Recently in People Category

"'Fly-fishing and direct-response retailing, Perkins says, 'are both games of inches. Success or failure is in the details.' In retailing the product has to be great. The pitch must be perfect ('Sometimes it's the difference of just one word in a catalog,' he says). And when you hook a customer, care must be taken to not lose him or her along the way."

Monte Burke profiles Orvis CEO Perk Perkins for Forbes magazine.

"RISE," the highly anticipated follow-up to last year's DVD "Drift," began shipping just this week. MidCurrent visitors get a sneak peek at one of the more powerful segments of the movie: Rene Harrop talking about his close connection with Idaho's Henry's Fork.

As Harrop says of his experience of becoming inseparable from the river, "I think I was destined to be here and to make my life right here. And that's the way it's been. 55 years later I still feel the same excitement, the same surge of energy and the sense of something very special about this place. The truest sense of happiness, of joy, is when we're where we want to be, and we're doing what we want to do."

Watch the video on MidCurrent.

Fly fishers are known for their reveries: imagining themselves following streams to their sources, pondering magical origins to favorite waters, or thinking of themselves as participating in age-old rituals. But amidst the shifting culture of what we call fly fishing in 2009, we typically forget to look back over our shoulders and remember how we got here. Looking "upstream" at history, we can better understand the evolution of techniques, technology, and other tributaries of our sport. This is especially true in fisheries conservation, where a historical perspective tells us where we've gone wrong, where we've succeeded, and perhaps where we should go in the future.

On November 21, several of fly fishing's noted figures -- James Prosek, Hoagy Carmichael, and author John Ross, along with two new historians of the sport, Sam Snyder and Bryon Borgelt -- will wade into the headwaters to explore fly fishing's contribution to coldwater conservation. A one-day symposium entitled, "A River Never Sleeps: Conservation, History, and the Fly Fishing River" on November 21, 2009 at the National Sporting Library in Middleburg, Virginia, will investigate lessons from our sources and insights on the future of fly fishing and fisheries, from native species to restored rivers. If it's any indication of the level of interest, the symposium is almost sold out.

Brian Milne reports on About.com that local pro George Daniel topped the rest of the field in last week's U.S. Fly Fishing Championships held in State College, Pennsylvania. "Utah's Lance Egan, who finished first during a difficult session on the Little Juniata, earned the overall silver medal, and New Mexico's Norman Maktima finished with the bronze."

You can read the full results in Milne's report.

Perhaps as a result of too much good fishing, Chris Ward, the brains behind the MSN news website and the MSN portal has decided not to return to Microsoft. "A keen environmentalist, Ward said in an interview before his sabbatical that he planned to travel with his family to the US for six weeks and then visit the Costa Rican rainforest, as well as indulge in his passion for fly fishing." On Domain-B.com.

Combining the constant-motion softness of marabou feathers with a woolly worm fly, Russell C. Blessing's Woolly Bugger did what most great flies do: it improved on an already workable idea, and it helped those of us less apt to make a perfect presentation catch more fish. Blessing passed away at the age of 74 last Wednesday at his home in Pennsylvania.

Tom Rosenbauer recommended the Woolly Bugger as one of eight essential patterns in his The Orvis Fly-Tying Manual, "the Woolly Bugger was first tied in 1967 by Russell Blessing of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who added a marabou tail to a Woolly Worm in an attempt to imitate a hellgrammite, a big mean larva of a dobsonfly. I saw the fly about five years later on the upper Beaverkill. I was sitting on edge of a deep pool with Ron Kusse, a bamboo rod maker who was running the old Leonard Rod Company at the time. It was one of those midday breaks in August when you realize you won't catch a fish for seven hours, when the sun leaves the water. 'Wanna see something amazing?' Rod asked."

As Gary Soucie wrote in his book Woolly Wisdom, Blessing had some specific advice on how to fish his favorite pattern, starting by "dead-drifting the Bugger, 'to see what happens.' If that doesn't produce, he will add jigging motions on the strip, jig it back at the end of the drift ... and across the current and let it swing, use hand-strip retrieves. 'Sometimes,' he says, 'it takes fast strips. Some of the guys around here will strip it as fast as they can.'

'Almost everything works, some of the time.' Amen to that."

Filed under "Things to Do In Cleveland On Your Day Off" (or, "I Need to Get Out More"): Cleveland Cavaliers general manager Dan Ferry been too busy working to indulge in fly fishing in his own backyard (which anyone familiar with Lake Erie steelhead will tell you is fantastic.)

"Off the top of my head, I would like to go fly-fishing again. I have fly-fished on vacation a bunch, but last year I went here in town. I have lived here for almost 15 years now and did not know you could fly-fish in Cleveland." Sarah Crump on Cleveland.com.

From the New York Times's April 3, 1988 edition comes this gem in which Joan Salvato Wulff describes how her infatuation with fly fishing began: with the sudden realization that ''It's better to be the fisherman than the rower.''

"In those days there was no way I could have made my living at tournament casting, but I didn't want to find myself happily teaching dance at age 75, without having fulfilled my fishing dreams. So I turned professional as a caster, giving sport show demonstrations, and a line manufacturer gave me part-time work as a good-will representative, calling on its Eastern dealers. I had no ambition to be rich - just happy, in the fishing field."

Dacre Stoker, great-grandnephew of (you guessed it) Dracula author Bram Stoker has penned a sequel to his ancestor's book that has already sold $2 million in pre-publication rights. Dracula: The Un-dead continues the saga with a new generation of vampire fighters.

But Dacre Stoker is not really even a fan of scary books. He's a former pentathlete who works for South Carolina's Aiken County Open Land Trust. He was pushed to take on the project by writer and vampire enthusiast Ian Holt. What would he rather be doing? "Indulging my real passion, fly-fishing."

Reporter Kent Garber recounts Chouinard's decision to move away from industrial farming to organic products and notes that even the spiritual leader of Patagonia says nothing is truly "sustainable." "He is wearing a black Patagonia jacket, which holds a box of flies and might be mistaken for product placement were it a marquee product of practically any other company. But Chouinard, who is 70 but looks younger, doesn't care much about selling jackets these days."

Has it really been 25 years since Richard Brautigan died? Known as a peculiar but brilliant beat-generation author who began his career handing out poetry on street corners, he's best known for his novella Trout Fishing in America, a veiled critique of American culture and a book that helped turned him into a literary icon.

Here's the San Francisco Chronicle's October 24, 1984 report on Brautigan's death: "Author Richard Brautigan, whose 1967 novel 'Trout Fishing in America' made him a literary celebrity, was found dead yesterday at his home in Bolinas. The Marin County coroner's office said the cause of death was not known."

Lori-Ann Murphy, long-time guide and pioneering instructor for women in fly fishing, will be taking on the role of director of fishing and guest relations at El Pescador in Belize on November 7.

"Lori-Ann has been an icon of the fly-fishing industry since 1989 when she became the first female Orvis Endorsed fly-fishing guide. In 1992 Lori-Ann co-founded Reel-Women; a very successful outfitter offering guided service, fishing schools, and fly-fishing travel primarily for female anglers. She has also acted as a member of pro-staff for numerous fly-fishing manufacturers, competed successfully in various casting competitions as well as the Fly Fishing Masters, and she has been featured in media ranging from ESPN to Martha Stewart Living."

Read the full press release in the extended entry.

Citing health concerns and disagreements with business partners, Jack Dennis went public this week with his decision to leave the fly fishing retail business after forty-two years. As Brandon Zimmerman reports in the Jackson Hole News & Guide, Dennis will devote his energies to producing high-quality DVDs and to personal appearances. "Dennis' immediate future will include four road-show events in Dallas, Atlanta, Boise and Denver and a full slate of Cabela's store appearances this year. Dennis, though, will no longer have his hands in the retail stores on Town Square and at Teton Village."

NPR's Melissa Block interviews Oregon's very green governor, a man who claims he'll "throw a fly into any puddle or stream of water in Oregon."

"Maybe it's Kulongoski's confidence. Maybe the fish don't want to make him look bad with reporters in the boat. But suddenly, the governor's rod arcs toward the water. The governor starts to reel in his line, his eyes fixed on the river. He's braced for a steelhead giving him a fight."

Formerly Yellowstone National Park superintendent and now president of the nonprofit Turner Foundation, Mike Finley oversees millions of dollars of conservation grants that touch everything from salmon habitat restoration to crane nesting grounds near the Korean DMZ. It all started with his dad taking him hunting and fishing. "The child of the Cold War graduated with a bachelor's degree in biology in 1970 from what is now Southern Oregon University in Ashland, where he met his wife. He fought wildfires for two summers as part of an elite hot-shot crew based in then-Rogue River National Forest to earn money for college, then spent two summers as a seasonal firefighter at Yellowstone National Park." Paul Fattig on MailTribune.com.

Author of more than a half dozen influential fly patterns and advisor to fly line and rod designers, Bob Clouser got due recognition in yesterday's ceremony at the Catskill Fly Fishing Center and Museum in Livingston Manor, N.Y. "Internationally known as the creator of the Clouser Minnow fly pattern, reputedly used to catch more species of fish than any other fly, Clouser also is a sought-after fishing guide, particularly on the Susquehanna River, and fly-fishing instructor." On Pennlive.com.

Other inductees included Fredrick Halford, George Skues, Bob Clouser, Dan Blanton, Roman Moser and Gardner Grant.

You may have mad skills, Alex O'Loughlin, but you might want to pick up a copy of Joan Wulff's "Dynamics of Fly Casting" before going trout fishing again. The idea is for the fly line to gradually release it's kinetic energy; that bullwhip crack is the noise of wasted effort. "I grew up fishing for trout. I'm not the best fly fisherman, but I can fly-fish, because I crack a whip. I learned to crack a whip as a boy, out on the properties."

We'll still watch you on "Three Rivers," though.

Any public perception of Norman Maclean's father -- who famously blurred the lines between fly fishing and religion -- was forever changed by Tom Skerritt's 1992 portrayal of the man. But look at the remarkable resemblance between Skerritt and the Rev. John Norman Maclean, and how involved the actor still is in the movie and its after-effects, and you might begin to wonder who changed who more.

The Missoula, Montana church where the elder Maclean once preached will honor him and his son with a monument to be unveiled this weekend.

"The reverend died in late 1941 at age 78. Clara, 10 years his junior and herself a remarkable leader in the church and the family, died at 79 in 1952. Both are buried in the Missoula Cemetery, as is Paul, around whose murder in Chicago in 1938 Norman constructed the plot of 'A River Runs Through It.'" Kim Briggeman of The Missoulian.

Yesterday Joe Humphreys was honored by the the Spring Creek Chapter of Trout Unlimited and the ClearWater Conservancy with their Spring Creek Heritage Award, fitting recognition for a life spent teaching people of all ages how to fly fish. Among his students: actor Liam Neeson and former president Jimmy Carter. "'He said learning to nymph fish was like, at the time, dealing with Congress. ... It was difficult,' said Humphreys, who fished with Carter in Spruce Creek." Ed Mahon in the Centre Daily Times.

A character fit for any Carl Hiaasen novel, Tim Chapman weighs in at 270 pounds, reads Emerson, Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, and after a lifetime as a Miami journalist has built a Cat 5 house (capable of withstanding category 5 hurricanes) on his Big Torch Key lot. He also fly fishes for tarpon.

Jeff Klinkenberg profiles the larger-than-life Chapman for the St. Peterburg Times. "He loves to cast a fly in the direction of a muscular tarpon, the most macho of all saltwater game fish. When a 100-pound tarpon feels a hook's sting, it leaps from the water in panic, shaking, rattling and tumbling. Then it dives deep and refuses to give up for hours. A tarpon is not a fish for sissies."

We don't normally attach the moniker of "fly fisherman" to someone like Johnny Morris, who began business by selling lures out of his father's liquor store and went on to make many millions of dollars selling aluminum Bass Trackers and pink camo baseball caps. But as Jayne O'Donnell reports in USA TODAY, Morris has always seen things the average person doesn't -- probably the reason his favorite form of fishing is fly fishing. "Clay Self, the country music singer who's been playing the Buzzard Bar at Big Cedar for 21 years, describes driving anywhere with Morris as a lesson in patience. If he sees a particularly interesting tree -- especially a twisted cedar -- Morris will insist the driver pull over and take what Self says seems like thousands of photos."

The legacy of Mel Krieger was celebrated and honored Thursday evening, September 24th, 2009 at a dinner in San Francisco hosted by The American Museum of Fly Fishing. Mel had been honored by the Museum as its Heritage Award Winner in 2003. Mel died from brain cancer at the age of 80 in October of 2008.

The dinner was held at the MarketBar Restaurant at The Embarcadero, where both a silent auction and, after dinner, a live auction were held to benefit the Museum in Mel's name. AMFF Executive Director Cathi Comar was the host for the evening, and among the speakers was Fanny Krieger, who thanked everyone and talked about Mel's many contributions to the sport of fly fishing. Reports from people at the dinner said there was more than ample evidence of love for Mel, as people in the Bay Area and beyond had a chance to honor one of the most revered and important teachers of fly fishing and fly casting the world has ever known.

We got a copy of Jeffrey Pill's remarks at the tribute and thought they were worth sharing with MidCurrent readers. Jeff -- the producer of some of the best DVDs on fly fishing ever made and a long-time friend of Kreiger's -- was kind enough to let us publish his tribute in its entirety. Especially if you'd never met Mel in person, it is well worth reading.

We just couldn't pass up sharing this picture of arch conservationist and author Roderick Haig-Brown in wet suit and mask getting ready to swim with the fish he loved.

Haig-Brown is remembered this weekend in an annual festival at the Haig-Brown Heritage Site on the banks of the Campbell River. Admission to the festival is free, and you can get more information by contacting the Museum at Campbell River.

Pete McDonald and I were talking some weeks back about Florida Keys fly fishing history and he asked who the "giants" of their era were. I could think of many names, but none deserves more recognition than George Hommell, who after more than half a century of participation in the sport as a pioneering guide and businessman still sits in his unofficial throne at World Wide Sportsman in Islamorada.

Pete took it upon himself to call George, to collect some memories from others who fished alongside him, and to tie together some of the earliest threads from Keys fly fishing history. He shares the results this week in "OK, We're There."

"Lo-fi" rock band Pavement is reuniting, much to the delight of Indie rock fans who consider the band one of the most influential of its era. Frontman Stephen Malkmus, a song-writing genius according to some, gets his inspiration outdoors -- specifically, from scaling mountains and fly fishing. Yesterday The Quietus Web site (language warning) profiled Malkmus's band as they come back from their 1999 breakup. "They've never worn leather trousers or been habitual drug abusers. They've tended to look outside the group, as well as inside it, for artistic inspiration. They've maintained their working relationship while living thousands of miles apart from each other. And they've made some remarkable rock'n'roll records that completely transcend - as well as critique - rock'n'roll."

"Micro finance" is one of the more interesting tools driving local economies in third-world nations, allowing those living without property to borrow money. Anne Pettinger writes about Annette Lilly Russ's "Just One Person" program, which uses micro finance and also trains secondary schoolgirls on topics ranging from family planning to computers. "Most of Russ's clients in western Kenya were women, many of whom were widows struggling to provide for their families. They would receive $100 unsecured loans, and as each loan was repaid, the women, who mostly worked as vendors, were able to borrow more. 'Micro finance gives women an opportunity to generate income,' Russ said. 'It's a solution.'"

Joan Wulff shows the gentlemen how it is done at yesterday's FFR show, laying one out in the big pool at age 83.

Morgan Lyle passed along word this morning that Fran Betters, "champion of the West Branch of the Ausable," died on Sunday. As Lyle says on his new blog The Fly Line, Betters was one of the most innovative tiers of his generation. His techniques spawned new classes of trout flies that in turn became the inspiration for thousands of other tiers. For example: "The same construction using snowshoe hare's foot fur instead of deer hair became the Usual, a generalist emerger/dun that has caught trout from coast to coast, while the basic structure of the Haystack was tidied up to become the Comparadun and Sparkle Dun -- slim, flush-floating flies that catch trout where traditional hackled dry flies won't."

Be sure to read the full tribute on Lyle's site.

Fly fishing guide, casting instructor and fly shop employee Aaron Goodis, 29, has been fighting Crohn's disease since he was 16. In Canada's Globe and Mail, Mark Hume describes how fly fishing got him out of a wheelchair and back onto the stream with fly rod and camera to finish the draft of his book The Recovery Project. "'My passion for fly fishing and being outside led me to the camera. With technical help from my dad, I was able to take photos and that is how this started. My point is that passion for something can overcome anything,' he writes in the foreword."

According to Thursday's press release, "Andy will manage pre-production design, field testing and product launch of Hardy's new saltwater rods and reels."

Read the full press release in the extended entry.

Not quite satisfied with Monte Burke's selection of the top ten trout destinations from Forbes magazine (see "Forbes List of Top U.S. Trout Towns"), west-coaster Mark Yuasa polls Leland Miyawaki, Don Wakamatsu (see Wakamatsu's recent 17-pound salmon caught in Puget Sound), Matt LaBounty, Keith Robbins, and Peter Van Gytenbeek and comes up with dozens more great fly fishing destinations. "When he's not making the lineup sheet for the next ballgame Mariners manager Don Wakamatsu is a fly-fishing fan at heart. In fact, he managed to take time off recently to hook a 17.2-pound hatchery king on a red and white clouser fly at a beach on the Kitsap Peninsula. Here are Wakamatsu's picks: Seattle, Wash. (Puget Sound); Lyle, Wash. (Klickitat River); Provo, Utah (Provo River); Redding, Calif. (Pit River); Trinity, Calif. (Trinity River)." In the Seattle Times.

What about your choices? Any places you can think of that are obviously missing from any "fly fisher's dream list?"

A bubbly Martha Stewart blogs about her recent fly fishing trip on Montana's Ruby River with Ted Turner. "The arm, the rod, the arc, the strength of the arm - all so nerve wracking!"

Funny, I saw that same look of triumph on Dan Vermillion's face just after he threw his brother Jeff into the family pond in Sweetgrass county.

See the complete Flickr stream of photos from the President's Montana trip.

In a cost-cutting move, the Federation of Fly Fishers will eliminate the role of president -- currently occupied by Peter Van Gytenbeek -- after September, according to the Livingston Enterprise.

Gytenbeek says the organization will be lucky to break even this year, and spoke candidly to Enterprise reporter Matt Dettori about the future of the organization: "'If we manage our money right for the rest of the year, (the FFF) can make their money last,' he said. He doesn't know what will happen to the organization, or what he'll do or where he will go, but the other staff members at the FFF will do a good job, Gytenbeek said."

"In the final seconds of consciousness after I slump to the ground while waiting on line for my fruit cup at Century Village, I'll look back on the Montana show with no small amount of pride. I will smile and be proud that I had the honor, the privilege, the sheer joy of having Jim Harrison on NO RESERVATIONS. Jim is one of America's greatest authors, poets, screenwriters--a gourmand of legendary reputation and a personality so big it's barely contained by the landscape." That's Anthony Bourdain in his blog talking about the filming of his recent episode in south-central Montana.

Here's a YouTube clip of part two of the show, focusing on Harrison, McGuane, "degenerate sportsman" Russell Chatham, and the uniqueness of Livingston. There are wonderful scenes here of Chatham at work. (Watch the rest of the show in five parts by clicking on them in "Related Videos.")

Author, lodge owner and Alaskan journalist Jim Repine has died, according to Mike Campbell on Alaska.com. "Repine, 76, died at home July 11. Longtime friend Charlie Gilman, a Colorado fishing guide and president of International Flyfisher, brought half of Repine's ashes to Alaska earlier this month to spread on his beloved Kenai River."

"When she first started guiding at Telluride Outside five years ago, fresh out of Montana and Glacier National Park, Hilary Fitzgerald breezed in with her blonde hair and big radiant eyes, and 'All the other guides were ga ga over her,' says Kris Knackendoffel, a fellow guide." Reilly Capps tells the sad story in the Telluride Daily Planet.

On Monday night the Travel Channel will feature Anthony Bourdain talking to Jim Harrison and Russell Chatham and commenting on saddle sores "the size of babies' fists" that he got while trail-riding east of Big Timber. "Highlights include a meal of buffalo, elk and chicken galantine at the Second Street Bistro in Livingston, drinks at the Emigrant Tavern, fried walleye from The Fry House in front of the Yellowstone Gateway Mall and traditional pasties at Pinky's, also in Livingston." Donna Healy and Zach Benoit in the Billings Gazette.

"One of the downs cost Patterson his right leg below the knee. Undaunted, he sports a prosthesis decorated with a trout motif - brown trout prominent on the front, rainbow less prominent on the back. 'That's because wild brown trout are the dominant fish in the North Platte,' Patterson said." Ray Sasser of the Dallas Morning News writes about the unspoiled southeast Wyoming and offers a glimpse into the life of fly shop owner Mike "Hack" Patterson.

Writer and stand-up comic Rich Hall spends much time in the UK these days, performing as his redneck alter-ego Otis Lee Crenshaw, but his thoughts are never far away from the U.S. West and fly fishing. "Hall returns to the US fairly often - most recently, to go 'back to the source' for some inspiration for his Edinburgh show. 'It's about fly-fishing, which is still a big hobby of mine,' - something anyone could have guessed from the eccentric, unappreciated Rich Hall's Fishing Show, one of BBC Four's forgotten gems - 'and I've never really tried to turn it into a performance oriented thing.'" In the U.K. Herald.

On the release of "The River Runs Through It" in Blu-ray HD format, MTV interviews Tom Skerritt and asks what the movie means to the actor more than fifteen years after its original release. "'It turned out every way I hoped it would,' recalls Skerritt. 'And that would mean it would be a classic film. These films hold up forever. You can look at them again and they'll always touch you on a different level.'"

Twenty years ago Steve Rajeff set the world record for single-handed casts with a 236-foot monster that many doubted would ever be exceeded. But yesterday we got word that at American Casting Championships in Toronto on Tuesday, Rajeff let fly with a 243-foot cast.

So apparently gravity is a problem only for the rest of us mortals.

Corner outfielder/first baseman/designated hitter for the New York Yankees, Shelley Duncan has read every hitting book there is, but his real love is the quiet sport of fly fishing. "He spent his first full season in Class-A Greensboro, N.C., and found a love for fly fishing in the Appalachians. When he rehabbed for a winter in Tampa, he woke up at 5 a.m. to fish before his workouts. 'It was like three months and I caught one fish,' he said. 'But every single morning it was a different sunrise, it was different weather, and there was just something that was beautiful about it.'" Chad Jennings of the Scranton, PA Times-Tribune.

Author Bill Tapply died Tuesday evening after a two-year struggle with leukemia. Tapply was a prolific writer, producing more than 40 books and thousands of magazine articles, mostly about fly fishing and the outdoors. He was perhaps best known for his more than two dozen New England-based mystery novels, including the recent Bitch Creek and Gray Ghost.

Tapply was a professor of English at Clark University in Worcester, MA. His handbook, The Elements of Mystery Fiction: Writing a Modern Whodunit, is used in writing classes and workshops across the country. He was a contributing editor for Field & Stream, a columnist for American Angler, and a member of the editorial board of The Writer magazine. He and his wife, novelist Vicki Stiefel, also mentored writers from their farm in Hancock, New Hampshire.

One of Bill's "students," author Norman Zeigler, sent us the following note about his friend:

Bill was a gentleman and a gentle man. When I was sick and mainly housebound and down and out and working on my first book, he offered unending encouragement and astute critiques that helped make it better. He was the best mentor a journalist turning author could have. His favorite writer was Hemingway and, like Hemingway, he believed strongly in being economical with his written words.

His love of the outdoors flowed through his writing like the waters of a cold, clear spring. And fly fishing was one of his biggest passions. The most famous character in his mystery books, Brady Coyne, was also a dedicated fly fisher.

He was kind, generous, thoughtful, smart, loving, talented, and highly intelligent. What more is there? His passing leaves a giant hole in the lives of all who knew him, and especially all who love fly fishing.

To paraphrase Hemingway's tribute to a Ketchum friend who died: Best of all he loved the woods and streams and ponds and other wild places. Now he will be a part of them forever.

Bloomberg News's Yalman Onaran describes the continuing role of economist Paul Volcker as a financial policy wonk -- and his love of fly fishing. "Even now, his tastes are modest. When he ran out of handkerchiefs on a trip to Washington this spring, his daughter, Janice Volcker Zima, says she took him to Macy's, where he bought the cheapest brand he could find--at three for $11. His one indulgence: fly-fishing. He's hooked on Atlantic salmon, which he has pursued in Russia, north of the Arctic Circle, and in Canada's Nova Scotia and New Brunswick provinces."

"'As a father, you want your kids to do better than you did, in sports and everything else,'' Hanousek said. 'Similarly, as a hunter and a fisherman, my goal, over time, was to have my kids outfish and outhunt me. When that finally happened, when I saw my sons outfish me, I was joyful.'" Dennis Anderson writes about the three fly fishing generations of Hanouseks, whose senior member Dick Hanousek seems to have his priorities straight. Come to think of it, teaching your kids all of the things they'll need to know to outfish you suggests some pretty good guidelines: don't rush them, make it a good experience, and teach them to love being there. In the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune.

CBS2.com got hold of the video of Jeff Patterson's great white shark catch and put it on Yahoo. (Thanks to David Dalu for this link.)

You might also check out Sean Fallon's entry and comments on the story at Gizmodo.

Alan Farago, a dedicated conservationist and long-time south Florida angler, writes about Bill Levy -- the original "permit fanatic" and one of the few anglers who could hold his own with Ted Williams when it came to stubbornness of opinion. "'That Ted Williams is the nastiest man in the world,' [Levy's wife] Esther said to me. 'He's a great fisherman,' I replied, baiting the hook. 'Oh he fishes with a guide,' she said, waving off the Splendid Splinter. 'Bill Levy,' she informed me, 'is better fisherman than Ted Williams with his little pinkie,' she said, holding up her finger." In Counterpunch.

For the record, Levy occasionally kept company with guides too. The first time I met him, Bus Bergman was toting Levy'vs canoe out to the Marquesas on the front of his Hewes Bonefisher. I followed them out there just to see Bill fish for tailing permit in his unlikely craft.

Three or four times when I was guiding in the Florida Keys -- always on some 10-mile flat without a tree in site -- a migrating warbler would come sit on the end of my pushpole while I was poling. In those cases, I doubt the tired little bird would have cared what my pole was made of, but in Chris Yates's profile of cane rod builder Edward Barder, I think he gets it right: "Once, I wasn't even looking when my visitor arrived; it was just the sudden soft thump on the rod that made me glance around to behold a miraculous coloured bird, staring down, ready to pounce on any tiddler. Somehow, I think these encounters might not have occurred had I been using a carbon rod." In the London Telegraph.

The handful of truly exceptional guides I have fished with all have this in common: every day they want to learn something new. As Denny Breer once said: "Isn't it true that you want to learn as much as you can about things you love?"

It's been only eight months since Breer died while tending his pigeon coops near his beloved Green River in Utah. As a reminder of what a remarkable guide and person he was, this week we're publishing the chapter Andrew Steketee and Kirk Deeter wrote about him in their book Castwork: Reflections of Fly Fishing Guides in the American West. Deeter commented after Breer's death that the one lesson he took away from fishing with the famous guide was this: "'Time on water equals fish.' Indeed. And time on water is precious."

Need a little inspiration to go out and do something good for your local waters? Look no further than 89-year-old Stan Griffin, who was just honored by Trout Unlimited as one of the ten people who have had the greatest impact on salmon and trout fisheries in the past fifty years. "His major accomplishments include orchestrating the removal of Roy's Dam in Lagunitas Creek, restoring fish passage over the Healdsburg Dam on the Russian River, promoting regulation of gravel mining operations in the Russian River and calling attention to the threats of diversions and illegal dams to the North Coast's fisheries." Mark Prado in the Marin Independent Journal.

Fly fisher and fisheries management expert Francis T. Christy, whose 1965 book The Common Wealth in Ocean Fisheries: Some Problems of Growth and Economic Allocation (co-authored with Anthony Scott) marked a launching point for increased awareness of the dangers of unsustainable commercial fishing, died on June 19. "Mr. Christy's research and publications on international fisheries management and ocean conservation played a major role in the 1982 U.N. Law of the Sea treaty. His work helped outline the guidelines and definitions for nations' rights and responsibilities for use of the world's oceans." T. Rees Shapiro in The Washington Post.

Temple Fork Outfitters announced Friday that Gary Loomis, founder of G.Loomis, will be designing a new line of affordable spinning and casting rods for them. Loomis won't be designing fly rods (yet), but TFO seems to now have a natural entry into much larger sector of the fishing market: "We've started production of 28 one and two piece rods in both spinning and casting configurations in 6', 6 ½' and 7' lengths. They will feature single foot guides with gold SIC inserts, skeletonized lower grips and fast/progressive actions. Retail pricing will be $99.95 and availability is expected in early September."

Read the extended entry for the full press release.

Mark Simonson writes a short but detailed history of the Catskill Fly Fishing Center and Museum in this morning's Daily Star (New York). "The idea of the Catskill Fly Fishing Center and Museum (CFFCM) dates back to 1978, and can be credited to Elsie Darbee. She and her husband, Harry, had a shop in Livingston Manor where they'd make flies and sell them to local and visiting anglers."

The Museum maintains a frequently updated Web site at www.cffcm.net.

Ask almost anyone who fished with him, and you'll probably hear that "the Splendid Splinter" carried his contemptuous demeanor from the baseball field onto Florida's flats or the Miramichi or wherever else he happened to be fishing. That's why HBO's new profile of Williams, which airs Wednesday, July 15, might interest some fly fishers -- certainly all those who are baseball fans.

The last time thundering herds of elk stampeded down Paradise Valley was probably more than a couple of years ago, but thanks to Wall Street Journal writer Alexandra Alter for showing us pics of Jim Harrison's summer writing and fishing quarters. Her story about the famed author's residence includes menu lists, a slide show, and moments of envy: "Earlier this summer, Anthony Bourdain, chef and host of the Travel Channel's food show 'No Reservations,' visited Mr. Harrison's home during a trip to Livingston. Mr. Harrison cooked an elk and antelope stew and grilled about two dozen doves, washed down with several bottles of Côtes du Rhône. 'Basically, I want to be Jim when I grow up,' Mr. Bourdain said in an email." (Thanks to reader James Card for this link.)

Moldy Chum "co-captain" Brian Bennett and Recycled Fish's Teeg Stouffer recently put their heads together with Michael Mauro of Mauro Media on a new series of predictably eclectic podcasts called "The Fish Schtick." Bennett and Stouffer are smart guys who don't take themselves too seriously, and their podcasts (nine, so far) cover everything from biodegradable fishing line to commentary by people in the trenches of fly fishing media and industry.

Every year about this time I seem to have the same conversation with the same intelligent people about what can be done to boost participation in fly fishing. Well Shane Bacon lays out what would undoubtedly be the best possible media event fly fishing could hope for: Tiger Woods (an avid fly fisher) lending a bit of his gravitas and magnetism to a TV fly-fishing special. "The guy could do a fly-fishing special and 20 million people would be glued to their TVs. (And, that special would probably be in high definition, as opposed to the British [Open] in two weeks)."

Joan Wulff will return to the Miramichi River after a ten-year absence to take part in the annual Miramichi Salmon Classic. Noting that she was pleased to see private access opened up to the public, Wulff also managed a classic observation when asked about her fishing prospects: "'In terms of catches only God and the fish know.'" Ryan Ross in the Miramichi Leader.

See Joan Wulff demonstrate the Double Haul.

"Bonime, a long-time fly fishing and outdoor industry veteran, comes to Patagonia from his post as Vice-President of Vast International, USA, based in Portland, OR. He also served as a Vice-President at Redington LLC, an apparel leader in the fly fishing market, and is founder and former President of Go Fish Corporation, one of the country's largest outdoor T-shirt and accessories distributors. Bart spent close to ten years at Columbia Sportswear leading their hunting and fishing merchandising efforts, as well as heading up their advertising and promotions efforts."

Read the full press release in the extended entry.

The upcoming publication of Ernest Hemingway's "restored" A Moveable Feast by grandson Sean offers yet another example that spicy family intrigue can have a legacy all its own. The book -- a memoir of Hemingway's expatriate years in Paris -- was originally edited by Ernest's fourth wife, Mary Hemingway, and published in 1964, four years after Hemingway's death. Now Sean Hemingway (who was encouraged to do the project by Pauline's son Patrick) wants to set the record straight by retelling the various aspects of Hemingway's marriages that might have made Mary uncomfortable. Apparently Scribner, who is printing 16,000 copies of the latest version, feels the minutiae of Papa's personal relationships still titillates plenty of readers.

"Patrick, 81, said he did not blame Mary, who died in 1986, for her editing. 'I think she did an excellent job, given the circumstances of the time, he said. But he speculated that Mary, who had had a falling out with Pauline, might have wanted to curry favor with Hadley, who owned the rights to a painting by Miró that Mary wanted." Motoko Rich in The New York Times.

71-year-old Tom Lionvale has hiked the John Muir trail and all 35 east-west passes of the Sierra Nevada crest., all with an original 1965 Kelty external-frame backpack. Where did he get his love of wilderness? From his dad, who was president of the Golden Gate Angling and Casting Club in San Francisco. "From a young age, Lionvale had a fly rod in his hand, accompanying his family on trips to Lake Almanor in northeastern California and the Rogue River in Oregon." Brett Wilkison in the Visalia Times-Delta.

Keys fishing captains are nothing if not resilient. But a drop in tourism has all but the top-tier guides wondering where the next booking might come from. Case in point: the 65-year-old Bud 'N Mary's marina in Islamorada, one of the original magnets for Keys anglers, where owner Richard Stanczyk -- who turned down a $25 million dollar purchase offer three years ago -- may go back to offering his own guiding services to make ends meet. "After 63 years and at least 25 skin surgeries, he's put off retirement at the landmark Islamorada fishing hub and sent in his eighth set of renewal papers for his captain's license." Douglas Hanks in the Miami Herald.

"'And then this guy from Ireland peels off his waders. He has a wet suit on underneath and he starts swimming with his rod up in one hand. He's one of those guys who was a force to be reckoned with. He won that competition.'" That's U.S. Youth Fly Fishing Team member Zach Bearden describing the type of thing that can happen at international competitions. Kelly Bostian writes about Bearden in the Tulsa World.

The fact that Colorado's fly fishing governor is on a tighter public leash than at least one of his eastern counterparts probably means good things for his state. "'It's definitely a balancing act, making sure the public has access to and information about Gov. Ritter,' said spokesman Evan Dreyer, 'and also making sure the governor has time and the ability to be a father, husband, son, brother, uncle, cousin and friend.'" Colleen O'Connor in the Denver Post.

Peter McDonald conducts a brief but interesting interview with 3D gaming artist turned fly fishing photographer on Fishing Jones.

"Is there one non-technical thing like that you can point to that, creatively, helps you shape your work?"

"Always looking at others work ... I am constantly looking at, and inspired by, the work of other photographers and artists. If I see something in a film or a painting that I like, I then ask myself ... 'How could that fantastic shot be applied to a fly fishing photo?'

Good weather and a focus on lake fishing turned into quite challenge for participants in last week's 2009 World Fly Fishing Championships, according to US team member Lance Egan. "'Scotland was a very difficult championship,' Egan admitted. 'To give you an idea just how tough, Ian Barr of England won the individual gold medal with 13 fish landed in five sessions. Last year, in New Zealand, several competitors landed more than 30 trout in one three-hour session.'" Briane Milne on About.com.

Bruce Holt, who has been in charge of most of G. Loomis operations for the past several years, will move to the position of communications director on July 1.

See the extended entry for the full press release.

"Mr. Earle routes his concerts through the Western states in August, when mountain streams are full of trout. This year, he's planning two late-summer concerts in Montana. In Bozeman, he'll rendezvous with the guide who taught him to fly-fish, and perhaps get some tips from the locals. He says, Some people come to the bus after the show and let me know where the fish are.'" That's musician Steve Earle in this morning's Wall Street Journal talking about why he chooses the mountain states for his summer tours . Article by John Jurgensen.

Not only did Ian Barr win top angler honors at the FIPS Mouche World Championships, but England overcame an early French lead to take the team competition, which ended yesterday in Scotland. Final team results: England first, France second, and Scotland third. Team USA placed eighth.

Canada's Donald Thom took second in the individual competition, and Belgium's Christian Jadouille came in third.

For the first time it looks like Microsoft has a chance of taking market share from Google in the battle over Web search. The marketing brains behind their shiny new product, "Bing," is a former newspaper journalist, an environmentalist, dad, and 13-year Microsoft veteran who also has a passion for fly fishing. In fact, Chris Ward will be spending a few weeks of his upcoming sabbatical fly fishing in North Russia, British Columbia and Scotland.

Ward on traditional versus new media: "We have come a long way with digital, but there is more we can do. There is still a gap between consumer use and online ad spend, but the gap is closing. We have to make advertisers feel comfortable with advertising online. Some of us still read newspapers, but as an advertising medium, press is less effective than online." Sara Kimberly in MediaWeek.

Cancer survival isn't a story that's typically considered "newsworthy" unless, of course, you happened to be one of the survivors. We just received this story from MidCurrent reader George Glazener describing the impact of Reel Recovery -- an organization that provides free fly fishing retreats to men recovering from cancer -- on his and Warren Wolf's lives. It deserves attention as a testimonial, but also as evidence that good causes attract good people.

Connected to our entry on Sunday about the tenth anniversary of the death of young fly fisher Liam Wood, a family friend tells a story about the kind of person Wood was. Hint: he was the kind of young man anyone would have wanted to fish with.

"In November they went to the mouth of the creek and cast flies for salmon from the bank across from the crowded jetty. December saw them at the Samish River, fishing for salmon and sea run cutthroat trout. Spring was trout season, sometimes hiking in to Lost Lake on Chuckanut. Summer was always the mayfly hatch at Padden." Article by Dave Scoboria.

The Seattle Times also covered Woods's death and life by noting the involvement of author David James Duncan in the 2004 establishment of a school named in Woods's honor.

Fly line guru, master casting instructor and MidCurrent board member Bruce Richards turned a big page this week when he retired from Scientific Anglers after 33 years. While he will continue consulting for SA, he plans to move to Montana in the near future.

Richards has been behind many of the most important advances in fly line design using computer-aided technology and advanced materials, but he counts among of his major successes simply thinking differently about how fly lines should work. "An example of the latter, he said, was the long-standing belief that lines to be used on small streams should not only be delicate, but have a long taper. But on a small stream a cast often doesn't even include all of the taper, meaning the caster isn't using the weight built into the line to deliver the fly. The solution was a compound taper." Steve Griffin writes about Richards in this morning's Midland Daily News.

Alternative music artist Bibio takes his name from an black and red Irish fly that imitates a common species of Diptera, used by he and his father to fish for rainbow trout. "With a nod to happy childhood memories fishing with his father on the Welsh rivers, parallels can be drawn in name to this quietly spoken artist and purveyor of this joyous summery music, where startling melody lines unexpectedly emerge out of grainy, glorious lo-fi." Bibio's real name is Stephen Wilkinson.

Cameron Mortenson's Fiberglass Manifesto covers the story of Recycled Waders, a company that turns breathable fabric from well-used waders into wallets, bags and hip packs. As Recycled Waders founder Patrick Jenkins tells the story: "I couldn't bear the thought of throwing away my very first pair of breathable waders - especially since they were pretty pricey to begin with! After a long drive back to Fairbanks, I sat down and sketched out a pack I could wear that would simplify my king salmon fishing. Then I enlisted my mom's sewing skills."

Last night on NBC News Tom Brokaw fly fished off of the Mercer Island dock of Hugh Riley, the subject of his story on the discovery of who was the real subject of Robert Capa's famous D-Day image of a soldier struggling in the Normandy surf. Riley was hit four times and dragged to shore by Capa and another soldier. After the war, Brokaw noted, Riley "returned to Seattle, and worked for a fly rod company."

This morning Brokaw told me that his subject was in fact Fenwick's "man in the North," and that he told Brokaw during their interview that "his Washington state outdoors childhood saved him," because he was comfortable in water.

NFL Coach of the Year Mike Smith catches an 8-pound rainbow on Georgia's Soque River, but can't keep his mind completely off of the season ahead. "Whenever he can, the Falcons 49-year-old, second-year coach seeks these places far away from the noise and violence of the NFL. While making his place in this world on a raging sideline, he chooses to spend his free time on a quiet river, in a pursuit that, Washington Irving wrote, 'tends to produce a gentleness of spirit, a pure serenity of mind.'" Steve Hummer in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The next time someone tells you "It's only fly fishing," remember Don Elder of Gresham, Oregon. He pulled three people from the ice-chilled water of the Sandy River as they were being swept toward rapids Sunday afternoon, using the extra strength of his spey line to "strip" them to safety. "The only safe way was to bite off the fly, so I (bit off the leader), and before I realized what I was doing, I started casting to them. Elder's first cast was to the woman between him and the man. She grabbed the line and he lowered his rod, 'stripping' her in a bit -- making short tugs on the line -- as she held on and the current drew her toward the shoreline." Read the full, fascinating story by Bill Monroe in the Oregonian.

By the way, Don Elder works for the Western Rivers Conservancy. Make a donation today -- now that you're sure your money is being put in the hands of the right people. (Thanks to reader Jenny Andrews for this story.)

Recently six U.S. war veterans fished Maine's legendary Grand Lake Stream as guests of Project Healing Waters and Weatherby's Resort. John Holyoke spoke with Weatherby's owner Jeff McEvoy about the trip, noting that "six guides-- Sue (Wheaton) Hurd, Dick Turmenne, Brett Vose, John Brown, Scott Sabol and McEvoy -- donated their time to make the trips possible." From the Bangor Daily News.

Many consider Kevin Jones snowboarding's first superstar. But Jones left snowboarding suddenly, fed up with kowtowing to sponsors and the terminal hipness, to spend a few years as a steelhead guide. In July 2002, he even participated in the Great Outdoor Games Fly Fishing Tournament at Lake Placid. Now Jones is back, making movies and looking for terminal velocity on the slopes. Nate Deschenes interviews him on ESPN.com.

20-year-old Detroit Tigers pitcher Rick Porcello has won four consecutive starts to improve to 5-3 with a 3.55 earned-run average. What's he like to do with his time off? Fly fish. He compares hitters to trout. "'The biggest similarity,' he said, 'is that they're both like a chess match. With fish, it's what you're going to use that day, what kind of fly to catch them. With hitters, it's what are they looking to do -- and where do I need to locate my pitches so they don't do it.'" Tom Gage in the Detroit News.

Jim Birklholm, also known as Jim "Castwell" on the Fly Anglers Online Web site, died Tuesday while on a fishing trip to Crooked Island in the Bahamas. According to a post on the FAO bulletin board, Birkholm "complained of severe stomach pains on the flight into Crooked Island, was taken to the clinic on the Island and died at the clinic while waiting for a charter flight to take him back to the Nassau Island hospital." More information can be found on the FAO Web site. (Thanks to Zach Matthews for this story.)

"Only weeks before a sniper's bullet found its way into Sgt. First Class Marvin Johnson's chest in 2006, he had managed to find a fly fishing rod in the middle of Iraq. He would steal away in quiet moments to practice casting -- whipping his fishing line into an empty, sandy lot in Baghdad, slowly pulling it back in." After meeting Marvin Johnson, whose left arm was paralyzed as a result of his wound, fly fisher Jesse Scott of Edmunds, Washington developed a device, the Evergreen Hand, that allows fly fishermen with one hand to tie their own flies. You can see a video of how the Evergreen Hand is used to tie flies on the Federation of Fly Fishers Web site. Chris Fyall writes about the friendship that produced the new tool for disabled fly tiers in The Enterprise.

This week on MidCurrent we take a look inside the fly box of shop owner and saltwater fly innovator Gary Merriman. Merriman's name isn't immediately recognizable to many anglers. But his now-famous tarpon Toad fly gained him cult status among guides and anglers who've used it for the past fifteen years to fool tarpon.

Although he's been fly fishing the Keys since the early 1970s, it was Merriman's use in the early 1990s of neutral-buoyancy flies that swam -- rather than classic patterns which rose and fell in the water column -- that changed the sport for him and for the many anglers and guides who later picked up on the idea.

Their names may be too long for a headline, but their investment firm Audur Capital is one of only two to survive Iceland's recent economic crash. The reason, they say? Values. "We tripled our wealth management business when everyone else was losing business. We achieved this through trust, and the things we stand for. And straight talking. We told our clients things that they would not have been told elsewhere." The one thing they have in common with many male counterparts: they are both serious fly fishers. From the BBC News.

David Liepman profiles Donna O'Sullivan, who proves that height has nothing to do with a person's ability to spey cast (she's five feet tall). "After winning the first three annual contests, O'Sullivan has come up against some stiff competition in recent years. She came in second place in 2007, third in 2008 and lost to ex-San Franciscan Whitney Gould last month in the 2009 Spey-O-Rama." In the San Francisco Examiner.

"The memories and comments of the interviewees -- such as the artist and author Russell Chatham, Disney movie composer Mel Leven, or fisherman Tom Ungrin, who keeps his hands busy constantly making flies while being interviewed -- illustrate the story at least as well as the jazzed-up archival art." Christian Kallen reviews "Rivers of a Lost Coast," which will be released later this summer on DVD, in the Santa Rosa, California Press Democrat.

Former Olympic skier and repeat tarpon tournament champion Andy Mill goes back to a sport he covered on television fifteen years ago: fly fishing for big grass carp in Florida's roadside canals. "Mill throws his line in a perfectly tight loop so that the fly alights beneath a broad, leafy ficus tree. The fly, a tiny cork ball painted cherries-jubilee red with Avon nail polish, bobs briefly on the canal's riffled surface. Suddenly, a wake foams up from nowhere and the fly disappears as Mill's rod bends into a semicircle." Susan Cocking in The Miami Herald.

By the way, Mill's new in-depth book on fly fishing for tarpon is due out from Wild River Press later this year. Reports from early readers say it will be quite a collection of insights.

From pronouncing "Miami" like a true Florida cracker to showing how guides towed their underpowered skiffs into the backcountry and positioned themselves on the flats, the narrator of this old film segment -- revived by the IGFA -- gives as genuine a picture of 1950s Florida Keys bonefishing as you'll find anywhere. The clip features the legendary Captain Jimmie Albright and shows the "GAF Ashaway experimental nylon" fly line ("Jimmie examines this line with interest") and Albright's bucktail fly. The camera even captures the angler casting to and hooking a big tarpon in 2 feet of water.

Also interesting is that the leader Albright used would in today's terms might be considered a "stealth rig," tapering down to 6-pound tippet (tied to the fly with a clinch knot). Of course a 6-pound tippet in 1959 would have had a considerably larger diameter than today's materials -- a reminder of how technology has changed the sport.

It might be a stretch to say that pouring delicate designs in the foam of a latte cup will help you become a better caster, but latte artist and fly fisher David Schomer draws several similarities between mastering nano-bubble milk spirals and his other passion. "When pouring latte art there is a mimicking of this process swinging the pitcher side to side, waiting for the milk to 'load' up in the side of the pitcher before changing direction and swinging it to the other side. Typically new people oscillate the pitcher back and forth too quickly, trying to rush the process. The side to side motion needs to be more rhythmical, almost lazy, much like the casting of a fly line." On CoffeeGeek.com.

"He's experienced snow, sleet, fog and sunburn, all while seeing no one other human on the river. Pulling the two oars for 12 to 14 hours per day sees him burning about 5,000 calories daily. 'It is not a leisurely transit down the river,' Cook said." In the Sioux City Journal, Bret Heyworth writes about Dan Cook's 3,700-mile journey from Montana to the Gulf of Mexico to raise awareness and funding for disabled veterans.

You can also follow Cook on his trip via the Rivers of Recovery Web site, where videos and daily tracking map show his progress. If you had any doubts about the difficulty of journey, check out the clip "Riding the Wind" in the video section (it appears under "Live Webcam" when you click on the left-side link).

In the Miami Herald, Susan Cocking reviews Stu Apte's memoir, which he self-published in December of last year. "Apte doesn't shy from the intimate details of his personal life, such as a recent bout with cancer; his painful divorce from his wife of 33 years that nearly caused him to take his own life; and his joy at finding new love in his late 60s."

Of Winds and Tides on Amazon.

Dick Galli, master rod builder and owner of Montana Flyfishing Center in Hamilton, Montana, died Wednesday when his raft overturned after hitting a brush pile on the Bitterroot River. Perry Backus and Will Moss write about the incident in today's Missoulian.

Novelist and fly fisher T. Jefferson Parker has written some very popular books in the past several years, among them Silent Joe (Hyperion, April 2002, 416 pages), which won the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award for Best Novel and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Mystery/Thriller, and his latest, The Renegades
(Dutton, February 2009, 352 pages). Turns out his idea of a good time is "a beautiful river full of fat trout." "In his orderly studio surrounded by things he loves, T. Jefferson Parker creates. He is now studiously working on his seventeenth novel amidst favorite art pieces, shelves of books and a square-jawed fish. It's not a real fish but a fiberglass rendering of one called a 'permit' that he caught and released in the Yucatan." Nathalie Taylor in the Fallbrook, California Village News.

Writer and photographer Patrick Case, whose last fly fishing article was published in the May/June 2009 issue of American Angler magazine, died of cancer on April 25 in California. An engineer, Case designed water treatment systems for marine parks, including those for SeaWorld, Chicago's Shedd Aquarium, the Oregon Coast Aquarium, and Marine World. In 2002, case founded Golden State Flycasters in Del Mar and later helped revive Trout Unlimited's San Diego County Chapter. Case's piece "Down on the Tsiu," about fishing for silver salmon on Alaska's Tsiu River, can be read in its entirety in the electronic version of the magazine (pages 72-77).

It's not the first report we've heard of fly fishers who have run into trouble in Mexico this year, but it certainly adds a layer of poignancy when a spouse can't get government assistance in continuing an investigation. Ronald Scheepstra disappeared three weeks ago near the tiny town of Xcalak in southernmost Mexico after separating from friends. "Photographs of the Xcalak police department show messy stacks of files. Cindy fears Ronald's file will vanish in the stacks, much like he did. 'Files are just going to end up in a box somewhere and no one will ever have answers and families need answers,' said Scheepstra." Jena Johnson of Lufkin, Texas's KTRE.

At the recent Jim Range National Casting Call, the National Fish Habitat action plan recognized Patagonia's Yvon Chouinard, EPA ecologist Janet Nestlerode, Project SHARE and others with 2009 National Fish Habitat Awards. Chouinard was given the Jim Range Conservation Vision Award. As the NFH said in last week's press release: "In 1986, Patagonia began a program that makes it unique among corporate entities that care about fisheries habitat. Patagonia committed to donate 10% of profits each year to grass-roots environmental groups. They later upped the ante to 1% of sales, or 10% of profits, whichever was greater."

Read the extended entry for the full press release.

Novelist V. S. Naipaul once said that nonfiction is better suited than fiction to capture the complexities of today's world. There may be no better example than the story of Floyd Watkins and his 45-acre Beaver Run Ranch in Woody Creek, Colorado. Hunter Thompson lived just downstream of the ranch and complained loudly about Watkins and his manicured spread, and was joined by the local sheriff, who later co-authored a book that called Watkins a "corpulent transplant from Miami." For his part, Thompson, who was accused of "trouticide" in the deaths of Watkins's stocked fish, ran for sheriff on a platform including a "policy of the sheriff's office to savagely harass those engaged in any form of land-rape. This will be done by acting, with utmost dispatch, on any and all righteous complaints." Brent Gardner-Smith revisits the whole story in this morning's Aspen Daily News.

Tiggy Legge-Bourke, former nanny to Princes William and Harry, offers a compelling reason for why someone would pay her £350 for fly fishing lessons. "'When a fresh 10lbs salmon takes your fly, it's the best fun you can have with your clothes on.' The 44-year-old now runs the Ty'r Chanter bed-and-breakfast as part of her family's 6,000-acre Glanusk estate near Crickhowell, Powys, with her husband Charles Pettifer." From WalesOnline.co.uk.

In the Chicago Tribune, writer Tom Hundley details the rich history and carnival-barker ambience of Bud 'N Mary's marina in Islamorada, then goes fly fishing for bonefish with guide Vic Gaspeny and lands -- astonishingly -- an 11-pounder. "When some fool (me) approaches Gaspeny about bonefishing with a fly rod, his advice is blunt: 'Go to the hardware store, buy yourself a ball-peen hammer and try to knock that stupid idea out of your head.'"

Answering a number of recent questions to MidCurrent about freshwater fly selection, Phil Monahan gathered an impressive list of "Top Ten Fly" choices for this week's "Fly Lines" feature. Brian O'Keefe, Tom Rosenbauer, Buzz Bryson, John Merwin, William Tapply, Bryan Gregson, Zach Matthews, and even Phil himself revealed their favorite ten flies. Very interesting stuff, especially when you consider the range of experiences these "guides, writers and fish bums" have had.

Question: How do you organize your fresh water fly boxes? Do you have a Top-10 list of dry & wet flies that you'll always carry?

Answer: There are lots of ways to organize your flies: by season, by species, by kind of water, by fly style, by color, and so on. Experts will obviously disagree on both of Mark's questions, so here's a sampling of responses from guides, writers, and fish bums of every stripe.

In a new podcast, Tom Rosenbauer, author of several notable books on fly fishing techniques, describes how he organizes his dry flies, wet flies, nymphs and "prospecting" flies for trout, and includes suggestions for must-have patterns and types of boxes to store them in.

Excerpt: "I have lots of fly boxes and I store them in a drawer -- not that I'm that organized, believe me. But I have my bass flies, and my steelhead flies and my various types of saltwater flies, just so that I can grab three or four boxes when I go on a fishing trip instead of having to take everything I own. Now there are some crossovers, of course. When I go Atlantic salmon fishing I might grab some steelhead flies, or when I am going steelhead fishing I'll definitely grab my plastic Atlantic salmon flies box just because you never know when you are going to find some steelhead that are in the mood for a small, swinging fly."

At one point 62-year-old Bill Matthaei had to make a choice between a career in fisheries management and carrying on a 300-year-old tradition of making health food. But the CEO of bread company Roman Meal still finds great joy in standing in a river. "In 1927, namesake William Matthaei enlarged the company by buying Roman Meal from a nutritional evangelist of sorts, Dr. Robert Jackson, who developed a cereal product, 'Dr. Jackson's Roman Health Meal,' which he manufactured in Tacoma. Roman Meal Bread followed, and is baked today by some 90 licensed bakeries worldwide." C.R. Roberts in the Tacoma, Washington News-Tribune.

In the Salt Lake Tribune this morning, Brett Prettyman profiles photographer Adam Barker (who is one of MidCurrent's featured fly fishing photographers). Prettyman squeezed some great photography tips out of Barker, including the following: "Graduated neutral density filter » An irreplaceable tool for capturing dramatic skies and balancing challenging exposures. Google it; you won't regret it."

Val Kilmer, whose 6000-acre ranch near Santa Fe, New Mexico has been home to a fly fishing lodge for several years now, just listed his entire property with real estate broker Orvis/Cushman & Wakefield after failing to sell parts of it in recent years. "The star of "The Doors" (1991) and "Batman Forever" (1995) assembled the ranch roughly 13 years ago. In 2006, he asked $18 million for 1,800 acres of the property, including the main houses. In January Mr. Kilmer offered those houses on a 1,000-acre parcel for $9 million, down from $12 million a few months earlier." Christina S. N. Lewis in The Wall Street Journal.

I started my day by reading an innocent question by Esquire book reviewer Benjamin Alsup: "Would anyone still subject themselves to the embarrassments of fly-fishing if it weren't for Hemingway?." While Hemingway fished and wrote about many waters now famous for their fly fishing, he was, by many accounts, reluctant to throw a fly. (As Nick Lyons said in his intro to Hemingway on Fishing, "For a writer so beloved by fly fishermen, he shows little interest in this brand of fishing." Apparently Hemingway preferred swinging multiple wet flies through the riffles -- when he had to.) So Hemingway/fly fishing references do beg the question of whether the great literature is fading from view faster than we'd like.

Arnold Gingrich, who founded and ruled Esquire during its heyday in the 30s, 40s and 50s and was a fly fishing fanatic, probably also knew more about the sport's literature than any man of his day. He fished with Hemingway and listened to F. Scott Fitzgerald's excuses for not doing so ("I can't face Ernest again, when he's so successful and I'm such a failure"). Gingrich was one of the first -- and last -- to publish Hemingway (and Fitzgerald, and John Steinbeck, and Truman Capote) in a major U.S. magazine. It would be fair to say that he saw fly fishing as one of his era's "extreme" sports, one that was worth the attention of the very best writers, fly fishers or not. But Hemingway, who was writing stories like "Sailfish Off Mombasa: A Key West Letter" and "Hemingway On Being Shot. Again," and was probably glad to lend a touch of machismo to Gingrich's favored sport, was unlikely to dilly dally around with the engraved fly fisher's flask when there was a case of Jameson's Irish whiskey stashed in the bow of The Pilar.

Some better literary candidates? Negley Farson, who lived in remote British Columbia and who fly fished to put food on the table, John Gierach, who cared enough about saving fly fishing from pretension that he coined the phrase "trout bum," or the gifted Jim Harrison, whose poetry inspired by rivers has nothing at all to do with the glamour of being a celebrity sportsman.

But maybe the best choice would be Gingrich himself, who did as much as anyone to point out that fly fishing is not a sport for sissies.

Last night CNN did a special segment on Project Healing Waters and followed it up with this piece on their Web site, which includes multiple video links. There's some pretty powerful stuff here -- the best coverage we've seen yet of PHW's important mission.

Gonzaga basketball's Mark Few, one of the winningest coaches in the game, seems to have his priorities in perfect order: fly fishing, continuity, and college tuition.

Dermatologist, cyclist, and fly fisher Alison O'Neill Andrew was inspired to provide a little extra happiness to seniors by the words of her father, who was dying of cancer in 2004: "'I spent the last nine months of his life with him and my mother,' Andrew said. 'One day, we were working in the garden and he said to me, "Alison, beauty becomes you." I'd never heard anyone say those words to me before. He meant it as a thank you and a message that what you do with your life makes you beautiful.'" Her Atlanta-based organization Beauty Becomes You is made up of volunteers who provide free haircuts, manicures, pedicures, massages, facials and makeup lessons to seniors in their residences. H.M. Cauley in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Alison's husband Jon Andrew -- also an avid fly fisher -- was a pivotal figure in the establishment of habitat protections for the Florida Keys in the late 1980s an early 90s. Now chief of the National Wildlife Refuge System for the southeast and former head of the Office of Migratory Bird Management at the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, earlier in his career Jon managed the Key West and Great White Heron refuges, which at the time was in danger of being overrun by commercial interests. (I was fortunate enough to give Jon his first tour of the Marquesas.) Jon led the development of a newer, stronger management plan that prevented the backcountry from being flooded with jet-skis and tour operators.

Quite a couple, indeed.

Thomas McGuane celebrates hunting dogs and their enthusiams in The Wall Street Journal. "There is so much in the air suggesting that hunting is an anachronism that it's easy for a hunter to feel he is an anachronism too. An old fishing friend of mine said, as we headed home from an agreeable outing, 'I thank God I'm not a day under 80.' I'm a meat eater and have the teeth to prove it, but greatly pity the creatures in the domestic meat businesses." (Thanks to reader John DeVault for this link.)

As virtually everyone knows by now, Natasha Richardson, the wife of actor and fly fisher Liam Neeson, died last Wednesday as the result of a head injury caused by a ski-lesson fall. Her death shocked the entertainment world and raised awareness of the role helmets can play in preventing injury. The London Times reports this week that his wife's death has put Neeson's acting career in limbo.

The best profile of Richardson we've read is Richard Corliss's piece in Time magazine. It includes this commentary by Neeson on the importance of living in the moment: "In 1986 he had been felled by diverticulitis, an intestinal disorder. That experience scarred him. 'I can't plan for next Thursday,' he said. 'I'll make a note of it and put a question mark after it. I don't like to commit, because you just don't know what's going to happen. It's got to do with "the moment is now."'"

Somehow reading through the accounts of the suicide of Nicholas Hughes, who will likely always be remembered as the son of poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, reminded me that human beings have very little control over how they are perceived, especially if they are the offspring of gigantic personalities. So it seems right to refer to Nicholas Hughes as a fisheries biologist -- and a gifted one -- who spent countless days studying grayling and salmon in Alaska, where he lived. His contributions to the science of ecohydraulics and how "the combination of water flow and the streambed guide the way natural selection influences the behavior of individual salmon, grayling, trout and other species" were considered extraordinary by scientists. "In 2004, he published a paper in which he offered an explanation of why larger fish tend to swim upstream farther from the river bank than smaller fish. This seems counterintuitive, he said, because the current is faster in the middle which would require more energy to overcome. Natural selection would work against that, it seems." Dermot Cole in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner.

He's not exactly a household name yet, but his new job will certainly be front-and-center in 2009. G. Edward DeSeve was just appointed by president Obama to oversee the spending of $787 billion in stimulus funds to revive the U.S economy. "A fly-fishing enthusiast, DeSeve once said he would go 'anywhere there is a trout in the water.'" Marcia Gelbart in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Rivers of Recovery, which offers fly fishing trips to veterans recovering from disabilities, has earned the endorsement of Senator John McCain and his wife Cindy. "Sen. John McCain and his wife, Cindy McCain, have signed on as honorary co-chairs of Rivers of Recovery's Heart of America campaign, in which nonprofit founder Dan Cook will paddle the 3,700-mile length of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. Along the way, he'll stop to provide clinics and champion veterans causes." Matthew D. LaPlante in the Salt Lake Tribune.

Chester Allen, whose Olympian fly fishing columns are a constant source of interest for us, just launched a new blog on "fishing, surfing and exploring the watery outdoors." His Watery Planet (watermagic.typepad.com) gives Allen more journalistic freedom, and we like the result. We spoke last night and I listened to how, on a recent trip to Mexico, he paddled his surf board out beyond the breakers and did what comes naturally to fly fishing surfers: casting and reeling in fish.

In the March 30 issue of The Nation, Philip Connors writes a terrific profile of and tribute to author Norman MacLean, who didn't pick up his writer's pen until turning 70, and only then on the request of his children. In the three-page article, which is one of the deepest discussions of MacLean's writing you'll find, Connors happens to pick out of my favorite passages: "Below him was the multitudinous river, and, where the rock had parted it around him, big-grained vapor rose. The mini-molecules of water left in the wake of his line made momentary loops of gossamer, disappearing so rapidly in the rising big-grained vapor that they had to be retained in memory to be visualized as loops. The spray emanating from him was finer-grained still and enclosed him in a halo of himself. "

If you're anywhere in the vicinity of Cameron, Montana in late June this year, you may want to consider attending the Madison River Foundation's annual banquet, where Howell Raines will be the keynote speaker and a live auction will feature an original oil painting by Ennis artist Ed Totten and a custom bamboo rod made by the "Boo Boys" at Sweetgrass Rods. The event will take place June 26 on the banks of the Madison at Sun Ranch.

Read the extended entry for the full press release.

Wednesday night on "The Late Show," David Letterman let loose on the American Museum of Fly Fishing's decision to invite the former vice president to their annual fundraising dinner.

"Cheney has now been invited to speak at the American Museum of Fly Fishing. After his speech, he's going to demonstrate how to waterboard a trout." From The New York Times.

Yesterday 3M Scientific Anglers announced that 10-year SA veteran Jeff Wierenga had been promoted to sales and marketing manager for the fly fishing product manufacturer. "Following his stint as business development manager for Scientific Anglers and nine years prior to that in the 3M lab working on new product development, Wieringa will now oversee all sales, marketing and product mix for Scientific Anglers business worldwide. He'll be the key contact for all international distributors and sales channels outside the U.S. and Canada."

Peter Frederixon, formerly national key account sales manager, was promoted to sales supervisor.

Read the extended entry for the full press release.

Is Liam Neeson is giving fly fishing lessons? "Taken" co-star Maggie Grace describes her favorite travel destinations, among them Chilean Patagonia: "I was a canoeing-kayaking-hiking-bouldering-camping-fly fishing fool for the rest of the trip, but in the back of my mind there was this surreal feeling. The place is so Tolkien-esque, with these big foreboding mountains and hanging glaciers watching over everything." Kelly Carter on USAToday.

According to The New York Daily News, one American Museum of Fly Fishing board member resigned in protest over last week's decision to invite former vice president Dick Cheney to participate in their fall fund raiser in Washington, D.C. On the other hand, trustees Gary Sherman and Foster Bam seem fully behind the decision. "A Cheney aide confirmed receipt of the museum's invitation, but declined last week to comment on the uproar," said writer Michael Saul.

Last night novelist Thomas McGuane was honored by the Center for the American West with its 2009 Wallace Stegner Award. The Stegner Award is given to a "an individual who has made a sustained contribution to the cultural identity of the West through literature, art, history, lore, or an understanding of the West." McGuane, who is a MidCurrent editorial board member, received the award at the University of Colorado at Boulder. You can find a complete list of McGuane's books on his Web site.

Interestingly, at the presentation, McGuane was introduced by Denver mayor John Hickenlooper, who used the occasion to remark on today's closure of the Rocky Mountain News, the oldest business in the state of Colorado. Hickenlooper commented that not having RMN around would be like living without sunrise, then said: "'On a broader scale, the Internet doesn't pay for the news rooms and gathering the news and all the things that the Fourth Estate does. Rapidly we'll see an increase in the superficiality of news coverage.' He said that he was reminded of his mother's comment when she saw the first issue of People magazine. 'This is a bad idea whose time has come,' she said." Jenny Shank in New West.

Moments ago we spoke with Cathi Comar, the executive director of the American Museum of Fly Fishing, and learned that the Museum has gone ahead with their invitation to former Vice President Dick Cheney to attend their annual fundraiser dinner in the fall. The decision was reached late last week but not made public until now. Cheney has accepted and will attend. Comar explained that the Museum board discussed the decision at length over the past several weeks and ultimately decided that since the Museum's role was historical, their primary duty is to record and preserve artifacts of fly fishing history. When asked about Cheney's obviously negative impact on fisheries conservation, Ms. Comar replied that the Museum chooses not to take sides on political or environmental issues. "Although we work with conservation organizations," she said, "conservation itself is outside of our role."

In a board-approved letter to the many fly fishers who have complained about the Museum's decision, Comar notes that the Museum has never allowed political reputations to influence its decisions about whether to include and display the fishing equipment of the various presidents or vice presidents. "Our premier traveling exhibition, Anglers All: Humanity in Midstream, highlights the fly fishing paraphernalia of former presidents Carter, Coolidge, Hoover, Eisenhower, F. D. Roosevelt, and George H.W. Bush. Controversy attended the administrations of each of these men. We did not vet any of these contributions using a standard of political popularity nor could we serve the Museum's overarching purpose had we done so. The Museum's commitment to the total history of fly fishing is inclusive."

Tony Pawson is Distinguished Investigator at Mount Sinai Hospital's Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute. He studies cell communication, a branch of science that has become critical in immunology, cancer research and evolutionary biology. He also fly fishes. "There is a lot of similarity between fishing and doing science in the sense that a lot of it is, you know, just keeping going. (Laughs) As they say, you can't catch fish without having your fly in the water. But it's also being alert to subtle things. Often, in science, the most important things can reveal themselves in the littlest ways." Megan Ogilvie in Canada's Toronto Star.

If you've been in a Facebook fly fishing group, trolled a few steelhead forums, or seen her double-handed casting videos on YouTube, you probably know that April Vokey is something of a phenomenon: an attractive young woman who's grown up addicted to fly fishing. You might not know that she is also an ardent conservationist and completely unafraid to speak her mind on water quality and fish protection issues. Vokey, who runs FlyGal.ca when she's not covering water with a fly, was just interviewed by Zach Matthews on Itinerant Angler. It's worth the half an hour or so to hear what motivates this B.C. angler to stay on the river.

Liam Neeson plays a vengeful ex-CIA agent in his new action thriller "Taken." But at least one hobby belies his on-screen persona:

"BILD: What makes you happy?

Liam Neeson: Fly fishing. I can watch a river in absolute silence for four hours. The water becomes the world. The fish become my friends. That is my meditation."

Norbert Korzdorfer on Germany's BILD.com.

As you may know, the standard grip-and-grin fish photo doesn't grind our beans. In fact, if we never saw another fish shoved into the camera lens, we'd manage just fine. But when an image includes a nine-year-old catching a nine-pound steelhead on a black stonefly, the rules are changed. Notice the distinct lack of branded hi-tech fishing gear... and especially the big smile. Go Tylor.

It is, after all, the thought that counts. "What is it about [hosting a talk show] that's so addictive? I don't know. I think if I had a hundred million dollars, I'd head for the hills. I'd grab a fly-fishing rod. The last anyone has ever heard from me. Now I say that, but I don't mean it. I know six months would go by and I'd be like, 'Hey, you know what would be funny?' and try to convince somebody of something." Melissa Grego in Broadcasting & Cable.

Friends Tom Brokaw and Yvon Chouinard promoted 1% For the Planet to an audience of New York philanthropists Tuesday night. "Chouinard views the donations as an 'earth tax' and told Wednesday's party crowd that the charity deliberately chose the top line as the source for donations. 'The earth is still there even if you don't make a profit,' he said." Mike Spector in The Wall Street Journal.

An $80,000 winning bid for a trip with the former president and first lady to Georgia's Brigadoon Lodge was second only to a baseball hand-signed by five U.S. presidents in raising money for the Carter Center this past weekend.

The non-profit support and educational program for breast cancer survivors Casting for Recovery has appointed Lori Simon as their new executive director. She takes over from founding executive director Seline Skoug, who noted: "We delivered 37 retreat programs in 28 states in 2008, we harnessed the passion and organizational skills of 1,000 volunteers, and we set new records not only for engaging the generosity of more donors and national sponsors than ever, but in increasing the percentage of our funding that goes directly to program delivery."

Read the extended entry for the full press release.

Perhaps someone should be writing a screenplay of the story behind the first movie adaptation of The River Why. In the February issue of Outside magazine, Abe Streep explains how, despite ongoing disagreement between the producers and author David James Duncan, the first movie to capture a naked woman landing a steelhead was completed and made ready for its upcoming premiere this March. "Thomas Cohen bought the rights from Duncan's publisher, Sierra Club Books, in 1984, hoping the project would launch his filmmaking career. Cohen asked Duncan to write the script. 'Tom said he'd pay me $6,000 to write the screenplay,' says Duncan, now 57. 'I said, Oh, great. I can write a screenplay for a guy I don't want to work with and impoverish my family. That was the end of that.'"

Whether or not you fish with bamboo or ever care to, there's no denying that split cane rods touch the heart of fly fishing. Aficionados declare that hand-crafted bamboo has "soul," that each rod's uniqueness can be felt. To hear an expert angler who occasionally fishes bamboo for its unique qualities tell why is even more interesting, especially if that person is Thomas McGuane.

This week we're happy to show Tom fishing and talking about bamboo rods and their role in the sport. It's a long excerpt from the DVD "Trout Grass," which also is one of the few films that captures legendary rod builder Glenn Brackett at work. "Trout Grass," which is narrated by David James Duncan, is one of our favorites.

In Canada's Globe and Mail, Paul Quarrington revisits what he calls the best fishing novel ever written, Thomas McGuane's Ninety-Two In the Shade. "Every page of Ninety-two in the Shade offers at least one immaculately turned phrase. On page 99 (in the Vintage Contemporaries Edition), he describes a heavy drinker as 'spavined in the morals,' an exemplary McGuane-ism, as it combines fussy word choice with a winking affection for the liquor-whipped."

Ninety-two in the Shade on Amazon.

In addition to some of the former president's oil paintings, the only baseball in the world hand-signed by five U.S. presidents, and a bottle of President Carter's homemade, private-label wine, the Carter Center will auction off a fly-fishing trip with the Carters at Brigadoon Lodge in North Georgia (www.brigadoonlodge.com) at this winter's February 7 fundraiser.

Jim Range, who represented the voice of AFFTA in the U.S. legislature for more than ten years and helped shape numerous regulations and laws that support fishing and conservation, passed away Monday night after a short battle with cancer. Range was also Senior Legislative Policy Advisor and environmental lawyer for Baker, Donelson, Bearman & Caldwell, a Washington, DC, law firm. Range received numerous conservation awards and honors, including Outdoor Life magazine's 2002 Conservation Award for his work to establish the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership (TRCP), the U.S. Department of the Interior's Great Blue Heron Award, and the American Sportfishing Association's Norville Prosser Lifetime Achievement Award. But he was perhaps most visible to fly fishers as the energy behind AFFTA's National Casting Call, an annual event that supports fish habitat conservation, science, and education.

You can read more about Range's work for the TRCP here, and AFFTA's note on his passing here.

Worth reading if only because of the portrait it paints of Yellowstone at the turn of the 20th century, this 1906 Atlantic article also reveals much about the personality of Theodore Roosevelt, the sporting President. He believed bears and mountain lions to be mere "varmits" and preferred to fish only when it was necessary to eat, but he did more to preserve wilderness in the U.S. than any president before or since. "It is this transparency, this direct, out-and-out, unequivocal character of him that is one source of his popularity. The people do love transparency,--all of them but the politicians. A friend of his one day took him to task for some mistake he had made in one of his appointments. 'My dear sir,' replied the President, 'where you know of one mistake I have made, I know of ten.' How such candor must make the politicians shiver!'"

Jack Gartside ties a sand eel pattern -- a super-simple but deadly fly for east coast stripers in the early spring -- in a video from the Fall River, Massachusetts Herald News. "By the next month, stripers are eating the American Sand Lance, better known to the nonscientific fly fishing crowd as a sand eel. Average sand eels are no bigger that a pencil than has been sharpened a few times. Most are even smaller. They are found all over New England waters usually over sandy bottoms. Not known for their speed, they have a novel way to escape danger." In an article by Dave Souza.

Looking for signs of a thawing in Cuban-U.S. relations? The thousands of documents that Cuba has digitized and plans to make available to scholars worldwide will find a U.S. home at the John F. Kennedy presidential library in Boston. (If you miss the irony here, catch "The Missiles of October".) "Most of the papers have never been published and will give new insight into the 21 years Hemingway spent at Finca Vigia in San Francisco de Paula where he wrote some of his greatest works, said Ada Rosa Alfonso Rosales, director of Museo Ernest Hemingway." From Reuters, via FishingJones.com.

The February issue of Outside magazine features a story about the steep slope David James Duncan's novel ascended on its way to becoming a movie. On their Web site, Outside posts an Amber Heard photo gallery and a video interview with Zach Gilford, who plays the protagonist in what the editors call the movie version of Duncan's "bildungsroman" (I'm not kidding). Let's hope the movie itself is a bit more scintillating.

24-year-old Christian Goodpaster lost his fight with Cystic Fibrosis in December, but not before filming a segment of "Spanish Fly" with Jose Wejebe. This Sunday's episode of (ESPN2, 9:30 a.m. ET) will feature Wejebe and Goodpaster's August trip in Key West. "Wejebe didn't know at the time of its taping that it would also serve as a memorial. Goodpaster, of Elizabeth, Ind., died on Dec. 18 in Durham, N.C., while awaiting another lung transplant." On ESPN.com.

On Fishing Jones, Pete McDonald interviews filmmakers Justin Coupe and Palmer Taylor, whose upcoming "Rivers of the Lost Coast" promises to be a multi-layered account of the history of west coast U.S. steelheading. Though brief, the interview offers some interesting detail about the filmmakers's subject: "Most of the innovation in California came out of the Golden Gate Angling and Casting Club in San Francisco. A lot of the stuff that we take for granted today was designed and refined back in the 40s and 50s by the GGACC, Winston, Powell, Sunset Line, Jimmy Green, Pete Schwab, Jim Pray, Myron Gregory, Buddy Tarantino, Phil Mirravelle." Don't miss the anecdote about Ted Lindner's hatred of Bill Schaadt, either.

I first met Tom Morgan in 1998, when he asked for some help with the Tom Morgan Rodsmiths Web site (www.troutrods.com). I was lucky enough to meet Tom and his wife Gerri at his elegant but modest home near Bozeman, Montana, and to hear Tom describe his operation first-hand. I had little knowledge of Tom's role in the moving of R.L. Winston Twin Bridges, and only heard later of his prowess at rod design. (Now I am fortunate to fish with a custom rod made from an original Morgan blank; it is, simply, the sweetest trout rod I own.)

In December, Monte Burke wrote a bright and detailed story on Morgan and his success at continuing to build great rods despite a devastating battle with MS, which Burke compares to Beethoven's loss of his hearing. "Facing a raft of medical bills and uncertainty about the future, Morgan petitioned David Ondaatje, the owner of Winston, to release him from the noncompete clause. Ondaatje gave his assent. That allowed Morgan to start Tom Morgan Rodsmiths in 1996. At that point, Morgan was unable to cast a rod from his wheelchair and needed 24-hour care. 'We didn't plan it like this,' says Carlson. 'It just turned out this way.' They were married in 1996." On Forbes.com.

(Back in June 2007, MidCurrent noted another extended profile of Morgan in the Billings Gazette. Worth reading if only to explore the concept of being willing to "throw away one's work.")

The Huffington Post's Katherine Thomson ran across something unusual in the Wikipedia entry for Paul Reiser yesterday. Someone had updated the actor/comedian's entry to note that he "was discovered dead in the Squallahassee River where he reportedly enjoyed fly fishing. No foul play was suspected." The reality? There is no Squallahassee River and Reiser is alive and probably happily fishing still.

Despite providing another example for why unattributed Web content shouldn't be trusted, the story does give us a convenient euphemism for moving on to the next life. I can hear it now: "He's gone to fish the Squallahassee."

Last night Moldy Chum reported that Thad Robison, Chris Owens, and Justin Crump have departed AEG, the group responsible for the Fly Fishing Film Tour and for many recent fly fishing DVDs.

"I never know what to do about some of my antique obsessions. I bird hunt, and a woman in Portland asked me, 'Must you hunt?' And I said, 'Well, maybe I am just less evolved than you are.'"

On the Lannan Foundation Web site, Jim Harrison entertains a Sante Fe, New Mexico audience with readings of poems that he has never read aloud before. Many consider Harrison one of the great modern American poets, even though he is said to have turned to novels and screenplays as a way to earn a living. This recording was made in 2002. (First seen on Fishing Jones.)

Morris Communications is cutting 12% of their magazine jobs, and Phil Monahan -- who edited American Angler for almost ten years and was largely responsible for a long uptrend in readership -- is one of the casualties. Morris, which publishes 13 daily newspapers and owns outdoor book publishers Lyons Press and Globe Pequot, as well as Fly Tyer and Gray's Sporting Journal, is swimming in the same dangerous waters as other newspaper publishers who are having a hard time meeting debt obligations.

Steve Walburn, the Morris Magazine Group general manager who will take over editorial responsibilities at American Angler, said yesterday that Monahan's departure "is not a reflection on Phil, his job performance, or the magazine content."

Just in case you were wondering what Henry Paulson will be doing after his days of performing economic triage are over.

Perk Perkins talks on-stream to Business Week's Charles DuBow and says that while you can hear the thud of sales hitting a low point, products like the company's new Helios rods are a reason to celebrate. Who doesn't find it interesting that a company like Orvis -- by all accounts a "lifestyle" retailer -- is finding success in a niche market where single-channel manufacturers are seeing orders drop dramatically. Maybe it says something about Orvis's forward-looking marketing techniques (they've been among the most aggressive at acquiring new customers online), or maybe it re-states an important point: good product design matters.

"Standing thigh-deep in Vermont's Battenkill River, tying a nymph onto the leader of his fishing rod and wearing a beat-up green cap with a feather sticking out of it, Leigh 'Perk' Perkins Jr. doesn't look much like a CEO. The tanned, sinewy, 56-year-old looks more like a fly-fishing bum, and the grace and accuracy with which he casts his line indicates the many years he has spent on the water."

Terry Tomalin of the St. Petersburg Times offers a profile of Stu Apte, who still owns two of the longest-standing fly fishing records, a 58-pound dolphin caught in 1964 and a 136-pound Pacific sailfish caught in 1965, both on 12-pound tippets. "In 2005, Apte joined the ranks of Ernest Hemingway and Zane Grey in the IGFA's Hall of Fame. 'For 50 years Apte fished with Ted Williams,' proclaimed the Hall program brochure. 'Ted taught him how to pole a boat and called him "bush" because he considered Apte's skills "bush league" compared to his own. When Williams finally started calling him "Stu," Apte knew he had made it.'"

Redding.com writer Tim Holt profiles 79-year-old Joe Kimsey, who began fishing on California's McLoud River at age 3 and went on to hold sway at the Ted Fay Fly Shop on the Upper Sacramento for a quarter century. "'When I started fishing here in the '80s, they were using flies that were popular in the '20s,' said Bob Grace, who in those days was trading stocks and bonds in San Francisco. 'It seemed like Kimsey and the others were content to do their own thing, what had always worked for them. They were totally unaffected by what was going on in the rest of the country. I don't think any other part of the state was that isolated.'"

Ian Botham, former (and somewhat controversial) Test cricketeer and now commenter for British SKY Sports, recently published Botham on Fishing: At Sea, Being Coarse, on the Fly (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, October 2008, 240 pages), offering his perspectives on fly fishing, coarse fishing and sea fishing. The Guardian's Jamie Jackson excerpts some of the new book this morning: "In January 2001 I opened the Scottish salmon fishing season in a tiny village called Kenmore, which is situated where the river emerges from Loch Tay. It was freezing in the Highlands - they'd had one of the heaviest frosts for a long time and there was ice on parts of the water, so I definitely needed the traditional quaich [Scottish cup] of whisky, which is drunk at the opening."

Bothan received the BBC Sports Personality of the Year Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004. (See Botham's Wikipedia entry.)

Botham on Fishing: At Sea, Being Coarse, on the Fly on Amazon.

Author and fly fisher Peter Matthiessen received the National Book Award for fiction last night, almost three decades after winning his first for the non-fiction The Snow Leopard (1979). The award was given for Matthiessen's Shadow Country (Modern Library, April 2008, 912 pages), a reworked trilogy of novels from the 1990s that includes a retelling of Lost Man's River. "Matthiessen, a world traveler, naturalist and founder of the Paris Review, is one of the great names in modern letters, but few -- including Matthissen -- expected to see him nominated this year. His novel, neither new nor old, condenses and deepens his previous work about a ruthless landowner from the Florida Everglades."

Shadow Country (Modern Library) on Amazon.

The Salt Lake Tribune's Brett Prettyman talks about his friend and guide extraordinaire Denny Breer, who was killed in an accident on November 6 (see "Green River Guide Denny Breer Killed in Accident"). "Denny apologized for the mess his loft was in, and I wondered how I would know the difference between a clean and a dirty pigeon coop. He pointed out champion racers and talked about the breeding he had achieved. His words became a blur as he talked passionately about how his discovery of a young pigeon on the ground under a tree when he was 5 sparked his interest in birds."

The next time someone tells you that fly shops are a thing of the past, suggest that they read this story about Santa Cruz, California retailer Ernie Kinzli, whose customers are planning to wear black arm bands as they mourn Kinzli's decision to do more fishing. "Kinzli, a native Santa Cruzan, began fly fishing with his father along the San Lorenzo River when he was in the third grade. Back then, Kinzli said, anglers would line up shoulder to shoulder under the railroad trestle at the river mouth during steelhead season. The fish were so thick the river often looked black." Leo Maxam in the Santa Cruz Sentinel.

The addictions, anger and depression that accompany many veterans aren't well answered by traditional means, but over the past four years Project Healing Waters has proved that simply being on a trout stream can help wounded veterans take a few steps toward normalcy. Cindy Wolff writes about a recent PHW expedition on Arkansas's White River, where the local Delta Trout Unlimited club worked with the Veterans Administration and $14,000 in private donations to arrange a week-long fly fishing experience. "Travis Dulaney keeps an Army-issue tin cup with him -- a touchstone to remind him sometimes when he wakes from a drunken stupor that he's alive. The 46-year-old who has had a few "come aparts" in his life, spent years trying to get put back together. He has prayed with Army chaplains in Georgia, walked in and out of detox, took 12 steps and then some, been on and off the wagon, in and out of jail." On CommercialAppeal.com.

As president-elect Obama sorts through the choices for appointed positions, Timothy F. Geithner looks like a prime candidate for Treasury Secretary. Besides serving as the president of the New York Federal Reserve since 2003, Geithner is an avid fly fisher, "picking up the favorite hobby of central bankers." Stephen Labaton in The New York Times.

By the way, another candidate, the more experienced Paul Volcker, is also being considered for the position. Volcker, a long-time fly fisher, even showed up to speak at a Joan Wulff tribute in New York this past spring.

I suggest a fish-off as the only honorable way to determine a final choice.

Kirk Deeter of Fly Talk sent us a note late last night to let us know that Denny Breer, who was featured in his book Castwork, was killed in an accident yesterday. Breer, who also operated Trout Creek Flies and was the author of a definitive guide to fishing Utah's Green River, Utah's Green River: A Fly Fisher's Guide to the Flaming Gorge Tailwater (June 1998) as well as several DVDs, was considered one of the top guides in the U.S. west. Apparently he died during an attempt to jack up one of his large pigeon coops.

Kirk Deeter writes in more detail this morning on Fly Talk.

While just about anyone who fly fishes would prefer a president who shares their curiosity about and appreciation of the natural world, a front-page Wall Street Journal article this morning might make us want to think twice about having another "fishing president." That label was first given to Herbert Hoover, who many blame for extending the Great Depression when, as the Journal's Louise Radnofsky describes, Hoover was perceived to "put ideological loyalty to the free market ahead of trying to help people suffering from the downturn." Hoover earned a reputation -- deserved or not -- for indolence, aloofness, and foolish disregard. If you consider that an entire 388-page book has been written about Hoover's fishing habits (Hal Elliott Wert's Hoover The Fishing President: Portrait of the Private Man and His Life Outdoors), and very few historians praise him for political adroitness, it's also worth considering whether an addiction to fly fishing recommends anyone to the highest offices of the land. (We have other negative examples that spring to mind, along with visions of Blackhawk helicopters on Wyoming streams, but I'll skip those.)

Fact is, U.S. citizens are more in need of a leader who won't treat leisure time and aloofness as privileges of office. Don't get me wrong: if today's winner wants to learn the Belgian cast, I'll be the first to offer. But I'm more than a little hopeful that the notion of the president being truly a public servant enjoys a revival. It's the only way we're all going to have more time to go fishing.

George Grant, first known for his contribution of a distinct method of weaving hackles in the 1930s, passed away on November 2. Grant was much more than a fly tier. He was an ardent conservationist who contributed greatly to the protection of important rivers and helped ensure that stream access and protection laws were written into the books. His took up the causes of the Big Hole and Clark Fork rivers long before environmentalism was popular in Montana, and the facts that the Big Hole is the longest free-flowing river in Montana and that the Clark Fork was returned to life after years of mining pollution are largely due to his long commitment.

From Wikipedia: "Grant was one of the first anglers to realize that large trout fed primarily beneath the surface on nymphs, and that one needed to imitate and learn to fish this insect-stage if one wanted to consistently catch large trout. Grant's nymphs imitated primarily large stoneflies such as the giant salmonfly (Pteronarcys californicus), which grows up to two inches in length. In recognition for this work he received the Fly Fishing Federation's coveted Buszek Award in 1973."

It takes a fine filter to pick anything meaningful out of the daily flood of political rhetoric. But Sunday's comment by Barack Obama on the importance of not allowing science to be co-opted for political purposes is worth noting, especially as regards the plight of Pacific salmon and steelhead : "'I want to make sure that the science hasn't been doctored, or it hasn't been shaded, or it hasn't been tweaked in ways that predetermine the answer,' he said. 'One of the things I hope would be a hallmark of an Obama administration is a restoration of the importance of science and how we make decisions, something that hasn't always been the case in this administration.'" Phillip Yates in the Colorado Springs Post Independent.

In this week's New Yorker, Dan Chiasson writes about the quirky correspondence of poets Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop in the mid-twentieth century. "Staying at the home of Pauline Hemingway in Key West and deep in what she called her 'female Hemingway' phase, Bishop wrote of catching amberjack and jewfish. Lowell, fresh from charming William Carlos Williams's ninety-one-year-old mother, responded that he had once 'tried swimming' but 'was nearly drowned and murdered by children with foot-flippers and helmets and a ferocious mother doing the crawl.'"

If you're a poetry fan, Bishop's "At the Fishhouses," published in 1947, is a wonderful escape to the northeast U.S. coast and to a fast-fading picture of what commercial fishing once was.

"In a shallow run on the mighty River Spey in Scotland, an Atlantic salmon has taken my fly and is slaloming around rocks in an attempt to head back towards the sea. I am grateful for the power of my 15ft, Scott double-handed rod as I try to subdue what turns out to be a 9lb salmon, fresh off the tide." Bob Sherwood goes salmon fishing with British politico Charlie Whelan on Scotland's River Spey in London's Financial Times.

"It was a fly fishing trip to New Zealand this winter 'with a close family friend' that gave Tait the sense of well being and clean slate he needed to embark on a comeback to international cricket. 'We went to the South Island. It was fly fishing during the day, cook the fish at night, have a few beers and go to bed. It was great,' he said." That's 25-year-old cricket phenom Shaun Tait talking about how fly fishing helped him overcome the stress of constant travel and media attention and return to the sport. Rich Earle in Australia's Adelaide Now.

Here's a little teaser for a new video produced by Justin Coupe and Palmer Taylor. "Rivers of the Lost Coast" covers the history of northwest U.S. coastal steelhead fishing and is narrated by Tom Skerrit. From the Facebook page: "At the turn of the 20th century a handful of pioneers carried their fly rods into California's remote north coast and gave birth to a culture that would revolutionize their sport. For a select few, steelhead fly fishing became an obsessive pursuit without compromise."

This morning, Wall Street Journal writer Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg talks about the recently released DVD "Tarpon" in the paper's Weekend Journal section. Trachtenberg begins, "A recently restored film featuring a trio of writers fishing for tarpon in the early 1970s has started attracting attention in literary and fly fishing circles."

You can read the full article and watch an outtake here.

Idaho-based novelist Kim Barnes, whose new novel A Country Called Home (Alfred A. Knopf, 271 pages) includes a main character who shirks family responsibilities to go fishing (a tragic hero?), talks about her idea of bliss: 'I definitely have that impulse, and I spend almost the whole summer with my husband fly-fishing in a wilderness area on a river and living in a tent, and I'm never happier."

Jenny Shank also offers this review on New West.

A Country Called Home on Amazon.

I often find myself referring to a 1998 Salon interview with Jim Harrison -- who at the time was on a book tour for his novel The Road Home -- because interviewer Jonathan Miles gets the jumper cables so firmly attached to the novelist's battery. "We met slightly prior to Harrison's strict 4 o'clock cocktail hour -- the only pinch of discipline, he says, that he regularly upholds. A few minutes into the discussion, however, Harrison ordered a glass of Côtes du Rhône."

Harrison's latest novel The English Major (Grove Press, 304 pages), just out in October, involves a 60-year-old protagonist who sets out to rename all the states and official state birds to something more meaningful. As Publisher's Weekly says, "In Harrison's funny, spirited latest, Cliff, a 60-year-old former Michigan high school teacher, bids adieu to his inherited family farm (lost in a shady real estate deal); his wife, Vivian, of 38 years (who has been cheating on him and orchestrated the deal) and dear departed dog Lola (the truest woman in my life); and sets off on a yearlong, countrywide jag."

The English Major: A Novel on Amazon.

This week brought an outpouring of tribute from fly fishers who were in one way or another touched by Mel Krieger, who died last week at the age of 80. In the 1970s I taught myself to cast a fly more than 30 feet by watching a Mel Krieger video about two dozen times. His classic book The Essence of Fly Casting, showed, in my opinion, that great photography could make all the difference in delivering casting instruction via print. But the number of folks whose personal contact with Mel left indelible memories is truly remarkable.

Marty Seldon posted his banquet presentation for the October 11 NCCFFF Festival of Fly Fishing and notes that "Mel originated the now predominant FFF Casting Instructor Certification Program, and the FFF Guides Association."

Field & Stream's Kirk Deeter mentions spending time with Krieger at last year's Hooked on a Cure event in Colorado.

And several folks contributed comments on the Fly Fisherman and Dan Blanton, Kiene's Fly Shop bulletin boards.

Finally there's the San Francisco Chronicle's Sunday obituary, which notes that Krieger "became a renowned fly casting instructor, teaching clinics all over the world. He was a pillar in the fly fishing community and was considered one of the foremost and innovative instructors."

"'I'm better at that than I am at golf. I just love the serenity of it. ... Swinging a fly through the water? It's my passion. I've always loved fishing, but I got into fly fishing the last few years. A buddy and I left Coeur d'Alene [Idaho] in my truck at 5 a.m. and drove 18 1/2 hours without stopping to British Columbia. That's what it's all about.'" Former tour leader Mark O'Meara confesses all in Kevin Van Valkenburg's Baltimore Sun piece about the habits of Hall of Fame golfers.

These days few anglers have heard the name Gadabout Gaddis, but it's worth remembering that Roscoe Vernon Gaddis spawned an entire industry: the TV fisherman. His uniqueness was highlighted by the fact that he steered clear of expensive resorts and gear. Rob Streeter offers a short biography ijn Albany, New York's Times Union. "He even got his start before there was any such thing as television, on WGY radio in Schenectady in 1938. The General Electric owned the radio station. A year after his radio debut, GE asked Gaddis to do an experimental show for a new medium called television."

Famed casting instructor Mel Krieger died peacefully at his home early this morning after recently being diagnosed with brain lymphoma, according to his wife.

Zany. It's a word that could describe almost any Carl Hiaasen character. It could also describe the level of skill required for a fly fishing team -- that is, an angler and a guide -- to win something as challenging as the Islamorada Fall Fly invitational Bonefish Tournament five times. Hiaasen and Klein caught three weight fish and counted eight more releases during the three-tournament, which ended Friday. Tim Mahaffey of Miami, guided by Capt. Duane Baker, was second, catching one weight fish of 11.5 pounds on day three and managing seven releases on days one and two. The largest bonefish -- 12 pounds -- was caught on the last day by Mark Richens, guided by Mark Cockerham.

To read more about fly fishing for bonefish, as practiced by Hiaasen and Mahaffey, read "Targeting Giant Bonefish" and "Inside the Box: Carl Hiaasen" on MidCurrent.

Apparently the presidential candidate was smitten with Montana during his campaign stops there. So spear-gunning is out, fly fishing is in. "'One way or another, after this presidential process is over, whether -- because I lose or because I win -- and I've got a little vacation time coming, I'm going to learn how to flyfish, because that land is spectacular,' he said." Ben Smith on Politico.com.

Whether you are one of the 18 per cent who worship at the altar of non-sentimentality or one of the other 82 per cent who might think Dick Cheney gives fly fishing a bad name, you'll get a kick out of this John McCaslin piece on writer Matt Labash's recent fishing trip with the vice president. "'Perhaps the strangest moment for [Jack] Dennis,' Mr. Labash now reveals, 'was one afternoon on the river, just days after Cheney had a heart defibrillator implanted. Dennis says Cheney was reclining in the boat with 'his head leaned back -- he'd never done anything like that. I went back to look and see if he was breathing.'" In the Washington Times.

The Light Foundation, which provides money for children's medical and educational programs, will be the beneficiary of an auction of a fly-fishing cabinet made from reclaimed wood by the Pro Bowler Matt Light and Stephen Staples. "Staples says the cabinet is worth $5,800, but hopes it will bring in more, given the work that went into it. 'It will fit in any home, no matter what the decor,' he said. 'It is a real piece of history.'" Benjamin Bell and John Wilcox in the Boston Herald.

These days James Prosek, this month's featured artist on MidCurrent, is known as a painter, author and, with the ESPN production of "The Compleat Angler" (see the videos), filmmaker.

Now Prosek's also a public radio podcaster. American Public media just posted Prosek's 53-minute commentary on the mystical nature of trout and other fish as part of their "Speaking of Faith Series."

Excerpt: "Nature really is chaotic.The real myth is the one that the Natural History Museum promotes in its collections and in its family trees and genealogies. The real myth is the myth of order."

What if when casting seventy feet you couldn't turn your legs sideways a bit to get that extra range of motion? Stories like this one by Sue Cocking remind us of two things: that fly fishing and its joys are about overcoming challenges, and that some of us -- like Lance Benson -- are better equipped than others to handle those tests of determination. "'My motto is "no legs, no problem,"' Benson said, smiling. Around town, he is known as a sharp dresser who wisecracks about his disability to put others at ease. 'As a person who's disabled, you have to look your best, so people don't get intimidated or think you're homeless or something,'' he said. 'I had to kind of work harder to work around it. I've always kind of embraced it to help others embrace it.''' In the Miami Herald.

The short answer to that question is that the 80s rocker and fly fisher spends a lot of time casting flies on one of those Montana waters where the surrounding property owners don't welcome the general fly fishing public with open arms. The Mitchell Slough (which Lewis called "just a ditch"), like the Ruby River, has been a focus in the ongoing debate over access rights. Ok then, Huey Lewis, workin' for a living, fly fishing in a ditch (albeit a very wide one) -- which will apparently be featured in a Canadian reality TV show: somehow that makes sense.

Randy Cameron reviews the ten commandments of stealth, as taught to Gary LaFontaine by river keeper Henry Ramsay. "The crusty old caretaker of the Windsor Club pulled him out of the bushes by his ear, and after admonishing the young LaFontaine, told him he could fish the stream if he learned the skills necessary to never be seen by any member of the club." In the Monte Vista, Colorado Journal.

Some of us remember Dame Diana Rigg as the original cat-suit vixen -- long before Halle Berry ever got coated in rubber for Batman. As she turns 70, the actress who later gained wide acclaim for theatrical roles enjoys her 20 cigarettes a day and her growing reputation as the coolest damn 70-year-old in the world. "Diana Rigg tries to avoid the trappings of fame and is usually happier fly-fishing and swimming naked at her home in France, writes Nigel Farndale" in the Irish Independent.

We mentioned the new book by Van Gorman Egan on Roderick Haig-Brown a couple of weeks ago (see "New Limited Edition Tribute to Roderick Haig-Brown"), but since then a couple of stories have popped up about the book and about how Haig-Brown, who originally intended to settle in Washington state, ended up in B.C. In the Times Colonist, Jack Knox writes that being unable to renew his U.S. visa let him to cross the border into Canada: "Roderick Haig-Brown came out from Britain at age 17, toiling in Washington state as a logger and weekend prizefighter before an expired visa chased him north to Vancouver Island's Nimpkish River in 1927. Still only 19, he worked in the woods again, but it was writing that got him fired up."

By the way, if you hanker to experience a little literary history first-hand, you can actually stay in the house formerly owned by Roderick and Ann Haig-Brown on the banks of the Campbell River.

Roderick Haig-Brown on Wikipedia.

Ray Petersen, an Alaska aviation pioneer who in the 1950s built some of the first fly-in fishing lodges in Alaska, died at age 96 on Tuesday. "In 1947 he formed Northern Consolidated Airlines, merging his Bethel-based air service, Ray Petersen Flying Service, with several other small airlines. In 1950 he brokered a deal with the National Park Service to build lodges in what was then Katmai National Monument. The five lodges launched a new era of fishing tourism in rural Alaska. Julia O'Malley in the Anchorage Daily News.

Word began circulating on Tuesday that Ed Storey, founder of the mail order company Feather-Craft, died on Sunday. Feather-Craft was created in 1955, and Storey built his business around mailed "bulletins" -- completed without a spell-checker, according to those on his list -- but later started one of the most successful catalogs in the fly fishing supplies and gear business.

"When the modern-day Olympic Games began in 1896, competitive fly-casting was already well established. In 1906, an Irishman named John Enright set a world record by casting a salmon fly 152 feet at an Anglers Club of New York tournament in Central Park. The New York Times reports Enright used a 20-foot greenheart rod that weighed four pounds." Morgan Lyle offers some history on the sport of competitive fly casting, mentioning current American women's record holder Pamela Peters and of course Steve Rajeff, who's made a cast of 236 feet with a single-handed rod. In the Schenectady, New York Daily Gazette.

He was stabbed tackling an armed robbery suspect on a California street and won a Presidential "Point of Light" award for helping police with drug busts, but what occupies the time of ex-card shark Herman Garcia these days is saving steelhead salmon -- 23,000 of them according to an article by Paul Rogers. His non-profit group CHEER, or Coastal Habitat Education & Environmental Restoration, pulls trash out of creeks that are prime habitat for spawning steelhead. "He took a job as a program specialist at First 5, a Santa Clara County program that runs childhood health programs with tobacco tax funds. As part of his job, Garcia drives young mothers to the doctor. He helps them fill out insurance forms. And he uses every vacation day to rescue fish." In The Mercury News.

"Scroll back a quarter century to a narrow store front at 26 Broadway, a place that advertises shoe repair. Every Denver fisherman knows it for something else. At a time when wading boots have the life expectancy of the average housefly, Uyeno's shop is the one reliable haven for repair. With unerring efficiency and shockingly low prices, he applies patches that will not leak, vulcanizes felt soles, shores up lagging spirits." Charlie Meyers profiles 88-year-old wader repairman and fly fisher George Uyeno in the Denver Post.

Bill Graves pays tribute to legendary Atlantic salmon guide Richard Adams with a story about how Adams made short work of a 27-pound fish with some deft use of the net. (There's also an interesting note about how "strumming" a line can make a big fish move.) "'Keep leading him right up beside the boat if you can', Richard said, "but all at once he's going to take off like a scalded cat.' I knew he was right; large salmon are seldom netted from a canoe, they are too wily. Then, all at once, the fish was right alongside. There was a quick flash as my old guide swept the net and snared the passing fish. That's when the salmon really got wild, I thought it would beat a hole in the side of the canoe as I held the net overboard while Richard poled to shore." In the Bangor Daily News.

You may know her as the slightly witchy Hermione Granger from the Harry Potter film series, but apparently Emma Watson sees as much magic in fly fishing. Back in March, she donated one of her Grey Wulffs to the Wild Trout Trust to help raise money for the U.K.-based conservation group.

GUY DE LA VALDENE is a mystery to most fly fishers. If his name is known widely, it is because he hung out with Thomas McGuane, Jim Harrison, Richard Brautigan, Russell Chatham and Jimmy Buffet in Key West in the late sixties and early seventies. He is also, of course, an author of two books on game birds and a novel, and the co-producer of "Tarpon," the cult classic that was finally released on DVD this summer. But de la Valdene is, by almost all accounts, a recluse. In fact, when we finished our four-hour interview with him, he said, "I don't think I've ever talked this much."

Our conversation transported us back to the post-war "boom" in destination fly fishing, the era of the pioneering Florida Keys guides, Parisian film studios, and to the days when de la Valdene and his friends enjoyed a heady mixture of talent, freedom and experimentation that blurred the lines between fishing and life.

On October 18, the Catskill Fly Fishing Center Hall of Fame will induct Dave Whitlock, Ed Zern, George Griffith, Art Neuman, Francis Betters,and Ed Van Put, who at age 70 still works full-time as a state fisheries and wildlife manager. "When you fish nearly 55 years of your life in the Catskills, you kind of pick up on the history behind the water you've fished. Along the way, Van Put wrote two important historical books on Catskill fly fishing. In 1996, he penned the critically acclaimed book, 'The Beaverkill,' (The Lyons Press), and more recently, Van Put released his second and broader historical book in 2007, 'Trout Fishing in the Catskills,' (Skyhorse Publishing)."

This seems to be the year of the Lefty Kreh book, with the arrival of at least three titles by or about the most recognizable name in fly fishing. The first, All the Best (Collector's Cover, July 2008, 215 pages), which just arrived in the mail, is a voluminous tribute in words and photographs written and compiled by Flip Pallot. The images themselves provide a history lesson on the many notable anglers Kreh has fished with, and personal written contributions by Lefty's many friends make up almost a third of the book. In the Washington Times, Gene Mueller mentions one error in the book but readily gives the title two thumbs up: "The many color plates alone are worth the price of the book and Pallot's text is thoughtful, alive, interesting and a well-deserved salute to one of the great names in sport fishing."

All The Best - Celebrating Lefty Kreh ** Signed ** Brand New on Amazon.

Having been born and halfway raised in Charleston, it doesn't surprise me that the Post and Courier, which was founded in 1803, would take a month to come up with a story about resident David Dalu's triple crown win in Florida tarpon tournaments this year. It has to do with the half-century "waiting period" for new arrivals, I think. But columnist Tommy Braswell wrote the most thorough piece yet about Dalu's phenomenal win: "Dalu didn't catch his first tarpon on fly until 2002, but in five years has reached the pinnacle of tarpon fishing. 'Last year was my first year of fishing tarpon tournaments in the Keys,' Dalu said. 'I fished with my friend Scott Collins, and we fished the Golden Fly and had the most releases. We fished in the Hawley last year and won, the first time a new angler had ever won.'"

If you ever happen to meet Jim Lepage, you'll quickly learn that he is good at a lot of things. Just as an example, the vice president of rods and tackle at Orvis, who came up with the Helios fly rod design, is a mushroom expert and cook. Lepage is the co-author, with Paul Fersen (manager of the company's retail outdoor division), of the new Guide to Great Sporting Lodge Cuisine (Thomas Nelson, April 2008, 232 pages), which contains 140 recipes from 42 sporting lodges around north America. John Waller writes about the book in this morning's Bennington Banner. "Lepage said some of the recipes are more difficult to recreate than others, but even a novice chef can make the lobster thermidor served at the Shoal Grass Lodge and Conference Center in Aransas Pass, Texas, if they follow the directions carefully. 'We tried to edit the recipes in a way that would make it easy to do the cooking,' he said."

The Orvis Guide to Great Sporting Lodge Cuisine on Amazon.

If you didn't know already, Bill Schaadt was an icon in northwest U.S. steelheading long before fly fishing for steelhead became a cult itself. He was, according to everyone who fished near him (not many fished "with" him, since he fished so hard and so expertly), one of the most talented anglers ever to hold a fly rod. As an example, in a recent interview I conducted with Guy de la Valdene, he described Schaadt fishing in Key West harbor in the early 1970s while Valdene and the "Tarpon" film crew partied away the evening on the Key West waterfront:

"He had some sort of a funny little rowboat and we were all having some drinks at the Chart Room or at the hotel that sticks out on the water there and you'd see him out there, at night, just dredging, and jumping the %@!#& out of tarpon. Like a lot of them. Like every 8 or 10 minutes Kaboom!, you know, something would happen. He was just a magnificent fly caster, and I'm sure there are people nowadays who are as good or better, and probably hundreds of them, but in our days, Bill Schaadt was something."

Some nominal digging turned up this piece from the archives of Sports Illustrated, in which Russell Chatham -- who probably sat there with de la Valdene and watched Schaadt dredging tarpon in Key West -- describes the legendary demeanor: "Transported, he would turn to follow the progress of his line downstream until a salmon took, then he would outline the peculiarities of the struggle as he battled the lunging monster to a standstill near the sink. Once again I was under the spell of the only man I know whose every thought, action and possession is a cohesive, unified extension of himself, like the spokes of a wheel coming into contact with the encompassing rim."

On July 10, all three authors will come to their alma mater's Wharton Center's Pasant Theatre for an authors' event moderated by Bill Castanier, who writes this very detailed piece on the authors' connections. "For more than 40 years, authors, friends and Michigan State University alumni Jim Harrison and Thomas McGuane have exchanged letters, documenting a trove of their trials, tribulations and careers. The letters reside in sealed boxes in university archives; McGuane's at MSU and Harrison's at Grand Valley State University. The letters may be signed and delivered, but as of now remain sealed from public view, and they probably will stay that way for some time." In the Lansing, Michigan City Pulse.

The next fly fishing adventure movie producer who doesn't sign up Greta Gaines to do the sound track has got some explaining to do, in my opinion. Gaines, who many might recognize as a champion snowboarder and ESPN correspondent, will release a "country-rock-inspired" album later this month, according to country music Web site CMT.com. "'I was fly-fishing with my grandfather when I was just a baby girl. Because I was the only girl, it was my way of getting undivided attention from my father and grandfather. I'm primarily a fly fisherwoman, but I'm really a catch-fish-woman -- whatever it takes to do that,' she laughs."

For a taste of Gaines's music, you can hear 10 of her tracks on her Web site.

The hand and the arm -- they are, after all, the gears driving any good fly cast. Tip control, proper application of power, and even the particular style of presentation all begin with mastering the fundamentals of hand and arm control. Joan Wulff considered it so important that she began her now-classic instructional DVD "Dynamics of Fly Casting" with a discussion of role of the arm and hand in the casting stroke.

We're lucky to have permission from producer Jeffrey Pill (whom you probably recognize by now as the producer of "Why Fly Fishing" and Gary LaFontaine's "Successful Fly Fishing Strategies") to begin showing segments of Wulff's "Dynamics" on MidCurrent. Wulff has the remarkable distinction of having taken the art of fly casting to its highest level while remaining able to explain complex techniques in the clearest, simplest terms. "The Hand and the Arm" is an example of why she has had such a tremendous impact on fly casting instruction.

Alice Munroe, author of the best seller The Beach House and of the new book Time Is a River, says fly fishing isn't just about catching fish. It's about feeling life. "Monroe says she is taken with the spiritual and intellectual aspect of fly-fishing, just as her character Mia is. 'You'll experience it today,' Monroe says to a fly-fishing novice. 'You'll feel life. You'll study the fish, what they're doing. It's what brings you back every time, trying to figure it all out. It's all about doing the dance with the fish.'" Craig Wilson interviews the author for USAToday.

John Smeaton may not be a household name in the U.S., but it certainly is in Scotland and in western Europe. Smeaton was the baggage handler who, one year ago, fought back against one of the bombers at Glasgow Airport and helped drag an injured colleague to safety. "John Smeaton is a remarkable man. He has the ability to smoke a cigarette, fiddle with the TomTom sat-nav, rummage for the next packet of Marlboro Lights, discuss Michael Bloomberg, the Mayor of New York, and the multi-billionaire's preference for the great rivers of Colorado for fly fishing and drive through Glasgow's early morning traffic without once slamming us into the tail of the car in front." Stephen McGinty in The Scotsman.

After reading yesterday's comment by the nurse who gave CPR to the dying Colorado kayaker (see Fly Fishing Guide Tries to Save Kayaker), I had to wonder whether there wasn't a mass rush to secure notoriety for high-water rescues going on. But then reader Doug Haacke sent us this link to a story that we know we can trust: in the past week fly fishing guide Bob Krumm has helped at least two groups of anglers who were capsized floating Montana's Bighorn River.

Herbert Hoover may have won the coveted "Fishing President" title by spending more time at his Rapidan River fishing camp than he did fixing the Depression, but as this story proves, Dwight D. Eisenhower clearly had the passion: "To please the president, the [Brown Palace] hotel created an ice carving of a mountain complete with pine trees and a miniature lake at the base of the mountain in which swam three tiny trout. Ike was enchanted with the creation and could hardly keep his eyes off the lake and its tiny inhabitants. Thus, when one trout suddenly flipped himself out of the pool and onto the carpet, Ike leaped out of his chair to the rescue, nearly upsetting the table in his eagerness to save the fish." Penny Parker in the Rocky Mountain News.

I just began reading the very entertaining advanced reader's copy of Lefty's upcoming book My Life Was This Big (And Other True Fishing Tales) (Skyhorse Publishing), which will come out in October. (For some reason I was under the impression that I had heard all of Lefty's jokes, but co-writer Chris Millard has managed to give them an eloquence that makes at least some of them seem new all over again.) Glancing through Mike Leggett's piece on Lefty this morning, I was reminded of how the veteran teacher manages to gather all the women in an auditorium when he does a casting demonstration: "'I can teach any woman I'm not married to how to cast,' Kreh says. 'Wives don't listen to what we say, they listen to how we say it. Learn to cast and then find somebody who knows the fish you want to catch. Fly fishermen are willing to share their knowledge, and outside of sex, it's one of the few things that men and women can really enjoy together.'" In the Austin American-Statesman.

The son of legendary sportscaster Curt Gowdy learned fly fishing from his dad on a nameless creek near Laramie, Wyoming. But these days his love of fishing has expanded to all tackle, though his philosophy hasn't changed. "It was quite clear to me that when the reward is such satisfying angling, the relative merits of fly and bait seem unimportant. 'Do what the fish want,' Gowdy said, summing up his philosophy and our morning on the water, 'not what you want them to want.'" Peter Kaminsky in The New York Times.

Driving back from Fort Lauderdale after my Bahamas trip yesterday, I found myself in that radio-wave dead zone known as Alligator Alley. Actually it's not that you can't find any music on Alligator Alley, it's just that it inevitably turns out to be a rumba or samba, or some relic from a music collection that might have been purchased in a gated-community yard sale. Then I heard "Up Where We Belong," sung by Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes, and decided out of boredom to actually listen to the lyrics. They weren't bad at all. But of course I prefer the live version of "With a Little Help From My Friends" or "Feelin' Alright."

Turns out the arm-flailing artist now makes his home in Crawford, Colorado, where after fifteen years he has managed to blend in with the locals. And besides growing tomatoes and riding horses, Cocker likes to spend his time fly fishing in the Gunnison. "He said the flailing was a subconscious motion -- what he would do if he could play a musical instrument. But he can't, 'because I have these fat thumbs,' he said, holding up two meaty digits. His version of air guitar is toned down in his performances nowadays. But his friends say occasionally his right arm will go into motion when he's caught up in a close snooker game." Nancy Lofholm in the Denver Post.

Apparently Blackhawk helicopter viewing in northwest Wyoming rivals that of some major species of wildlife. "Out of the corner of my eye I see movement and then, in a WHOOSH and a flash, three wild Blackhawk helicopters rise up from the river like a bad testosterone movie scene. They fly in formation along the riverbed for several miles with me and then they make a hard right and take off down a lush valley." Terri Orr in the Park City, Utah Record.

Jim Murphy, who founded both Redington and Albright Tackle, has been hired as president of Hardy & Greys' new wholly owned subsidiary, Hardy North America, headquartered in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. According to an article by Tim Mekeel in Lancaster Online, Hardy's presence in Pennsylvania means an end to its distribution relationship with Cortland. "Hardy & Greys is investing more than $1 million to open the 14,000-square-foot facility. It will start with eight to 12 employees, with 'significant potential for growth' as the business expands, he said."

"Bill Taylor, [Atlantic Salmon Federation] President, commented, 'This year's Lee Wulff Conservation Award is being presented to Joan Wulff for all she has done to advance the sport of salmon angling, while working tirelessly to ensure conservation of this valuable species. For many years Joan worked along side her husband and, after his passing, she continued the work he had begun, especially promoting live release angling, which saves thousands of salmon each year.'"

Those who have been lucky enough to see a bootleg copy of the movie "Tarpon," filmed in Key West in 1974, have seen a glimpse of what fly fishing for tarpon was like in the early days. The film never made it to market in the U.S. and the original footage sat in a barn in the French countryside for 35 years. Recently, Guy de la Valdene and UYA Films went back to the original footage and produced a re-mastered DVD of the original. Starting today, you can purchase "Tarpon" (UYA Films, 53 minutes, $34.95 plus shipping) from The Book Mailer in Helena, Montana: order online, call 1-800-874-4171, or email orders@thebookmailer.

Besides including some of the only footage of Richard Brautigan, the cult 60s poet and novelist, "Tarpon" also features commentary by legendary guides Woody Sexton, Steve Huff, and Gil Drake, as well as Page Brown, an ardent Keys conservationist. Thomas McGuane and Jim Harrison are also featured in the film, and Jimmy Buffet composed the music. Many consider this film to be the first of the modern fishing films.

Tom Brokaw recently said of the film: "'Tarpon' is a timeless and beautifully executed film about life, sport and culture. You'll be moved, amused, outraged and, most of all, entertained." The film's message about the importance of releasing fish was far ahead of its time and prescient in highlighting the increasing pressure on fish by sportsmen, tourists and boaters.

We're very glad the producers thought the film worthy of the effort and expense it took to color-correct, clean and digitize the film, and we hope you'll support their decision to distribute the DVD. "Tarpon" is a slice of time and a piece of art, but it's also a message that concerned anglers can make a difference in protecting our resources. After more than three decades tarpon fishing continues to be a fantastic experience for fly fishing experts and novices, in part because the artists and anglers of the day recognized the growing threats to the fish and their habitat.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer's D'Arcy Egan interviews John Gierach and talks about the author's latest book, Fool's Paradise, which recently arrived on store shelves. "'I love fishing and I love writing,' said Gierach by telephone from his rural Colorado home. 'I don't know which one I'd ever give up. Charles Waterman, who is one of my favorite authors, once said that writing about fishing can be more fun than actually fishing.'"

Berlin, who most recently was head of the International Hunter Education Association, has been tasked with establishing a new AFFTA headquarters in the Denver, Colorado area. "The process to hire a new president began over 4 months ago. More than 65 names were considered for the position with over 35 résumés reviewed to narrow down the list of candidates." Berlin replaces Robert Ramsay, who resigned in March.

Read the extended entry for the full press release.

Former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, who by any estimate is a large guy (a friend commented that he "must be about 6' 7""), is also an avid fly fisher -- so avid that he was invited to speak at the Wednesday night dinner given by The American Museum of Fly Fishing in honor of Joan Wulff. Apparently he has recovered well from the worst mistake of his life, which was not a macro-economic decision but one made shortly after getting married. "Volcker kicked off a serious recession in order to slay inflation. From an objective standpoint, his decision made economic sense, but it was a political death knell. Volcker's clearly aware of the fact, joking that the 'greatest strategic error' in his life was not the recession, but taking his wife fly-fishing in Maine for their honeymoon." On SeekingAlpha.com.

"Larry Kramer, dean of the Stanford Law School, said the best word to describe Neukom is audacious: 'He has the audacity to really set ambitious goals, and then he does it by sheer force of personality.' The dapper Neukom, who sports a wavy silver pompadour and an ever-present bow tie, steps in at a pivotal juncture for the Giants." In the San Francisco Chronicle.

"Saunders recalled that his friend seemed troubled that spring day in 1968, and seemed somehow to know his death was imminent. Saunders recited for King a psalm he had written that describes the reflection of God in nature -- in the sea, in the mangroves, in a snowflake. Afterward, Saunders said King told him: 'I feel like I could reach up and touch the face of God in this place.''' Bimini guide and boatbuilder Ansil Saunders recounts days spent with Martin Luther King and guiding famous clients in Bimini in The Miami Herald.

John Gierach's first book in three years arrives in readers' hands May 16. Fly fishers can hardly wait, and there are plenty of non-angling adherents of the Gierach view of life waiting for the UPS truck to arrive.

This week on MidCurrent you can watch and listen to Gierach as he draws the connections between fly fishing writing and the sport itself. As far as we know this segment, from the "Why Fly Fishing" DVD, is the only time Gierach has ever appeared in film. "We who fly fish," Gierach says, "think it's deeply meaningful until we try to explain why it's meaningful, and then suddenly it's just fishing again."

For his upcoming new edition of Spey Flies and Dee Flies: Their History and Construction, Oregonian John Shewey traveled to northern Scotland in search of flies tied by the legendary ghillie Geordie Shaw. He found them, after years of searching, hanging on the wall of the Craigellachie Hotel.

John Shewey's Spey Flies and Dee Flies: Their History & Construction on Amazon.

"Since selling his fishing rod company in 1997 to Shimano American Corporation, Gary Loomis has spent the last eleven years at G.Loomis, Inc. in a promotional capacity and assisting when needed on new rod designs. Now, Loomis has decided it is time to move on and focus on other interests, including several conservation projects in which he's involved. He founded Fish First, a group dedicated to restoring salmon runs in his home state of Washington in 1995, and was the driving force in bringing the first chapter of the Coastal Conservation Association to the West Coast."

Read the extended entry for the full press release.

Looking again at a copy of "Tarpon," the 1974 film by Guy de la Valdene and Christian Odasso of UYA Films, got me wondering more about the slice of time that produced so much interest in tarpon fishing and conservation in the Florida Keys. A little research turned up this piece by Jim Harrison in Sports Illustrated's December 1973 issue on the prominent Keys guides of the era: "When he is not enervated by bad weather, Woody Sexton gives the appearance of tremendous strength and vitality. He constitutes some sort of classic in conservative guiding; while most guides have turned to larger skiffs -- Fiber Craft or Hewes -- for the comfort of their customers, Sexton keeps his light Nova Scotia. The skiff was bought from a Hamiltonian Republican who named it Amagiri years ago after the Japanese destroyer that sank PT-109. The name is still on the skiff and has been known to vex some of the Navy personnel on the Keys."

Interestingly, the makers of "Tarpon" chose not to focus on the guides but on the fish and the slightly hallucinatory experience of fly fishing on the flats. Harrison's piece proves, I think, that the writers who were fishing there at the time understood the game very well, no doubt because of the guides, who were genuinely impassioned about the sport and not in the game to become celebrities. The film's estimation of the threat to the future of tarpon bound the writers, guides, fishermen to accept that it was all too good to last. Yet here we are, 35 years later, with most of that first generation of expert guides gone, and the tarpon are still coming.

This week on MidCurrent, guide and filmmaker R.A. Beattie shares his terrific short film on the relationship between Alaskan guide Mark Rutherford and his daughter Kate, who is also a guide. Not only does the film showcase the young filmmaker's talent, it's a teaser for a larger story, which Beattie introduces here:

"In July of 2006 Mark Rutherford, of Wild River Guides, and I were dropped at the headwaters of an un-run tributary of the Upper Nushigak River in Bristol Bay Alaska. We were strangers. We had only spent the last 20 hours together before this point, but had created enough trust during a winter of phone conversations to attempt a dangerous endeavor: a first descent of a virtually unknown river. Our trip was a monumental success, but did not come easy. We struggled through a twelve-hour portage from our landing pond to the headwaters, fought hypothermia during viscous storms, sustained almost entirely on salmon (which were sometimes difficult to find), and managed to capture some astounding footage."

"If I have one message on this Earth . . . it is that fly fishing is fabulous... no really." Fly fisher, actor and author Henry Winkler (the Fonz), comments on the real life stories behind his series of books that are meant to help build children's self-esteem.

When the Wall Street Journal ran a story on Carl Hiassen's new book The Downhill Lie: A Hacker's Return to a Ruinous Sport, I couldn't help but once again notice the similarities that might compel a fly fisher to play golf, and vice-versa.

WSJ: Have you played golf since finishing your book?
Hiaasen: I actually played yesterday. I hadn't played in a month. I disgraced myself completely. A lot of the strategy in golf involves getting your excuses lined up. This time there were no alibis, it wasn't windy, there were no snakes on the course. I shot an abominable 97." We don't have many snakes on saltwater flats, but we do have rays. And more than one beaver has spoiled a perfect drift of the fly.

By the way, you won't see Hiaasen fishing "like a putz." He's recognized as one of the top bonefishers around. You can see his fly box on MidCurrent.

Colorado's Post Independent posted this piece on a couple of the filmmakers featured in the new 5 Point Film Festival, which runs May 8-10 in Carbondale. One of them is R.A. Beattie, who at age 25 is focusing his considerable cinematographic skills on fly fishing. In the interview, Beattie explains his attraction to film: "Why make movies? 'I love the storytelling process. When we create a film we don't have story boards. We don't have a shot list set up. It's cool to go to a place where you don't have expectations, and you don't know what you're going to shoot or what story you're going to tell.'"

You can watch a sample of Beattie's work along with the story behind why it was made on MidCurrent.

Tom Pierce started guiding in Key West back when wire was the preferred material for tarpon shock tippets. His experimentation with knots for dissimilar lines led to many improvements in leaders, not the least of which was the Slim Beauty knot. And he's one of the most mentioned captains in the IGFA world record book. Through it all Tom has remained one of those guides that never boasts, never says an unkind word about a client, and would rather be fishing than doing anything else. The Miami Herald's Susan Cocking describes an example of the complex leaders that Tom has perfected over the years for catching large, fast, or toothy fish on fly rods. "The fly line was connected to a 12-inch butt section of 30-pound mono, which was fastened to a six-inch section of thin shock gum, which stretches like parachute cord. There followed another small butt section with a loop to connect to the two-pound, tournament-grade tippet which was fastened to a flexible wire-trace bite tippet. It seemed to me you could launch a fly shop with just what was on my rod."

We learned late yesterday that David Foster, who was at the helm of Morris Communications' national outdoors magazines, including Fly Tyer, American Angler and Gray's Sporting Journal, finally succumbed to the cancer he had been fighting in recent years. As Don Rhodes notes in an Augusta Chronicle obituary, Foster never lost his desire to enjoy one more day in the outdoors: "He wrote in one of his blog postings, 'Even the last day of your life can have meaning. A warrior friend died recently and I went to see him the day before the last day of his life. He smiled weakly and said, "Dying ain't so bad. You get to hold the hands of all the people who love you." Frankly, I would rather be shooting birds, but you gotta give him credit for keeping life going to the very end.'" Steve Walburn, general manager of the Morris Sporting Group of magazines, noted that Foster "fought his disease with incredible determination and courage. David was a friend and mentor to our entire group, and the Morris national magazine division is in large measure part of his legacy."

With U.S. political energies reaching a frenzy, is it any wonder that pundits are scrutinizing the reflection in Dick Cheney's fishing glasses? "In a Google search for the words 'Dick Cheney' and 'sunglasses,' 79,300 hits came back at midafternoon on Thursday. On DemocraticUnderground.com, the discussion starts with this question: 'Notice anything ... interesting ... reflected in his sunglasses? Something that has little to do with conventional 'fly-fishing'?'" Kevin G. Hall and George Bridges in the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

Meanwhile Moldy Chum seems to have found an even more astounding photograph -- of a reflected Dick Cheney.

"If you are a rock and roll fan, the name Cory Wells no doubt is familiar. He’s a co-founder, guitarist and a lead singer in Three Dog Night. Brought together in 1968, no other group achieved more top 10 hits, sold more records and concert tickets than Three Dog Night from 1969-74." As Wayne Shaw reports on SanLuisObispo.com, Wells's record for white bass on 8-pound tippet may have been broken, but his passion persists.

Oceanographer and Harvard professor James McCarthy co-chaired the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change from 1997-2001. Last year the Panel shared the Nobel Prize for Peace with Al Gore. His hobbies? Fly fishing, telemark skiing, woodworking, and polar history. "And I do all my own auto repairs, and my cars are over 15 years old." Billy Baker in the Boston Globe.

The only thing we can be sure of is that he won't be getting lessons from Dick Cheney.

Meanwhile sports bar cook Dan Taylor is now proudly displaying Obama's signature on the rainbow trout sign he brought to Saturday's Missoula, Montana rally. "'I'm going to frame this sucker. You will never see this on eBay,' he said."

Writing for the news Web site of Penn State, where Harvey began preaching the merits of fly fishing in 1934, Margaret Miceli and Danielle Vickery pay tribute to a well-loved teacher. "His successor, Joe Humphreys, also a retired Penn State faculty member, characterized Harvey as 'a good man.' 'He really enjoyed helping people,' Humphreys said. 'He taught approximately 35,000 people how to fly fish. In Pennsylvania alone, he taught 72 classes in 68 cities.'"

Yesterday's letter from the friends of Marlene, Duane, and McKenzie Hada says it all:

"Duane Hada and his family have been consistent in supporting the great watersheds and fisheries of Arkansas, Oklahoma and Missouri. Duane is well-known to a great number of fly fishermen, as a guide, fly fishing instructor and artist. The Hadas’ have contributed much to conservation via donated artwork and personal time to numerous worthy causes. Now they need your help."

Duane's wife Marlene is fighting a serious battle with breast cancer, and the medical expenses are mounting daily. Their friends are organizing a raffle to benefit the Hada family. The drawing is on May 17, and ticket prices are only $20, or 6 for $100. The prizes are pretty amazing, and show how important the Hadas are to their friends. They include a day with Dave and Emily Whitlock on the White or Norfolk Rivers (with accomodations and gear), a $6000 L42 River Boat, Simms waders and jackets, several guided trips and, of course, original art by Duane.

To purchase a chance at these prizes and do something good for the Hadas, just visit the Marlene Hada Raffle Web page. You can buy tickets with a credit card or by check. Read more about the benefit here.

"The split-cane rods run between 6 feet and 7 feet long and feature special detailing like a rattan grip and Ramanauskas's hand drawn India-ink fly art logo. As expected, a rare rod of fine craftsmanship will cost big bucks: $2,650 in this case. Ramanauskas also makes an elite Eden Cane line of node-less bamboo rods." Tracy Harmon profiles bamboo rod craftsman Bernard Ramanauskas in the Pueblo (Colorado) Chieftain.

You can listen to an audio podcast of an interview with Ramanauskas on MidCurrent.

Joe Doggett reappears in the Houston Chronicle (thankfully) writing about two people who were instrumental in bringing fly fishing to waters around Rockport, Texas. I've fished with Dave Hayward, who is now Orvis's southwest regional manager, in both Texas and the Keys, and he is easily qualified to be a professional guide in his own right. Chuck Scates was a name in the business at a time when fly fishers were just discovering the fabulous sight fishing in Aransas Bay. "Hayward redeemed the choke with an excellent cast on a 27-inch redfish weaving through water so shallow the gleaming back was exposed. The fish snatched the fly and turned against the positive strip strike. Five minutes later, Hayward held the red against the hull, then opened his hands for a clean release. Scates grinned from the poling platform. 'It's a lot easier when you wait until they get the fly in their mouth, eh?'"

We got word yesterday that George Harvey, a fly fishing icon and central figure in Pennsylvania trout fishing, passed away on Monday. Besides authoring a handful of books -- including Techniques of Trout Fishing and Fly Tying and George Harvey: Memories, Patterns and Tactics -- and many, many magazine articles, Harvey is credited with starting the first college course in fly fishing, at Penn State, with which he is said to have introduced tens of thousands of younger anglers to the sport. Of course Harvey was also the originator of the George Harvey Dry Fly Knot, which you can see demonstrated here.

Jarkko Suominen of Finland took first place in the national competition, which was also open to the teams competing in the World Fly Fishing Championships that start today. Second place went to Sando Soldarini of Italy while Suominen's teammate Janne Pirkkalainen was third. Judges also gave special commendation to ten-year old Jacob Bond from Lake Rotoma, who has been tying flies for just a year.

Read the extended entry for the full press release.

"'When I started out I had one rod and two lines. Now I have six to eight rods and 20 different lines.' Most anglers put a fly on and fish it all day. The competition anglers are changing flies every five minutes." In New Zealand's Manawatu Standard, Ewan Sargent interviews Paul Dewar, who describes his 3D approach to visualizing trout water.

This week Thomas McGuane joins the editorial board of MidCurrent. He brings literary acumen, of course, as well as a unique sensitivity to fly fishing literature and art as a whole. Nick Lyons recently said: "Among all the great fly fishing writers writing today, I would include Tom McGuane at the very top." In an age of increasing political correctness in both art and sport, McGuane chose to loosen the reins. His suggestion, "If the trout are lost, smash the state," gave trout bums a mantra of their own and sent a wake up call to anglers who had ignored the connection between bad government and the loss of fish habitat.

McGuane is perhaps best known among fly fishers for his novel Ninety Two in the Shade, which was nominated for a National Book Award for Fiction in 1974, and for The Longest Silence, a collection of angling essays. His novel The Bushwhacked Piano received the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award for a Work of Fiction in 1971. Some of his other books include The Sporting Club and The Cadence of Grass, and, most recently, Gallatin Canyon.

Tom joins Bruce Richards, Chico Fernandez and John Merwin in helping to guide MidCurrent forward, and we are very happy to have him.

"'You can miss where you're casting. You just pick it up and cast it again,' he said. 'You never know if a kid is going to do what you've told him to do and, actually, I've had flies that have reacted a lot better to my instructions over the years than a lot of the players I've had, so maybe I'm better at fly-fishing than coaching.'" Perhaps because screaming at flies doesn't guarantee a good drift.

Bobby Knight will be a featured studio analyst during college basketball's March Madness broadcasts, as noted by Nancy Marrapese-Burrell on Boston.com.

Fly fishing artist and guide Duane Hada's wife was stricken with advanced breast cancer this year, and it has devastated their family. John Berry gives the details on a recently announced fundraiser to aid the family.

Good cause, good people. Do what you can.

"There's something particularly feminine about fishing. It has something to do with water -- that elemental association of the female with water. I think of Venus rising from the foam in Botticelli's famous painting. Women own the water, and make us out of it. There is, in Radcliffe's great history of ancient angling, a lovely Classical and sumptuously naked Venus sitting next to a stream, her rod nicely bent to a fish." Gordon Wickstrom draws parallels between water nymphs and life cycles in Boulder, Colorado Daily Camera.

"You know me as a journalist but in another life I'd have been ...

I've always wanted a daily television show so anything else would have been my second choice. Maybe I'd be a wilderness fly fisherman."

In the U.K. Independent.

Whether it be Bill Clinton, John McCain, or Kenneth Lay, Washington politicians in trouble have long counted on attorney Robert Bennett to throw them a lifeline. While the not-quite-innocent may idolize Bennett, his own role models share a personal passion: fly fishing. "Mr. Bennett admires former Michigan Supreme Court Justice John Voelker, who famously penned a 1950s blockbuster mystery titled 'Anatomy of a Murder.' I have always considered Voelker the patron saint of fly-fishing lawyers, and Mr. Bennett seems to agree. Voelker, who wrote as Robert Traver, took the book's proceeds, quit the bench, bought a cabin on a pond in the Michigan woods, and spent the rest of his days catching fish and writing books such as 'Trout Madness' and 'Trout Magic.'" David Keen in The Wall Street Journal.

Apparently when ultimate fighting star and former NCAA wrestling champion Josh Koscheck wants to chill out, he heads to the nearest stream. "A Pennsylvania native, Koscheck grew up in steelhead fishing country. He kept it up while wrestling at Edinboro University, adding fly-fishing to his repertoire. 'One year I was hurt in wrestling and I probably fished 40 some days in a row while I was in college. I just fell in love with it,' he said. 'It's something I've always loved to do and always get time after my fights to go out and get away for three, four days and do some fly-fishing. Not only do I fish, I tie my own flies too. I'm really, really into fly-fishing.'" In the Canadian Press.

When most of us hear the name Roderick Haig-Brown, we think of his A River Never Sleeps (1944), or perhaps The Seasons of a Fisherman (1939). We don't automatically connect him with keeping British Columbian salmon safe from dams and being broadly active in environmental education. But in fact he rivals any conservationist for the impact he had on preserving B.C.'s natural resources. To mark the accomplishments of Haig-Brown and his wife Ann Elmore, the Museum at Campbell River launched a year's worth of celebration with a speech by the couple's daughter. Paul Rudan covered the event and offers a short biography. "After moving from England, the Haig-Browns settled in a home located on the south bank of the Campbell River. Roderick Haig-Brown became an active fly fisherman who traipsed along rivers throughout Vancouver Island. He wrote 25 books on fishing and the natural surroundings, and is recognized today as a pioneering conservationist who helped shape the values for community leaders in Campbell River and abroad. He also served as a local magistrate and, later in life, as Chancellor of the University of Victoria." In the Campbell River Mirror.

There is also an attractive (albeit rather empty) new Web site for Haig-Brown enthusiasts at www.haigbrowninstitute.org. Hopefully the creators will begin to seed the site with some samples of the author/conservationist's fine writing.

"Mr. Daniels, the son of a German university professor and a Chinese mother, entered banking in 1975, joining Citibank after a taking a degree in history at Cornell University and a masters in management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology." Well, he grew up in western Montana; of course he is a fly fisherman. Dominic Walsh in London's Times.

There is a class of fly fisher who spends the better part of a lifetime working to perfect their knowledge of an aspect of the sport. These people rarely pursue notoriety, but they share their knowledge willingly and improve the fishing of anyone lucky enough to come in contact with them. Bill Nash, who passed away on Wednesday, was one of those special class of anglers. His self-published "Flycasting Systems" became a bible for many folks who appreciated the intricacies of knots, and in my opinion his testing and constant search for ways to improve fly fishing knots was in a class by itself. Bill spent most of later years fishing California waters and was a regular contributor to Dan Blanton's bulletin board. If you care to read samples of Bill's fine advice you can find it there, along with what is surely to be an outpouring of sentiment about what Bill did for his fishing friends.

Gresham hosted and produced The American Sportsman on ABC and Shooting Sports America on ESPN, was shooting editor of Sports Afield magazine for 26 years. "Gresham's affable personality and love for the outdoors combined with his trademarks, a driftwood hat and white muttonchops, made him a recognizable figure around the world."

Bob Edwards interviewed author, fly fisher and cutting horse devotee Thomas McGuane on XMRadio on his January 31 show. Even if you don't have XMRadio, you can listen to a portion (and purchase the rest) of the podcast on ITunes (just go to "Podcasts" and search for McGuane), or you can buy it from Audible.com for $2.95. In the interview McGuane talks about the eastern literary establishment, writers who live in "flyover country," and how getting bitten by a rattlesnake feels like getting whacked with a stick.

You can also read samples of McGuane's writing on MidCurrent: "The Longest Silence" and "Foundationless Opinions" are examples of what Nick Lyons has said is some of the best fishing literature ever written.

Commercial tier and fly fishing hackle supplier Henry Hoffman began raising chickens in 1974, just in time to enjoy the boom in interest in the 1980s. But it wasn't all a bed of rose petals, as some former wives might attest. "The grueling effort, which required extensive research into the world of poultry and large expenditures on feed, drove off his first two wives and left him unable to pay child support by 1973." Nice profile by Cassandra Profita in the Astoria, Oregon Daily Astorian.

"Though his friend Carrie Stevens won wide acclaim for her streamer flies, it was Welch who virtually invented the streamer for catching trout and salmon in the Rangeley watershed. Herbie Welch came to the Rangeley area in 1903, according to Graydon and Leslie Hilyard's wonderful book Carrie Stevens, and established himself as the region's premier guide, fly-tyer and taxidermist, the latter skill enhanced by his training as an artist in Paris (France)." Blogger Nick Mills gives a short history lesson inspired by a visit to the Fly Caster's Club of Boston.

"Laura Prepon enjoys the casual, laid-back appeal of small-town living. She finds pleasure in horseback riding or fly-fishing. Prepon, 27, was born in the small city of Watchung, N.J., home to a little more than 6,000 people." Jeffrey Dransfeldt in the Ventura County Star.

"Jack Handey, a former Saturday Night Live staff writer, moved to Santa Fe full-time with his wife Marta in 2003. In addition to the character of Jack Handey—famous for his “Deep Thoughts” bits—Handey is also the mastermind behind the characters of Toonces, the cat who could drive a car—but not very well, and Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer." Handy's second passion after writing? Fly fishing. Cullen Curtis in the Sante Fe Reporter.

As tier and fly shop owner Pat Ehlers reminds us, it takes only one fish -- and not a very big one -- to spark a lifetime obsession. "Pat Ehlers of Franklin, Wis., has seen 40 birthdays pass and he has tied more than 10,000 flies since that fateful day. But he can still dial up the scene like it's on DVD. 'Wading in Anderson Spur Creek in Marinette County, had on cut-offs and a T-shirt, getting mauled by mosquitoes,' said Ehlers. 'Tied on a green caddis fly I had tied and caught a 6-inch brook trout. Nice.'" Paul Smith in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Seven years before ESPN's somewhat stilted production of Guide House (featuring Paul Dixon, Brendan McCarthy, Amanda Switzer, Matthew Miller, and Bryan Goulart), Dixon was profiled in New York magazine by writer Guy Martin. Besides noting Dixon's annoyance at Peter Kaminsky for wanting to eat his fish, Martin captured some nice subtleties about the sport and the person. "Martha Stewart's $400,000 Hinckley 'picnic boat,' the Skylands II, lolls -- as its owner would loll if its owner were a half-million-dollar pleasure boat -- primly buttoned under a white canvas skirt. Not fifteen feet away, a sun-blasted captain named Paul Dixon engages in the martial preflight check of his craft, a twenty-foot Hewes skiff so shorn of detail that it looks like it's been stripped for refitting: no cabin, no above-deck cleats, no seats with backs, no rail."

Never heard of Jarden? Well, besides owning the First Alert, Oster and Sunbeam brands, they own a huge share of the outdoors products business. Think Berkley, Fenwick, Penn, Pflueger, SpiderWire, Trilene, and ExOfficio, to name just a few of their fishing brands. This week Jarden named Terry Carlson president and CEO of their fishing businesses. Carlson had been CEO of the Americas division of Raymarine.

Read the extended entry for the full press release.

Robert Ramsey will step down from the leadership role at the American Fly Fishing Trade Association on March 30, 2008, according to a press release we received this morning.

Read the extended entry for the full press release.

A couple of recent articles in the Atlanta Journal Constitution note that the new head coach of the Falcons is given to contemplative pursuits when he is not dreaming up new ways to motivate players. "The man hasn't surfed in close to 15 years, he figures. His hobbies now — fly fishing and kayaking — speak to a contemplative approach. His candidacy came out of nowhere, because he is not one of those coaches who shoot off flares in the media. 'He's always been: 'I work hard, and someone will be out, is watching, and they'll notice.'" From an article by Steve Hummer.

Vancouver Whitecaps goalie Jay Nolly was lured to join to play in Vancouver by what? Fly fishing.

"Q: 'I read a bio, too, somewhere that you said if you weren't a pro soccer player you wanted to be a coach, a teacher or a pro bass fisher?'

A: 'Yeah, now, if I wasn't a soccer player I'd probably want to be a fly-fishing guide.'"

Steve Ewan in The Province.

While many professional photographers say the digital age has done nothing but diminish the value of their work, Barry and Cathy Beck say photographing fish is a growth business. Go figure. "Unlike most of their peers, the Pennsylvania-based partners made photography a key component of their 30-year old business from the beginning. Beck’s seminar: 'The Digital Road to Better Fly Fishing and Outdoor Photography' now draws large crowds at shows throughout the country." In the Worcester, Massachusetts Telegram & Gazette.

It took Colorado Governor Bill Ritter only seven paragraphs to introduce an analogy from fly fishing into his official hopes for the upcoming year. Ritter described his plans to work with the legislature as much like his attitude when working a fly fishing stream: "Every time you cast a line, drop a fly onto the water or move to a new spot, there's a new opportunity for a promising return. It is my hope that each of us approaches this session with a sense of hope, of promise, of the immense possibilities." Text in the Rocky Mountain News.

Some of our readers might know that U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson is a devoted fly fisher. But even I was surprised to hear him -- while engaged in a fish-photo contest with fellow "obsessed" fly fisher and CNBC commentator Steve Leisman Tuesday morning -- bring up the importance of releasing tarpon in the water. Let me tell you folks, when the Treasury Secretary says that he doesn't take photos of his fly-caught tarpon because he doesn't want them lifted out of the water, it is time to pay attention.

Paulson said "I've caught many, many tarpon over one hundred pounds on fly." "But you don't have any pictures," Leisman said. "But I don't take them into the boat; I don't want to hurt them," said Paulson. "I didn't want to hurt that tuna either, Mr. Secretary, I just wanted to eat it," Leisman responded. "Truth be known, I'm envious" Paulson replied. "I would love to catch a bluefin tuna on a fly rod. I've never done it, and I've tried."

According to our sources Secretary Paulson is spending even more time fly fishing for bonefish than he was when he was head of Goldman Sachs. We admit to being a little surprised by his comment that he had caught "a number of bonefish bigger than 15 pounds," but hey, he does deal with inflationary pressures all day long.

Oh, the stories I could tell. In the Miami Herald, Susan Cocking writes about long-time fly fishing guide Jan Isley, his role in the development of the first effective permit flies, and his return to Key West. "Today, after an almost 20-year absence, Isley, who is 59, is back in Key West, guiding light-tackle and fly-fishing clients in his Dolphin Super Skiff out of Hurricane Hole Marina. 'If I were going to fish somewhere else, it would take me too long to learn the area,' Isley said. 'It's a little late when you're 59 to come up with a new career.'''

Do yourself a favor and book Jan for some fishing. You'll touch a little history and fish with one of the most interesting and talented guides to ever come out of the Florida Keys. (305) 295-3596 or (985) 264-8332.

It belongs in a Monty Python skit, perhaps, but the New York Inquisition has apparently named departing Field & Stream editor Sid Evans to their list of the "to-be-persecuted." At least that's how this piece in The New York Times presents it. "Since 2002, he had served as editor of Field & Stream, following a stint as the editor of Men’s Journal and senior positions at GQ and Sports Afield. He had worked with highly regarded and hard-living writers like George Plimpton, Thomas McGuane, Jim Harrison and Richard Ford." Article by Eric Konigsberg.

We'll see how Mr. Evans likes the switch from elk chops to roast oysters.

(Thanks to reader Chris Miller for this link.)

Gary Loomis for president? If those concerned about salmon recovery could have their way, the founder of G. Loomis would at least be on the ticket. As this fine profile in Oregon's Register-Guard points out, Loomis is one of the few private conservationist-sportsmen to fully dedicate himself to salmon protection on a large scale, whether that involves hand-carrying salmon carcasses to feed hungry smolt or pressing the flesh to invite involvement in fisheries protection groups.

George Daniel, who is by all accounts one of the top competitive fly fishers in the U.S., told graduates of Lock Haven University (Pennsylvania) that life isn't about succeeding at everything. "He also told a story about a former coach’s fly-fishing experience with baseball legend Ted Williams. During that adventure, Daniel said, Williams told the coach that even though the opposition got him out six out of every 10 times he came up to plate, he was still considered one of the best baseball players of all time." Lindsay Davis on Lockhaven.com.

"When I was 14, I was caught fishing illegally in a drinking-water reservoir by a game warden named Joe Haines. Instead of giving me a ticket, he took me under his wing." James Prosek describes the underpinnings of a life-long friendship with Joe Haines in The New York Times.

"There are three things I have learned never to discuss with people: religion, politics, and the Great Pumpkin."

-- Linus in "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown"

Of the many things I thank fishing for giving me, not the least is the time I have spent on the water with people, strangers and buddies alike. There is no better place than on the water to get to know someone or uncover something fresh and unpredicted about a friend, even if that means comparing notes after a day spent separated by half a mile of stream. Fishing is the ultimate equalizer. I feel more connected at the roots while fishing with my kids, and since I have spent time with movie stars and veterinarians and Secretaries of the Navy and trust-fund hippies and CEOs and trash truck drivers trying to catch difficult fish, I've gotten to witness how the good and the bad melts into a common and undeniable humanity. It is, as they say, all good.

So whether you are celebrating Thanksgiving or the harvest moon or just taking time to call family or entertain neighbors today, we hope you're reminded of what good company is: not always what we expect, but often what we need. Everyone brings something to the table, sometimes even bait fishermen.

The lessons of many years as a long distance runner fuel the fly tying passions of Leslie Wrixon, who was the official fly tyer of Team USA for the 2006 Fly Fishing World Championships in Portugal. "She had grown up watching her grandfather fly-fish in the Catskills. At age 35, she bought a fly tying kit at Cabela's. 'It totally came to me,' she said. 'It feels like I've been doing it my whole life.'" In the Hartford, Connecticut Courant.

Chicago Tribune writer Trevor Jensen delivers a long and laudatory review of the life of angling pioneer Jim Chapralis, who died last Saturday. "'He'd say, "When I am on a stream at midnight, guided by the light of the moon, that to me is my religion, my spirituality," his wife said.'"

Australia's Peter Morse talks about the four species of bonefish found around his native land, the jaw-dropping power of New Guinea Bass, the amazing species of fish found on the Australian mainland, and wade fishing in the land of crocodiles. On New Guinea bass: "There are two species: one is the black bass and the other is the spot-tail bass, and I recall when I was guiding up there a fellow landed a spot-tail bass about 35 pounds. And we used to lip-gaff these things and lift them into the boat for photographs, and as it came in this 35-pound bass spewed up a whole possum." New on MidCurrent.

Jim Chapralis, who helped pioneer destination angling and was a key figure in tournament casting as well as the author of several books, died Saturday night after a long battle with cancer.

Chapralis's passion for distance casting came early in life, as evidenced by his knowledge of the sport and his involvement at a very early age: "Marvin Hedge first demonstrated the double-haul in 1934 at a tournament. The shooting heads evolved from tournament casters. Jimmy Green and Phil Miravalle introduced the monofilament running line. Green also invented the tip-over-butt ferrule system used on almost all fly rods today. Tournament caster Myron Gregory introduced the current fly-line calibration system. Other casters helped to develop rod and fly line tapers, introduced different rod blank materials, and in general contributed heavily to today’s fly-casting tackle and technique. Tournament casting flourished decade by decade, so that by 1950 many cities had elaborate casting clubs. In Chicago, for example, there were eight casting clubs. I know this is true because as a youngster, I would take a streetcar to the different park casting clubs every Sunday to compete." (In an article on FlyAnglersOnline.) And Chapralis competed throughout his life, winning five Gold Medals at national casting tournaments and even winning first place in the one-hand distance fly casting senior division with a cast of 172 feet at the 2006 Nationals.

As the founder of PanAngling, the first travel agency devoted to finding fishing destinations for world-traveling anglers, Chapralis took the experience of fishing in exotic locations and turned it into a real business. In the process he rubbed elbows with many of fishing's icons, including Charles Ritz, Lee Wulff, and A. J. McClane, and by all accounts he made friends wherever he traveled.

You can read a sample of Chapralis's no-holds-barred account of Stu Apte on MidCurrent.

A memorial service for Mr. Chapralis will be held this Friday (11/16) at the Smith-Corcoran Funeral Home, 6150 N. Cicero Avenue, Chicago, Illinois.

Sometimes "doing the right thing" means giving up a lucrative career path for the things that make you happy, then sharing the bonuses with others. Teacher and Bozeman fly fishing guide Brian McGeehan does just that. He recently turned a $1000 prize into an opportunity for kids to watch wildlife through a high-powered spotting scope. And, for fun, he teaches fly tying to curious youngsters.

Long-time Keys angler Mo Smith was the first person in history to win four different Redbone titles in one year when he took home the grand champion and superfly titles from the Mercury Cheeca Redbone Tournament held Nov. 2-4 in Islamorada. The Redbone was started by Gary and Susan Ellis 20 years ago to raise money and awareness for the battle against cystic fibrosis, after the disease was discovered in their young daughter.