By Tim Romano

This past Wednesday I played a little hooky and spent the day throwing size 6 dry flies at ravenous trout on the upper Colorado River at one of my favorite locations. While I've been known to skip out on work to go fishing for the day, this wasn't just any other day. The weather was perfect, the water flows were just right, and the fishing was silly good.

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By Tim Romano

A couple of months ago I wrote a post about the Thompson Divide here in Colorado. It's an undeveloped backcountry area just west of the Roaring Fork Valley and is home to many productive and pristine native cutthroat trout watersheds as well as one of the most productive elk habitats in the state. Unfortunately for hunters and anglers here as well as out of state visitors, energy development is creeping in.  Almost half of the 220,000-acre area has been leased for natural gas development. I'll be blunt and say that I'd like some help working out a reasonable solution to development in the area.

The video above was made by my friend Josh Duplechian and features two of my friends and colleagues that depend on this wilderness area to make a living. [ Read Full Post ]

By Kirk Deeter

Greetings from Ryabaga Camp on the banks of the Ponoi River in northern Russia. 

The Ponoi has certainly lived up to its reputation as one of the world's greatest Atlantic salmon fisheries. Prior to coming here, I fished for Atlantic salmon in Canada and Ireland for a total of eight days, and only landed one fish. I landed nine on my first day here, and I did even better yesterday. The 12 anglers who covered this section of the river accounted for 205 caught salmon, the largest being around 20 pounds.  [ Read Full Post ]

These 20 fishing secrets will help you catch trout, bass, bluegills, cats, walleyes, and more—and have the time of your life—all season long.

When rivers heat up in late summer, smallmouths can get downright lazy. The same fish that charged fast-moving streamers and poppers earlier in the season often take to feeding at night, and if your river is loaded with late-summer shad or herring fry, getting bass to eat fur and feathers becomes even harder.

Delaware River smallmouth guide Joe Demalderis (cross​current​guide​service.com) gets around this by leaning on bugs tied with synthetic fur and fiber for the salt, such as a Mushmouth. Flies tied with Angel Hair or Puglisi Fiber retain more buoyancy and a wider profile when wet compared with flies using feathers, bucktail, and rabbit fur, which take on water and sink faster.

Demalderis casts those artificials on the outside of bait schools or in the deeper, slower runs summer smallmouths frequent, and lets them fall broadside with the current. Whereas a Zonker or Clouser would sink away quickly, these synthetic baitfish imitators flutter down slowly, presenting a more accurate representation of a dying baitfish—and an easier target for... [ Read Full Post ]

By Colin Kearns

Fans of Top Chef might remember Edward Lee from Season 9 in Texas. Louisville residents might know him as the chef of his acclaimed restaurant, 610 Magnolia, or his brand new place, MilkWood. And fans of Southern (and Korean) cuisine are about to know him as the author of the fantastic new cookbook, Smoke & Pickles.

The subtitle of Lee’s book is “Recipes and Stories from a New Southern Kitchen,” and as you read through the book, you get a very good sense what he means by “new.” Recipes include: Collards and Kimchi; Soft Grits and Scallions; Chicken-Fried Pork Steak with Ramen Crust. There’s also his twist on the Mint Julep, which calls for jalapeño-infused simple syrup. And, yes, there’s some great recipes for fish and game—including this recipe for a fried trout sandwich that Lee was kind enough to share with us. Don’t let the long ingredient list intimidate you; the recipe is pretty simple. And just look at the photo. How can you not want to dig into that?

Fried Trout Sandwiches with Pear-Ginger-Cilantro Slaw & Spicy Mayo
This is my take on the famous Vietnamese banh-mi sandwich. Traditionally banh-mi is made... [ Read Full Post ]

By Will Brantley, Joe Cermele, Kirk Deeter, Mark Hicks, and Don Wirth

We reached out to 15 of the country’s top guides and pros—you know, the guys who get paid to reel in largemouths, smallmouths, trout, crappie, cats, walleyes, striped bass, and more—and asked them about what they rely on most to catch big fish come summer. Here are their answers. You’d better clear room in your tackle box. [ Read Full Post ]