At the risk of sounding simplistic, tarpon fishing is as easy as it gets. Knocking it down to basic components, you place the fly in front of a fish and keep it there until he eats or refuses it. Plus, tarpon are so predictable that in some areas, I know within five or ten feet [...]
It’s not for the faint of heart, this fishing, but the rewards are worth it. Picture this: you’re standing in the bow of a center console 50 feet away from the face of rocky edifice rising out of the Atlantic. Swells are rolling in from the open ocean, lifting you high in the air and [...]
Anyone the least bit familiar with striped bass knows about the creature’s propensity for hanging out in rips. Not only do rips concentrate the bass, they also hold some of the biggest fish. To understand why stripers are attracted to rips it helps to know a little bit about how they are formed. Rips occur [...]
“There’s a tailer at one o’clock, about 120 feet out!” Ken and Eldon Shannon were experiencing their first taste of bonefishing, and I wanted it to be a success. I began poling the boat as quickly and quietly as I could through the crystal-clear water toward the feeding bonefish, keeping an eye out for others [...]
The skiff floated on a gently rolling sea. Early morning light reflected off the waves, and from the backs of the tarpon that rolled sporadically throughout the area. Barry Kent couldn’t wait for a specific target and cast blindly, hoping for the best.
Suddenly he said, “I’m on, John!” He set the hook repeatedly (shouting nothing [...]
Anticipation is one of the most powerful sensations in angling. In clear-water flats fishing, the greatest thrill comes in the instance between when the fish is spotted, and the presentation is taken or refused. The combination of visual drama and tactile electricity between angler and quarry truly gets the heart pumping!
More so than any other [...]
Several years ago, October found me drifting over Napatree Point in Watch Hill, Rhode Island, hoping to find one of the stripers that frequent this rocky point. As I imagined the falling tide washing my eel pattern along, making it pulse beneath a heavy Teeny line, I was just getting oriented when BANG!! I was [...]
I changed my shooting head yesterday and practiced booming out some casts in the yard with the floating line, practicing for the bluefish prowling the flats of Oregon Beach here in Cotuit.
The bluefish are a week late this year. It has been a cold May and everything from the lilacs to the barn swallows are [...]
Had it been mere mayhem I might have been able to cope a little better, but this was something different. Two schools of sand eels had been corralled on either side of our boat and were being decimated by heat-seeking, eel-eating, supersonic, drag-burnin g, bonito and false albacore which attacked as if with personal vendettas. [...]
