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.

Listen to the Podcast (1:07:14 - 79MB)
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Interviewer: Zach Matthews | Itinerant Angler

Podcast Excerpt: "The New Guinea bass is the pit bull terrier of the fish world. It lives in dense river cover. It's a freshwater species. There's very little known about it actually, scientifically. It grows to 50, 60 perhaps 70 pounds. It's a member of what you would call the snapper family. A cubera snapper would be a close relative. So imagine a cubera snapper living in dense, fallen jungle trees that have tumbled into the river amongst rock bars in these big rivers, and basically it eats whatever it wants to. 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."

Posted by Marshall Cutchin at 7:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

James Babb is the long-time fishing columnist and now editor of Gray's Sporting Journal. He's also a successful author with a finely tuned sense of humor. In this podcast he offers insight on the trajectory of sporting and angling literature, as well as the effects of Ad Men on publishing.

Listen to the Podcast (31:38 - 31MB)
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Interviewer: Zach Matthews | Itinerant Angler

Podcast Excerpt: "For better or worse, most magazines today are advertisers' magazines. Gray's has a lot of advertising today, more than I would like to see, but, you know, we have to pay the bills. But it's a readers magazine -- it was started as a reader's magazine, as an allergic reaction, I think, to this kind of commercialization and dumbing down of the literature. I mean, advertisers aren't interested in an intelligent readership, they're interested in a docile readership, and Gray's has always, from its inception, gone for that intelligent readership."

Posted by Marshall Cutchin at 9:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Lefty Kreh's early days as an outdoors journalist to his many second-career accomplishments as a photographer, marksman, writer, and fly fisher, this well-traveled angler has been an inspiration to generations. Listen as he recounts his career in post-War biological weapon manufacture, demonstration marksmanship, and fly rod design.

Listen to the Podcast (38:15 - 37MB)
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Interviewer: Zach Matthews | Itinerant Angler

Podcast Excerpt: "When I first started in the forties, I went fishing with Joe Brooks, who was the most famous fly fisherman of that time. I was so impressed with how good he was that I asked him to give me a fly casting lesson. So I drove 50 miles to Baltimore in a Model A Ford where he lived, and he selected -- and I paid for -- an outfit. And then he left town -- I'm not sure whether he left town because of my lesson or not -- but anyway I bought a fiberglass rod and was told that it would break as soon as the weather got cold because it was made of glass. They were very new then and they were very bad. They were very floppy, the modulus of the glass was not good, they were full of glue, but you could still cast them."

Posted by Marshall Cutchin at 10:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Few anglers in the history of the sport have achieved mastery over their chosen specialty on the level of Simon Gawesworth. Listen in as he takes us from the origins of spey casting on the river Spey in Scotland to a common sense explanation of spey techniques, and then on to modern spey casting in the Pacific Northwest.

Listen to the Podcast (35:04 - 31MB)
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Interviewer: Zach Matthews | Itinerant Angler

Podcast Excerpt: "If you want to know exactly what a spey cast is, it's a form of flycasting that changes direction and is perfect for a limited backcasting space. It kind of stems from roll casting -- if people know what a roll cast is they are halfway on the road to knowing what spey casting is. That's regardless of whether it is a single-handed roll or a two-handed roll, or a ten-foot cast or a 175-foot cast."

Posted by Marshall Cutchin at 7:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's easy to think Brian O'Keefe has done it all. He's traveled the world as a fly fisherman and photographer and fished in many of the places most of us just dream about. While sharing plenty of good advice on photography, O'Keefe takes us through a few favorite stories, beginning in New Zealand and ending up on the India/Pakistan border, where an armed confrontation ends as they all should: with someone buying a beer.

Listen to the Podcast (41:44 - 40MB)
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Interviewer: Zach Matthews | Itinerant Angler

Podcast Excerpt: "In 1973, when I told a lot of my friends that I was going to New Zealand, they thought it was like New Guinea or New Caledonia or some real exotic place like that. Those in the know obviously knew all about it, but it was definitely beneath the radar for most. I walked with a backpack and a Fenwick fly rod from the tip of the North Island all the way down to the tip of the South Island and fished every river along the way. It took about eleven and a half months, and of course part of the time it was winter there so I fished as much as I could and then got a job washing dishes at a little hotel and skied every day at that nice little ski area in Queenstown. But that whole time on North and South Island I never saw another fly angler."

Posted by Marshall Cutchin at 8:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Ted Juracsik walked from Budapest to Austria before finding his way to New York City and a new life in the U.S. In his own distinctive voice, he traces the remarkable path from his beginnings in Hungary as a soccer player and tool and die machinist to his eventual emergence as one of the world's top fly reel designers.

Listen to the Podcast (35:33 - 54MB)
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Interviewer: Zach Matthews | Itinerant Angler

Podcast Excerpt: "It took me almost a week to walk to Austria and I had to go through a minefield -- that was kind of scary -- but you know I was eighteen and didn't really know what was going on. But thank God I made it to Austria and stayed in a refugee camp and the Austrian people were very good to me. I had a couple of fellows with me and we were hiding during the day and walking at night and we finally got to the border. We spent about a month there and then everyone was going to the United States and so we got on a four-engine plane heading to the U.S. but the motors quit over Iceland and we crash landed there. So I was thinking, my goodness, I made it this far and all of a sudden I wind up in Iceland in some godforsaken place ... oh my, it was cold."

Posted by Marshall Cutchin at 8:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Buzz Bryson has -- frequently -- been titled "the nicest man in fly fishing," and you'll know why after hearing this interview. As a current contributor and the author of Fly Rod and Reel magazine's former long-running "Ask Professor Buzz" column, Buzz has had the opportunity to fish with some of fly fishing's greats, and in some of fly fishing's great places. In this interview he takes us to the Outer Banks of North Carolina with stories of one of the sport's most notorious tackle-busters: the false albacore.

Listen to the Podcast (34:57 - 34MB)
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Interviewer: Zach Matthews | Itinerant Angler

Podcast Excerpt: "I switch to a 10-weight when they get bigger than 12 pounds. What they do when you hook them is, like all tuna, they will go down and away, but mostly down. They never jump. I mean in all the years I have been doing this I may have seen one jump. But the difference between them and tarpon is that you are fighting more vertically, and with a tarpon you are fighting more horizontally and can apply much better pressure. And when you get albacore in close to the boat they will typically circle right under the boat, and it's just a terrible situation for maintaining pressure on them. But they are so fast. If it is quiet, you can literally hear the sizzle of the line cutting through the water over the sound of the drag."

Posted by Marshall Cutchin at 6:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Whether they're pummeling rented Jeeps in Patagonia or trout bumming their way across Reykjavik, these young documentarians and explorers make desk-bound anglers everywhere jealous, though as you'll hear, it's not all tall blondes and warm campsites.

Listen to the Podcast (32:01 - 29MB)
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Interviewer: Zach Matthews | Itinerant Angler

Podcast Excerpt: "There was one time we were cruising up this mountain pass and, uh, we had no brakes. And on both sides we had 4,000-foot cliffs, and were putting along in the dark and the jeep just started peeling out and we slipped backwards and the trailer is overhanging and Ryan is on the gas pedal and I end up doing some sticky switch with him. I put my stuff in the passenger seat and put my foot on the brake pedal then went over him. The trailer that's hanging over the cliff weighs something like 4,000 pounds and if that thing had rolled two more inches it would have taken everything with it."

Posted by Marshall Cutchin at 9:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Fly Tier editor David Klausmeyer tells about the early days of the leading magazine of fly tying and gives advice on what it takes to have your fly patterns published. Along the way, he discusses the looming threat of bird flu, the rise of synthetic materials, and his own favorite flies.

Listen to the Podcast (30:54 - 30MB)
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Interviewer: Zach Matthews | Itinerant Angler

Podcast Excerpt: "Even in trout flies we're going to see more and more and more synthetic materials being used. Even in terms of saltwater [the suppliers] are telling me that most of the good saltwater saddles have always been imported, and Tom Schmuecker, who owns Wapsi, the largest fly tying materials distributor in the world, has been identifying some domestic sources, and he says prices are going to be going up a little bit. [Because of bird flu], there is just a very limited supply of product available. A number of years ago, synthetic materials came on the scene, and there were so many articles and a couple of books about them. Now, they're becoming the lifeblood of fly tying."

Posted by Marshall Cutchin at 10:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

3M/Scientific Anglers chief line designer and all-around fly fishing guru Bruce Richards discusses fly line manufacture, the Sage Casting Analyzer, and why all those new rods are so darn stiff.

Listen to the Podcast (28:43 - 27MB)
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Interviewer: Zach Matthews | Itinerant Angler

Podcast Excerpt: "The basic process is simple. Use a braided or some sort of nylon core -- almost all lines are made on nylon cores -- and that core is run through an adhesive primer, because PVC doesn't stick to nylon, so you have to put a binder between the two. So then you have prime core material. Then that runs through a bath of PVC, which is a very viscous liquid. Then that runs through a sizing die with a variable orifice that opens and closes to give you the diameter of the line, which correlates to weight. And then it goes into a curing oven that thermal-cures the PVC, and there you have a finished line."

Posted by Marshall Cutchin at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Author and researcher Dr. Robert Behnke is one of the world's foremost authorities on trout and salmon species. Listen to his down-to-earth explanations of the creation of cutthroat trout, the salvation of the Greenback and Lahontan cutthroat subspecies, and a fish called onchonychus clarki behnkeii.

Listen to the Podcast (43:29 - 41MB)
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Interviewer: Zach Matthews | Itinerant Angler

Podcast Excerpt: "When I first started working on trout in 1957, and I was a graduate student, that was my master's thesis, to set out to find the 'extinct' Bonneville Lahontan cutthroat. And I did that, and when I came to Colorado I began to look for the 'extinct' greenback cutthroat, and found that too. And the problem was, that if you found these fish, you wouldn't be able to recognize them because there was nothing in the literature, no descriptive or diagnostic information that you could use to get a positive identification."

Posted by Marshall Cutchin at 3:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dan Blanton is one of the world's top authorities on striped bass and saltwater fly fishing, particularly along the California coast. He shares an introduction into the intricacies of shooting head casting and fishing for world record-class striped bass, and he reminiscences on visiting Australia's Gulf of Carpentaria, as well as the good karma that comes with fundraising to protect fish in your own backyard.

Listen to the Podcast (37:50 - 36MB)
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Interviewer: Zach Matthews | Itinerant Angler

Podcast Excerpt:"Originally I designed the Whistler [fly] to compete with the bucktail jig. I didn't say I'm gong to design a shad pattern or a perch pattern. In 1964 the lead-head, bucktail jig was just kicking our butt in San Francisco Bay. Most of the fly patterns back then were pretty simplistic bucktails, like the Blonde series. Lefty's Deceiver was just coming around about then. So I wanted a fly that worked like a bucktail jig. Now if you ask what a bucktail jig represents, it represents a lot of things. It could represent any number of bait fishes. But basically the Whistler was designed to imitate any of the more deep-bodied bait fishes."

Posted by Marshall Cutchin at 3:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Renowned Arkansas guide and big-fish fisherman John Wilson discusses not only Arkansas's amazing White River system, but also distance casting and the tournament experience, both in the United States and abroad.

Listen to the Podcast (49:39 - 47MB)
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Interviewer: Zach Matthews | Itinerant Angler

Podcast Excerpt: "The difference between Arkansas and a place like Patagonia or Tierra del Fuego is that these fish are always here. Big brown trout are largely territorial. They all have the same feeding patterns. There are dominant holes in our river system, and you can go to any one of those, and any large fish that is in that river is going to be in that one spot. He might be twenty inches, and he might be forty inches. But that's where the big fish is going to be almost every single time."

Posted by Marshall Cutchin at 10:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

TFO President and founder Rick Pope talks about the foreign manufacturing of fly rods, his experiences with Lefty Kreh and other fly-fishing celebrity consultants, and the technology in the pipeline for future TFO products. He also sets the record straight on a few popular misconceptions about the fly fishing industry.

Listen to the Podcast (27:23 - 25MB)
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Interviewer: Zach Matthews | Itinerant Angler

Podcast Excerpt: "I'm not sure that many people have been displaced domestically because of fly rod outsourcing, because I don't think there are that many people employed in the industry to start with. Asia has made -- at least in my life time -- all of the affordable equipment, for the most part, whether it be general tackle or fly fishing. You know, we went to Asia not looking for the cheapest thing we could sell but looking for the best we could come up with."

Posted by Marshall Cutchin at 10:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

MidCurrent editor and ormer Key West guide Marshall Cutchin discusses the thrill of tarpon fishing and the impact of twenty-five years of angling on some of the sport's most hallowed waters.

Listen to the Podcast (35:02 - 32MB)
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Interviewer: Zach Matthews | Itinerant Angler

Podcast Excerpt: "That's the one thing that actually has changed, is how you go out and find tarpon and fish for them. As fishing pressure increased, it became less the classic practice of a guide going and staking out on a white sport or a known route that the tarpon swam along and waiting for the fish to show up to one where you're actually hunting the fish. So if I had to describe what I learned as I learned how to become a better tarpon guide, it was how to put tegether all the various factors that determine where tarpon are, where the fish that will eat are -- which is a whole different question, and how to present the fly to the fish. And of course the techniques developed pretty rapidly once you had a lot of really good anglers like George Anderson, Fitz Coker, Dan Blanton and others spending a lot of time tarpon fishing."

Posted by Marshall Cutchin at 9:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Phil Monahan, editor of American Angler magazine gives us an inside look at the publishing side of fly fishing while talking about what it was like to go from academia to guiding in Alaska and Montana, to editing for Outdoor Life in Manhattan, and finally to holding the reins of his own periodical.

Listen to the Podcast (52:15 - 72MB)
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Interviewer: Zach Matthews | Itinerant Angler

Podcast Excerpt: "[Differentiation] is certainly one of the most frustrating topics that any of us in [fly fishing] magazines deal with. And in fact at the Denver show, I had this very conversation with one of the editors of Fly Rod & Reel. To us, our magazines are completely different. They're both fly fishing magazines, sure, but once you get past that, their focus and focus of American Angler seem to us to be completely different. The most frustrating thing is that you might be at a consumer fly fishing show and a guy will come up to you and say 'God, I loved that article you did on so-and-so.' And, of course, they are describing an article printed in another magazine."

Posted by Marshall Cutchin at 8:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Conway Bowman, bluewater captain and flyfishing adventurer extraordinaire, brings us first-hand accounts of landing boat-jumping, hand-chomping, kayak-charging mako shark on the fly.

Listen to the Podcast (44:57 - 82MB)
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Interviewer: Zach Matthews | Itinerant Angler

Podcast Excerpt: "The deal is, you make that cast, the shark takes that fly, and the shark makes a run. So it's making a bunch of jumps, and you need that shark to get through all those jumps. Once it gets through the jumps, like this big one did, you got him. Now we chase him down in the boat. We kind of let the boat work against the shark and the shark against the boat. You could never really break a shark that big without the boat, even on the heaviest fly tackle. It would be like going hunting for elephants with a BB gun."

Posted by Marshall Cutchin at 8:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Larry Kenney describes 1960s San Francisco, when he had a bird's eye view of the founding of the Scott Fly Rod Company and the early development of graphite rods. Don't miss his unique perspective on the surprising San Francisco, California roots of fly fishing, and the many ways the company scene has changed over the last fifty years. His comments on fiberglass rods may have you wondering whether the revolution in rod design is really over.

Listen to the Podcast (55:49 - 52MB)
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Interviewer: Zach Matthews | Itinerant Angler

Podcast Excerpt: "I got hooked into fly fishing in the mid-60s in college at Berkeley when I was doing a lot of backpacking. And I thought I had good equipment, but one of my friends, who had more disposable income that the rest of us, showed up one time with a 4-piece Winston glass rod for a number 5 line and my eyes were opened to that fact that the equipment I had, while decent, was nowhere near as good as his, and since my father wasn't going to lend me his E. C. Powell rods I had to do something."

Posted by Marshall Cutchin at 7:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In 1960, no one clamored for rods made by Glenn Brackett, Tom Morgan, or Mike Clark, but today those makers command top dollar for their exquisite bamboo creations. For Bernard Ramanauskas, this is 1961. At 36, Ramanauskas has achieved what some well-regarded craftsmen never do -- his creation, Eden Cane, became so well respected that he was offered the chance to bring a major bamboo studio, Scott Cane. back to life. The new SC rods he developed draw heavily from techniques pioneered at Eden Cane, putting other makers on notice. Listen as Bernard gives us a masterclass in the finer points of bamboo fly rod design.

Listen to the Podcast (38:42 - 35MB)
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Interviewer: Zach Matthews | Itinerant Angler

Podcast Excerpt: "For me there are two extremes in [fly rod] building. There are very simple rods that have continuous-action tapers on one side. On the other side there are very dynamic rods that capitalize on thinks like swells and drops at ferrule stations which transmit energy toward the tip completely differently."

Posted by Marshall Cutchin at 7:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Let's face it: for mid-American anglers, all those saltwater magazines are nothing more than a big bait and switch. From reading articles about massive "silver torpedos," most anglers sadly turn to anemic and washed out stocker-sized rainbow trout. If you're an angler in flyover country, Bill Butts has the answer to your problems. Tune in and listen close, because Bill's going to give you what you always wanted: a real fish on the line.

Listen to the Podcast (36:15 - 34MB)
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Interviewer: Zach Matthews | Itinerant Angler

Podcast Excerpt: "From a tacke and fly standpoint, when you go after these fish, there's two basic categories, without getting too technical. That is when you've got fish, let's say they're white bass, small hybrids, small hybrids from one pound up to five or seven pounds, I think you're looking at a six- to seven-weight rod. A good seven is going to handle those fish and the flies you cast for them very, very well. You need to have a floating or intermediate line, something that is going to stay up close to the surface. I use a type III sink-tip, that's 12-15 feet of sinking tip. I can't tell you how important it is to have that line. I use it 80-90% of the time. With about four feet of leader. But then you also need -- for the deeper rivers, lakes, and holes -- something that is longer and heavier. That would be a 250-grain line, approximately, that's going to sink even quicker than that type III."

Posted by Marshall Cutchin at 7:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)