At the Maine State Prison Showroom in Thomaston you can purchase for your kitchen a sturdy butcher-block cutting board, but not a knife. The store sells bookcases, dressers, tables, toys, games, birdhouses, gadgets, gizmos and works of art, all handcrafted, all of wood. Your salesman is a prison inmate but you give your money to […]
(The Virtual Angler has been in hibernation but has been roused from his slumber by the distant sound of bat striking ball and the unmistakable scent of Spring in the air.) The day after the shock of Super Bowl LII plunged Patriot Nation into a darkness deeper than a CMP blackout, the sun rose at […]
Anglers are forever being asked by non-anglers, “Why do you fish?” They ask it in the tone of voice they might use when picking up a dead mouse, as though it were some disfigurement or character flaw. We anglers have a hard time answering the question, because we cannot fathom how another homo sapiens could […]
When I first started doing it I did it every chance I got. My father saw me doing it and warned me that if I kept it up I’d go blind. We’re talking, of course, about tying flies. Fly-tyers have been around for a long, long time. Forget about the revered Isaak Walton, the 17th […]
What New Year’s Eve is really for is not so much to celebrate the arrival of a new year as to blow off the steam accumulated in your boiler under the terrible pressure of Christmas. Yeah, sure, Auld Lange Syne and all that, but the auld acquaintance we’re trying to put in the rear view […]
When a-fishing I will go, I will pull on my jeans, the ones that are too stained and tattered to wear in polite society; or maybe an old pair of paint-splashed cotton cargo pants, the ones with so many pockets that a search for my car keys becomes a minor expedition; or, if it’s chilly, […]
One evening a few years back Trout Boy (not his real name) and I were in a canoe on a sort of remote trout pond in northern Maine during the pond’s annual drake hatch. The drakes, a large species of Mayfly, were popping up on the surface of the pond after a desperate dash from […]
I’m in love with a fish. It’s no secret. I don’t try to hide it. This affair has been going on for some time, since I was, I guess, twelve years old and saw my first brook trout. That trout had just opened its mouth to dine on a live worm, until recently a contented […]
…but in our operating systems. Or so the Immortal Bard might have written had he tapped out Julius Caesar on an iPad rather than scratching it out on parchment with a goose feather. I started thinking about defaults the other day as I sat in the estimable Rangeley Public Library (est. 1909, now on the […]
Little Pigeon Cove harbor, on Cape Ann, on the north shore of Massachusetts, was a virtual fish trap back in the day when there were actually fish to be trapped. The granite breakwater narrows the mouth of the harbor and schools of tinker mackerel, perhaps chased into the harbor by plundering stripers or blues, tended […]
