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by Dave Hurteau

If this damnable recession has robbed you of your job or you're bored to tears at work or you just hate your boss like most people (but not me, definitely not me)--well, here's a little inspiration from jobs.aol.com and Jim Brown of Wildlife Encounters taxidermy.

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by Joe Cermele

A few weeks ago I was cleaning some old junk out of the basement at my mom's place, and amid the clutter was a pile of rods wedged in the corner. Most them were beaten to death, missing guides, and not worth saving. But in the cluster were four I just had to keep, because they all represent milestones in my fishing history. There was my first spinning rod (1), an Olympic 2000 that, if memory serves correctly, my dad cut down for 7-year-old me. It only has three guides. Then there's my first fly rod (2), an Eagle Claw Feather Light. I got the rod in 6th grade, and used it until my sophomore year of high school. That Christmas Santa brought me a G. Loomis 5-weight.

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by David Draper

Back in college, I spent one of my first federal student-aid checks on camping gear. I bet I could make a pretty convincing argument that spending the money on outdoor equipment was a better investment than paying my tuition. Or, at least, that’s how I rationalized it at the time. I will say, much of what I learned in college has been long forgotten, but I still use some of the gear today, including my trusty Coleman Dual Fuel 2-Burner Stove. [ Read Full Post ]

by Kirk Deeter

Most of you who follow FlyTalk might realize by now that Romano and I are both shameless streamer junkies. We'll pound the banks from a boat, trying to turn big fish with blind casts, but we also like to wade and sight-fish streamers in low, clear water. Big flies catch big fish, to be sure. Yet in clear water, you have to make the right presentation for streamers to work well. While I've learned many valuable tips from streamer gurus like Kelly Galloup, who said, "You have to dictate the action, and not wait for something to happen," the greatest streamer lesson I ever learned didn't happen on a trout river, and it didn't even involve a true streamer fly.  [ Read Full Post ]

by David E. Petzal

Melvin Forbes started Ultra Light Arms (now New Ultra Light Arms) in 1986, and is still very much in business, which is a towering tribute to the quality of his rifles. Small gunmakers riseth up and are mown down, but Melvin is still turning out the best truly light hunting rifles in the world.

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by Joe Cermele

Last week I spent some time chasing smallmouths up in Buffalo, New York. If you're a smallmouth freak like I am, at some point you have to fish Lake Erie. Even the small fish are footballs and the shear number of bass is insane. One day I shared a boat with Elite Bass Pro Bill Lowen, who proceeded to crush me in the numbers of bass category. It seems every time I fish with a bass pro, I'm like Baby Huey. Case in point, at the end of this video featuring some great jerkbait tips from Lowen, you get to watch Billy yank a treble hook that's buried to the bend out of my hand. It was bound to happen sooner or later while I was rolling a camera. Enjoy.

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--Martin Leung

Sage Manufacturing, the company behind some of world's finest fly rods, was recently dubbed Seattle Business magazine's Manufacturer of the Year, Small Company.

From this press release:
The May issue of Seattle Business features the awards for 2012 and is the culmination of the publication’s Washington Manufacturing Awards. Each year Seattle Business honors companies whose work results in growing or advancing the manufacturing sector in the state. During an awards ceremony on Thursday night, April 26th, six winners were chosen in different categories. Representatives of roughly 270 manufacturing companies located in the state attended the event.

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--Chad Love

Quick, without thinking, name the most interesting, entertaining man in college football today. If you didn’t say "Mike Leach" then you're just plain wrong. The eccentric, pirate-loving, sometimes-befuddled-acting, but always-entertaining new coach of the Washington State Cougars makes that "Dos Equis" dude look like an accountant.

He's the funniest, most bizarre, off-the-cuff and unpredictable sports personality out there. Just how entertaining is Mike Leach? While he was the coach at Texas Tech, he actually made Lubbock, Texas an interesting place. Hell, even Buddy Holly couldn’t do that.

Well, look out, hunting world it seems that Mike Leach is going bear hunting, at least according to his Twitter feed yesterday, which read "Watching the movie Grizzly Man. Going bear hunting in Canada on Tuesday with Mike Pawlawski."
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by John Merwin

Yesterday morning in about two hours, I caught more large brown trout than ever before in one day of fishing. It was just crazy. In addition to the 7-pounder I’m holding in the photo, we also caught and released a brown of 8.5 pounds and a third that weighed in at 5 pounds.

I guess that’s bragging of a sort, but mostly I share all this so I can then explain just how it was done. In a nutshell: Free-lining live-bait minnows.

So here was the deal. A small local lake had become infested with alewives, a non-native species introduced by accident. Some years back, the state started stocking brown trout here, hoping the browns would help to control the invasive alewives.
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by Chad Love

I woke up a few days ago to a beautiful, sun-kissed, dead-calm spring morning (a rare combination in these parts), so I did what any sane person would do: I went fishing. I abandoned the wife, the kids, the dogs and the rest of the world and felt not one pang of guilt. Sometimes you've just gotta be selfish. I hit the road with no defined plan, and eventually found myself on one particular piece of water that I sometimes use for training dogs. It's not a bad little pond for fishing, either, so I broke out the fly rod.
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by Kirk Deeter

If you're planning on visiting Colorado to do some fly fishing this year, you might want to do so sooner, rather than later. In stark contrast to last season when above average snowpack had rivers and streams brimming well past the 4th of July, this year's abnormally low snowfall amounts have left many wondering if there will be any runoff at all in some watersheds.

Scenes like this surging spillway are increasingly rare. Denver is more than 35 percent below average rainfall for the year. Snowpack levels in some drainages are less than 20 percent. And many high country rivers, like the Colorado, Arkansas, and Gunnison are experiencing significantly (some historically) low flows.
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by T. Edward Nickens

The hardest hunting lesson I have ever learned resulted in my missing the biggest deer of my life. My guide and I found a monstrous mule deer bedded down within bow range of a cliff top. After a 90-minute barefoot stalk I had the bowstring nearly anchored for a 15-foot shot—and then the really big deer snorted 40 yards away. Had I spent more time behind the binoculars and less time mentally clearing wall space in my office, I’d have seen both deer. Using this grid system for glassing would have done the trick.
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