by John Merwin

So how about a nice, tasty piranha for lunch? I caught the fish in the photo, a yellow piranha about a foot long, some years back while fishing the Bolivian headwaters of the Amazon. And it was indeed delicious, sort of like eating a giant bluegill.

The circumstances were even stranger than the fish. I was the guest of a wealthy Bolivian industrialist who was thinking of opening a fishing lodge to attract North American business. Trouble was, he had no concept of how the modern world went fishing. The lodge idea never did work out, but getting there was half the fun.

When we, along with a motley contingent from the jungle village. took a day trip to Piranha Lake (very rough translation), I was given a choice of fishing from an extremely narrow, tippy-looking dugout canoe or from an inflatable Sears raft, new and still in its carton. I chose the raft, from which my guide Arturo and I dangled 10-pound-test handlines baited with fresh hunks of beef.

Sure enough, there was eventually a tap-tap-tap on the line. I hoisted a piranha in the air and watched its razorlike teeth chattering on the hook shank. Arturo gestured for me to give him the fish, so I flipped the flopping piranha over to him through the air. He got all upset. “No, no! Not like that,” he shouted.

by John Merwin

Among many thousands of fishing-related web sites, I’m always surprised at how few there are that have really solid, useful information. So I was happy to fall upon one such over the weekend from Anglers Resource, which is the sole North American distributor of Fuji rod components. If you’re about to buy a spinning or baitcasting rod, Anglers Resource is a must-read.

The section on five rod-buying tips is really excellent. They demonstrate how to match a spinning reel to a spinning rod, for example. Take the reel you plan on using with you when you go to a tackle shop. Then check to be sure the reel’s centerline axis matches the guide set-up on the rod you might buy. In the accompanying Anglers Resource photo, the match is marginal at best.

Importantly, the company is not touting any particular rods or brands. It’s just that the physical configurations of spinning reels and rods are widely varied. Some match well together. Some don’t. And the only way to get peak performance is to check that match before you buy. This is just as true if you’re planning on spending $50 as it is if the price tag were $500.

There’s lots of detail, also, about guide size and spacing on both spinning rods and baitcasters. Maybe more than you want to know. There are plenty of people who don’t care about this sort of thing. As in “Here’s my money. Just gimme a rod.” But there are plenty of others (like me) who obsess over the smallest details. For those, the Anglers Resource sections on static loading and guide spacing are truly enlightening.

by John Merwin

“You’ve gotta put down the duckie if you want to play the saxophone.” That’s a line from an old Sesame Street song that’s rolling around in my head this morning. Maybe by using it in a blog post, I’ll get rid of it. It also has a lot to say about fishing.

Concentration and focus are essential to successful fishing (with one exception. See below). The more of those things you bring to the game, the more you’ll catch. If you’re thinking or worrying about family issues or job problems, the fishing is not going to go well. So put down the duckie, and you’ll fish better.

by Joe Cermele

Yesterday, during a break from fishing Elk Creek near Erie, PA, our guides took my buddy Mark and I on a little tour of the area and we ended up at the mouth of Walnut Creek. As we marveled at the amount of anglers surrounding each little pool, a conservation officer pulled into the parking lot and one of our guides flagged him down. He wanted to report a guy he and other locals suspected of snagging steelhead. He had even written down the man's plate number. It was then that the officer (below) reached into his truck's cup holder and pulled out a handful of homemade snags hooks. "I've collected these just in the last few days," he told us. "I'll have a lot more by the end of the weekend."