
morbidly self-involved—tucked in under the
branches at the downstream edge of the tree, as if
he has snuck up on the rainbows just to observe
them (and despise them).
How these rainbows eke out a living while
screwing around all day, I have no idea. Their
conduct is so disruptive that you wonder whether
it’s even worth casting to them. I sometimes give
it a shot, but I see lots of other anglers walk right
past this spot. Those of us who fish it typically do
so from a downstream position, but the layout is
troublesome, with only about ten or fifteen feet of
free-flowing water under the west bank. Dropping
a fly upstream that drifts past the rainbows and
the brown requires a delicate cast in tight quarters,
avoiding bushes on the backcast and the tree itself
on the presentation. Once the fly lands, it comes
storming back at you so fast that it seems unlikely
that a fish will even notice it. And, indeed, in my
experience, none of them ever do.
BENJAMIN CARLISLE
Having never caught a fish in the water around the
tree, I’ve gradually become one of those anglers who
bypass it, refusing to engage with a problem that
has seemed unsolvable. But one day, while hurrying
along, I saw a young person in the river drifting
a fly toward the tree from an upstream position. :$',1*7+(Ŝ&$1<21ŝ/22.,1*
)255,6,1*75287)/$7:$7(5
I paused to watch but quickly concluded that the $1'6/2:)/2:6/($'72620(
young person was clueless and naive (and thus more 6.,77,6+),6+217+,6675(7&+
ally than competitor). Not much happening there, I
thought, and scuttled off down the path.
The next time I visited the Swift, though, I
climbed down the bank upstream of that tree and
started throwing puddle casts, a size 22 bluewing
at the end of my line. With each presentation,
the fly would drift five or six feet before the S
curves in my line would straighten, and then the
fly would skate. It seemed an idiotic approach,
guaranteed to spook any nearby fish, but I kept
at it, flipping casts as I moved closer to the tree.
Finally, on one presentation, my line straightened
and arrested the fly just as it was about to
get sucked into the tree’s canopy. Right at the
moment when the fly stopped, a trout grabbed it
with a heavy take. When I tried to set the hook, I
snapped the tippet.
Hands trembling, certain that I was on the verge
of a glorious achievement, I tied on the only other
size 22 bluewing I had, not thinking to change to
a stronger tippet. And a few casts later, I achieved
precisely the same result: a heavy take on a
straightened line, a snapped tippet.
Stunned, I looked around. There was no one in
sight. No one had witnessed this . . . what was it?
A dazzling near-success? No, it was a depressing
failure, further evidence of my unrelenting
mediocrity as a fisherman. Still, I had learned
something; I was on the brink of something. In the
same way that the hermetic Russian mathematician
Grigori Perelman had built off the work of the
Fall 2022 The Drake 81
 7+(6:,)75,9(5-867%(/2: American Richard Hamilton to prove the Poincaré
7+('$0+$6$3$5.ˎ/,.(9,%(
conjecture, I, a hermetic Massachusetts fisherman,
had built off the pioneering work of an unidentified
young person to nearly solve the problem of the
tree. All I needed to do now was come back in a
week with a few size 22 BWOs, and, Bob’s your
uncle, Q.E.D. Success would be mine.
The flaw in this mode of thinking, as every angler
knows, is that unlike mathematical conundrums,
the problems we encounter in rivers aren’t static.
I could have returned to the Swift with a whole
fanny pack full of BWOs and still not taken a trout.
And that’s because, a week later, the question had
changed imperceptibly, and a different solution was
required. Even in a tailwater like the Swift, with
its dependable flows and water temperature, there
are countless variables. Maybe the sun is higher
in the sky, or maybe the trout gorged themselves
overnight on a fall-out of flying ants. Who can say?
You never quite know why fish act the way they do,
and that’s why received knowledge—whether it’s
obtained through direct instruction or by peeking
through foliage—can be of limited value, and an
experimental mindset often wins the day.
Later that same summer I rolled up to the
Swift on a Sunday afternoon, figuring I’d have
to endure several slow hours until the sun set.
But as I descended the steep hillside toward the
riffle at the head of the canyon, I saw something
astonishing: the first forty feet below the riffle was
alive with mayflies and feeding fish. Upstream and
down, the water was dead, but those forty feet
82 The Drake Fall 2022
were a frenzy, with no other angler in sight.
The canyon is typically fished from the east side,
but I waded in under the west bank, where there
was a deep eddy. Standing in that black, quiet
water, ankle-deep in organic muck, I found I was
at a fulcrum point with respect to the current.
The water exiting the riffle flowed toward the
eddy, rubbed up against it, and changed directions
slightly. Simply by raising and lowering my rod
tip and tracking the progress of my fly, I’d get
effortless drifts of thirty feet or more.
The duns popping off the water were a light
tawny brown, size 20 or 22. I’d never seen them on
the Swift, and I didn’t have a fly quite like them.
Still, I was determined to throw a dry. The first one
I tried got looks but no takes, so I snipped it off
and tried a tiny Adams, thinking it might present
the right profile, even if the colors were off.
I was just starting to work the Adams when a
fisherman came down the hillside, following the
path to the head of the canyon. He stopped and
watched with his mouth agape, clearly amazed at
the density of action.
“Heads and tails?” he asked.
“Ah, yeah,” I said. “I think so.” I was in no mood
to talk. The Adams was generating no interest, and
I was starting to stress out, knowing that at any
moment this hatch could shut off.
He watched a few more casts, then turned
CASEY BREEDS
and headed upstream. What a waste, he was
probably thinking, because that’s exactly what
I was thinking. I’d been handed this incredible
 opportunity, and I was blowing it.
As he disappeared up the path, I did an
inventory of my fly boxes and found one size 22
emerger—a little black thing with a few strands
of flash tied in. It seemed entirely wrong, but I
understood I had no choice. On the water, the
emerger settled through the film and became
invisible, meaning I’d just have to set on any
movement in its vicinity. And that’s exactly what
happened: a small swirl, a gentle raising of the
arm, and I was tight to a rainbow.
It came quickly to the net, and I’d just released
it when another fisherman came down the hillside
and stopped. He looked like Jeff Lebowski’s
scrawny younger brother: oversized sunglasses,
a tight little goatee, wavy hair shooting out in all
directions from under his hat. “Wow,” he said,
seeing the activity on the water. “Any luck?”
I told him about the rainbow, and we started
chatting. He was from northern Connecticut and
usually fished the Farmington. With the Farmy
running high, he and some buddies had decided
to meet up at the Swift, something they did a few
times a year. I told him I might have seen one of
his friends go by ten minutes earlier.
“Could’ve been,” he said, sounding unconcerned.
He stood and watched as I continued fishing, and
on the third or fourth cast, I hooked another,
bigger fish. This one put up a fight and went
JAMES HUNT
airborne a couple of times, as if it knew it had an
audience. “That’s no rainbow,” Lebowski said, and
he was right. The fish I scooped into my net was a
thick, gorgeous brown. 27+(56(&7,2162)7+(5,9(5
)((/025(:,/'$1'/(66
“Mind if I fish downstream from you?” Lebowski 0$1$*('75((ˎ/,1('%$1.6
asked. I told him to go for it. $1'3/(17<2):22'<'(%5,6
3529,'(6*22'75287&29(5
I managed one more rainbow before the trout
lost interest. Soon the water around me went
completely quiet, so I headed up the trail, feeling
pleased with myself. Yes, I’d been lucky, but I
hadn’t blown it, had I? No sir, I had figured it out.
I walked straight past the downed tree in the
shallow straightaway and headed for the Y pool, the
first pool below the dam and the most famous spot
on the Swift. It’s also the most crowded, and there
were half a dozen anglers strung from the top of
the pool to the bottom. No room for me, so I circled
around to the overflow arm, where the stagnant
conditions are more like pond fishing. For the next
two hours I threw tiny flies at cruising fish and
didn’t get a single take. My luck had run out.
As dusk was falling, Lebowski showed up at the
pool. I heard him greeting his friends from the
Farmington, and when they asked how he’d made
out, he said he’d taken only a single rainbow.
“Slow night,” someone said.
“I guess,” Lebowski replied. “There was one guy
downstream who was killing it, but that was a
couple of hours ago.”
Such was my state of mind—hopes faded,
confidence in tatters after two hours of failure—
that it took me a moment to realize that the guy
he was talking about was me. I was the one who
had been killing it. It was almost impossible to
believe, but there had been a witness.
Fall 2022 The Drake 83
84 The Drake Fall 2022
 A Steelheader’s Search for Salvation

ǫȂȃǪǬǴȀǸDZǵǹDZǸǽǸǼǫȂdzǸDZǷǼDZǮǻǶǪǷ

“Before I sought enlightenment, the mountains were mountains and the rivers were rivers. While I
sought enlightenment, the mountains were not mountains and the rivers were not rivers. After I reached
enlightenment, the mountains were mountains and the rivers were rivers.” —Zen Buddhist proverb

I
n countless photos of a flyfisher holding a steelhead—in
books and magazines, on Instagram and Facebook—most
grasp their fish in the standard glory pose: lifted just
above the water, one hand behind the pectoral fins and
the other around the tail. Some fish are bright silver, so fresh
from the ocean that sea lice still cling to the body. Others
have a vivid orange band down the side of their fat bellies.
Sometimes there is a scar; a dark line left from a run-in
with a commercial net, or a short curve from an otter’s
teeth. Males will occasionally have jaws that culminate in
protruding kypes—menacing points that mark their return
from the sea. To the uninitiated, these images are merely
a trophy on display, the prize at the end of a quest. But to
others, these photos represent a milestone instead of a goal,
a moment of confirmation on the lengthy, restless journey
that is steelheading.
Aside from the familiar pose, pictures of an angler
holding a steelhead have something else in common. It
is not their facial expressions, which vary from a piercing
gaze above a mustached grin to a peaceful, knowing look
directed toward the fish. It is their aura, often captured at
first or last light, that makes them glow against a backdrop
of the river from which they have extracted true meaning.
They have been struck by sudden enlightenment, and they
exist, in that moment, in the domain of the gurus, mystics,
saints, and masters.

Fall 2022 The Drake 85

 T
SOMETIMES, SIMPLY WORKING here are no steelhead. This is what I tell
YOUR WAY THROUGH A PROPER
PIECE OF STEELHEAD WATER CAN
myself in the fading light, shivering as I
PROVIDE ALL THE SATISFACTION stumble across the gravel bar back toward
YOU NEED. AND SOMETIMES NOT.
my car. On the long drive home, sipping
the last lukewarm coffee from the bottom of my
thermos, I consider my potential errors: I stomped
past the fish that held in shallow water; they
wanted a bushy purple fly rather than my slim
black one; the sun was too bright; the water too
cold. Or maybe there was just no one home.
Steelhead are among the most footloose of fish,
and being a steelhead is as much a state of mind
as it is a biological designation. After hatching
in the smooth gravel of rivers and streams along
the Pacific Basin, some rainbow trout decide that
life in a river beneath thick coastal redwoods
or parched oak grasslands won’t be enough.
I am not anthropomorphizing these fish: No
one knows why some fish born from resident
rainbows head out to sea and why some fish
hatched from steelhead never see saltwater. But
those that do leave their home river and pass
through the brackish coastal mouths to feed in the
86 The Drake Fall 2022
great expanse of the Pacific Ocean are no longer
rainbows; they are steelhead. During their year or
years roaming the Pacific, they may go thousands
of miles, from the West Coast of the US or Canada
to Japan. When they return, they are guided first
by the Earth’s magnetic field, and—once closer
to home—use their powerful olfactory glands to
smell their way back to their natal stream.
Their timing fluctuates. Summer-run steelhead
typically enter freshwater as sexually immature
fish in late spring or early summer and may
swim nearly a thousand miles inland to spawn
nine months later. There is also a winter run,
bringing a trickle of hefty, dime-bright fish capable
of spawning within days of leaving the ocean.
Whenever they arrive, there are telltale signs:
the first winter rains swelling a river between its
banks, the falling leaves and cooling air chilling the
water, and the streamside accumulation of anglers
as word spreads that a run is in.
H ow do you catch a fish that doesn’t eat?
When steelhead return to freshwater, they
 stop feeding; they have only one thing on their
minds. Many flyfishers believe that since they
aren’t feeding, you can’t imitate their food like you
would with trout—fishing delicate, subtle patterns
meant to mimic caddis pupae or tricos. Instead of
getting a steelhead to eat out of hunger, you must
trigger its instinct.
There are the old rules about fly choice: dark
day, dark fly; light day, light fly; low and clear
water, muted colors; high and dirty water, pink
and black and fluffy. But it is easy to discard the
rules in favor of a gut feeling. I pick a fly like I
would cast an actor in a play: I have to believe
that the fly can be the soldier returning from war,
tall, broad, deep voiced, and a little rigid; or the
lovestruck beauty, delicate with long curls, soft
skin, and sad eyes; or the antagonizing leech with
a single strip of dyed rabbit fur, a few flowing
strands of palmered black marabou, an orange
bead-head, and a razor sharp hook.
PHOTO CREDIT
A swung fly tells a story to incite a fish’s
curiosity, and the story is more important than
the pattern. A sculpin or minnow has lost its way,
leaving the safety of the shallow banks. The heavy, WHEN HOLDING ANY FISH FOR
A PHOTO, YOU SHOULD FOLLOW
conflicting currents carry it into the belly of the THE “KEEP ‘EM WET” PHILOSOPHY.
river. Writhing and vulnerable, it dares to pass a BUT BECAUSE THERE ARE SO FEW
OF THEM LEFT TO BEGIN WITH,
powerful steelhead that rests during its journey PLEASE BE EVEN MORE CAREFUL
upstream. The steelhead, intolerant of the minnow WITH STEELHEAD. IF YOU HAVE
TROUBLE REMEMBERING: HOLD
flailing in front of its nose, snaps at it. And STEELHEAD OUT OF THE WATER
sometimes, that’s all it takes. AS IF SOMEONE WERE HOLDING
YOUR HEAD UNDER THE WATER.
L ike a steelhead fattening itself on the spoils of
the ocean, I must also prepare for my return to
the river. Wading through a city pond shaped like
a shield and surrounded by redwoods, firs, oaks,
and pines, I set myself amid a white grid of ten-
foot squares painted on the bottom. Beyond the
autumnal trees, the occasional growl of an engine
reminds me of the highway that runs beside the
park. I hold my heavy spey rod level in front of
me, cradling the wormwood cork grip in both
hands. The line stretches out from the rod’s tip
straight on the water. A gentle breeze showers me
with amber leaves.
I begin the motions of my cast: Lift-Drop-
Sweep… Lift-Sweep-Twirl… Cast-and-Shoot.
Fall 2022 The Drake 87
 SWINGING FOR WILD STEELHEAD
BENEATH A BUNCH OF REALLY
TALL TREES IS A GLORIOUS WAY
TO SPEND AN AUTUMN MORNING.
88 The Drake Fall 2022
The sailing shooting head carries light running
line behind it, rushing through the rod’s chrome
guides and ending, finally, with a satisfying clunk
when it all straightens out and pulls against the
reel. I consider my competence and grace as I
strip in the running line before my next attempt.
Another powerful, tight loop curls out from the
end of my rod.
On my next cast, I blow the anchor. The line
makes a whipping sound, and rather than taking
flight it collapses into a pile in front of me.
Looking around to see if anyone was watching,
I gather myself and repeat the motion, this
time punching it harder to make up for the lost
distance. But harder does not equal farther, and
I blow it again. Searching for the culprit, I begin
a frenzied analysis of my cast’s components:
the location of the anchor placement, my rod-
sweep path and speed, the alignment of my
hands and elbows in front of my shoulders, my
wrist angle, the relative force applied to the
rod by my top and bottom hands... Once I have
completely disassembled my cast and attempted
to adjust and polish the constituent pieces, they
don’t easily fit back together into a functioning
whole. The smooth sequence has fallen apart
into a jerky tumble.
I think of my casting teacher who would sit at
the edge of the pool wearing a thick wool shirt,
his boots dangling in the water. He would watch
me through attentive, wrinkled eyes. After a long
drag, his fingers would pull the cigarette from
beneath his white moustache. “It’s not a thinking
thing,” he’d call out to me across the pond. “If you
think about it, you’ll get yourself all fucked up.”
Iset out again from the Bay Area to the river.
After many trips, the drive has become an
integral prelude to the fishing experience. I
cross the Benicia Bridge and pass the last couple
warships of the Mothball Fleet, remains of the
rusting vessels that lined Suisun Bay when I
was a child. In the soft early light, patches of
scorched grass dot the otherwise golden Vacaville
hills. Billboards rise out of empty Yolo County
farmland, advertising a café, a weed-delivery
service, and a fertility clinic. In one field there is
a lone cutout billboard of a man in a plaid shirt,
kneeling with a bird dog, pointing at the sky. I
once saw a hawk perched on the man’s finger.
The sign has no words to clarify its meaning.
I park my car on a dirt patch beneath a
concrete bridge near a riffle. It’s late fall, and
there aren’t many fish in the river, but the past
few days I’ve had grabs. After an actionless hour,
I drive a couple of miles upstream. As I pull my
half-assembled rod out of my car, a warden with
a shaved head and a moustache stops next to
me in a big truck. We chat for a minute, and he
mentions a 4X4 buck that’s been roaming the
area. He offers me solace, “Come back in the
spring for shad, when you can catch ’em by the
dozen. You know what they say: When there’s
cotton on the trees, there’s shad in the river.”
I graciously thank him for his advice but assure
him that it’s steelhead I’m after.
I wander up a dusty trail out of sight of the river
and come out just beneath a small brushy island. I
step in and cast, starting with a tongue of mottled
water at the head of the run. Again: Step, cast. ALL STEELHEAD ARE BEAUTIFUL,
BUT THERE IS SOMETHING EXTRA
Below me I see a promising soft bucket sitting 63(&,$/$%287$',0(ˎ%5,*+7
inside the broken surface of the riffle. I pull up my FISH ONLY A FEW DAYS REMOVED
FROM LIFE IN THE PACIFIC OCEAN.
hood as rain starts to drip from the chalk-gray sky.
Step, cast. I look upstream and see the buck that
the ranger mentioned, standing on the edge of
the island a few dozen yards away. Grayish brown
with a black tail, it looks healthy and full-bodied,
ready to weather the approaching winter. It walks
to the top of the riffle and edges its way into the
water before wading across. It doesn’t seem to
notice me, or if it does, it doesn’t care, and once it
has crossed, it vanishes into the thicket on the far
side. Step, cast.
Now in reach of the bucket, I send a cast just
upstream of it and begin my swing. The murmur
of the water drowns out everything beyond me.
Like Alaskan bears that stand in the falls snapping
at salmon, I’ve returned to meet these fish along
their journey. The line and fly travel along their
path, undisturbed. They cross various currents
before easing into the slower water near the bank.
I take a deep breath, and I wait.
Fall 2022 The Drake 89
 CITY LIMITS CLEVELAND
Drum Circle
&KDVLQJWKHƋVKLQ7KH/DQG ǫȂdzǮǻǻȂǭǪǻǴǮǼ
I cast my Clouser out on a sinking-
head, counted to ten, then started
Drake
a fast retrieve. Halfway back to the
boat, the line stopped, a strip-strike
90
followed, and my backing was soon
The
flowing out through the guides...
Question: Where was I? Striper
fishing the Northeast? Chasing
jacks in the Keys? Peacock bass
in Brazil? The answer is likely
one of the last places you’d guess:
Cleveland, Ohio. And the fish would
likewise be far down your list, if on
it at all: freshwater drum.
Other than a few select
tributaries, the Great Lakes—at
Fall 2022
least from a flyfishing viewpoint—
are still pretty much untapped.
There are a few recognized places,
like Beaver Island in Lake Michigan
for carp, or Lake St. Clair on the
Michigan/Ontario border for
smallmouth and musky. But of all
the overlooked water around the
Lakes, the most surprising is the
quality and variety of flyfishing
opportunities that exist in or
adjacent to large urban areas. Cities
like Buffalo, Chicago, Cleveland,
Detroit, Milwaukee, and Toronto all
offer an interesting menu of species
that will eat a fly.
 The
91
Drake

ON THE HUNT FOR DRUM, WITH

CLEVELAND IN THE BACKGROUND.
PHOTO BY JERRY DARKES.

Fall 2022
 CITY LIMITS CLEVELAND
When most flyfishers think of drum, they picture red drum—
redfish—caught in saltwater. But freshwater drum, Aplodinotus
grunniens, is a Great Lakes native and one of the most widely
distributed of freshwater fish. The species name, grunniens, comes
from a Latin term that means grunting, and—like certain men—
refers to the noise mature males make while spawning.
Freshwater drum are found from northeastern Canada’s
Hudson Bay south to Guatemala, and from the eastern
Appalachians west into Texas and Oklahoma. Throughout much
of the Mississippi River drainage, drum are an edible target and
Drake
an important commercial species. But while all five of the Lakes
contain drum, they are considered a substandard food fish
92 in the region, due to the delicately-flavored walleye and tasty
yellow perch taking the top rung.
The
Drum are disrespected in other ways beyond their edibility.
They are called sheepshead in many places and are often loathed
by recreational anglers, being viewed as a bottom-dwelling, bait-
stealing nuisance. Their appearance doesn’t help in this regard,
with a subterminal mouth (lower jaw shorter than the upper
jaw); a high, Peyton Manning-like forehead (a fivehead); and
large bulging eyes that give them an almost Neanderthal-like
appearance. Their mouth (also called “inferior mouth”) might
be primarily responsible for them being placed in the trash
fish category, as so many bottom-feeders are. Yet some of our
favorite fly rod species—redfish, bonefish, even permit—share
Fall 2022
$67287'5801$7,9(72$//
7+(*5($7/$.(6,65(/($6('
$/21*7+(&/(9(/$1'6+25(
this characteristic, being similarly constructed as primarily
bottom feeders.
Forgotten in all this contempt is the drum’s size and fighting
ability. They average five to fifteen pounds across much of
their range, and fish of twenty pounds or more are regularly
caught. While they don’t jump, their brute strength produces
strong runs that can peel off line faster than many of the more
glamorous fish.
It’s only in the past decade or so that we’ve learned how
readily freshwater drum can be caught on flies—a real bonus
for Midwest urban anglers due to the fish’s abundance and
availability. Many harbor areas provide excellent angler-access
to drum habitat. And while it’s certainly possible to catch
them from shore, some sort of kayak or small boat opens up
far more options.
Freshwater drum are a well-adapted species, able to live in a
variety of environments and feed on many types of food under
varying conditions. While they prefer their water clear and clean,
they can tolerate a wide range of murky or turbid conditions,
especially over sand, gravel, or hard bottom. Rarely will they sit
on mud or soft bottom. Their color varies based on where they
live. In clear water with a rocky bottom, they have a bronze or
JEFF LISKAY
brown tinge, and in more turbid conditions, or when sitting on
sand, they tend to be silvery gray. When targeting them with flies,
rocky breakwalls and drop-offs are prime drum locations.
 '$7(1,*+7,1&/(9(/$1'

Drum aren’t plant eaters, focusing instead on crayfish,

mollusks, and other invertebrates, including invasive zebra 7+(&233(5&2/252)
7+,6'5806+2:6,7
mussels. They will also target hatchlings or fry if available. :$6$52&.ˎ':(//(5
When this happens, the size and color of your fly both need +$1*,1*,16+$'(
7+(<$5(6,/9(5ˎ,6+
to be close to natural, as drum can become as selective as :+(129(56$1'25
trout. While known primarily as bottom-dwellers, drum will ,1025(23(1:$7(5

occasionally follow schools of larger baitfish and will even

suspend high off the bottom to feed.
In the Great Lakes, freshwater drum will sometimes move up
onto sandy flats to feed. Here they become a challenging but
rewarding freshwater-flats target. Requirements include realistic
flies, accurate casts, and a stealthy approach with long leaders. The
Even then, a strike isn’t guaranteed, as drum can be picky as 93
permit on clear-water flats.
Drake

The harbors and near-shore areas of larger cities around the

Great Lakes are accessible to millions of people. Fly anglers in
-2+1)$%,$1˖723˗.$5(10$'$&+,.

these urban areas, who may travel long distances to fish, likely
have a viable opportunity right out their door. Freshwater
drum may not be a glamorous, popular fighter à la Sugar Ray
Leonard or Manny Pacquiao. Instead, they remind us of an old
prizefighter in the vein of Jack Dempsey or Joe Frazier—less
attractive, perhaps, but always ready to slug out through the
final round.

Fishing info: Contact Jeff Liskay at greatlakesflyfishing.com

Fall 2022
 BUGS
6DOPRQƌ\
Questions
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RXUIDYRULWHKDWFK"
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Living in Eastern Idaho allows me
to fish some of the finest trout water in
the country, from the South Fork of the
Snake to the Madison in Montana. But
lately, nostalgia has drawn me south, to
northern Utah’s Logan and Blacksmith
Fork rivers, both of which flow through
the fifty-mile-long Cache Valley where
I grew up. Each of these rivers had
healthy salmonfly hatches when my
grandpa was a kid, but now only
the Blacksmith Fork does, and few
people seem to know why.
The Logan’s annual salmonfly
hatch used to be as large and reliable as
nearly any in the West. But this hatch
began to wane throughout the ’60s
and ’70s; it’s now nearly impossible
to find an adult salmonfly anywhere
along the Logan. Conversely, the still-
robust Blacksmith Fork flows through
an adjacent canyon and belongs to the
same Bear River watershed.
Two hours south of the Logan,
salmonflies have also disappeared along
a stretch of Utah’s Provo River, from
Jordanelle Reservoir to Utah Lake. Severe
declines have also been reported on the
Drake
Ogden River below Pineview Reservoir.
This case of disappearing salmonflies
94 isn’t just a Utah problem. Over the past
sixty years, salmonfly declines have been
The
reported in at least eleven important fisheries
in the Rocky Mountain West. Populations have
collapsed in more than three hundred miles of river in
Montana, including stretches of the Madison (below Ennis
Reservoir); the Smith (above Camp Baker); the Yellowstone
(just above and below Livingston); and the Clark Fork River
above Missoula.
In Colorado, salmonflies have gone locally extinct in
parts of the Arkansas River, and from several sections of
the upper Colorado (Windy Gap Dam to Kremmling), and
Fall 2022
the Gunnison, from the town of Gunnison to Blue Mesa Dam.
It’s likely that unreported losses have also occurred elsewhere,
especially in smaller, less well-known fisheries.
In many cases, these historic populations were incredibly
strong. In the 1950s, on the Provo, one research paper reported
fifty or more salmonfly nymphs found under a single boulder at
sites where now there are none. Unfortunately, all attempts at
restoring salmonflies to areas where they had previously gone
extinct—including several attempts along the Logan in
the 2000s—have been unsuccessful.
Scientists have been trying to determine the cause
of these disappearances for years. In most cases, the
rivers where declines have occurred still maintain strong
trout populations. Likewise, most appear to be healthy:
fast-flowing water cascades over boulders or meanders
around willows or cottonwoods—seemingly prime
habitat. It’s likely that a combination of many subtle
changes—temperatures, flows, sedimentation,
pollution, and the availability of food—is responsible.
Recent studies show that although salmonflies can
withstand surprisingly warm water temperatures
(above 80ºF) for long periods, they can die in cooler
water when flows and oxygen levels are low or when
pollution levels are high. In addition, sublethal
impacts can negatively affect nymphs later in
life, making it difficult to molt or to time their
emergence properly and ensure reproduction as
adults. This complexity makes pinpointing the
problem especially challenging, particularly when
negative impacts differ from river to river.
Scientists do have hypotheses as to why
declines have occurred in certain locations.
Along the Madison, for example, where low
flows have become more common in recent
years (recall the Hebgen Dam malfunction
in December of 2021), causing water
temperatures to spike. And in the Provo,
where declines are thought to be related
to the combined effects of dams, water
withdrawals, agriculture, and urbanization.
In the upper Colorado, increased siltation
from reduced flows is likely the culprit. These
are just a few specifics, though. In most rivers,
the true causes of salmonfly declines remain a
mystery. It’s been suspected that their extinction
on the Upper Logan, for instance, was due to high
JEREMIE HOLLMAN
levels of salt washing into the water. While this has
yet to be confirmed, biologists at Utah State University
are currently investigating whether salmonflies are
sensitive to long-term exposure to salt.
 Considering the number of anglers
who view the salmonfly emergence as
a can’t-miss event, and the economic
impact that a healthy hatch can have
on local economies, it is surprising
how few of these declines have been
seriously investigated. Two aquatic
entomologists from the University of
Montana in Missoula—Jackson Birrell
and James Frakes—plan to change
that. Birrell and Frakes have formed a
nonprofit called The Salmonfly Project
(salmonflyproject.org) with the goal
of protecting—and, where possible,
recovering—salmonflies across their
native range. Both are avid flyfishers
with scientific backgrounds in the
ecology and physiology of aquatic
insects, and they use this knowledge
to guide their work.
The three goals of The Salmonfly
Project: perform ecological surveys
and experiments to understand why
salmonflies are declining; collaborate
with diverse stakeholders to help
monitor and track current salmonfly
populations; and design and implement
restoration and remediation plans
based on the science that they and
others produce.
The Salmonfly Project is being
launched as an ongoing “citizen-science”
project, and Birrell and Frakes are
asking for the public’s help. “Additional
research is vital if we wish to protect
remaining populations,” says Birrell.
“And we need data from anglers across
the West to help us identify areas where
salmonflies have declined, or potentially
rebounded.” Visitors to their website can
fill out a “stakeholders’ questionnaire.”
(And of course, make a charitable
contribution if they feel so inclined.)
“We are living in an era when the
natural world, from polar bears to
steelhead to salmonflies, is being
strongly influenced by human activities,”
says Birrell. “Salmonflies are on an
unfavorable trajectory, and we’d like to
do all we can to correct that.”
 BACKCOUNTRY
Innoko Waterwolves
Chasing pike in the name of science ǫȂǴǮǿDzǷǯǻǪǵǮȂ
Clouds and rain threatened as I stepped from the single-prop
onto the tarmac at the Alaskan village of Galena, home to a few
hundred residents along the north bank of the Yukon River, 270
air miles west of my home in Fairbanks.
Waiting for me in the parking lot, leaning against his vintage
Toyota pickup, was Wyatt Snodgrass, fisheries biologist for
the Innoko, Koyukuk, and Nowitna National Wildlife Refuges
(combined acreage: 9,450,488—the size of six Delawares). I was
visiting in my capacity as a fisheries ecologist for the NYC-based
Wildlife Conservation Society, here to help Wyatt with a pike
Drake
research-and-monitoring project in the Innoko River, Alaska’s
fifth-longest at 500 miles.
96
Our plan was to document the population’s diet, age, genetic
The
information, and levels of contaminants. I felt fortunate to be
fishing the Innoko, one of the world’s top big-pike destinations.
I took in the landscape around me: old military buildings
(Galena served as an airfield during World War II); wide, flat
topography; and muddy roads, surrounded by a green hardwood
forest. The rain began peppering the windshield as Wyatt took
me on a driving tour of the sleepy, dispersed hamlet scattered
along the enormous river.
The following morning, Wyatt and I carried our gear to a pair
of red-and-white Piper Super Cubs resting in a shallow, weedy
slough. Here we met our pilots, Ben and Ed. Ben was an avid
Fall 2022
THE INNOKO RIVER IS ON THE
LEFT HALF OF THIS PHOTO. THE
IDITAROD RIVER IS ON THE RIGHT.
hunter and a soft-spoken guy who exuded competence. Ed was
warm and garrulous with a flowing golden mullet reminiscent
of a pro hockey player. The pilots crammed our gear into the
planes, wedging in rods, camping kit, food, sampling gear, and a
cooler. Skimming down the slough, we were soon airborne over
Galena and then heading south across the mile-wide Yukon.
After a turbulent, hour-long flight over low mountains
and expansive spruce forest, Ben and I descended toward the
muddy ribbon of the Innoko. Tin roofs and aluminum boat
hulls glinted in the sun as we angled down and landed on the
dark-brown water of a slough adjacent to the river. Ed and
Wyatt landed ten minutes later, and we all went about the
chores of making this unique USFWS camp serviceable. The
outpost consists of several small cabins for cooking, sleeping,
and storage, all of them perched high on pilings to keep clear of
frequent floods, giving the place a sort of Amazon-village vibe.
Ed fired up a small tractor with a rope attached to it and used
it to lower a boat thirty yards to the river, where we tied it up
and prepared it for cruising the Innoko in the coming days.
After one last caution about bears chewing exposed fuel lines,
the pilots climbed back in their planes and left us alone at our
camp in pike paradise.
Having dreamt of this opportunity for months, I soon
6(17,1(/ˎ6$7(//,7(
began casting from shore with my seven-weight, wire leader,
and rabbit-strip streamer. It didn’t take long to land several
medium-sized pike to keep for samples. To protect the large
female spawners, we would only be collecting fish that were
under twenty-eight inches. This became a challenge when a
 TWO TRUSTY CABINS,
BORROWED FROM BEARS.

quarter of the fish we caught stretched beyond that mark. and cleithra can be used to age pike (like counting rings on
An hour in, while sloshing around in the slough, I hooked trees), which provided information on the average age of
a particularly large pike. It smashed my streamer along the the population. Muscle and liver tissue samples would allow
lilypad-littered margin of the deeper water, bucking and diving measurement of contaminants such as mercury. Finally, we
in the inky depths. After a fight of several minutes, I got the fish clipped portions of the pike’s fins for a genetics study that an
to the bank and laid it on a measuring board, taping it at thirty- Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologist had requested.
four inches. Removing the Each pike seemed to
hook with long-handled have a favorite food.
forceps, I slid its yellow- One had a stomach full
and-green mottled bulk of small aquatic insects
back into the dark water. called water boatmen.
Over the next few days, Several had cannibalized
fishing throughout the smaller members of their
miles-long slough, this own species. Others had
The
time in the powerboat, eaten small whitefish and
Wyatt and I collected a suckers, and a number of
97
respectable number of fish. stomachs were empty. One
Drake

We took our measurements of the pike (not a giant

and samples while holed one, at twenty-six inches),
up in the large mess-hall, MUSKRAT LOVE. was particularly plump.
recording lengths, weights, Opening its stomach, I
and stomach contents, and was shocked to find a fully
extracting earbones (otoliths), cleithra (a thin bone along the grown muskrat, not much shorter than the fish itself. I had
pike’s cheek), fin clips, liver, and muscle tissue. The lengths and heard of pike eating small mammals and ducks, but it was cool
.(9,1)5$/(<˖˗

weights revealed the typical dimensions and average condition to see evidence of this in person. As a mammal myself, however,
of the fish, while stomach contents gave us information on what I was a little unnerved by seeing this large of a muskrat in a
the main prey were for these pike, and if their food preference pike’s belly.
is abundant enough for most pike to have full bellies. Otoliths Our down time at the camp during fishing breaks was relaxed

Fall 2022
 BACKCOUNTRY

as it simply ignored my
yelling and continued sniffing
around the underside of the
cabin. A bit louder and more
spirited noise-making sent
it onto the porch of another
cabin (not Wyatt’s), where it
began chewing on a glove that
was covered in pike slime.
Eventually, I walked down
and blew the boat horn. While
this did wake up Wyatt in a
startling manner, it also made
the bear spit out the glove and
finally amble out of camp. We
saw him the next day on the far
side of the slough, but he never
returned to bother us.
With a few days remaining,
Wyatt and I decided to fish the
main river. We boated across
the slough and transferred
to the bigger boat, where we
found three puncture marks in
the handle of a gas can—more
handiwork of the bear. Cruising
up and down the muddy, slow-
moving Innoko, we caught
pike while casting soft-plastic
minnow-baits on spinning gear.
But out on the main river, a
higher percentage of them were
too large for our sampling. We
caught many fish over thirty
inches and two that measured
more than forty. These fish
were healthy and strong, and it
7+($87+25+2/',1*+,6ˎ,1&+
3(5621$/ˎ%(673,.(21$)/<˖:,7+ was difficult to land and release
HIS %/22'217+(6,'(2)7+(),6+˗ them from the boat, because the
landing-net mesh ripped during
and occasionally amusing. A library of dog-eared books lined the an encounter with a particularly
Drake

mess-hall shelves (Clive Cussler books were apparently a favorite),
and the large stash of food was months, sometimes years, past
98
expiration. Chicken noodle soup packets had congealed, thanks
The
large specimen. The cut-resistant glove and long forceps did the
trick, but we tried to keep the fish in the water so they wouldn’t
hurt themselves.

to years in alternating damp summers and -40 winters. A bucket
of Tang had become a lump of orange cement. If the rain stopped
falling, a horde of mosquitoes would appear, requiring headnets
or liberal application of DEET.
One evening, while reading a book in the twilight, I kept
hearing a faint bumping noise outside. Assuming it was Wyatt
Our research permit allowed us to set some tangle-nets in the
river to increase our sample size, but this proved ineffective for
pike, as they were either not moving around or could see and
avoid the nets. We did catch one chubby whitefish that looked
to be the perfect-size food for a forty-inch waterwolf.
One side of the river was the boundary of the 1,240,000-acre
.(9,1)5$/(<˖6(/),(˗

rummaging around his cabin, I peered out my window and
instead saw a small black bear under the overhang of my cabin
platform. Grabbing bear spray, I popped out onto the deck
and yelled at the bear, just ten feet away. It apparently found a
fisheries ecologist in sweatpants not the least bit intimidating,
Innoko Wilderness Area, and we walked around on the bank
basically so we could say we visited it—not many have. Our base
camp was more than a hundred river miles from Shageluk (pop.
99), the nearest downstream village. No villages are upstream.
The next day the Innoko was higher and muddier, with rain

Fall 2022

continuing to fall. On the way upstream, along one wide bend,
movement on the left bank caught my eye. It was a group of
seven wolf pups, playing and exploring beside a large den in
the riverbank. When we first approached, they ran toward us
to get a better look, but when we got within thirty yards, they
reconsidered and retreated into the den and the surrounding
vegetation. A pup poked its nose out of the foliage here and
there. Just upstream, near the top of the riverbank, we saw an
adult that was likely the pups’ mom. We pulled
upriver across from her, and she watched us,
unimpressed. She was a spectacular animal with
salt-and-pepper coloring. A raw wound on her
side was noticeable, perhaps from an encounter
with a moose she was trying to bring down for
her pups.
We backed off and continued upstream.
Later that day, hunkered in the boat to shelter
from heavy rain, we saw another black bear,
this one swimming across the river. These
encounters drove home just how remote and
wild this setting was. Since the cabin gets
MAMA GRAY WOLF.
so few visitors, it’s likely these animals we
encountered had never seen a human.
On our final morning at camp, I was back out on the slough
with my seven-weight, trying to catch a forty-inch pike on a fly
rod, which I’d set as my goal for the trip. The closest I’d gotten was
.(9,1)5$/(<˖˗
the thirty-four incher at the beginning of the trip—my personal
best on the fly. Drifting within sight of camp, I threw a large foam
mouse into some dark water next to a lily pad, and as I began
stripping it back, a giant pike exploded on the mouse, going
USFW FISHERIES BIOLOGIST
WYATT SNODGRASS WITH A
HANDSOME INNOKO PIKE.
airborne trying to eat it. I set the hook too early, missing the fish
as it crashed back into the water. Cursing, thinking I had blown
my chance, I made another cast. Immediately after the mouse hit
the water, the big pike ate it. I reefed back, setting the hook, and
the fish shot directly into a patch of water lilies. For a moment
I thought it might break off, but my thick leader sliced through
the vegetation and the pike was soon out in open water, shaking
its head and going on several powerful runs, one of them taking
me into the backing. After five-plus minutes
of fighting, I finally had the fish alongside the
boat, where it thrashed and caught one of my
fingers with its teeth, cutting a half inch slice
that bled profusely. I grit my teeth and waited
for the pike to calm down.
When I lifted it to take a photo, I noticed a
streak of blood on its side. My blood. I laid the
beast on the measuring board in the bottom
of the boat. Thirty-eight inches. Not quite
the forty-incher, but I was satisfied with this
magnificent fish, a new personal best on the
fly for me. Popping the mouse out of the pike’s
jaw, I lowered it into the water and cradled it
there. With a single thrash of its tail, it shot
away toward the lily pads. I wrapped my bleeding hand with a
towel and motored back to camp.
Wyatt and I were happy with the data we collected, which
will be kept in refuge records for future use in fisheries studies.
The Innoko River had lived up to its legendary reputation as a
northern pike stronghold in one of the least-populated parts of
a state known for its many remote areas.
 DRA KE
ALABAMA
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 PERMIT PAGE
Happy Silver Anniversary
%77FHOHEUDWHVWZHQW\ƋYH\HDUVǫȂǽǸǶǫDzǮ
Bonefish and Tarpon Trust (BTT) is celebrating its twenty-
fifth anniversary in 2022, and while many anglers are likely
familiar with the work this Miami-based nonprofit has done
to benefit the two fish in its name, the data BTT has gathered
and the conservation work it has accomplished on behalf of our
beloved permit is equally impressive and important.
To be clear: A quarter century ago, virtually nobody was doing
this work. Broad, practical, science-based research on bonefish
and tarpon—and especially on permit—just wasn’t happening
at a meaningful level. In the mid-1990s, the group that would
eventually become BTT consisted of just a half-dozen anglers
who’d noticed that bonefish numbers in the Keys had dropped
and that little was being done to figure out why—much less
reverse the trend. With some help from the University of
Drake
Miami, this band of bonefishers scoured for clues in existing
research and learned that not much research existed.
104
By 1997, an organization calling itself Bonefish and Tarpon
The
Unlimited had collected a group of sixty founding members,
including many of the biggest names in saltwater flyfishing,
from Lefty Kreh and Joan Wulff to Billy Pate and Rick Ruoff.
The first research projects were conducted on bonefish, using
conventional plastic “dart” tags (aka “spaghetti” tags) to gather
baseline information on size, range, and population. In a few
short years, satellite tags were being used on tarpon, and in
2003 the inaugural Bonefish and Tarpon Research Symposium
was held, bringing together twenty scientists and many mem-
bers of the curious, flats-fishing public. The next symposium
was held in 2006, and one has been held every three years since.
Fall 2022
PERMIT REQUIRE A GREAT
AMOUNT OF RESPECT AND
DISCRETIONARY SPENDING.
In 2009, Bonefish and Tarpon Unlimited became Bonefish
and Tarpon Trust. The name change coincided with the group’s
expansion of its research and conservation efforts in the Carib-
bean, along with an increased focus on permit work. These
studies received a major boost in 2011 when BTT teamed with
Costa Sunglasses to create Project Permit, with the goal of “con-
serving and restoring the Keys’ iconic permit fishery.” That same
year, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission
(FWC) established a Special Permit Zone (SPZ) around the Keys
and Biscayne Bay, giving these special environments more strict
permit regulations than waters in other parts of Florida.
Project Permit began with guides and scientists tagging more
than twelve hundred permit with dart tags, and then carefully
recording their recaptures over the years. This was the first
permit-tagging program ever conducted in Florida, and it was
soon expanded to Belize and Mexico.
In 2016, BTT embarked on a five-year acoustic tracking proj-
ect that revealed permit movements in the Florida Keys, and
further influenced critical FWC management decisions. These
improvements included expanding spawning season protections
in the SPZ from three to four months, and in 2021 creating a
total fishing closure during spawning season at Western Dry
Rocks, a crucial permit-spawning site.
While most permit are recaptured within just a few miles
of where they were tagged—some are even caught swimming
the same flat they were tagged on years earlier—a few have
been travelers: One tagged in Biscayne Bay was recaptured nine
months later more than a hundred and twenty miles away.
If you find this type of work to be interesting and important,
consider supporting BTT by attending their 7th International
JIM KLUG
Science Symposium & Flats Expo, being held November 4-5 at
PGA National Resort in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla.
 Get the net.

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