North Carolina is a romantic coast. Pale windswept dunes covered with waving sea oats and diagonally reaching juniper trees stir a solemn melancholy in the spirit. This is truly art in nature, which the human hand attempts but rarely perfects to such measure. The encroachment of civilization feels luckless. The white sands and clear water…
“Fuego!” And thus Vicente Guerreo’s life–though not his legacy–ended by firing squad in 1831. Guerrero, hero of Mexico’s war for independence with Spain, abolished slavery in 1829 as the country’s second president. But known for his hot-blooded personality, he was deposed by coupe after only nine months in office. In 1971, the General Vincente Guerrero…
For every great fishery in the Americas, there has been a golden era. Whether you are fishing off the Florida Keys or Central America, life has changed in the last generation. Encroachment from resort living onto what was wild habitat, increased commercial and recreational fishing, and a general increase in the population of fishermen who…
Tarpon Fishing in Costa Rica I still think of the old painting from time to time. In a quiet, intuitive moment it will spread across the whole frontal view from the Captain Kirk’s chair of my mind. Renown historically as the first record of the fishing reel, I described it in an article on the…
Outside some white patches of the unreasonable, unseasonable snow persisted. Wet and cold, leaves plummeted down like lumps of plutonium. Not Robert Frost swirling, but more like Charles Bukowski depression poetry. Raking them would be like pulling up iron ore. And what about my regular fishing trips to Central and South America? Business was too…
Business had been good since moving into these new offices. So good, in fact, it was…dictatorial. I sat there alone. It was getting late with work still piled on the desktop. My usual long-range fishing trips to Central and South America had been pushed back and back. Where had they gone? Modern clocks don’t tick…
We grow up with songs and poetry of plains, grasslands and mountains. But life teaches us that all rivers are storytellers. Guyana means “The Land of Many Rivers,” but the 630-mile-long Esseuino dominates one of Earth’s greatest regions of biodiversity. Portuguese, Spanish, French, British, Dutch The Essequino witnessed billowing sails upon Christopher Columbus’s third expedition…
What to do when Jaws shows up in the chum slick. Story and photos by Michael Love Jr. We were three old college roommates, now consumed with fly fishing, meeting in San Diego to get our fix. On the first afternoon with On the Fly Charters, we whipped Clousers into Mission Bay and hooked up…
If you wanted to feel the soul of our country, you might dip your hands into this water. From the headwaters in the far north land of the Great Lakes, from the Ohio River in eastern steel mill country of the Three Rivers, and across the Great Plains from the great American West where the…
The nose of the inflated raft crashed steeply down into the white water, soundless in the river’s throaty roar. Its Kevlar surfaces would face a mortal test- fail for once, fail forever. So very cold that brisk spray from across the confirming across our faces how early was the season in these mountains. At least…
New Horizons on the Isthmus…Where the Road Ends It is difficult to remember the real meaning of the term “breathtaking” until something actually takes your breath away. In the interval of quiet between exhalation and inhalation you realize…there is nowhere in the world that you would rather be. The ancient god that created the Pacific…
He was tiring of the cold and wet Paris apartment life that winter. Celebrated fellow author and friend John Dos Passos recommended the island of Key West to Ernest Hemmingway. “A good place for old Hem to dry out his bones.” Hemingway arrived from Paris via Havana on the docks in April 1928 with his…
All the rivers of the world have a commonality. Upon their banks, whether in the Yukon, the Himalayas or Amazonia, mankind has paused and fallen into meditative trance. Compelled by their flow; the irrefutable metaphor for pas-sage of one’s own life and the unspooling of history, they’ve reflected that as their dust settled once again…
The winter of 2015 was a bitter season. Fishermen railed against it, but gales and hoarfrost blustered from the north. Sons and fathers gazed out the windows at the ruthless milieus and longed to be on the water, forced to live on the stuff of their dreams even as their patience withered to suffering. While…
OCEANOGRAPHY AND GENETICS The dawn of the nineteenth century was an exciting era. Science and geographic exploration were hand in hand discovering the nature of our world and for the first time organizing those discoveries of flora and fauna with the binomial nomenclature system of Linnaeus (the Latin derivation of Carl von Linne). Although familiar…
Cast your eyes to the northern sky and you will find it. It is cold, white and brilliant, the distilled essence of the north itself. Gleaming at the tail of Ursa Minor, “the little bear,” its radiance cannot be mistaken. Polaris, the North Star, has guided ships’ captains through dark nights since ancient men first…
It was a Key West kind of joint; you know the style. Canvas for a roof and slowly turning fans above. The lights in the swimming pool behind us were more than what the barroom had, so the potted palm trees swaying at the edge of darkness were enough to keep you suspicious. There were…
Shuffling the feet to scratch up the gravel hasn’t changed since l was young. The little road atop the levee, like so many others from childhood past was beleaguered by the grass on each side wanton to reclaim the last of the hill. I send out a shower of chat with the toe of my…
Nolo contendere and on to the next good story, you say? But it happened here before. Just a stone’s throw from where you’d knock back a cold one on the beach is the Chixulub crater. This is where the world ended, some 65 million years ago with a meteor blast of such magnitude that it…
There have been many nights spent far up unnamed river tributaries, the only sounds those of tiny frogs, the rustle of wind in the thatch roof and a distant deep voice of mystery from the jungle. But not this time. Not in this place. San Juan, Puerto Rico, waits until well past the witching hour…
These islands are known as the “The Pearls”, Las Islas Perlas. There is much to contemplate about this from my vantage point, soaking in the Jacuzzi on the upper deck of the big steel ship. Around me, jagged edges of earth’s crust erupt through the surface to create this archipelago of islands, some covered with…
The light perspiration and feeling like the carbon atoms in my cells had transmuted into lead crept up on my awareness. Yeah, my fever was rising again. Time for another palm full of ibuprofen. This would make the third round of flu this year. T’was my usually quip, “The viruses have to eat, too,” but…
From the grassy hillocks, even the most ancient of the Galapagos tortoises would not remember the first time billowing white sails had appeared over the horizon when HMS Beagle brought the young naturalist, Charles Darwin to these shores in 1835. It had been 300 years since the Bishop of Panama had been blown off course…
Who you are lives behind your eyes, depending upon vision far above your other senses, a creature of the light. The biochemical wheels and cogs of our brains want images to process prior to making decisions. This is what we want-it’s what makes us what we are. It is no wonder then that such vivid…
I know what you’re thinking, but it’s not true. With such great numbers of bass in the lake, you might suppose it would be easy to hook them up with virtually any technique. Actually the El Salto fish seem quite sensitive to multiple factors. Clearly they seem to prefer a slow speed to the action…
It was 1963. Bob Dylan recorded his anthem of social change and a 10-year-old boy discovered fishing in the Florida Keys. Truly, the world changed, and a lifelong love affair with the Keys began. What boy’s heart could be left untouched by emerald patches of flats, secreted bays hidden between mangrove islands and blue water falling deep from the edge of the reef?
Wading out on a bottom of fine white sand, it’s important to shuffle the feet and boost out any freshwater stingrays without prompting retaliation. There’s time for a few last casts into the sunset. I can just make out the crackling of ice in my drink above the gentle murmur of water flowing around my…
“Time is but the stream I go a-fish-ing in.” This thought from Henry David Thoreau’s musings on Walden Pond swirls in the cold morning air, over the Fraser River’s brown boiling water and up to Mount Chan, still purple in the early dawn’s light. The metaphor that connects the flow of the river to the…
‘Panama’ translates as ‘an abundance of fish’ in the Cueva Indian language. It certainly is an area of great interest to gamefisherman. These rich waters are home to plentiful marlin and an expotic mix of inshore treats. HISTORY Panama is the name of the first village founded by Spanish explorers in the early 1500s and…
Holidays Made Happy Wintertime brings many things to the residents of the hinterlands. These include winter weather and the holidays. In this season Jack Frost starts nipping at your nose, and Jack Daniels in the eggnog can tickle the ol’ liver. Both of these influences bring the mind to bear on heading down South FLorida…
There’s an old adage: “Can one understand what it means to be a leaf without knowing that it’s part of a tree?” In the early morning netherlight at Guatemala’s Puerto Quetzal Marina, a small tropical tree grows near where my son is combing the water’s edge. On its branch a leaf dances in the breeze,…
There’s only one cure for the Costa Rican blues Costa Rica, nestled in the thin strip between the bottom of Mexico and South America, is acknowledged as one of the best gamefishing destinations on the planet. Riley Love opens the door to this must-see adventure. It is a sound that resonates like no other. Sometimes…
“I’ve got a big one!” The thick pole was bent u-shaped in my small hands and was being pulled down toward the boat’s gunwale. “Try to keep your rod tip up, partner,” said my father looming large next to me. With his strong hands the rod seemed to come up easily. “That’s it; make him…
“Zzzrreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeh.” It will never cease to amaze, just how fast the line can scream off one of those big Penn Internationals when a heavy fish hits, and how high the sound’s pitch can reach. You don’t even need to look down at it to know what’s happening. Sublime, finger tips touch the spool just enough…
When our plans for peacock bass fishing in Venezuela in early 2003 were terminated by the political strife there, I was delighted to stumble across an Internet website for a new fishing camp on the Pacific coast of Panama. My brother, Mike, and I had fished this area several times before, going back 25 years…