Some of my friends exhibit excellent taste (despite the fact they’re my friends), and when they suggest a book, fly, fly rod or leader design, by god you try it.
Sully - the Underground’s Montana Correspondent and Director of Curmudgeon-Related Activities - mentioned that Many Rivers to Cross was a book worth reading.
So by god, I […]

I largely avoid fly fishing coffee table books. The problem? Fly fishing picture books typically attain a kind of artificial beauty, and do so at the expense of spontaneity, realism or soul.
Images are carefully arranged, styled and colored - to the point I’m witnessing the product of an advertising shoot instead of a real moment […]

I’ve long used studded felts on the Upper Sac; they provided good grip on most surfaces, but my constant hiking along the sharp-rocked beds of the railroad tracks quickly wore away the felt around the studs.
After a few months, I was left with spiked wading boots that skated on smooth surfaces, grated noisily on rounded […]

An entertaining book about fly fishing in urban environments and unusual places, The Offbeat Angler is worth a look. Read my review of the Offbeat Angler here.
With fat, rubbery carp lips all the rage in magazines and on the Internet, it seems “The Offbeat Angler” is less an iconoclastic book than an essay title that’s […]

I’m writing this from the dreaded Internet, which - according to a writer on the muddied waters of the Fly Fisherman message board - is responsible for a decline in article payments to fly fishing writers everywhere.
Instead of stating the obvious - that popular FF magazines are endlessly recycling the same old stories and using […]

Your penniless, wandering correspondent visited the Upper Sac yesterday, and though I managed to hook six fish, I only landed two. With the river headed back up to 3,000 cfs, I probably should have run to the middle or lower river, but chose to try the upper canyon. The water is high (and getting higher), […]