“Watch out for spiders!” Susan warned as I left to go ice fishing a few days ago. She knows the history of arachnids that sneak into camp and into sleeping bags when least expected. Yes, even in mid-winter. But it was particularly cold today, the high only reaching about 20. I wasn’t […]
Read more "The Spiders of January"When I was a little kid in Newfoundland, Canada, I followed dad on the adventures he thought we should go on – adventures to far off places and strange country that I now know were neither far off nor all that strange. We went up and down streams for mud trout, drove down to […]
Read more "Longing for Ice"Like me, young Felix Omondi grew up loving to fish and feeling it was natural to be outdoors. We both took to the fly rod at some point as we grew up, finding that sport could be as valuable as fish in the pan. We were much alike, the only significant thing separating us being […]
Read more "Felix Omondi"8:30 PM – It’s dark outside and darker here underground. This tunnel allows a tiny brook to flow under the freight yard down to the Allegheny River and allows me to reach the walleye, I can only hope. At least when your fishing begins with sloshing through a dark tunnel to a flooded river, […]
Read more "Walleye, the Steel City, and a Long, Cold Night"This article is an attempt to work through the residual pain of an unusually traumatic week’s fishing. Susan and I run off to the north country every fall, a foray that might take us to anywhere in New England. This year’s trip was a somewhat reduced jaunt up to the northern Adirondacks and St. Lawrence […]
Read more "I’m Not Fisherman Extraordinaire…I’m Mrs. Nesbitt"Finding big fish isn’t easy and catching them is even harder. I’ve fished a good deal over the last 34 years or so and I’ve very seldom caught a really big fish, and by “big fish” I mean a fish that is at least half as large as the species will potentially grow. I have […]
Read more "Big Fish (of Scale)"A couple of days ago I found myself in an outfitter’s canoe transport van, eavesdropping for just a moment on the bearded outdoorsmen in the seats behind me. Like myself, they were on the way upriver for a day of floating and fishing the Conemaugh River – a new place for me. At the moment […]
Read more "A Well-Rounded Outdoorsman"