Connected and Committed

The angler's connection to water goes bone-deep. There's something transcendent about reading a river's seams and riffles, about feeling the wild pulsing through graphite, fiberglass, or bamboo. Through countless hours of observation and practice, fly fishers develop an almost primal understanding of their home waters—the way temperature shifts trigger hatches, how high banks crumble and reshape pools, how the whole system breathes together. This physical intimacy with water and the creatures who call it home creates fierce advocates. Those who know in their innards how a healthy stream feels and moves tend to fight hardest to protect it. When a wild fish slides away in the currents, it carries a piece of the angler and leaves behind a deepened commitment to keeping the waters alive.

In this week’s edition:

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Image by Winged Reel

IN THE RIFFLES

Image by Josh England

Sadly, we are in an era when many fisheries throughout the country are facing difficulties, and it should be those of us close to troubled waters tolling the bell of concern. There are causes for alarm on so many fronts. From steelhead on the West Coast to Chinook salmon in Alaska to redfish on the Gulf Coast to brown trout in the Big Hole River, there should be a gnawing in all our souls while we cast to ghosts of the past with hopes that things will miraculously go back to the way they once were.


The hollowness I feel while fishing for a diminished striper population is not unlike what I remember when looking for the disappearing bull trout out West in the late 1970s or when Montana’s Jefferson River dried up in 1988 or when whirling disease severely impacted the Big Sky’s Madison River in the 1990s. And in retrospect, when the Niagara River was dying during my youth in the 1950s. In a macro sense, it would seem we are fighting a losing battle from the impacts of climate change to the never-ending attempt to lessen regulations enacted to protect our water resources. Despite these realities though, we can’t get overwhelmed with discouragement…


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