--Chad Love

Landing one of these babies is pretty much a catch-and-release-only proposition. I hear they're not good eating and extremely difficult to fillet. Not to mention the fact that they thrive in some pretty nasty water...
 
From this story on therepublic.com:
 Robot "fish" developed by European scientists to improve pollution monitoring moved from the lab to the sea in a test at the northern Spanish port of Gijon on Tuesday. The developers hope the new technology, which reduces the time it takes to detect a pollutant from weeks to seconds, will sell to port authorities, water companies, aquariums and anyone with an interest in monitoring water quality...The fish, which are 1.5 meters (5 feet) long and currently cost 20,000 pounds ($31,600) each, are designed to swim like real fish and are fitted with sensors to pick up pollutants leaking from ships or undersea pipelines. They swim independently, co-ordinate with each other, and transmit their readings back to a shore station up to a kilometer away. [ 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 Kirk Deeter

Take a close look at this photo Tim Romano took of Oliver White battling a small tarpon. You'll notice something is missing... the reel. That's because there isn't one.

We just came back from a gonzo jungle expedition (in a place I'll tell you about later) where we literally caught hundreds of trout- to salmon-sized tarpon every day. So to make things even more interesting, we decided to catch some on a Tenkara rod (Yamame). We landed over 50 tarpon on Tenkara, the largest weighed about eight pounds. [ Read Full Post ]

Congratulations to Austin Bockwinkel, whose spring Iowa largemouth bass takes top prize in our weekly Catchbook Photo Contest! Austin gets a PFG Blood and Guts™ Ball Cap from Columbia, and also qualifies to win our monthly prize, a Columbia Airgill Chill™ Long Sleeve fishing shirt and his mug in the pages of our magazine. Click here to learn how you can enter this contest by. Click here for the official rules. [ Read Full Post ]

By C.J. Chivers

Mick Chivers lowered the rod as the gaff struck the bluefish and his brother Jack swung the fish over the gunwale. It was a nice fish—about a 6-pounder—good both for the table and for light-tackle game. Using spinning tackle, Mick, who is 9, had hooked the fish on a popper in about 15 feet of water. The fish had run, circled the boat, and leapt twice. Now it was headed for ice. Except that in Mick’s mind, there remained a step.

“Bleed it,” he said.

On this day I served as both skipper and mate for sons who soon will do these things for me. I took the knife from the bait table and made a series of quick cuts. As the blood began to rush, I put the fish nose down into a bucket.

We had been thick into a school of feeding blues for almost an hour. Mick and Jack, 11, had boated nearly 10 fish, keeping me busy in the best kind of way. The cooler was heavy with meat. The blood in the bucket was already 2 or 3 inches deep.

Why would three guys in a boat busy with fish add a step like this?

The... [ Read Full Post ]

by John Merwin

I spent the past few days at one of my favorite fishing areas, the 10,000 Islands/Everglades region of southwest Florida. For inshore, light-tackle saltwater anglers there is probably no better place--not even the Florida Keys. In fishing here with Capt. Terry Shaughnessy, I also learned a few things that others might find helpful regardless of where you fish. Shaughnessy is roughly my age, meaning he’s been around the block more than a time or two, so I was especially interested to see how he rigged and fished his gear.

There are countless small islets and cays in this wilderness, mostly within Everglades National Park, where on any particular day we were catching redfish, seatrout, snook (as in the photo), jacks, and potentially tarpon if we found them--we didn’t. Most of our fishing was with medium-weight spinning tackle using 3-inch soft-plastic grubs on various sizes of leadhead jigs. Pretty simple, and the grubs worked for everything.

[ Read Full Post ]