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"Autumn’s come early to the northeast this year or at least to Pennsylvania. As a lover of cold weather, I’m thrilled to see it. How do I know fall’s come early? Well, obviously, the daily highs have been significantly below what I can remember from recent years around the beginning of September. That’s […]
Read more "welcoming fall"Drew’s not really a kid these days but 20 years ago he was, and so was I. We met at a small Christian school where Drew, as I remember, was mostly into computers – the high speed Commodores of the day and their incomparable role-playing and first-person shooter type games like Wolfenstein and the timeless […]
Read more "Take a Kid Fishing"The hiking stove featured here is the Emberlit. In my book, The Dying Fish, I recount the story of catching my first brook trout late one summer evening in Newfoundland, long ago. The moment was magical because I was seeing this fish for the first time, a fish that would shape my life in […]
Read more "Summer Nights Well Spent"Catfish have always been a fascination of mine. Maybe it’s because I grew up in the north where there were almost none of them and I went through childhood hoping to some day catch a catfish. Actually, I’m told that I caught my first one in Indiana at the age of 3 on a cane […]
Read more "Pole Cats"
the dying fish 