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Wild or hatchery? Idaho fisheries managers want to know
A rainbow trout from the Snake River. Roger Phillips photo. The Idaho Department of Fish and Game wants to know if the rainbow trout that swim in the Snake River between two eastern Idaho impoundments are wild or if they're hatchery fish that have migrated upstream. The rainbows between Gem Lake, just below Idaho Falls…
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Five reasons you should be fishing lakes today
Fishing stillwater for trout is so good for you, and good for your game, on so many levels. But many anglers don’t bother. Here are five reasons to go jump in a lake (or at least fish from the shore 1. Knowledge You learn things you don’t often learn on the river. Making casts so…
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Finding trout ‘hiding’ in plain sight
Remember the approach we took as kids when fishing? “The big ones are all out in the middle.” So we’d cast as far as we could because, well, we wanted to reach the fish that no one else could. We know now that such an approach is (usually) misguided on a literal level, but it’s…
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Why fly fishing is like pizza
Pizza is pizza, right? A little crust, a little sauce, some cheese… bada-bing! There you go. Not hardly! Perish that thought. Great pizza is an artform. It should be a perfect balance involving great crust, delicious sauce, golden cheese and fantastic toppings. If any of those four elements are deficient in any way… meh pizza! The operative word…
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Chill out and let others enjoy the river, too
I once observed a school of trout whacking away at PMDs have a canoe float right over them. How long do you think it took for them to turn back on?
I have to chuckle when I see anglers get so bent out of shape when a kayak floats by, or a dog takes a swim within barking distance of where they are fishing. I once watched a friend’s ears literally turn red every time a tuber drifted downstream. That’s silly for two reasons. First, we…
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One salmonid for the rest of my life? I choose Dolly
You can try to time the silver run or the king run, and maybe you'll get lucky and hit it just right. Odds are, you'll time your date with Dolly perfectly — she's rarely a no-show
I made an off-hand comment on a friend's Facebook post this morning — he uploaded a great photo of a Dolly Varden in Southeast Alaska and I quickly opined that, should some higher power ever dictate to me that I could only catch one salmonid for the rest of my life, it very well might…
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Jumping the shark
I have many bad habits, for sure, but the one fly-fishing vice I cannot break is casting at mako sharks off the California coast with flies. It started nearly 20 years ago when I met Conway Bowman while writing the book Tideline. That led to a larger story for Field& Stream magazine (“Flyfishing Gone Mad”) a couple years later.…
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