Hatch Magazine - Fly Fishing, etc.

Somewhere between Shawano and Wittenburg in northeastern Wisconsin I began to get the nagging feeling I’d forgotten something. I was on my way to a stream in Langlade County, an under-the-radar spot I hadn’t fished before but one that was rumored to hold a healthy population of brookies. I’d scouted it earlier in the spring, stopping at multiple road crossings to “look at the...

Dr. Robert Behnke, the late and eminent fisheries biologist who literally wrote the book on trout taxonomy, was a matter-of-fact kind of guy. In my early years as a newspaper journalist, Behnke was on my speed dial as I navigated the fascinating and complex world of native trout classification, particularly the names and biological assets prescribed to the West’s cutthroat tr...

Quiet is the sound of a rainbow trout in a bankside lie slurping mayflies from the film; it’s the bay of a lone beagle on 6 million acres of wild America and the whoosh of a merganser’s rise from the fog; it’s the ache in your body, the falling in your gut, and the rise again; and on the last day, it’s the ease in your chest recalling the journey.

The 9-weight lays in ...

Just a year ago, the future of the largest American wilderness area east of the Mississippi River was in question, as biologists and conservationists feared that a dragline mining project on its southeastern fringes would tragically lower the water table and change the Okefenokee Swamp forever. After a land purchase last summer, and the formal transfer of the would-be mining ...

Some think of streamer anglers as the “nose tackles” of fly fishing. Short on finesse, these bestial trout hunters use heavy rods, sinking lines, and flies that cast about as well as a dirty diaper, all in the name of fooling big trout, immovable muskies, or massive king salmon in moving water.