Fishing

When I was 11 years-old I didn’t care much about fishing. Give me a BB gun or a good book to read and I could get excited. Until my Uncle Jon told me that I could learn to read a river like a book. Read a river? Now I’m hooked. There are two ways to…

Heading out to the highway with a fly rod in the rack? Try one of these lakes for great springtime trout action. When we planned our annual family camping trip last year, the easy part was deciding where to go. My new book, The Oregon Lake Maps and Fishing Guide was out and thumbing through…

When we set out to do battle with trout, we arm ourselves with specific techniques to handle typical encounters with our quarry. But often, our opponent has seen our stratagems before and is wary of taking the fly. That’s when its time to bend the rules of engagement. And time to adopt guerrilla tactics. Guerrilla…

To catch big brown trout, they say, you’ve got to fish very early and very late in the day or even all night long. Big browns, they say, come from big, deep lakes where they feed on kokanee and chubs. Furthermore, you need big baits to turn salmo trutta’s head. Well, they should have been…

The waters of the Klamath Basin in southern Oregon are legendary for big rainbows, but there is a trophy trout tributary to Upper Klamath Lake that is little known, lightly fished and miles off the beaten track. Clean, clear, low and shallow, up to 50 yards across, the creek empties into Pelican Bay in the…

It is no secret that bull trout are in trouble across much of their range, but they are still found in fishable numbers in parts of British Columbia, Alberta, Montana, Idaho, Washington and Oregon. The bull trout (a char) is a colorful fish with back and flanks of olive or brown, sprinkled with red, orange,…

“The go-to patterns and tactics you’ll need when you chase the biggest of the big in the Northwest’s Pay-to-Play waters” Sometimes you just want to catch big fish. Trout that can be measured in pounds, not inches. And not just a few pounds, either. Double digits look good in the fishing journal. A lot of…

When I booked a February trip with Coyhaique River Lodge in Patagonia, I told owner Gaston Urrejola, that I hoped to ride horseback to access a stream on a nearby estancia. A few days before I boarded the plane to Chile, I told him I wanted to catch a wild trout, on a dry fly,…

I turned my back on a career in professional basketball when I entered the seventh grade. You have to practice every night, they told me. With church on Sunday that left only Saturday for fishing. I was forced into a decision between the roar of an adoring crowd and a jerk at the end of…