The Drake

IN FALL OF 2012, Patagonia hosted a media gathering at their headquarters in Ventura, Calif. This was back when print magazines like Fly Rod & Reel and Fly Fishing in Salt Waters still existed, so it was a larger crowd than it would be today. The focus was on editors getting a look at their 2013 line, but the last afternoon included a Q & A with Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard, which quickly evolved—as industry dialogue at the time often did—into a dire discussion on how to “attract more young people to the sport.” So now, a decade later, when the staid sport of flyfishing is finally attracting more youth (and women, and non-Anglo anglers who don’t all look like Mitt Romney), what is the response from the self-appointed custodians of…

THE SECRET LIFE OF COWS I am on faculty at Michigan State in animal science. We recently launched a new Center for Regenerative Ag, and have been doing research on managed grazing for the past 13 years. I also have a heart for rivers and trout. Our research farm is embedded within an hour of five blue-ribbon trout streams, including the AuSable and Manistee. Your article, “Cattle & Brookies” (Winter ’21) did my heart a lot of good. Nice work. Jason Rowntree, East Lansing, MI YOU CAN HANDLE THE TRUTH! Finally had a chance to read “Blame Game” (Fall ’21). That is probably the best article you’ve written in The Drake—articulate, factual, all sides represented, and most importantly, common-sense reasoning. All of us have some responsibility and participation in how and why salmon and…

NOT ONCE in the Book of Samuel did David stand on the bow of a Chittum Skiff with a megaphone, screaming at Goliath as he traveled on a cruise ship filled with 3,000 people. But when Captain Will Benson, along with many other Florida Keys guides and anglers, protested the arrival of the megaship Celebrity Constellation in Key West back on Feb. 3, they were fighting boats—and a political battle—of biblical proportions. Many of the protesters became loudest as the 965-foot boat (20 feet shy of the Eiffel Tower) churned-up a silt trail in the port of Key West, exemplifying the damage, both environmental and financial, that the cruise-ship industry has left on the fish, anglers, fragile reefs, and economy of Key West. Much maneuvering has occurred throughout various levels of…

SOUTH CENTRAL ALASKA’S Kenai River flows for more than 80 miles from Kenai Lake to Cook Inlet near the town of Kenai. Just below the outlet of the lake, the river passes the town of Cooper Landing, where anglers have forever flocked in pursuit of the region’s salmon. Because of these prolific salmon runs, the incredible flyfishing opportunities for rainbow trout were largely ignored around Cooper Landing until the mid-1980s, when a man named Curt “Trout” Muse made one of those non-conventional career choices, uprooted his life, and moved to Cooper Landing with his wife, Judy. Muse and his wife opened Alaska Troutfitters in 1984, and were joined shortly thereafter by a couple of young, enthusiastic guides named Dusty Byrd and Billy Coulilette. Byrd and Coulilette spent more than a decade…

CLYDE HAD BEEN SITTING in a barn outside of Gadsden, in West Etowah County, Alabama, for nearly six months, with a flat front tire and a massive gash in his gas tank. He wanted to rumble his Detroit muscles, but hadn’t done so for some time under my watch. I never developed any mechanical skills, but my friend Adam has worked on cars since his youth, tinkering with his grandfather in their garage in Decatur. He put on a new gas tank in a little more than an hour, performing what seemed to me a mannish miracle. Clyde was purring again, and my passion for flyfishing culture would be realized at the Fly Fishing Film Festival at Cahaba Brewing in Birmingham the following weekend. What Clyde will do to save me…

WHAT IS A “TROPHY-FISH CARVING” and how are they made? For Ellen McCaleb, widely considered one of best trophy-fish carvers of the past fifty years, her craft began with an unlikely source: two-by-fours—notoriously crooked and knotty—from Home Depot. Over Zoom, with the waters of Chesapeake Bay outside her window, McCaleb holds up her first-ever carving: a small brook trout, mounted on a little round stone that looks, in her words, like a three-dimensional James Prosek painting. Her favorite memories growing up are of fishing with her dad on Maryland’s Eastern Shore—moments of reprieve from work, she said—but how did she go from catching fish to carving replicas of them? A famous neighbor, it turns out. McCaleb used to babysit for Mark McNair, a noted master bird carver whose sons continue the tradition.…