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The True Cast – Does Angler Pressure Affect What Trout Eat?
I absolutely love fishing with streamer flies. After all, streamers elicit a predatory response, particularly when trout fishing. Streamers are what turn a trout’s instinct dial from meek and mild dun sippers and nymph inhalers to full-on carnivorous beasts. And mouse flies! It’s one thing to hear a trout crash on a fly at night,…
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The True Cast – When your kid rows your boat…
Riding in the back seat of my own drift boat, I’m looking over my son Paul’s shoulder as he sizes up the entry and plots a line through a rapid. It isn’t a terribly complicated run—there are a couple sneaky rocks that might pin or flip a boat if you hit them sideways, but otherwise,…
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The True Cast – same gear different sports
Fly fishing in rivers and on saltwater flats are worlds apart. I often daydream about fly fishing for trout. But my night dreams inevitably involve tarpon. Like over 90 percent of fly anglers, I got my start on a little river chasing trout. But I’m now an “anadromous” fisherman, migrating back and forth from salt…
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The True Cast – Secret Spots
The best “secret spot” story I can share involves a place (I still can’t say where, other than somewhere in southwestern Colorado) a good friend (D.)
As a writer of fishing stories, one thing I wrestle with most is whether to divulge the places where the stories take place. That’s not a new dilemma. Legend has it that when Ernest Hemingway wrote about the “Big Two-Hearted River,” he wasn’t really writing about the actual Big Two-Hearted River. I admit to doing…
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The True Cast – The smell of mud
I can smell spring coming. It reminds me of walking to the school bus stop in Wisconsin, in a lost era when the ground would be covered by Thanksgiving with snowfall that would last until St. Patrick’s Day. After a long, dark winter, I would yearn for the special sunny morning when I would catch…
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The True Cast – That bug thing… how do I pick the right fly?
If you told me I could only pick six patterns to fish for trout anywhere in America, these are the patterns I’d pick.
Fly fishing for trout encompasses many challenges, which I think is much of the appeal of the sport in the first place. It is, as my friend Monte Burke so eloquently explained, all about puzzle solving; How do I make this cast? How do I know where a trout will be in the river? How…
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The True Cast – It isn’t about the gear. It’s about the hook.
When I first signed on as the editor of TROUT magazine, the great John Merwin—author of The New American Trout Fishing and then the fishing editor for Field & Stream—offered me some friendly advice. “Run a cover that shows a trout with a Panther Martin lure hanging out of its mouth,” he said. “That’ll get…
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