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Time to Stop the Bullying of Salmon
The moment remains etched in memory. We hiked in neoprene wetsuits pulled down to our waists because it was 85 degrees, but the rivers we snorkeled in were a LOT colder. The stream, a tributary of the South Fork of the Salmon River in Idaho, was small, perhaps 10 yards wide. I recall how my…
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Boys Becoming Men
Measuring the passing of time during a week in Canada
Measuring the passing of time during a week in Canada. For a few months longer, until Wylie turns 20, I will have three teenage sons in the house. Three sons It is a magical time in their lives, and for me, too, watching the slow but blindingly fast transition from boys to men. I am…
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How to bring a river back from the dead
One chapter’s handiwork (literally) has salter brook trout returning to a famous creek The Quashnet is a five-mile prayer of a river that flows into Waquoit Bay in Cape Cod, Mass. Fishing the river is like walking in a verdant tunnel, as wide as a fly rod is long in many sections. Willows and other…
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As Zen and Cool as it gets
The outsize conservation legacy of a garage bamboo rod builder. Bill Lamberson started making his first bamboo rod in 1981. He didn’t finish it until 1998. Now, from his garage-shop in Columbia, Missouri, he makes about one bamboo rod per month. Bill Lamberson fishing bamboo with success - Photo courtesy of Noppadol Paothong, Missouri Department…
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Be well. Fish on.
When this group gets together, it’s much more than a fishing trip.
"Be well. Fish on." Stewart Brown wrote those words with his finger on the rear window of a friend’s dusty pick-up after a day of fishing in Colorado. It was three days before he would go into surgery for brain cancer. A few of his friends noted how much peace fishing gave Stewart through his…
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Time forgot this place. We haven’t.
Why folks at Trout Unlimited care so much about a shad fishery up the road from the Washington monument Everyone has a special place. When I was going to high school in Jersey City, one of mine was the abandoned docks below the Hoboken train station. To get there, I had to sneak past darkened…
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Mastering the March Brown hatch
A son catches his first trout on a fly rod, and a father fears losing the family fishing crown My dad, who went to Georgetown on a basketball scholarship, bet my three brothers and I that none of us would be able to beat him one-on-one before we were 16. I beat him at 15. …
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